The Goodbye Summer (11 page)

She went to the dresser to look at the pictures—it was covered with framed photos of Christopher and King, Christopher and other dogs, Christopher and a ferret. Here was one of Christopher and three women; they looked so much like him, she knew they were his sisters. They’d spoiled him, he joked. If so, Caddie couldn’t blame them. What a lucky life he’d led, being the youngest in a family who adored him, looking the way he looked, loving and being good at satisfying work that truly helped others. She could’ve envied, might even have resented someone who led a life that charmed. But for some reason he was inviting her to share it with him, and resentment was the furthest thing from her mind.

She almost didn’t hear him until he was behind her, sliding his arms around her waist. They smiled at each other in the mirror. “We look good,” he said, pressing his cheek to her temple. “Don’t we?”

He looked good. Her hair was damp and straggly and she’d lost most of her makeup in the shower. Maybe he liked that, though, the wholesome look. He was from the Midwest.

“Let’s get in bed,” he whispered in her ear.

She nodded, shivering.

But first he lit candles, a fat, fragrant one on each bedside table, a row of white ones beside the gurgling fountain on the windowsill. They turned the heavy bedspread down together. He took off his bathrobe, she took off her towel.

It had been a long time since she’d been with a man, even longer with one she cared much about. She couldn’t relax. She felt overwhelmed, overstimulated by all Christopher’s
skin,
the warm and the cool places, hairy places, indescribably soft places. And all hers for the taking, which made her shy and inept. “You okay?” he murmured between kisses. The candlelight shadowed his cheeks and gleamed on his broad forehead. “Anything wrong?”

“
No.
It’s—this is great, it’s just—you know, the first time…”

He drew back, horrified.

“For us—the first time for us!”

He dropped his forehead on her chest and sighed out his breath. “Oh, thank God.”

She started to laugh, helpless giggling, and after a few seconds he joined in. That felt so good, like the most intimate thing they’d done together yet, it almost cured her of her nerves.

“You scared the hell out of me.” He started all over, taking little bites of her jaw, her neck, moving down to her breasts. She slipped her fingers into his hair and let herself drift. He was a wonderful lover. He made her feel masterful and natural, as if she knew what she was doing. He found condoms in his bedside drawer. She wanted to preserve the moment when he came inside her, commemorate it, make it last, because nothing she’d done with a man had ever felt this important. She made him stop so they could kiss—but then it was over, time moved on. She forgot about preserving things in the heat of her gathering excitement. Christopher was a groaner. She was shocked, then thrilled by his guttural, free, heartfelt grunts of pleasure. He buried his face in her hair. She held tight, and in the instant before she might have approached an edge, might have gotten close to a place to jump off from, she saw King.

He was standing next to the bed, his head inches from hers, peering at her with alert brown eyes and a judicial expression. Wagging his tail very slowly.

She wanted to tell on him,
Look what your dog is doing!
—but it wasn’t the right time. And just then Christopher ground his teeth and let go, driving into her with enough force to push her shoulders against the head-board. Such a release! She felt complimented and proud.

“That was incredible,” he sighed, collapsed on her. He turned her, holding her from behind, his warm breath on the back of her neck. “Are you good?”

She smiled. “I’m good.”

He sighed, relieved. “Yes, you are. You are damn good.” He kissed her behind the ear.

Her heart swelled. She wanted to tell him what it had meant to her. “Your dog was looking at us,” she said instead.

“Hmm?”

“Not like this. He was closer.” King had curled up across the room in front of a wicker and bentwood rocker, and he was blinking his avid eyes
with exaggerated sleepiness. “Much closer. I mean, he was really
watching.
”

“Hmm.”

He fell asleep while she and King stared at each other. It ought to be easy to stare a dog down, but King won. Caddie shut her eyes first and didn’t open them again. She felt like Rebecca, and King was Mrs. Danvers.

When she woke up, the clock on the bedside table said twelve-thirty. Yikes! Finney! Oh, but she didn’t want to get up yet. Christopher was all warm and golden, lying on his side in a loose, sexy sprawl. What fun it would be to kiss him awake and see what happened. No, she had to go home. She would look at him for a minute, and if he woke up because of mental telepathy, her mind calling to his, it would be fate. She peered at him between his eyebrows, which might’ve twitched. She stared hard at his temple.
Wake up, Christopher.

She sighed and got out of bed. So much for mental telepathy.

Dressing, she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, the same way she’d stared at herself in the ladies’ room at Hennessey’s, this time trying to reconcile the kind of woman a man like Christopher would want to be with and the kind of woman she looked like right now. What was confusing was that she looked exactly like herself; she looked the way she looked when she got up in the middle of the night to pee or something. She had stupid hair. Her teeth were crooked, her lips were too thick, and her smile was asymmetrical. She disliked the whole lower half of her face. Nana used to say a man would sleep with any girl who had two legs and a vagina, and the two legs were negotiable. But that couldn’t be it, because Christopher wasn’t that kind of man.

What did he see in her, then? She liked animals. He liked music. He was in a new town; he had friends, but probably not too many. Maybe he was lonely?

Those were possibilities, but deep down she had a better hunch. There was something real between them. There, it was out—she’d been too superstitious to put it in words before. It was just starting for him, but she’d felt it from the start, a true chance at connection, a genuine relationship. Love.

She made a face in the mirror, like knocking on wood. She’d almost given up on it ever happening to her, she’d seen herself as marked, excluded because of circumstances from the community of lucky ones who met other normal, ordinary people and made it work.
If I’d had a regular family,
she would think.
If I’d had a mother who stayed, if I’d had a father, if I’d lived in a regular house. If Nana hadn’t been so crazy.
But look—Christopher didn’t care about any of that, he liked her the way she was. It was enough to make her think better of herself.

“Are you leaving?”

She turned, startled. He filled up the doorway, sleepy and tousled. “I have to. I have to let Finney out,” she said virtuously, “he’s been in all night.”

He yawned and rubbed his eyes, rubbed his bare chest under his bathrobe. “I’ll miss you.” He put his arm around her as he walked her to the front door. She felt let down and realized she’d been hoping he would come home with her. But that was silly, he’d have to get dressed, they’d have two cars again, not to mention the problem of King.

“Let’s do something tomorrow. Supposed to be nice. How about a picnic?”

“I can’t. Saturdays are my busiest,” she reminded him.
Tomorrow,
though—he wanted to see her
tomorrow.

“How about tomorrow night?” he said. “It can be late. Come over and I’ll make you dinner.”

“Oh, lovely. But you come to my house, I’ll make
you
dinner.” What would she make? Something romantic and sophisticated. She’d have to get a magazine.

“No, you come here, it’s better. Besides, you’ll be tired, and this way you won’t have to do anything.”

“You talked me into it.” She hugged him, touched and grateful. They kissed good night. He made it so sweet, she pulled back to look into his eyes, see if the same tenderness she felt was in them. It was…she thought it was. She framed his face with her hands. “I had the most…I had a very nice time.” If she said what she was really thinking, she might scare him off.

“Me, too, Caddie. I’ll call you in the morning.”

She went out briskly, striding down the walk with her arms swinging, to show she wasn’t a clingy sort of person. She couldn’t resist a look back from the sidewalk, though. His dark silhouette looked tall and straight in the doorway, and handsome even from here. King stood at his side with his ears cocked, watching her go.

Mr. Lorton told Caddie she’d better hurry up and write down his life story before anybody else’s, winking at her to make sure she got the joke. So they set up a time and a place, right after breakfast one morning in the Blue Room. He sat in the big easy chair with his cane between his knees, his feet barely touching the floor. His two flesh-colored hearing aids made his ears stick out on either side of his bald, freckled head. “What I’d like is for you to write it but make it sound like me. Put it down just like I’m saying it to you, not fancy or anything, but fix up the grammar and whatnot. Can you do that?”

“I’ll try. If you don’t go too fast.”

He gave a wheezy laugh, twinkling his eyes at her. “Too fast is not a problem, believe you me. Well, you ready?”

“Ready.”

My name’s Charles Micheaux Lorton and I was born in Fairfield, Pennsylvania, so long ago it doesn’t make any difference. I get tired talking about my age. After you hit ninety, it’s about the only claim to fame you’ve got, and people run it into the ground. Oh, well, I’m ninety-seven, but let that be the end of it. And don’t ask me the secret to my longevity. Which I’d say is moderation, but nobody wants to hear that. They either want some peculiar regime like yogurt and deep
knee bends three times a day, or else they want to hear how you smoke a big fat cigar and drink two martinis every night. I’ve just lived like a regular fella, tried not to get arrested, offend anybody, or draw too much attention to myself. That approach appears to be working.

My father was a blacksmith, a horse trainer, a mechanic, an amateur boxer, and a bartender. My mother was the church organist at Otterbein Macedonia Lutheran Church. They had two babies before me who both died, and after me they had my sister, Alice, and my brother, Floyd. We lived in various towns in southern Pennsylvania, which is still pretty country, and then in 1917, when I was nine, my father got shot trying to bust up a fight between two drunks in a tavern. He died eight days later of blood poisoning. After that, we moved to Frederick, Maryland, because my mother had family there, and that’s where I finished growing up.

I had a wild streak when I was a young fella. Nothing like now, of course. We were innocent babes compared to what goes on these days. I won a car in a card game, a 1920 Ford Depot Hack, which was a kind of a station wagon fitted on a Model T chassis to haul passengers and luggage to train stations. This one had seen about all the depot hacking it was ever going to, but it had enough life left that I got plenty of speeding tickets tooling around Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and D.C. Course, back then speeding meant you were going thirty-five instead of thirty. I remember one time I got in a race with my best friend, Buster Flanagan, on what used to be the two-lane road to Gettysburg but is now U.S. Route 15. Buster had an old Oldsmobile, I believe it was a 1915 Model 42 Roadster, that had also seen better days, but he thought the world of it, was always challenging me and my Ford to the point where I got fed up and said okay, let’s go. Of course, this was an illegal enterprise,
and we had to have it during the day on account of Buster’s car’s headlights had gotten smashed in a previous accident and he didn’t have the money for new ones. Well, we get to going side by side up what’s now the turnoff to Libertytown but back then was nothing but woods and cow fields, and we come to that leftward curve, which to this day is too sharp, they need to iron it out. We’re pushing forty, neither one giving ground, we’re neck and neck all the way when all of a sudden Buster can’t turn his Olds any sharper, and instead of rounding that curve he sideswipes my Ford and runs us both off the road. I flipped over and landed in the ditch, his car kept going and slammed into a tree, and neither one of us got a scratch. But about two minutes after Buster climbed out of his wreck and came over to see if I was alive or dead, that Oldsmobile caught on fire and blew up. Boom! You never saw anything like it. Except us trying to tell the police about how a herd of deer ran out on the road in front of us and we oversteered—both of us, mind you—oversteered and ended up in the rough. They didn’t believe a word of it, but they couldn’t prove otherwise so we got off scot-free. Except Buster, whose heart was broke; he’d still be mourning that old Oldsmobile today if he was alive. He died in 1959 of cirrhosis of the liver.

I didn’t inherit my dad’s mechanical bent, but I liked working with my hands, and my first good job was odd-job man to a house builder. After that I got into the carpenter trade. Which went bust as soon as the crash hit, rendering me and most people I knew unemployed. What growing up didn’t cure of my former wild ways, the Depression did. I got by out of the kindness of a Mr. Abel C. Brooks, good friend to my mother’s sister’s husband. Mr. Brooks owned the ACB Hardware on what used to be Potomac Street in east Frederick. He gave me a job cleaning up and stocking, which
turned into selling, then ordering, billing, and inventory, and eventually everything else, and in 1935 Mr. Brooks retired and offered me the business on terms so favorable I was just able to swing it. I stayed in the hardware game for forty-plus years, and retired in 1981 at age seventy-three.

Military-wise, I was 4-F because of my feet, so I volunteered in the civil defense and served as an air raid warden, 1942 to 1944, then chief air raid warden for Washington County, 1944 to VJ Day. I took a little ribbing, some people not considering that proper military service for an able-looking man, but I took pride in it and did as good a job as I could, and you notice the Germans never did bomb Frederick, Maryland.

I thought I’d end up a bachelor because until I was thirty-nine I never met a girl who could put up with me for long, or else me with her. I wasn’t that particular, I just wanted someone down to earth and kind of heart who thought a little better of me than I deserved. Good looks wouldn’t’ve hurt anything. Well, one day I’m helping the wire mill delivery man unload fasteners off his truck and the dang fool drops a keg of 16-penny nails on my foot. Broke it! I’m hollering like a baby, never been in such agony before or since, so he shoves me in the truck and drives me to the hospital. And there she was. I used to say it was the shot she gave me for the pain that disordered my brain and made me fall so hard, but that was a joke, I’d say it just to needle her. “Nurse Stanley,” it said on her collar, and I had to pretend I was dying in order to get her to tell me her first name. Sarah. She said it laughing. She was so pretty, with yellow hair and light brown eyes, but Sarah saying her name and laughing is what made me fall in love.

It took a good deal of persistence, but finally she consented to a date and I took her to the Maryland Hotel to hear the Lewis Tranes Orchestra. She wore a green dress with a
white collar and a matching jacket. She told me I was a good dancer, that was her first compliment to me, and that’s when I knew for sure she wasn’t only pretty, she was a most sweet and tenderhearted liar. We got married five months later.

I don’t know what she saw in me, then or in all the forty-one years we had together. I can say in truth I never let a day go by without thanking the Lord for her, and although she’s gone now I still do. If I made anything of myself, if I did any good or served any purpose, it’s because of Sarah.

We had Daniel first, then William two years later with lots of complications, and after that we couldn’t have any more. They were wonderful boys, and that’s not just prejudice. They looked like Sarah, for one thing, brown-eyed blonds with her same soft nature and heart. Daniel died in Vietnam in 1969, age twenty. That’s all I got to say about that, because even though so many years have passed since I lost my boy, it hurts exactly the same. Sarah’s the only one I could talk to about it, and her not that much. She used to poke and prod me to open up, but even for her I couldn’t do it. I still can’t.

William’s a good boy and he lives in Spokane, Washington, don’t ask me why. He’s an engineer, works with airplane parts and such. Says he’s about to retire. He’s got kids and his kids have got kids, but I never see them, they’re too dang far away. We talk on the phone some.

So now I’m an old man, older than anybody I’ve personally known, and it’s the most peculiar thing you can imagine. Inside I’m myself, same as always, and outside I’m this crippled-up old shell of a guy. By nighttime I’m used to myself, but when I first wake up in the morning and see that wreck in the mirror, there’s a minute when I can’t recognize him. “Who the hell are you?” I say, as I try to shave around all the wrinkles without cutting my chin off. Seems like I was in a car race with Buster a couple of years ago, not almost eighty. Wake House is a fine place and everybody’s
nice to me, and I’m a lucky man in that nothing much hurts except the usual, what you might expect, but I’ve got to say this is never how I pictured ending up. I only have one big regret, and it’s that Sarah went ahead of me. I wish I could’ve gone first, it would’ve been more in the natural order of things.

But here I am, and if God’s forgot about me, there’s nothing to do but make the best of it till he remembers. Here’s the part where I’m supposed to say something wise, I guess. I don’t have any advice for anybody. Love the ones you’ve got while you’ve got ’em, because you never know how long that’ll be. Stay on the level, try to treat everybody fair and square, because your name’s worth more than your money. That’s it. I wouldn’t do anything different, and that’s about as much as a man can hope for.

On Wednesday afternoons Claudette always led a game in the Blue Room, Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit, or sometimes a game she just made up. This day it was “Name That Friend”—Caddie vaguely remembered playing a version of it with girls in her dorm back in college days. You took turns being the guesser, and you had to figure out who the others were talking about when they answered questions like, If this person were a flower, what would he or she be? What color is this person? He/she is the sort of person who…fill in the blank. No doubt Claudette’s object was to bring the residents of Wake House closer by exploring in creative, free-form ways how they really thought of each other. The possibility of pitfalls must never have entered her mind.

Everybody was there except Susan, whose boyfriend had taken her out for a drive, and Mrs. Brill, who had an eye doctor appointment. Somehow Caddie got talked into joining the circle of players, she wasn’t sure how; one minute she was sitting with Nana on the sofa, thumbing through an old AARP magazine, and the next she was trying to decide what kind of vegetable Mr. Lorton was.

Thea came into the parlor after the game was in full swing. Everybody stopped what they were doing to greet her—“Hello, Thea,” “Hi, Thea, where’ve you been?” “Thea, come sit over here.” She was sorry to be late, sorry to interrupt the game, she’d just watch and not say anything
—No, no,
they wouldn’t have it, she had to play, she would be so good at this—Cornel and Bernie shot out of their chairs and insisted she sit, sit right here, come over and sit down. “Thank you, thanks, I believe I’ll just squeeze in here with Frances and Caddie.” Nana moved her leg in her cast a little further down on the coffee table, Caddie moved the other way, and Thea sat down between them.

She always wore a faint, citrusy perfume, very lively and distinct, not like the powdery, old-fashioned scent the other women wore. She didn’t dress like them, either. She wore jeans and a man’s white shirt tied in front, she wore capes, berets at cocky angles, tight black capri pants with a long, bulky sweater. When the weather was nice, she went barefooted. “What’s she think she is, a beatnik?” Caddie once heard Mrs. Doré Harris ask no one in particular after Thea had left the room. Nobody answered, nobody even nodded or said “Hmm.” They liked Thea. If Doré didn’t, Caddie was pretty sure it was because until Thea came,
she
was the youngest and prettiest of the ladies at Wake House.

Thea patted Nana on the knee. “You said you’d wake me up,” she whispered. “I was just going to close my eyes for a second, I
told
you.”

She made it sound conspiratorial, as if Nana had colluded with her in some fun but naughty adventure. Nana hadn’t quite made up her mind about Thea (“Too young, and there’s nothing the matter with her. What’s she doing here?”), but she couldn’t help smiling and shaking her head back at her. “Sorry,” she whispered, shrugging, drawn in in spite of herself.

“Look at you,” Thea said, turning to Caddie, “there’s something different about you today. What is it?”

Caddie widened innocent eyes and opened her hands to show they were empty.
I might be in love,
she thought. Could Thea tell?

“What are we doing?” she asked in a murmur, leaning against Caddie’s shoulder. “I don’t understand the game.”

No wonder. People were going around the circle saying things like “Thornbush” and “A holly tree with prickly leaves” and “A dead one!” Caddie whispered in Thea’s ear, “Edgie has to guess who the mystery person is. It’s one of us. If they were a tree, she just asked, what would they be. You take turns and go around—”

“So it’s Cornel?”

Caddie covered a laugh with her hand. “How’d you get it so fast?”

They snickered together, looking over at Cornel, who was scowling around, not pleased with the picture of himself people were painting. He knew he was “it”—Claudette passed around a slip of paper with the name of the person each new guesser had to guess—so Cornel had to answer questions about
himself,
and either be honest and searching or pretend he was talking about somebody else to throw Edgie off. “Sturdy oak,” he answered to the tree question.

Next Edgie asked, “What kind of
car
is this person?” and Bernie, Cornel’s roommate, called out, “Hearse!” to general amusement. Somebody said “Model T,” somebody else guessed “Rusty old Studebaker.”

When Thea’s turn came, she paused thoughtfully, a finger on her lips. “One of those cars that’s been in a garage for the last forty years or so. Somebody finds it, and under all the dirt and grime there’s a perfect vintage…something or other. A classic Cadillac. A Rolls-Royce.”