The Summer House (17 page)

“I’m not asking you to drive,” Liz replied, climbing the stairs up to the porch. She did not know why Danny refused to drive the van they had bought him, the one fully equipped for him, offering him freedom from a world of confinement. She often wondered if she would ever know her son again, if he would ever know himself. “Just come with me. You can’t sit here all day watching Keith and Joe play checkers.”

“Chess. They play chess. And I don’t watch them all day; I go on the Internet.”

Liz sighed. She did not know how far to let him go, when or how to force him back to society and life. She did not know where those boundaries lay and how far beyond them she should intrude. Danny, after all, was not like her other children; he never had been. He was the brightest, the most charismatic and energetic. He had also been the most challenging to raise, always inquisitive, always wondering how things worked and why. But his energy seemed depleted now, and if his mind was still sharp, he rarely let Liz see that. Perhaps he, too, had shut
down into that limbolike state of disinterest. The difference was, Liz knew that, one way or another, she would feel again, she would one day—probably soon—rejoin the world. For Danny, the outcome was less certain.

“Clay!” she shouted to the far end of the porch. “Talk some sense into your patient.” She was trying to act light-hearted, trying, as the psychiatrists had suggested, to seem normal and positive and not devastated for her child and his anguish. The trying was easy some times more than others.

“It’s not Clay’s job to talk sense into me, Mom,” Danny answered for his nurse. “He’s here to wipe me and dipe me and put me to bed, not to make me part of your human race.”

Exasperation formed a small knot in her chest. It seemed that if Danny couldn’t be civil to the world, he could at least be decent to Clay, whose patience with her son seemed to outweigh his salary.

“Okay,” she relented, “but I’m going to make peach pie and you’re going to eat it.”

“You win, Mom,” Danny replied, his words riding the wave of disinterest again.

Liz went into the house and grabbed the car keys from the wall hook. She didn’t feel as if she’d won anything at all.

“You can’t go in,” Joe said to Liz as she pulled into the parking lot of the Chilmark General Store. It was the fourth time he’d said it since he’d jumped into the van as she was pulling out of the driveway. He’d threatened to force her to turn around. “The store could be unsafe,” he repeated now. “It hasn’t been cleared.”

Liz turned off the ignition and looked over the rocking chairs that lined the front porch of the store, the hanging
pots plump with geraniums, the people who lazed there munching sandwiches from the deli or walking in and out of the screen doors with the ease of a long summer day. She noticed the wheelchair ramp.
Handicapped accessible
, she thought, wishing it hadn’t become second nature for her to notice these things.

“I have been coming to this store since before you were born.” Of the two agents, Liz preferred Keith: he was close to fifty, soft-spoken, and calm. Joe was not much older than Danny, but brimmed with good health and vivacity. “Believe me,” she bristled, “when I tell you the Chilmark General Store is safe.”

Joe placed his healthy, young hand on her arm. “I can’t let you go in alone.”

“Please,” she said, jerking open her door. “Don’t be ridiculous. There are no evils lurking between the peaches and the corn on the cob.” She got out of the van, slammed the door harder than necessary, and marched up the wide wooden stairs. She tried to block out the sound of the passenger door opening, then closing, and the feel—that damned pervasive feel—of footsteps behind her climbing up her heels. She put a hand to her forehead. Why was she being so uncharacteristically bitchy? She could not seem to help herself.

Liz opened the screen door and stepped inside, holding the door until Joe caught up.

She made her way to the back of the store, which she knew better than the large supermarkets in Boston, where she rarely went, but sent the cook. On the Vineyard, however, Liz had always been able to be herself, the keeper of her own kitchen, her own domain. She took a paper bag, then began examining the peaches, tucking the best into her bag, only the firmest—“not too ripe,” Mother had instructed so many years ago.

Not too ripe
.

Liz stared at a peach in her hand, struck by the realization that both her parents were dead, that she was a forty-four-year-old orphan now.

It reminded her of Christmastime when she was a child, when Will had packed his four children into the station wagon and driven them to the orphanage on the north end of the city. There they distributed dolls, toys, and games to the poor orphans and shared candy-cane cookies that Cook helped them bake. The next day their pictures always appeared in the newspaper, children of privilege sharing with the less fortunate.

Liz did not know how old she had been when she began to suspect that Father had them do this for the image it created and not for the good of the motherless and fatherless orphans.

Her hand closed over the peach. She felt the cords in her neck grow taut.

Enough
, she said to herself, quickly dropping the fruit into the bag, and heading for the checkout. It was then that she noticed Joe speaking with someone … a young man as polished as himself, a man with a similar U.S. Marines buzz cut and nondescript clothes. Liz kept moving, hoping the agent was not hassling him, wasn’t going to make a scene, right here in the Chilmark General Store where she had practically grown up.

She ducked down an aisle. Huddling against a shelf of soup cans, she heard Joe say, “No shit. You’ve got to be kidding.”

Did they know each other? Joe laughed, but Liz could not make out the next words or who had spoken them. It didn’t matter. Obviously it was just a friendly encounter and Liz was being paranoid.

She headed back to the cash register and paid for the peaches.

It was not until they were both back in the van that Joe grinned and said, “Unbelievable, I ran into an old friend
in there. Rob Morrison. I knew him in Washington. We trained together.”

Liz thought for a moment, then carefully steered the van out onto the main road, sensing something discomforting, almost foreboding. “He’s with the Secret Service, too?” she asked quietly.

“Yeah,” Joe replied. “Guess he’ll be on the Vineyard for a few days. He’s assigned to your husband’s competitor.”

Liz did not have to ask who he meant. Everyone in the world certainly knew by now that the candidate of the opposite political party also had ties to this island.

She steadied the wheel in her hands and struggled to keep her eyes on the road, wondering why Josh had chosen now to come to the Vineyard.

“Josh Miller is coming to the island,” Danny announced from his perch in front of the television, where he half watched the evening news. There were rattling sounds from the kitchen. He looked toward the room but did not get a response. He turned back to the TV.

“Sources close to the campaign tell us that Mr. Miller will retreat to his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard with his strategists in an attempt to find a way to bridge the seesawing gap in the polls, now at eight points between him and Michael Barton,” the talking head at the anchor desk reported.

“Dad’s only leading by eight points,” Danny called out, but still his mother did not reply, as if she did not remember—or care—that right after Gramps died the difference had expanded from six points to twelve, and that now it had dropped back to eight. He also knew that an eight-point lead was not big enough to relax.

He stared at the television wondering who the people were who were polled, and why that was supposed to indicate how the whole country felt. It was like during
that entire Clinton-Monica thing. At one point the polls said that, despite the scandal, his favorability rating was at something like seventy-two percent. But three-quarters of the people Danny associated with had not agreed.

Danny reached down and scratched the top of his leg, not because he could feel any kind of an itch, but because it was there. He wondered what life was like for the rest of humanity who did not have to deal with polls or men with dark hair and penetratingly black eyes, like the man on the screen in front of him now, the man whom thirty-eight percent of the people (with sixteen percent still undecided) preferred over his father.

Once, Danny had asked why they did not know Josh Miller. After all, the Millers and the Adamses had been summer neighbors on the island since long before Danny had even been born. He had never received a straight answer—something vague about the fact the Millers were from New York; something about the Millers being Jewish. “Not that your grandfather dislikes Jews,” Michael had said. “He just doesn’t trust them.”

Danny thought it was stupid and had told his grandfather so.

“Good,” Will Adams had answered. “When you’re my age your grandchildren can think differently from you, too. And you can tell them to go to hell.” He had then walked away.

On the screen now came a map of the country, with states that were Barton territory colored in red, those for Josh Miller in blue. The fact that Miller’s states were bigger in size made it appear as if he were way out in front instead of eight points behind.

Danny thought about his mother, and wondered if Uncle Roger was right, if Liz should be back on the campaign trail. Did she no longer care about being First Lady? And what about Dad—shouldn’t they be fighting harder?

Ten, five, even only a couple of years ago no one would have believed a Jew would even be a candidate, let alone win the race. But now here was Josh Miller, closing the ethnic gap with his grassroots charm and his tireless campaigning. The fact that he was a widower whose wife died last year of cancer leaving him with two young daughters only seemed to have increased his chances.

“Sympathy vote,” Roger had said. “It can kill us if we’re not careful.”

Danny wondered if, now that Will was dead, perhaps they couldn’t capitalize more strongly on the sympathy vote, too, more than the quick six-point jump that had since fallen by four. Then he wondered why he was doing all these ridiculous mathematical gymnastics and acting as if he cared.

Suddenly his father’s face flashed on the screen, captured in the balance between air and air time, smiling in the balance between truth and the polls.

“My wife is taking a few days off from the campaign,” he was saying into the camera, with just enough hint of gravity in his voice to let the folks know Liz was grieving, that Liz, after all, was one of them, the all-American girl. “As I’m sure everyone understands, this has been a difficult time for her. But she’s with our son Danny, and I’m certain they will rejoin the campaign soon.”

Danny scratched his leg again, unsure how “soon” would be soon enough to “rejoin the campaign.” All he knew now was that his mother was clattering around in the kitchen, that for some reason she would not discuss the campaign, and that she was not even interested in the person named Josh Miller who could alter the well-charted course of their life if she didn’t do something about it. And maybe do something fast.

Evelyn double-checked her carry-on bag to be certain she had everything to make the long trip from Illinois to San Antonio productive: profiles on the organizations to which Michael would be speaking; head sheets and bios on the key players so he would be able to recognize them and act as if he knew them. It had worked at today’s luncheon: no one would have guessed that only yesterday Michael had buried his influential father-in-law. No one who might have missed the news or the papers or the very trail of sympathy laid by well-meaning voters.

But Michael was a pro: Will Adams had taught him well. Still, Evelyn thought as she snapped her bag shut, she wondered why she cared when Liz no longer seemed to. Liz, the princess, who might just screw everything up because she was selfish and spoiled and always had been. Then Evelyn wondered if everything, from day one, was going to have been a big waste.

All these years she had kept quiet. All these years she had been the unimportant wife of the unimportant son, just because Daniel had gotten himself killed.

Even after Roger’s “confession” about being gay, which she’d suspected for years, Evelyn had stayed Roger’s wife because she had known that someday it was going to pay off. That someday Michael Barton would make Roger his attorney general (it had worked for Bobby Kennedy) or something equally impressive. Then she would become a grand Washington hostess, the one everyone would want to get close to because she was the sister-in-law of the president.

It had almost been worth it to funnel so many of her grandfather’s millions into the campaign, no matter how many back doors she’d had to sneak it through, no matter how many favors she’d had to call in.

And all this time she had kept quiet about the young lovers whom she’d seen on that warm summer night long ago. And now the young lovers were on opposite sides,
and perhaps only Roger and Evelyn knew. Roger had made her promise to keep the secret. It had been difficult, but she had done it for Daniel and for the family; she’d done it, of course, for her future.