Nine Women (13 page)

Her picnic was a traditional clambake. There’d been a few changes over the years—and she hated them all. Now caterers from Harrisport rather than her own servants dug the pit and built the fire and collected the seaweed. Jeeps brought the tables and the plates and the ice and the wine and beer rather than the ox-drawn carts she preferred. The last ox cart had vanished in the late fifties. She missed them still.

The next morning, on Labor Day, Cleo Wagner closed the door on her summer and started home. The bright bunting still fluttered from the flagpole, six or eight of the youngest cousins carried her suitcases and packages. Her only son waited at the road to wave after her car. From other scattered houses firecrackers rattled off a salute.

Late that afternoon her son, Dan Wagner, locked the doors of his boathouse. He’d spent almost the entire day there, putting it in order for the winter. He would let no one else do it, he would let no one else help. He brought a sandwich with him for lunch, he drank from a nearby creek, wading up from the brackish mouth to the cold sweet water above.

He enjoyed this day, this last-of-season packing and putting away against the winter storms and the prowling animals. He liked the neatness and the orderliness. It gave him pleasure to work and pleasure to see what he had done.

The life jackets were washed and hanging neatly—he would need to buy at least two, possibly three, new ones. He listed that carefully in his spiral notebook, along with all the other small gear—blocks and shackles and sail stops—he would replace before the next summer. The shiny washed hulls of three Sunfish were hoisted to the boathouse rafters, their masts hung beside them. Two outboard motors, cleaned of salt water, sat on high racks, sheets of plastic spread beneath them. Two dinghies were upended side by side, their oars in wall racks next to precisely looped lines, canvas fenders, whisker poles, hooks, gaffs, and swimming ladders. His powerboat, ordinarily at the dock outside, had already gone to the boatyard for winter storage.

The end of summer, he thought, this sound of closing doors. These now, and tomorrow the final slam as he left the house.

It had been a short summer, he thought, as he began the walk back to his house. June was gray and cold and good only for bluefishing. July was stormy. August held all the warmth of the year and ended in a three-day gale. The gardens were ruined. He’d seen rose petals whirling around the house on swirling currents of air, falling like sea wrack on the slopes, flattening themselves like moths against the windows. All the paths and steps were coated and slippery with leaves.

Well, he couldn’t count on his guests to wear deck shoes, so he would have to clear up a bit. He stopped at the garden shed and got a rake and a broom.

Katy Wagner swept the veranda and the deck, wiped dry the chairs and the benches, brought out the blue and white striped cushions. Occasionally she stopped to stare across the calm ocean to the hazy horizon. The beach, yesterday crowded with picnickers, now held only a nervously pecking group of sandpipers. And the Atlantic had changed color. For thirty-odd years she’d watched that deep winter color appear after a storm, and it always surprised her. It was so sudden. Like a heart attack.

Ever since Dan had left to see to his boats, she’d puttered about, packing, putting things away, making inventories for the winter insurance. Her sons, their wives and children were gone and there was very little that needed to be done; still she enjoyed touching and smoothing and folding away blankets and sheets and towels. Summer wound down like a clock with slower but still regular intervals.

She put the last of the cushions into their proper chairs as Dan came up the side steps.

“That’s done,” she said. “We’re ready for the last of the summer crowds.”

A handsome woman, he thought, still a handsome woman though she was fifty-seven and her wiry curly flyaway hair was completely gray. That pink dress was a good color for her, it deepened her tan and made her look younger.

“I cleaned up the walks,” he said. “You know those stone steps are so slippery we really should do something about them before next summer. They’re dangerous without boat shoes.”

“Well”—Katy smiled at the narrow granite steps that reached from parking area to porch—“the very first time I came to this house, just a couple of months after our wedding, I slipped on them. And I remember your father standing just about where you’re standing now saying we’ve got to do something about those steps.”

Dan smiled. Any mention of his father brought that small smile to his face, even now, twenty years after his death. “You know, every time I straighten up the boathouse for the winter, I think about him. The way he always insisted on doing it, even that last summer when he was sick. So much of that gear is his, his initials on the oars, and that pretty little dory Carter built specially for him, and even the way most of the things are stowed, that was his doing.”

It was easy to remember him with affection, Katy thought, that tall, angular man with the monumental ugliness of an Abraham Lincoln. “Sometimes, Dan, now and then, I think I hear him talking and I’m sure he’s in the house.”

Dan thought: As long as we are here, he will be here. Just as he was for seventy years, ever since that first summer of his life when his father bought this land and built the first house … As long as we are here, as long as any of our four sons are here … The boys understood that, he’d explained to them when they were very small, and he had repeated it at intervals through their childhood. They would tell their children, he was sure of that.… There was beginning to be a certain reluctance, a certain impatience in two of his sons. They came every summer, of course, and they had a wonderful time. But there was something else, something different.… They came out of respect for him. When he was dead, they would drift to other locations … And that was very sad. To him this was more than a summer place, a family enclave. It was a fixed point, a firm center for life to revolve around. Winter was filled with change and movement. They’d sold their house when the last boy married; they gave away most of the furniture and took an apartment in town. Now they were moving again: to a condominium in a building not yet constructed in a totally planned residential community. Everything would be new, every bit of furniture. Katy loved doing it, she had great taste … Here nothing changed. She’d never even suggested it. Some of the furniture had been his grandfather’s and showed water damage from the great hurricane of 1927, which had twisted off part of the roof. Most of the furniture had belonged to his parents. It was all handsome and comfortable, and appreciating in value year by year, especially the larger cabinets which had come from his aunt’s house in Philadelphia. He liked them all. Sometimes he found himself rubbing them absentmindedly, as if they were pet animals.

He mentioned nothing of this to his wife; he did not talk to her of things that were close to him. He’d never talked to any woman about them, not even his mother. He loved Katy, but he could never explain feelings to her. She might not understand. She might even laugh.

He remained a little shy with her, a little afraid. She was so much brighter than he, so much quicker. He’d met her on a double date her senior year in college. She was president of the student body, she’d been in the homecoming court, a shiny new Phi Beta Kappa key hung from her charm bracelet. He had finished college and was doing his military service, an army corporal who shuffled papers all day long, fought boredom, and counted the months to discharge. He hadn’t called her. He’d thought about it, but delayed. Finally, she called him. He remembered her words: “I don’t know when your leave ends, but I got tired waiting. Does a lady ask a gentleman out for a beer?”

He hadn’t been embarrassed, he’d been relieved and then rather pleased with himself. They were married six months later.

Thirty-six years ago, time marked by the growth of the boys.

“Everything’s ready here,” Katy said. “You have any news?”

“Mother got off right on time.”

“I heard the firecrackers,” Katy said. “I thought she must be leaving.”

“I walked over to the lane to wave her off.” He sounded surprised—as if it were a new idea, rather than something he’d done every Labor Day since his father’s death. “Seemed to be more firecrackers than usual. Josh and Tricia and the Sullivans, I think. Anyway, Mother wasn’t driving. She wasn’t complaining, but she didn’t look too pleased.”

“How would you feel if you had to change your ways just because you’d grown old?”

Their insurance agent had called Dan, very discreetly, to suggest that perhaps his mother ought not drive in heavy traffic, after all she was in her eighties, and wasn’t there somebody else in her household? Dan’s shoulders shook with amusement as he answered solemnly, “My mother doesn’t keep a big staff any more, you know, she only has a houseman …” He waited while the electronic voice gobbled relief. “Of course the houseman is a year older than she is … ”

Still, Dan managed to convince his mother that a younger driver was needed for the heavy Labor Day traffic. “Of course, Mother, you could wait and go later in the week when the traffic is much lighter.”

“This house is unlivable after Labor Day,” his mother said firmly. “I have never stayed longer.”

So Dan found a driver who was also a part-time policeman in Harrisport.

“Well,” said Katy to the empty Atlantic, “she not only has a new chauffeur, she has an armed escort as well.”

“I don’t think he carried his gun,” Dan answered vaguely, turning into the house. The screen door slammed after him.

Rachelle, who did the daily housework, was leaving as he entered the kitchen. She waved cheerfully. “See you next summer, Mr. Wagner.” Hurrying down the freshly swept walk, she called over her shoulder, “This day is fantastic!” She stripped off her blouse and skirt, to walk across the fields in a bright green bikini. The clothes swung from each hand like streamers in the wind.

In his mother’s day, Dan remembered, the house had been staffed by Irish maids. Every evening after dinner, bathed and dressed in pajamas and robe, he was allowed to watch the sunset from his bedroom. And from that window, the highest in the house, up under the point of the roof, he also watched the four maids walk down the kitchen path to their lodgings half a mile away. They walked slowly, in single file, each in black uniform (their white aprons left folded and hung in the kitchen). With their measured and careful pace they might have been a procession of nuns at vespers. Sometimes in the late evenings when the wind was right, a tiny thread of singing and laughter drifted across the meadow from their little house.

Those maids were gone, replaced by a constantly changing flow of local girls in bikinis. Only his mother’s houseman remained from the old days.

The kitchen was clean and bare, with the characteristic sulfur smell of the well water hanging in its corners. Most people disliked that odor. He found it quite pleasant; he missed it during the first weeks in town.

In the refrigerator were three half-gallon jugs, two labeled
MARTINI,
the other, a pinkish cloudy liquid,
DAIQUIRI.
On the shelves below were two platters of cheese. And nothing else.

Katy stood in the doorway. “That’s an end-of-summer refrigerator.”

“Martinis and daiquiris? Pink?”

“They’re strawberry daiquiris. Jean Price drinks them and she says everybody loves them.”

“Jean Price drinks daiquiris now?”

“She switched a few years ago, she said the martinis were killing her.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” Which was true. Jean and Boyd Price lived a few miles down the coast, summer friends for forty years. He and Boyd had gone to the same prep school. He and Jean had once been lovers. So long ago now, that love made awkwardly on beaches, on the musky-smelling cushions of sailboats. A large tanned woman with hazy pale blue eyes the color of cataracts. A capable woman, earthy and practical, wonderful outdoors, a better sailor than he was. They suited each other well for years. When the attraction faded, they remained friends, good friends.

“Do they still have that awful grandchild with them?”

“The one who’s studying dancing? Yes, they’re bringing him today. I couldn’t very well say leave that ghastly young man home … And who else is coming? Well, the Abbotts, all their guests are gone. And Midge is coming alone, Phil’s gone back to town already.”

A thin dark woman who lived miles down the coast in Harrisport, who painted and showed in New York and Chicago galleries, who had an unsteady marriage with a very handsome architect who was reported to be bisexual. They hadn’t known them very long, only five years or so. Once he had considered an affair with her, she was very willing. Something stopped him. Something his father would have called the old philanderer’s instinct.

Katy said, “And the Rasmussens are coming with their guests. We don’t know them. And the Howells and the Seavers. And I forgot who else, I don’t even remember who we asked. And of course there’ll be Elsie and Alice and Blanche.”

His sisters, all older, one widowed.

“Did Alice tell you?”

Dan continued staring at the half-empty refrigerator. “I don’t think Alice ever told me anything in my whole life except when I was a child and then it was Daniel, sit down, Daniel, be quiet.”

“She told me yesterday that she’s going to marry Fred Saunders.”

He considered taking a drink from one of the labeled bottles but resisted. Never before six o’clock. “Fred who?”

“You met him at that big bash Alice gave in July, there must have been three hundred people. He was there.”

“I remember the party,” he said. He’d found himself in a corner of the patio with Ellen Donovan, sitting quietly on a low bench overlooking a small noisy brook. They’d not talked long, but when they stood up again, moving on different paths to the bar, Dan knew that he had found his little friend for next summer.

His father’s term: little friend. Dan could still hear him saying confidently: No summer is complete without a little friend.

Katy said, “Alice is very happy.”