The Summer Guest (11 page)

“That it’s yours?” Her eyebrows rose. “I’d have to say no. That I didn’t know.”

“And is it okay?”

“Hell, Jordan.” I would have liked a smile right then but didn’t get one. “Of course it’s okay. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I don’t rightly know.” And I didn’t. As far as I could tell, everybody had gotten just what they wanted, without even asking. “This is going to take a while to sink in,” I said.

Hal rose from the couch, and I noticed for the first time how tall he was, nearly a full head taller than Joe, or his own father. He fixed his eyes on me, squinting a little in the weak, yellow light of the office. “It’s a lot to think about. But it’s all right to be happy, too, Jordan. It’s a great gift.”

Which was, of course, precisely true. That’s exactly what it was.

I said, “Thank you.”

He gave me a weary grin. I thought he was about to shake my hand, sealing the bargain, but instead he fixed one hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

“You’re welcome, Jordan.”

He was a beautiful man, Harry Wainwright. I thought this even before I knew who he was, before he made the fortune that made him famous, or famous to some. I was a waitress, seventeen years old, so sheltered you would have thought I was twelve anywhere else: a girl from an inbred town in northwest Maine where, as we said, half the people spoke French and the other half yelled. The summer began in May, when Joe kissed me behind the metal shop at school. My parents, who owned the sawmill in Norbeck Pond, were friends with Joe’s dad; when Joe told me they were hiring a waitress at the camp, I knew they’d let me do it. So, a summer of firsts: my first real job, my first kiss from Joe, my first vision of Harry, for that’s what it was: a vision.

I had also become pretty, and knew it. I had started my junior year just another gangly girl from nowhere, big-boned and big-nosed, so plain and unpromising with my drab skin and oily hair that you might have missed me standing against a freshly painted wall. But between the last of the leaves and the first of the blackflies, somebody somewhere had said the magic word, and this new thing about me, this prettiness, was something I could suddenly see everywhere I went: in puddles and windows, in the slow smiling eyes of boys at school and the men who worked at my parents’ mill-a different look, more respectful but also more afraid, like I was a bomb that might go off any second. I saw it in the way my friends treated me, like I was somebody they wouldn’t mind becoming, and planned to, someday soon. I saw it in Harry that day.

So in walked Harry for breakfast on a June morning in 1964; he stood a moment in the open doorway, his eyes roaming the room, letting me have a look at him. Not an especially tall man, but he made me think so; slender and strong, his skin flushed pink with fresh air, deep sleep, and a good morning on the water, his eyes so blue that these days I would assume he was wearing contacts, but not back then. I followed those eyes as they scanned the dining room like two blue searchlights, taking everything in; there was the first sprinkling of silver in his hair, which he wore just a little longer than the respectable men I knew but not as long as the drunks at Wiley’s, our one bad bar, or the trappers who came into town twice a year, stinking of themselves, to stock up on jerky and rifle shells before beating it back to the woods they’d come from.

The word I might have thought as I looked at him was handsome, or even cute, what we said of boys we liked, a shorthand for all the new feelings of desire that danced inside us like sparklers on the Fourth of July. Joe was cute; Joe was, with that little bit of a beard he was growing and the way he strutted around the place, knowing everything, even a little bit handsome.

Harry was: beautiful.

“Screen door, hon,” I said. I was calling everybody “hon” and “sweetie” that summer, a habit I’d cribbed from the real waitresses at the Pine Tree Café downtown. He met my eyes, and in his face I saw it: that look.

“I’m sorry?”

“Blackflies.” I waved a finger at the open door. “You’re letting them in.”

“Oh, right.” A laugh that crinkled the skin around his eyes. “Stupid of me. Hang on.” He backed out the door and I heard him call out from the pathway, “Hal? Hal, where’d you go?” I thought he might be calling a dog, which would have been fine; lots of folks brought dogs with them, and they were more than welcome in the dining hall if they didn’t smell too bad and knew how to mind. But then the door swung open again and in marched a boy somewhere between eight and eleven, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and bright red Keds, his hair all whichway, Harry bringing up the rear. They took a table by the big windows and I busied myself with menus and a coffeepot and took them over.

“Cream on the table there,” I said, pouring. I raised the pot over the boy’s cup, having fun. “What do you say, hon, coffee for you too?”

“How ’bout it, Hal?” The boy blushed and mumbled something; Harry lifted his face to me and shrugged. “Just milk for him, I guess.”

“I want chocolate.”

Harry shot him a fatherly frown-pure theater, done for me. “Listen to you, with the I wants.” He tapped his son’s elbow with the back of his hand. “Would it kill you to be polite to the young lady?”

Hal sighed and rolled his eyes. “May I have chocolate milk, please?”

“Better.” Harry lifted his face to me once more. “You’ll have to excuse him. The truth is, he’s just some kid I found in the woods.” He leaned over the table in my direction and lowered his voice. “Raised by wolves, I think.”

“Dad!”

“What?” He widened his eyes in mock alarm. “It’s some kind of secret? Better we come clean, Hal.”

Now I was the one laughing. “It’s perfectly all right, we’re pretty informal around here.” I pointed at the menu with the back of my pen. “Don’t know how hungry you are, but the raspberry pancakes are everybody’s favorite. Fresh berries from the farm down the road.”

“How about you?” Still with those blue, blue eyes on me.

“How about me?”

He cleared his throat: had I embarrassed him? “Do you like the raspberry pancakes?”

Thirty seconds of chitchat, and I felt like I was riding a swing with my shoes off. I cocked one hip and shrugged. “More of a blueberry fan myself. But they don’t come in till August.”

He looked at Hal, who gave another of his silent nods.

“The raspberry pancakes, then,” Harry said.

I took their menus and tucked them under my arm. “You won’t be sorry, because no one is. Have a good morning on the lake, gentlemen?”

He paused and smiled at me and there it was again. Even I could tell he was deciding how far to take this.

“Terrific,” he said.

In the kitchen I gave their order to Mrs. Markham, the cook. My brain was buzzing a little, the way a cigarette made me feel, minus the nausea. Joe was sitting at the big kitchen worktable, pulling apart a cinnamon bear claw, and a tang of guilt shot through me: things were moving along with us, we had entered the first, tentative weeks of boyfriend-girlfriend, and here I was, half breathless from flirting with a man as old as my father.

“What’s gotten into you?” Joe said, looking at me.

“What are you talking about?”

He pointed at me and whirled his finger around. “You’re all pink.” He munched the roll and took a drink from his mug of coffee. The air in the room was heavy as the inside of a hive, thick with the smell of airborne grease and dough baking in the oven. “You got that thing that’s going around?”

“Never mind me. I’m fine.”

I peeked through the door and saw two more parties arriving. For the next hour or so, as the late sleepers straggled in on top of the early risers who’d already been out since dawn, I’d be running without a moment to spare. Mrs. Markham disappeared into the pantry, leaving everything popping and steaming on the stove, and Joe came up behind me and put his hands on my waist.

“I’ve got some time off after lunch,” he said quietly. “What say I put together a little picnic for us? We can take one of the canoes for an hour or two.”

I leaned back a little and gave him a noncommittal “Hmm.” When things had started to change for me that winter, my mother sat me down one night after dinner over a plate of Toll House cookies for what she called “the boy talk,” and the one thing she said that stuck was not to jump at offers like Joe’s too quickly; a little hesitancy, she explained, was part of the game. It was sensible advice, and though I’d heard it a thousand times in other ways, I liked the way she said it-“the game,” as if the whole history of men and women, garden to grave, was as unserious as a game of Parcheesi on a rainy afternoon. This was the kind of thing my mother was good at, putting your fears at ease with a turn of phrase and a well-timed plate of cookies, though in this case I also knew she was speaking from the kind of second-guess work that all of us eventually do: game or no, she’d married my father right out of high school and had my older brother Lucius (Lucy and Lucius; I still shake my head at that one) about nine months and ten minutes later.

I was thinking about this and looking across the dining room to where Harry was hunched over the table, talking earnestly to Hal, who, after all the surliness, was finally smiling. A first big trip with Dad, I figured. Fish stories over breakfast.

“Say, who is that guy?” I was pleased at how casual I managed to sound. “Over by the windows.”

Joe followed my look. “Who, Harry?”

“Yes, Harry.” I gave him a little bump with my shoulder. “If that’s his name. And get that beard out of my neck. It itches.”

Joe stepped back, embarrassed but not very, and rubbed a hand over his cheeks. “Jeez, you’re in a mood today. I thought you liked it.”

At that moment Mrs. Markham returned from the pantry. During the year, Daphne Markham was a librarian at the elementary school-a woman with a thick waist and glasses on a chain who could shut you up with one steely-eyed glance that went through you like a spear. We were all terrified of her and assumed she’d never married because she was just too mean, but I later learned that this was not the case: she had been married, long ago, in Africa, where she and her husband were missionaries. What became of her husband I never learned, but earlier that summer she had shown me a photograph of herself, much younger, thin as a whip, standing in front of a small timber-framed church and wearing, of all things, a pith helmet.

For a large woman she was surprisingly fast, and she could handle a breakfast rush with the coolheaded precision of a bomber pilot; in one continuous motion she stepped to the stove, flipped a line of pancakes, dropped two slices of bread into the toaster, pulled a plate of rolls from the warmer, and cracked two eggs into a bowl for beating.

“Lucy, order’s almost up. Let’s get a move on, please.”

I looked at Joe, who had returned to the table and his bear claw. They were a specialty of Daphne’s, dripping with honey and completely irresistible. “Well? I promise to like your beard if you answer the question.”

Joe shrugged, not interested but willing to play along. “He’s just some friend of my dad’s. A regular, been up the last few summers. I guided him a few times. I guess that’s his kid.”

I peeked out the door again. Harry was gesturing toward the window, pointing something out to Hal. At one of the other tables, a man lifted his head and moved his eyes around the room, scowling: Where the hell’s my waitress?

“Okay, so he’s good-looking,” Joe said, and laughed. “Quit your mooning.”

I felt my face flush again and backed away from the door. “I am not mooning.”

“Sure you’re not. He’s as old as your dad. He’s also some kind of big shot, what my dad tells me. A good tipper too. Usually gives me at least ten bucks. Kinda folds the bill and slips it to me, like I might be embarrassed to take it.”

I could somehow see this. “How about his wife? Is she a good tipper, too?”

Joe frowned impatiently, and I felt my stomach tighten. Why was I asking this? And why was I asking Joe, of all people? “How should I know? He always comes by himself, until now.” He gave a thoughtful look and wiped his hands on a napkin. “Actually, I heard his wife’s sick or something. Don’t know why I’d think that, unless maybe he mentioned it.” He lifted his eyes to me then and smiled, ready to change the subject. “So, how about it?”

“How about what?”

Joe glanced over at the stove. He pointed at me, then himself, and mouthed the words: the picnic.

Behind him, Daphne sighed irritably and banged her spatula against a pan. “Lucy, for heaven’s sake, order’s up now.”

Two new tables seated, orders backing up, and I had forgotten Hal’s chocolate milk. “Oh, shit.”

Daphne spun and nailed me, hard, with one of her librarian glares. “Lucy, I won’t have that kind of talk in my kitchen. I expect it from the men, but not from you. And Joe,” she continued, pointing her spatula, “don’t you have anything better to do? Go help your father. Go on now, scoot.”

I fetched milk and chocolate from the fridge, made Hal a glass with an extra squirt of syrup-what the heck, maybe I could make him like me after all-and set up the trays, with menus for the new tables tucked under my arm. I was wondering how I’d get it all outside when Joe stepped up and held the door for me. He raised his eyebrows as I passed.

“Okay,” I said, and stifled a flirty laugh. There was something about him at that moment, a gentle sweetness, that always worked on me, and I would have kissed him right then if I could have, scratchy beard and all-though for a moment it also struck me that maybe I was thinking of Harry, that I had confused myself that much.

“Okay what?” he said, grinning.

“Just okay,” I said, and bumped my hip into his to let him know my meaning, and took my trays outside.

And there they stayed, the two of them mixed together in my mind: Joe and Harry, my handsome boy and this beautiful man who’d blown in from nowhere. I went on the picnic with Joe, giving myself a good case of razor-face as we passed a lazy hour under the birches, and all that week I served Harry his breakfast and lunch and dinner, tucking bright little bits of conversation about absolutely nothing into my trips to his table. Even Hal got the hang of things, trying to woo me with his fish stories and reformed good manners, like a boy trying to impress a friend’s older sister. And when my shifts were over I went off to find Joe, my thoughts still full of Harry: a recipe for permanent confusion, if ever there was one. By the end of the week Joe’s beard had softened, or else my face had gotten used to it; and then on Saturday I came into the dining room at 6:00 A.M. and found an envelope by the hostess station, with my name on it, and this note: Off at 5:00 A.M. Thanks for the conversation. See you next year. Yours, Harry Wainwright. I folded it like money, put it in the pocket of my apron, and let it ride around there for the rest of the summer. Say what you like, but I was just a girl; I felt like I’d been secretly kissed.

I knew about Meredith, of course, just as Harry knew about Joe. Bit by bit over the next few summers we let our stories come out-because we wanted to, and because we had no reason to hide them. Harry was Harry, and I was who I was, the most pertinent detail being a single mathematical reality: there were twenty-two years between us. Joe had been right. Harry was, in fact, exactly as old as my father, give or take a month. There was a point in my life when age wouldn’t have mattered, and I’m not sure it ever should have mattered, though I say this as a woman of forty-seven, so consider the source; but it seemed to matter back then, a great deal in fact, when I was seventeen and Harry was thirty-nine, a man with a son not much younger than I was and a slowly dying wife, a man I saw exactly seven days out of every three hundred sixty-five. There was a way in which we loved each other from the start, I think, a cosmic symmetry that could not be refused, but it was a love that was always folded into other loves, and that is the real story of me and Harry Wainwright.