The Beach at Summerly

by Beatriz Williams

Genres: World War II; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

New York Times bestseller Beatriz Williams returns with a ravishing summer read, taking readers back to a mid-century New England rich with secrets and Cold War intrigue.

June 1946. As the residents of Winthrop Island prepare for the first summer season after the sacrifice of war, a glamorous new figure moves into the guest cottage at Summerly, the idyllic seaside estate of the wealthy Peabody family. To Emilia Winthrop, daughter of Summerly’s year-round caretaker and a descendant of the island’s settlers, Olive Rainsford opens a window into a world of shining possibility. While Emilia spent the war years caring for her incapacitated mother, Olive traveled the world, married fascinating men, and involved herself in political causes. She’s also the beloved aunt of the two surviving Peabody sons, Amory and Shep, with whom Emilia has a tangled romantic history.

As the summer wears on, Emilia develops a deep rapport with Olive, who urges her to leave the island for a life of adventure, while romance blossoms with the sturdy and honorable Shep. But the heady promise of Peabody patronage is blown apart by the arrival of Sumner Fox, an FBI agent who demands Emilia’s help to capture a Soviet agent who’s transmitting vital intelligence on the West’s atomic weapon program from somewhere inside the Summerly estate.

April 1954. Eight years later, Summerly is boarded up and Emilia has rebuilt her shattered life as a professor at Wellesley College, when shocking news arrives from Washington—the traitor she helped convict is about to be swapped for an American spy imprisoned in the Soviet Union, but with a mysterious condition only Emilia can fulfill. A reluctant Emilia is summoned to CIA headquarters, where she’s forced to confront the harrowing consequences of her actions that fateful summer, and a choice that could destroy the Peabody family—and Emilia’s chance for redemption—all over again.

Release date: June 27, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 368

Sample

I.

April 1954

Wellesley, Massachusetts

Aunt Benedita telephones long-distance just as I’m rushing out the door. She’s one of those people who has a knack for it.

“I can’t talk right now,” I tell her. “I’m late for class.”

“You’ll want to hear this. Your father told me that Tom Donnelly and his boys started to work on a new job.”

“Gee, that’s terrific. You know how I love hearing all the little tidbits from back home.”

“Don’t you want to know whose house they’re working on?”

“Look, Auntie, I know you don’t believe it, but a mile away from where I stand at this telephone, there’s a lecture hall filled with undergraduates desperate to hear me speak about the Salem witch trials. Could you put them out of their misery?”

Aunt Benedita disregards my pique. That’s how we’ve remained on speaking terms, all these years.

“They’re fixing up Summerly,” she says.

Lucky for me, an armchair sits next to the table where we keep the telephone. I land on it hard and notice that the telephone cord has somehow gotten twisted around the table leg. I unwind the cord while Aunt Benedita’s voice leaks out of the earpiece, repeating my name. When I put the receiver back to my ear, the darn thing shakes in my hand, all by itself.

“Good for them,” I tell her.

 

Outside, the air smells green. The temperature is positively balmy. The blossoms are popping out at last in their pinks and whites. Even after all these years on the mainland, I can’t look on a blossoming tree without my throat feeling sore. You simply don’t get blossoming trees on Winthrop Island. It seems so extravagant. The sky has turned an ultramarine shade of blue and the blossoms nod and waft against this exemplary field. I hurry across the quadrangle toward Founders Hall and try not to mind all the beauty, but it hits my gut all the same.

I wasn’t exactly lying to Aunt Benedita about the lecture hall, but you might say I was stretching the truth. I still have time to hurry up the steps, deposit my belongings in the fourth-floor telephone booth known as my office, and drink a cup of muddy coffee before presenting myself in the classroom two minutes before the lecture’s due to begin. It’s the end of April and the air is green and balmy, as I said, and most of my students have given up trying to arrive early, if at all. “Women in Early Colonial America” is a brand-new course in the history department curriculum—a course I designed myself, if you must know—but I’m afraid nobody seems to care much about colonial history in these days of hydrogen bombs and Jackson Pollock, even though I try to present the subject with a certain amount of panache.

Still, a few young ladies have managed to drag themselves through the dreaming blossoms and into the classroom, and that’s all that matters, really. To reach a few fresh minds, to plant some germ of inspiration. That girl in the second row, for example. The light, curling brown hair and the sharp chin; the dark, narrow eyes like a young fox. She sets that inquisitive chin into her palm and loses herself in the parable and I say to myself, in a thought that floats in parallel to my words and my theatrical gestures, That’s it, honey, just sink yourself into the past, so you don’t have to spend so much time in the awful present.

 

Later, when I retire to my telephone booth office in the fourth-floor attic, there is the newspaper to distract me. Sure, maybe it describes the awful present, but at least it isn’t myawful present. I light a cigarette, pour myself another cup of muddy coffee, and add a splash of cognac from the flask in my desk drawer. If you’re going to drink in your office, I always say, make sure it’s worth the trouble.

The news is even more rotten than usual—same old mess in Indochina, the Red Sox lose another one, that chump McCarthy’s starting in on the Army now—but I read on regardless. If nothing else, I know the trick of mental discipline. Close your mind to the unwanted thought. Throw yourself a nice, noisy party of the head so you don’t hear it knocking.

Still, now that I’m sitting down to read the newspaper instead of lecturing, drinking this miraculous coffee instead of standing cold sober in front of a room full of dewy coeds, that damned word keeps streaking across my mind from wherever it is you hold your memories.

Summerly.

Why in God’s name did Aunt Benedita have to go and telephone me about a thing like that? Long-distance, no less. She might have put it in a letter—she writes plenty of those, too. Always trying to smooth things over, Aunt Benedita, always having the exact opposite effect. I bicycled to Summerly the other day, she might write, and it’s an awful shame how they’ve let it go to seed. The roof shingles are falling out by the dozen and the grass is up to the front window. Do you remember that old rhododendron bush? It’s taking over the hedge.

Does she not understand how these details hurt? Does she think they’ll make me feel better? Now she wants to tell me that Tom Donnelly’s crew is fixing up the place again so the Peabodys can return for the summer season like old times. What am I supposed to think about that? Am I supposed to want to join them?

Well, now I’ve done it. You see what I mean? You open your mind a crack, just a crack to allow a single dumb word like Summerly into the party, and the rest of that thought shoves through uninvited and eats up all the canapés. I lay down the newspaper and open the desk drawer, and this time when I uncork my bottle of cognac, I really let the coffee have it. I do like cognac. It’s like brandy, only . . . more. A professor of mine made the introduction, junior year, and we’ve been friends ever since. The cognac, I mean, not the professor. No, Professor Pete and I had the briefest possible affair before his wife found out and reported him to the department head. He accepted a research position at some progressive-minded college in the Midwest somewhere and I haven’t heard from him since. The cognac was the best part of our friendship, to be perfectly honest. I prop my feet on the corner of the desk and slide the newspaper into my lap. The aqua vitae gives off its perfume inside my skull. I turn the page.

“RED BRAHMIN” PAROLE HEARING CANCELED, SOURCES SAY

And I guess it speaks to the old adage about trouble coming in threes that my phone rings the exact instant I’ve absorbed that headline. The coffee spills in my lap. I swear savagely and reach for the receiver.

Emilia Winthrop, I growl.

The voice on the other end is a courtly Southern baritone. “Miss Winthrop. I hope I haven’t called at a bad time.”

 

When I arrive home at a quarter past five, Susana’s making dinner. Lizbit sits nearby on the kitchen counter, stirring something inside a large metal mixing bowl.

“Emmie,” she says sternly, “have you been hitting the bottle at work again?” Lizbit calls us both by our first names, to the delight of visitors. They think it’s so amusing and precocious in a seven-year-old.

“Hell, no.” I swoop her into my arms and deliver a boozy kiss to her cheek. “I’ve been a saint. What’s for dinner?”

“Pork chops,” says Susana. “What’s the matter with you?”

“You’ll never guess.”

“Not Cato again.”

“No, not Cato. Believe it or not.”

My kid sister’s a terrific cook. I’m going to miss her terribly when she gets married in June. When I try to picture the aftermath—Susana and Harvey on their honeymoon in Key West, me and Lizbit sitting around the living room in our underwear—I get this sinister feeling of bleakness and hunger. I can only hope Lizbit takes over the cooking.

Susana flips the pork chops in the skillet. “So what gives? Poor Lizbit’s going to get sauced just standing downwind of you.”

“I can hold my breath,” says Lizbit.

I snap my fingers. “Witches. That’s it.”

“Witches?”

“Witches, not Women. ‘Witches of Early Colonial America.’ That’ll turn out the kids next semester.”

“For God’s sake,” says Susana, “just go set the table, will you?”

 

Now, I don’t mean to impugn the good Harvey. He’s a real prince and I’m grateful he’s taking my sister off my hands. It’s a sad story, really. He’s only twenty-six and a widower. Graduated Harvard Law and married his sweetheart, a girl from Brookline, nice girl by all accounts, then six months later she’s dead of cancer. They didn’t catch the tumor until it was too late. Terrible story. We don’t know the details, actually—just that it was a female type of cancer. Harvey’s too embarrassed to go into the specifics. Harvey’s embarrassed about a lot of things. Honestly, I don’t think they’ve even reached second base, Susana and Harvey. He came into the bookstore the Christmas before last to buy a present for his ex-mother-in-law. The Serenity Bookshop, right here in Wellesley, Mass.—ever heard of it? It’s a nice cozy spot packed with armchairs and atmosphere. We keep some dirty novels in the back for people with real imagination. Susana opened it when she moved up here with me seven and a half years ago. She had to do something, and she didn’t want to start college, like me. So she started a bookstore instead. I usually pitch in on weekends and holidays, but when Harvey Reed, Esquire, walked into the store late that Christmas Eve (well, he’s a man, after all) I happened fatefully to be four streets away in our living room with Lizbit, trimming the tree and skimming the eggnog, and the next thing you know, Susana leads the widower Harvey home for the holidays like a stray puppy. Can we keep him, that was what I saw in her eyes that night, and it turned out we could. He’s a lawyer at some nice Boston firm. Always a good idea to have a lawyer in the family, don’t you think? Just in case? They’ll be happy together, I’m sure.

Anyway, I once asked Harvey sort of a legal question. I asked him why the newspapers insist on making up catchy names for notorious criminals—the so-called Red Brahmin, to take a random example. He said he disapproved of the practice, that it mocked the sacred principle of innocence presumed until guilty proved, without which our democracy could not stand. (All right, so Harvey can be a bit of a prig.) But he conceded that democracy also required the freedom of the press to make asses of themselves, so what could you do?

And it was true that this Red Brahmin, though she had the privilege of belonging to one of Boston’s oldest families, had betrayed our country’s most vital secrets to the Soviet Union. So even if the moniker was a little crude, you couldn’t deny it was apt.

 

One thing I love about Susana, she can take a hint. She refrains from questioning me about my day at work until after Lizbit is scrubbed clean and passed out cold in her pink canopy bed, so remarkably like an angel it chokes your throat.

Early on, we made a deal in our house, which is Susana shops for groceries and does the cooking, while I do the baking—the doctor says it’s good for my nerves—and the washing up. Accordingly, I yank on the rubber gloves and plunge my arms into the hot water. Susana sits down at the kitchen table and lights a cigarette. Well? she says.

“Sumner Fox rang me up after class today.”

She almost spits out the cigarette. “Fox? Our Sumner Fox?”

“Is there another one?”

“So what for did he call you?”

“He wants me to come to prison and talk to our mutual friend.”

“Our mutual friend?”

“You know.”

“Talk to Mrs. Rainsford? Our Mrs. Rainsford?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call her our Mrs. Rainsford, dear. Not in public. People might get the wrong idea.”

Susana drags thoughtfully on her cigarette. “Why does Fox want you to talk to Olive Rainsford?”

“He wouldn’t say. She wants to speak to me, that’s all. It is apparently of the utmost urgency, according to Fox.”

“Well,” Susana says.

“Well what?”

“Well, it’s about time, I guess.”

“What do you mean, it’s about time?”

“Honey,” she says soothingly, “any shrink could tell you that it would do you a world of good to sit down with that woman and—well, get some answers.”

“You’re absolutely right. Any shrink.”

Susana rises from the kitchen table and snatches a towel from the hook. Susana’s the only person I know who can smoke a cigarette and dry a plate at the same time. “Just because Cato’s a psychologist doesn’t mean the whole science is wrong.”

“It might, though.”

“All right,” she says. “Let me correct myself. First you should end things with Cato, then you should visit that prison and talk to Olive.”

“First, I don’t see any reason to end things with Cato. I think it’s the most satisfactory relationship I’ve ever had. Second, nuts to Olive.”

“Why not, though? Give me one good reason why you can’t just sit down with her for half an hour.”

I hand Susana a water glass. “You didn’t happen to read the papers today, did you?”

“Sort of,” she says. “Not really.”

“You know Olive’s been coming up for her first chance at parole, right? Well, the parole hearing’s been canceled. Right there in the Globe, page four or something. And then—at that exact moment I’m reading about it—Fox rings up.”

“So?”

“So you don’t smell a rat? Because I smell a rat.”

Susana turns to me all round—round face, round mouth, round eyes. “Oh! You don’t think they’ve found out something else she’s done? Or she’s been spying from prison?”

“I just think it’s funny, that’s all. At this particular moment in time, Olive sticks up her hand and says she wants to have a nice friendly chat with the woman who put her in prison. No hard feelings.”

“I would say you’ve got plenty of hard feelings.”

I hand Susana the last fork, pull the plug from the drain, and peel off the gloves. The pipes bubble and gasp. A hint of putrescence drifts up with the bubbles. I make a mental note to call the plumber. “I agree,” I tell her. “Which is why I told Mr. Fox to go to hell.”

 

When Susana and I moved to Wellesley seven and a half years ago, just in time for the start of term, we got this bungalow for a steal. Maybe the G.I. Bill was sending battalions of young men into college in the autumn of 1946, but you couldn’t say the same for girls—especially the kind of upscale girl who went to Wellesley College to further her education. Those girls were mostly getting married. But not us. We needed a place to live, and this was the first place we saw. It was twenty years old and needed a lick or two of paint, to say nothing of a working icebox, but it had three nice-sized bedrooms and a modern bathroom and plenty of bookshelves left behind by a previous occupant, and it was only a mile from the center of campus. We’ll take it, I said.

Since then, Susana has done wonders to make our place the kind of place you’d want to come home to. By the time Lizbit was born, she’d repainted all the rooms and lined all the drawers and made these nifty patchwork curtains out of fabric ends from the dry goods on Main Street. For mine she selected various patterns in green, because green’s my favorite color. I’m looking at those curtains now, except the room is too dark to tell what color they are. You’ll have to trust me. They’re green. Green, the color of new life, the color of spring, the color of fecundity. I close my eyes and try to throw a party in my head, but nobody comes. Just the past.

Olive Rainsford.

Absolutely not, I told Sumner Fox over the telephone, and by God I meant it. I didn’t want to see Olive again. I didn’t want her treacherous eyes meeting my treacherous eyes, to determine which of us was the greater traitor. I didn’t need to speak to Olive. I speak to her every day! All the time, we have these imaginary conversations.

My goodness, how you’ve changed, she’ll say. You’re nothing like the Emilia I used to know.

I’ll light a mental cigarette and pour myself a mental Scotch. Well, whose fault is that, I’ll tell her. And so on.

Fox was persistent, I’ll give him that. He explained to me how this might be my last-ever chance to sit across the table from Olive Rainsford. How Olive had specially requested the meeting. She’d insisted, in fact.

What do you mean, insisted? I asked.

There was a long silence down the line, the kind you might expect from Sumner Fox while he picks his thoughts. I hadn’t seen him in years, nor heard his voice—not since that final day in the courtroom when I gave my testimony and he thanked me afterward for what he called my courage. But time hadn’t changed him, except to make his throat raspier and his words even more measured. I would almost say weary. I guess espionage is nearly as brutal a business as academics.

She has a request to make of you, he said. I’m afraid I can’t disclose any further information over the telephone. But I urge you to think it over, Miss Winthrop. You’d be doing your country a great service.

That’s when I told him I have already done my country more than enough service, thank you very much, putting her in jail in the first place. I’m not going to waste my time helping you get her out again.

 

Eventually I fall asleep. I know this because I wake to an immense pressure crushing my chest. This happens to me from time to time. Cato says it’s a response to repressed trauma. He thinks I need analysis, a lot of analysis. I roll my eyes and tell him he would say that, wouldn’t he? Personally, I think he’s just miffed because I won’t tell him about what happened before I moved to Wellesley. Why should I? I don’t speak to anybody about what happened that summer, about what I lost. Even Susana knows better than to speak his name. The pressure grows on my chest, like a booted foot stands on the center of the sternum. My ribs crack under its weight. The room is still black, the color of longing. Tears leak out from the corners of my eyes and run down to the pillowcase, so badly do I want it all back—the summer, the man who loved me, the Emilia that was. In the distance, a telephone rings. I tell myself Pop will get it. He’ll be downstairs by now.

Then I remember there is no downstairs, and there is no Pop. Not here with me, anyway. I’m a mainlander now, and I answer the telephone at dawn all by myself, before the noise wakes up Lizbit.

I cup my hand over the receiver. “Hello?”

“Emmie? Is that you?”

“Aunt Benedita? What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”

Of course something’s wrong. Aunt Benedita doesn’t call you at five in the morning to tell you the sun is about to rise. Already my heart knows what’s coming. My heart beats itself senseless, anticipating the blow.

“It’s your father,” Aunt Benedita whispers. “He’s gone, Emmie.”

May 1946

Winthrop Island

That was the summer the boys came home—those who were still alive, anyway. I guess some girls came home, too, the ones who went off to do war work or nursing work, joined the WAACs or the WAVES or the what have you, drove ambulances and flew airplanes and parachuted into France. I wasn’t one of those girls. I spent the war right here on Winthrop Island, where I grew up. I listened to the war on the radio and read about the war in the newspaper. I grew vegetables and raised chickens and milked the cow and the goats. I wrote encouraging letters to the boys at the front. I wrote comforting letters to the families of the boys who died. Now the war was over. Even the rationing had ended. The bill had been totaled and paid and everything was going back to the way it was.

Well, except for the boys who died, and the people who loved them.

On a nice sunny day at the end of May, the Wednesday before Memorial Day, we didn’t have all that many visitors at the Winthrop Island Library and Historical Society. The year-rounders couldn’t be bothered, what with the weather turning so nice, and the summer folk had only just started trickling in with their trunks and boxes. At around three thirty that afternoon, Mrs. Collins stretched her arms above her head, so she resembled a chintz cushion about to attempt a dive. She glanced at the clock and smiled at me kindly.

“I guess you might as well go home and help your sister start supper.”

“But I haven’t finished cataloging this new shipment of books.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. Mr. Winthrop will be so tired after getting the big house all ready for the Peabodys.”

“That’s true.”

“When is the family due in?”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” I told her. “According to the latest telegram, anyway.”

I was sure Mrs. Collins already knew this, on account of her younger sister worked at the post office and was therefore privy to all the Western Union traffic to and from the island. But it was nice of her to ask, anyway. I thanked her for letting me off early and gathered my hat and pocketbook and white cotton gloves from the desk drawer.

Just as I made my way around the counter, the little bell on the door went jing-a-ling and a woman walked in, baby braced on one hip and a child clinging to the other hand, besides an older one trailing behind. She wore a flowery dress and a straw hat, kind of a striking woman with curling dark hair, real slender, red lipstick, about forty years old, smelled of rose petal soap.

I glanced back at Mrs. Collins, as if to say, You want me to take care of this? Mrs. Collins just waved me out the door.

The last thing I heard was this woman asking, in a fine educated Boston voice, whether she might trouble Mrs. Collins for some books to keep her children entertained while she worked.

 

Because we only had one car, the old Ford truck Pop used for work, I pedaled my way up and down Winthrop Island on this bicycle that used to belong to my aunt Hannah, before the island winters drove her crazy and she divorced Uncle Petey and moved out west to St. Louis or someplace. It wasn’t much, but it got me around. Pop kept it shipshape for me, gears and chains all nicely oiled and everything, straw basket hanging from the handlebars to carry my pocketbook and lunch and Thermos of coffee, maybe a ragged novel or two. Of course, the library was in town, and home lay five miles down the main road to the other end of the island, but I’ve always liked a little exercise and anyway the views along the way were million dollar, even in winter. First you cycled up West Cliff Road, which was hard work, but then you breathlessly reached the top of the cliffs and the long grass burnt against the horizon. As the pedals relaxed beneath your feet and your breath caught up with your chest, you discovered the sea and the green tip of Long Island. The Fleet Rock Lighthouse, the tide that flew into the sound from the giant Atlantic. The tidy sails and the lobster boats and the lethargic ferry to Orient Point. You passed the driveway to Greyfriars, brooding alone where the cliffs come down into a little cove across from the lighthouse. The Fishers spent their summers there—they’d be arriving in a week or two. But today the house was empty and still.

The road turned around a bend after that, and the sea dodged out of view. A public beach nestled underneath these cliffs, where the villagers and the day-trippers and the renters went to swim and sunbathe and picnic—regular people who didn’t belong to the Club at the private end of the island, where I was headed on that May afternoon. The road wound this way and that, following the general line of the island’s southeastern shore. Horseshoe Cove, where the kids lit bonfires sometimes, away from their parents dining oblivious at the Club. Eventually I came to the modest clapboard hut that marked the boundary of the Winthrop Island Association, the private side of the island. Stan poked his head out of the window and sent me along with a cheerful wave. I waved back. On either side of me unrolled the land my family had farmed for centuries. I passed the Lowell place, the Dana place, the Dumonts and the Monks. The big pond, where all the kids learned to sail, and then the little pond. Past the entrance to the Club, the sharp Tudorbethan roof peaks of the clubhouse, the shaved tees overlooking the water, the plush greens, the immaculate sand traps. Everything empty and waiting. Holding its breath. Finally Crystal Pool—that’s Yankee irony, see, because the pond’s so brackish—where at last you turned down Serenity Lane.

There are old-timers who will tell you that the arrival of the Families on Winthrop Island each summer resembles an invasion of starving locusts, that the purchase and development of the eastern chunk of Winthrop into a seasonal resort for rich folks ruined the island altogether. But I had never known anything different. When I turned down Serenity Lane that particular afternoon and saw the building asleep on the horizon, my heart swelled against my ribs. Summerly, the Peabodys called it. There must have been a dozen bedrooms, each with its own gable or tower or sleeping porch. It was made of fieldstone and gray shingle and white clapboard trim, topped by a slate roof to ward off the afternoon thunderstorms you got here during the hot spells. The bicycle tires jigged over the gravel. The limpid afternoon sun cast my shadow over the handlebars. Behind me stretched the bare and lifeless months of winter. Ahead of me, the house grew against the blue sky, ready to wake. I remember I stopped pedaling and braced my toes on the drive so I could get a hold of myself, so I could catch my breath and contemplate what was due to arrive tomorrow on the midday ferry—the end of the war, the return of summer, the return of the Peabodys. A giant new world gaping before me, packed with possibility and also with a dread I couldn’t name, waiting for me to step inside.

Into this trance pierced the rattle of a car engine and a strangled beep-beep from a constipated horn. The noise startled me into the grass. I set my toe back down and twisted around to see what was coming. Some dusty black car about ten years old. It rolled to a stop right next to me and a woman poked her head out. Dark hair, red lipstick—the woman from the library.

“Hello there!” she called out cheerfully. “You must be Emilia!”

“That’s right. Can I help you?”

“We’re here for the summer! Just arrived today! The guest cottage! Olive Rainsford!” She had to yell above the car engine, turning over in vast wheezy chugs. In the back seat, a couple of children squabbled over candy or something. I thought I glimpsed the baby sitting upright in the middle. She pointed her thumb at them. “My kids!”

“It’s nice to meet you! We’re the caretakers!”

“Yes, I know! Edwina Peabody’s my sister!”

“Oh! You’re Aunt Olive!”

“That’s right! Will you children be quiet?” She turned her head to address the nippers. I couldn’t make out what else she said to them, but they shut up quick.

“I’ve heard so much about you!” I called.

“What’s that?”

“Heard a lot about you!”

“Don’t believe a word of it!” She winked and yanked the car back into gear. She had nice arms, lean and already tanned apricot. “I’ll be off now! Nice to meet you, Emilia!”

I stood for a moment, balanced atop my bicycle, one toe pressed into the short spring grass. The car rumbled away. An arm snaked from the window and waggled its hand. The fingers were long, the nails short and unpainted. The horn belched again. Inside the patch of rear window, two small, white faces appeared and stared at me like a pair of ghosts, unblinking, until the car disappeared around a hedge on its way to the Summerly guest cottage.

Once the dust settled, I pushed off with my toe and cycled right, onto the dirt track that led off the main drive. At the end of this track sat the caretaker’s lodge, a fine old clapboard house dating back before the Revolution, all slanting floors and warped roof beams, picturesquely put to rights by the Peabodys when they built Summerly thirty years before. It had plumbing and electricity and central heating now, a modern kitchen and a hygienic upstairs bathroom with piped hot water and everything, so it was much more comfortable than when Pop grew up inside its walls, scrubbing himself once a week inside a wooden tub next to the coal stove—so he claimed, anyway, when I was a kid. But if you approached it as I did that afternoon, pedaling a bicycle down the middle of the track until the center chimney popped up from behind the profuse beach plum and then the whole house slid into view from around a bend, it looked just like it might have done when the Winthrops first settled here in the middle of the seventeenth century and gave the island its name.

I put my bicycle in the shed and ducked through the lean-to entrance on the side, where we kept our boots and things in the mud season. “Mama! I’m home!” I sang out, as I always did, even though she couldn’t answer me. Susana replied instead, from the dining room where she sat at the table, surrounded by homework. The school year was nearly over and she was studying for final exams. Next to her, Mama sat in her chair and laboriously folded squares of colored paper into flowers. I kissed the top of Mama’s head on my way to look over Susana’s shoulder.

“Tangents,” I said approvingly.

“I hate ’em.”

“Math is just logic, Susana. Everyone needs to learn logic.”

“Says you.”

“Where’s Pop?” I asked her.

“He’s still at the big house, helping Aunt Benedita air all the beds. Auntie said not to hold supper for him, he’ll be late.”

“Did Aunt Benedita say anything about somebody staying in the cottage this summer?”

“The guest cottage? Somebody’s in the guest cottage? Who?”

She said this like you might ask about rats in the basement. I looked up from Mama’s chair, where I was conducting my habitual inspection of her color and pulse and breathing, the dilation of her pupils and that kind of thing, which Dr. Pradelli taught me after Mama had the stroke, two years ago. (I was the one who discovered her, you know, on the immaculate white tiles of the new bathroom. She had fallen on her face and I’d had to roll her over to see if she was dead.) Susana stared back at me with a horrified expression. She had wide cheekbones and a small, pointed chin, so her face reminded you of a heart.

I gave Mama’s shoulder a pat and plopped on the chair next to her. “Oh, just Aunt Olive and her kids, that’s who.”

“Aunt Olive? The Aunt Olive?”

“I don’t know another one.”

Susana clapped a hand over her mouth. A second later, she lifted it away and primped her hair, like she expected Olive Rainsford to sweep into the room that very instant.

I turned to Mama. “You’ve heard about Mrs. Peabody’s sister, haven’t you, Mama? The one who went to finishing school in Switzerland and never came home?”

“Are you sure?” Susana demanded. “Did you see her?”

“I saw her twice. Once at the library and again on the way home. She stopped the car and said hello.”

“What did she look like? What did she say?”

“She said hello, that’s all. She had a couple of kids in the back seat. I think there was a baby, too. She was getting some books for them at the library.”

“What kind of books?”

“I don’t know. Children’s books, I guess. Mrs. Collins helped her.”

“You let Mrs. Collins help her?”

“Well, I didn’t know she was Olive Rainsford, did I? I thought she was just another summer renter.”

Susana sat back in her chair. “You’re no help.”

“What do you want? She looked like a housewife, that’s all. Kind of a stylish housewife, you know the type. She wore lipstick and a nice dress.” I ran my palm down the grain of the wooden table and called up details to my memory. “I thought her hair was a little short, under her hat, just dark and waving naturally? Like she doesn’t like to bother with it much.”

“Of course she doesn’t. She’s too adventurous to think about her coiffure.” Susana laid a French accent on the word.

“You don’t even know her.”

“But all the stories, Cricket! You remember the stories the boys had about her. How she lived in China and used to send them all those funny souvenirs.”

“A lot of people travel to China.”

“She’s had two husbands, at least.”

I stood up. “I’m going to see about supper.”

“I’ll help you.”

“No, you finish studying. Exams start in two days.”

Susana shifted her feet under the table and fiddled with the ends of her hair. “Mary says they’re looking for more waitresses at the Club this summer.”

“Not in a million years.”

She threw back the curl she was fingering. “You wait tables at the Club!”

“I’m older than you.”

“Besides, we could use the money, right? You’re always worried about money.”

“We’ll manage. Now go back to your tangents. You have to pass your exams before you can even think about summer.”

“Sure I do. But the last I heard, I don’t have homework during the summer.”

Well, she had a point. I looked down at the top of Mama’s head. Her nose pointed in Susana’s direction. The doctor told us Mama couldn’t understand everything we said to her anymore, that the stroke had shut off oxygen to various segments of her brain, so that Mama was left with the intellect of a small child. People used to come up to me and pat my arm and say—in that slow, condescending voice by which you convey comfort to grief-stricken people—that it was a mercy, really. Just think about it! If the circuits in her brain had plain shorted out, so to speak, upon receiving the news that her only son and favorite child had been killed the previous week on some mountain slope in Italy, maybe she was better off like this—like a child who didn’t understand what was happening around her.

A mercy, really, people repeated. Patting my hand.

I told Susana, “All right. I’ll see if Mrs. Collins needs any more help at the library.”

 

By the time we finished the soup and washed the dishes, Pop still hadn’t arrived back from the main house. Susana wanted to make up some excuse to go visit Mrs. Rainsford, bring her a neighborly food hamper or something, but I insisted it could wait for another day. Mrs. Rainsford would be getting the kids their supper right now, getting them bathed and in bed, and she wouldn’t appreciate neighbors stopping by with their hampers of curiosity. Besides, Susana had school in the morning.

So Susana stomped upstairs to run her bath and I stepped outside for a breath of air. The sun had only just fallen and a sheen of orange still rimmed the horizon. The air was blue and cool and clear enough to see for miles. Between the birches—planted by the Peabodys thirty years earlier, likely for privacy—the shingles of the big house rambled on forever. Somewhere to the north, hidden by the sprawl of Summerly, the guest cottage perched right near the edge of the rocks—hardly a place you wanted to bring small children, now that I thought about it, but maybe Mrs. Rainsford was the type of mother who felt kids should learn to fend for themselves and have proper adventures. The Peabodys were like that.

I wandered to the edge of the lawn, a thick stubble grass that lapsed into scrub meadow before disappearing altogether into the rocks that tumbled down to the beach. Once I overheard Mr. Peabody pronounce that the island reminded him of Scotland—or was it Ireland? Never having visited either one—never having traveled farther from Winthrop Island than Boston, Massachusetts—I couldn’t say. Certainly my ancestors didn’t farm this land with much success. Only the hardiest survived around here, things that could stand the salt and wind and soil, the dark and bitter winters. All the timber came down in the great gale of 1815, according to my granddad, whose granddad told him the stories about that storm from when he was a boy. What’s left was brush and scrub and meadow, like this. Some trees planted in by the summer people on the new summer estates. I brought together the edges of my cardigan and crossed my arms over my chest. In May, the air turned chill as soon as the sun stopped warming it. To my left,Summerly shone salmon pink along the white trim that reflected the dying sun, and it seemed to me that this light faded right before my eyes as the last beam fell behind the earth.

“They’re not going to get here any sooner just because you’re watching,” said Susana at my elbow.

I turned my head. She wore her worn old dressing gown and her hair was already in pins. In the fading light she looked somehow old and wise.

“I wasn’t thinking about the Peabodys,” I said. “I was thinking about Eli. How strange it’s going to be. I mean, it hasn’t seemed real, has it? All the boys were away. Everybody was gone. Eli getting killed, it was just words on a telegram. But now that Shep and Amory’ll be home again . . . all the boys who made it . . .”

Susana lifted my arm and slung it over her shoulders. Her sweet soap smell made me think of Mama’s voice, reading bedtime stories. “At least they’ll be back, though,” she said. “Shep and Amory. They’re almost like brothers, aren’t they?”

“Almost,” I said. “Now get to bed.”

She kissed me on the cheek and scurried to the house. I folded my arms around my waist and stared a moment longer at the blue-shadowed house in front of me.

As I turned away, my eye caught on a small object just visible inside the attic window on the third floor. I stopped to squint—shaded my eyes, as if that would help. I couldn’t be certain in the gloaming, and the lights in the attic weren’t lit, but it seemed to me that an old rag doll slumped against the window frame.

 

It’s funny how your body can understand a thing before your brain does. For a minute or two, I stood there absolutely numb in the head, while my heart clunked and my breath came short and my fingertips tingled, the way they did in the driveway a couple of hours ago.

I couldn’t recall the first time a Peabody boy set the rag doll in the window, visible between the birch leaves to the bedroom I shared with Susana. When six kids play together daily, the rules and customs will develop naturally, growing like vines, sprouting off shoots—a wild, invented landscape mapped forever inside their heads.

But if I rummaged around the attics of memory, I did remember pedaling madly home from some adventure at the other end of the island, sun sinking, air gold with promise, supper wafting from the Peabody kitchen, Arthur and Amory and my brother followed by Shep and me, followed by Susana calling desperately to wait up, and it seemed to me that Arthur was the one who skidded to a stop, spraying gravel everywhere, and said, Let’s meet on the beach tonight, and I said, Sure, when? because Arthur was our captain and we would have done anything he asked us to do, anything.

When the coast is clear, he said, so I asked him how I would know when the coast was clear, and he squinted up at the attic window, where the six of us played on rainy days—just exactly the way I squinted up there now—and said, Why, I’ll just stick something in that window there. So that must have been it, the first time. Over the summers of our childhood, I had obeyed that signal on so many occasions I couldn’t begin to remember them all, and the absence of that doll, the emptiness of that attic window over the past five years, was maybe just as painful as the absence of the Peabody boys themselves.

And now it was back, like it had never been away at all.

 

By the time I’d scrambled over the rocks to the little cove we kids used to call Pirate Bay, the last minutes of sunset had drained away. Blue shadow everywhere. I called out the password—no, I can’t tell you what it was, I was lucky to remember it myself after so many years—and the next thing I knew, a meaty pair of arms had hoisted me off the final rock and whirled me in a circle to set me in the sand.

“Cricket! I was about to write you off.”

“You’re supposed to be in Boston!”

“Says who?”

“Last I heard!”

“Well, I decided I couldn’t wait another minute and sailed over early on the Esmeralda. Holy moly, Cricket! Let a fellow breathe!”

He was kidding. Nobody alive on Winthrop Island could have obstructed the flow of air to those lungs. That’s why we used to call him Shep, see—his size and his shaggy appearance. Short for sheepdog. Me, I’ve always been Cricket to the Peabodys, on account of my green eyes and olive skin and spindly stature. But shaggy, lumbering Nathaniel Peabody—Arthur called his kid brother Shep, so we did, too. He spun me around in a few more circles before we staggered, dizzy and laughing, into the sand.

 

Looking back, everything was so obvious. Sometimes I want to shake that girl on the beach that night, it was so obvious. But then everything looks inevitable in hindsight.

“Because there was nothing to tell,” he said, when I wanted to know why he hadn’t written in months.

“Baloney. You were right in the middle of Berlin, and you couldn’t think of anything to tell me?”

“Maybe I was busy.”

“Sure you were.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Some girl.”

He folded his arms behind his head. “What makes you say that?”

“Isn’t it always?” I turned on my side and poked his ribs. “Well? What about her?”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Well, if you don’t want to talk about it—”

“I said what I mean. There’s nothing to tell.”

The moon hung in a bright, solitary quarter above our heads. I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at the side of his silvery face until he smiled and wanted to know what I was looking at.

“Your face, that’s all. I can’t believe it’s you.”

He rubbed a hand along his chin. “How so?”

“I don’t know. It’s been—how long? Since you joined up.”

“Four years. May of 1942, right after graduation. But we last saw each other Labor Day the year before. Five years ago, almost.”

“You were just eighteen. You were off to war and you were only eighteen.”

“Well, almost nineteen,” he said. “I was nineteen in July. I remember you sent me a birthday card. I was six or seven weeks into basic training. I nearly cried.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I did, I swear. I hadn’t seen you since the summer before, when I left for school. And you were on Winthrop taking in the sea breeze, and I was sweating through my shirt at goddamn Fort Bragg in North Carolina.”

“Poor you.”

“Well,” he said, after a second or two, “it meant a lot to me, anyway. It meant the world.”

I traced a circle in the sand next to my leg. “Five years.”

“Four years and nine months.”

“Golly, was I only just sixteen the last time you saw me.”

“Only just. Your birthday’s three days after mine.”

“You didn’t send me a card when I turned seventeen.”

“They don’t sell birthday cards in the PX at basic training, Cricket.”

“And now you’re—what, twenty-two?”

“Hot dog. You’ve passed arithmetic.”

“Oh, stop. I just mean you’ve—well, you’ve lost your baby fat, for one thing—”

“Baby fat—”

“And sprouted an awful beard—”

“This old thing? You should see it when I don’t shave.”

I nestled back in the cool sand and tried to think of something funny. Truth to tell, there was no humor to explain the difference—how the clumsy, rawboned, mumbling boy had disappeared under the serious skin of a man I didn’t know. Or no, maybe the man had burst through the awkward skin of the boy, that’s how to describe it. Well, that was life. That’s what war did. Turned a boy into a man. Even his laugh was different. There was nothing silly left about it, nothing carefree.

“We were just kids,” I said instead.

“Babies.”

“You were supposed to be headed off to college.”

“I guess I figured college could wait when there was a war on.”

“Poor old Harvard. Losing all of you in one fell swoop.”

He laughed. “Lucky break, if you ask me.”

“But you’re going back now, aren’t you? In the fall.”

“What, a college freshman? Wouldn’t that be a gas, at my age. No, I’m thinking on something else.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“Buddy of mine from the service. His family’s got some land out near San Francisco, used to make wine before Prohibition put them in the cattle business. He wants somebody to help him sell the cattle and start up the vineyard again.”

“California? You want to move to California?”

“Why not? It’s a big country out there, Cricket. I’ve been figuring I might want to see some of it. Do some things I never used to think I might do.”

“And just what do you know about making wine?”

He turned his head toward me. “I know a lot more than you think, Cricket.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Anyway, he’s got a real live Frenchwoman to help us, this girl from Bordeaux; she’s worked the family vineyard all her life. Until the war, I mean.”

“Is that the girl?”

“What girl?”

“The reason you didn’t write much.”

He turned back to face the sky. “No, Cricket. She’s my buddy’s girl. They got married last month in Paris. I was the best man. Geez, what makes you so sure I’ve got a girl somewhere?”

“I don’t know. I just figured.”

Above our heads, the stars popped out. I thought about the time I last saw Shep, a night like this one, stars popping out, except it was Labor Day and the fireworks had just started on the strip of sand at the edge of the golf course that people called a beach. The day after Labor Day, the Peabodys would pack up Summerly and head home, and the boys would head back to their schools—Arthur and Amory to Harvard, Shep to boarding school, his senior year. I remembered that terrible adolescent ache I felt, thinking of the empty days of autumn and winter ahead, how it would be nine whole months before the Peabodys returned to Summerly. Nine whole months!

“What are you thinking about, Cricket?” Shep asked.

“Me? Nothing.”

“Come on.”

“Nothing special, anyway. Just how much time’s gone by. Everything that’s happened to us both since I saw you last.”

Shep unfolded one arm like the wing of a condor and slung me against his side. “Remember that time you covered for me when I ran my bicycle into Mrs. Pinkerton’s flowerbed?”

“I can think fast when I have to.”

He laughed. “Thank God one of us can.”

“It’s a shame, what happened to Mrs. Pinkerton. Poor Tippy.”

“Yeah, poor kid. First her fiancé gets killed, now her mother dies.”

“They were so close. Tippy and her mother.”

Shep made a noise of agreement. He wore an old woolen sweater that scratched my cheek. You had to wonder how many sheep must have given their all to knit a sweater big enough to cover Shep. It smelled of mothballs, like he’d dragged it out of a trunk from before the war. Thank God, I thought. Thank God it was Shep here tonight instead of Amory. Shep settled your nerves. Made you feel like everything was going to be all right.

He said softly, “What about you, Cricket?”

“Me?”

“Eli. When I heard the news—you know he was like a brother to us—”

“I know.”

“It tore me up, when I heard. And you. I figured it must have crushed you. I couldn’t sleep, I was so worried for you.”

“I appreciated your letter.”

“It was a terrible letter. I don’t even remember what it said.”

“It was a beautiful letter.”

“I’m no good with words, you know that. I didn’t know what to say that would help. I wasn’t trying to make you feel better. I mean nobody should think she has to feel better about a thing like that, losing your brother, but I wanted you to know that—well, how much I cared about him.”

The truth was, I didn’t really remember the incident in Mrs. Pinkerton’s flowerbed. We got into so many scrapes when we were kids, the six of us, you couldn’t keep them all straight. Arthur and Eli always raced ahead together, because they were the oldest, and Amory went along with them because he wanted to be just like his big brother. Susana usually stayed behind because she was the littlest and didn’t like to play rough games, so that left Shep and me, together in the wake of the older boys. ...