A Glimpse of Scarlet
And Other Stories
This book is for my best friend, Tony
SNOWFALL
During the Second World War, the American Friends’ Service Committee gave my mother the name of a Polish woman whose family needed help. My mother wrote to her in English and sent her a parcel of clothes. Anna replied with pages of closely written blue script, in Polish. With it, in another hand, was a stilted and awkward English translation, full of formal, old-fashioned phrases. Anna’s letters ended always, shockingly, “I give you hot kisses.”
There were five children in our family, and nine in Anna’s. Our mothers were of an age. They kept each other informed, though there were different milestones. My mother wrote about graduations, commencements; Anna had more exotic news: baptisms, first Holy Communion, saints’ days, weddings. Sometimes—rarely—Anna sent us photographs, and we pored over the faces of the family we all knew. This was Zygmunt, who now wore, I could see, the torn green sweater I had outgrown, passed down to me third-hand, the hole in the elbow concealed by an innocent hand: these brilliant black eyes, awkward knees, cropped bristly blond hair. This was Margareta, the high forehead, square shoulders, soft, long ringlets. Anna’s husband, Andrzej, looked, with his faintly pointed ears and questioning eyebrows, as though he were on the verge of a smile, but Anna was stern, her jawline strict. They faced the camera bravely, those black-and-white faces: set and solemn for the moment of record, their mouths firm, their eyes challenged, gleaming, their bodies frontal, backs straight, as though they were responding to some question about themselves. Here we are.
At Christmas, at Easter, Anna sent a Communion wafer in a small envelope. Thin, brittle, a translucent white, it had an image impressed onto its fragile surface. Propped on a shelf in our kitchen, the wafer was always surrounded by the artifacts of our more casual lurid life: photographs of our family, for example, snapshots, us lolling about; maybe the wafer would stand next to a small radio stuck there in a hurry, full of cant and chat.
For us, the wafer was as exotic as some Eastern amulet: Quakers have no such magic things. The wafer lay on our shelf pale and mysterious, the secret strength of it rising, spreading invisibly through our lives, faint and serene, subtle as scent. Once I ate one in secret, holding that faint, chalky presence on my tongue, pressing it, melting it, against the roof of my mouth, waiting, my eyes closed, breath held, for some mystical transference from Anna’s life to mine.
Anna’s letters were full of gratitude. We were not rich, and most of the clothes we sent were secondhand. I was secretly embarrassed for her, that she should be so pleased to receive things that were so patently out-of-date, so visibly used. In spite of those sober black-and-white faces, those careful poses, challenged eyes, I had my own vision of Polish life. It was brightly colored, full of fat blond braids, cottages warm with cooking, glittering officers on wild-eyed horses, red-stitched blouses, strange skies full of stars I did not know. Those frail white wafers were symbols of that other life, made up of syllables I could not speak. I give you hot kisses!
Now one of Anna’s children has arrived in America, and my mother calls me. It is Janusc, which sounds like Yanoosh. I remember him. Solemn, quizzical, large-eyed, he stood crookedly against his mother, wearing a sailor suit, short pants, neat collar. Nineteen forty-seven. He is now a house painter, and my mother wants me to hire him. Where would he stay, I ask. He’d stay with you, she says, it would be easy. But I don’t speak Polish, I say, anxious. I think of mealtimes with this strange man, who will not be wearing a sailor suit now: I think of explaining spackle, latex paint, the dishwasher.
Janusc is staying with a cousin, who calls me. He speaks good English, and is very soothing. Janusc will be no trouble, he says, don’t worry. Just give him a room and a TV and he’ll be no trouble. I have no answer. It bothers me that we talk about Janusc as though he were a beast, an invalid, as it bothered me when we laughed at those stilted, awkward English phrases.
When Janusc arrives we all smile widely at each other, we shake hands ceremoniously. The cousin stays, while we go over the painting to be done, then says good-bye. Janusc is small, my own height, with a creased, narrow, mournful face. He wears heavy sandals, and a short plaid gray coat that ends above his knees. His hair, his eyes, the cast of his skin are gray. With his grieving eyes and quiet face he looks Polish; his somber coloring and old-fashioned clothes make him look like someone in a photograph taken during the war, Eastern Europe. We have seen that look.
Janusc settles down to work at once, changing into soft, worn jeans and an old shirt. He moves quietly, a gentle shuffle from time to time is all I hear, but he goes at our raddled walls up on the third floor with great determination. We believe we have conversations with each other; that is, we each speak long and complicated sentences in our own languages, with much smiling and gesturing, but there is no way to determine that we are even talking about the same subject: I ask if he is ready for lunch, he answers that he will need more primer for the moldings. We believe that we understand what the other says, but this is not always so: poor Janusc paints the bathroom three times, in different colors, because of a mistake; mine, not his. I learn some useful words from his battered red dictionary: yes, no, please, thank you, more, sorry, beautiful. The sounds are strange and unmanageable. Janusc has his own set of strange words: ceiling, paint, milk, bread, dog, and tea-China.
At dinner, Janusc comes down in clean clothes, washed and shining. He sits with my husband, my daughter, and me at the small maple table in the kitchen, watching us with concentration if we try to speak to him, looking politely elsewhere if we do not. One night, after a bottle of red wine has been emptied by the three of us, he brings down photographs: his parents, his wife, Anna and the whole family when he was five, Anna and Andrzej today. They are all pictures I have seen, of course, and, sitting next to Janusc beneath the glowing lamp in my kitchen, I am as delighted to see them in his hands, at my table, now, as though we had suddenly broken through the barrier of speech, and our words and thoughts flowed in a limpid rush from one to the other of us. These faces are all old friends of mine. Have they not all sent me hot kisses?
Janusc hands me a photograph of himself in a dark suit, standing stiffly next to a woman in a white dress, with a cloudy white veil about her head. Nineteen sixty-two, Janusc says, I think, in a soft, sliding Polish. He traces the numbers slowly on the tablecloth: one, nine, six, two. Tak, tak, I say, nodding vigorously, yes, yes. He has given me all I need to know, these two solemn faces, the moment, the date. I point to the face of his wife, who has melting, slanting black eyes, and a wistful expression. Ladne, I say, beautiful. Janusc smiles, a shift which transforms his face entirely from its somber verticality. It becomes imp-like, the mouth a deep V, the corners of the eyes slanting suddenly upward.
During the day it is difficult to remember that Janusc is in the house. He is quiet, there on the third floor, crouching on his knees now, filling in the cracks between the floor-boards. I work at my drawing board on the second floor, in silence. At intervals we meet in the kitchen, or I go upstairs to him with a mug of tea-China and a slice of bread. He likes my bread, and I find myself baking three times a week, instead of once.
I am pleased to have him in my house: I wish I could send him back to Poland with some of our space, some of our vivid colors, the warmth of the house. I no longer believe that life in Poland is made up of those embroidered reds and complicated dances. Janusc and his family have had difficult times. I wonder what he thinks of us here. I find myself embarrassed at our casual plenty, at the huge quantities of food, of stuff, I seem to buy for our small family. Janusc himself is modest in his appetites, he eats and drinks sparingly.
But it is more than food. If the truth be known—and it will be known to someone who lives in your house, whose days are spent silently in your rooms—I do not use my time as well as I ought. Janusc never stops working, but I spend, listening to him sanding and scrubbing up there, some time staring out the window. And the time I spend working—I am doing a series of still lifes in pastel, a set of white bowls that change endlessly with the light, the shifting of the shadows and mysterious arrangings of colors that fall across them—but is this work? I hear the floorboards above me creak. And worse, Janusc sees my cleaning lady come in to scrub out my tubs, and one Saturday night he sees a woman come in to serve at a dinner party. He sees me leaving the house with my tennis racquet: I smile, and point to the clock to tell him when I will be back. But I am embarrassed.
I do not think he knows that I go running, I have tried to conceal this altogether. It seems indefensible, while most of the world hoards calories and energy, to be so arrogant, so deliberate in their dispersal. I sneak out of the house to run, going down the driveway with the dog in a casual, longstrided walk in case he is working near an upstairs window, not breaking into a run until I am down the road, already into the woods.
Now, this morning, there is a heavy snowfall. The landscape, when we wake up, has been transformed: virgin, mysterious, alluring. To her utter bliss, my daughter’s school has been canceled, though my husband’s trains are running. He leaves, and she and I settle down, still in our nightgowns, with our breakfast, in the window seat in my bedroom, to watch the snow outside. It falls like white lace handkerchiefs, in huge, dreamy flakes. On the third floor, Janusc has begun on the door frames and moldings.
At midday we decide to go out. The wind has dropped, and though the snow is still falling, the sky has lightened. I call up the stairs. “Janusc!” I say, and beckon. “Photograph!” Janusc understands me at once, and nods soberly. “Okay,” he says, and begins to tidy up. When he comes down, my daughter and I are dressing; it is twenty degrees. My daughter puts on thick blue snow pants, green parka, knitted cap; I wear my parka and goatskin boots. I hand Janusc a wool cap and my husband’s down jacket. I offer him boots, to go over his sandals, but he shakes his head. He asks me something about the cap, but I shrug and smile, I do not understand. Outside, I turn, and see that he is putting on the knitted cap in front of the back door, the glass in its top half reflects his earnest face. He is adjusting the cap, pulling the top half of it down, making sure that its character is reflecting its bearer’s, that its curves are Polish, its creases Januscian.
Outside in the snow, giddiness rises. Loose, limpid whiteness surrounds us, insistent and confounding. It is drifting down improbably—from the sky itself!
“Over there,” I call, and I gesture for Janusc and my daughter to stand by the back door. I run back, away from them, clasping the camera clumsily to my chest. My goatskin boots thud through the heavy snow, its soft density yielding slowly, cumbrously, against my legs. I climb the slanting stone steps and crouch beneath the bare little crab apple tree so that I can get the whole house in, the two of them at the back door. I want the whole house as a backdrop: I want Janusc to be able to take this back with him, proof that he was a part of all this, to show that there has been some bridge between our lives. And I want to implicate him: If Anna looks at our farmhouse and purses her lips with disapproval—three stories, for only three people?—I want her to see that Janusc had lived there with us, he had his own room in our house.
And I have color film in the camera, and I have given Janusc my husband’s bluebird-colored parka, so that no matter what Janusc presents me with in the picture, no matter how earnest, how solemn, how dour he shows himself, he will not be in black and white. Some transference will have taken place. And while I cannot defend idleness, frivolity, arrogance, opulence, I do defend the bright colors of our life, I defend whatever grace we have achieved. And perhaps, when they see Janusc in this brilliant blue, before the house he is living in himself, they might forgive us our idleness, our arrogance: they will see that Janusc himself has taken on our wild hues, for this moment.
I squat in the snow, taking off the lens cap, adjusting dials and meters. When I see the figures through the tiny silvery window, at first I do not understand. Janusc has crouched to the ground. I think perhaps he is adjusting his shoe, but he is saying something to my daughter, and I see first one of her padded blue legs and then the other appear on either side of his face. She is sitting on his shoulders, and he rises quickly, with great ease, like a dancer. He stands very straight and graceful against the white clapboards of the house, the dreamy snow shifting past him in the still air. Janusc, in my husband’s huge blue parka, raises his arms, holding them out straight at shoulder height, proudly, palms up; so does my daughter.
Their two faces, framed in woolen curves, are neatly stacked one above the other, and with the raising of their arms, as though this were a sign, they both smile: brilliant, brilliant smiles, their arms lifted in that regal gesture, signifying, perhaps, merely great delight in being there, at that particular moment, before our white farmhouse, in that snow-muffled landscape, their bodies bold and vivid patterns against the frail white translucence that surrounds them, merely great delight: joy. I give you hot kisses.
THE TIME FOR KISSING
My mother never calls me, so I call her. I make the call on Sunday nights. She answers right away, and I know exactly where she is. She spends Sunday evenings in what is called the library, though it only has two bookcases in it, and those hold more plates than books. Mother sits in the flowered chintz armchair, which matches the curtains. Bacon the dog is lying on his green pillow next to her feet. The walnut table beside my mother holds an ashtray, a small porcelain Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and her drink, which is Scotch. Next to her chair is a standing lamp, and her feet are up on the upholstered footstool, which also matches the curtains. On her lap is the newspaper, which is folded back to the TV section. She is holding a cigarette in one hand, and the TV remote controller in the other. When the telephone rings she is interrupted.
“Hello, Mother?” I say.
“Who’s this?” she asks warily, unwilling to commit herself.
“It’s me,” I say, “Susannah.”
“Oh, yes,” she says, and if I say nothing, she pulls herself together and adds, “hello.”
“How are you doing?” I ask.
“Fine,” she says, faintly peevish.
Mother is seventy-one years old, and has lived alone since Harry died three years ago. When he retired they began spending most of their time in Southampton. They sold the big shingled house on the beach, where we spent our summers as children, and moved to this smaller one behind high privet hedges. When Harry died Mother sold the apartment in New York as well. At first she planned to spend a night or two in New York during the winter, but now she hardly ever does.
“What have you been up to?” I ask, “anything exciting?”
“I don’t know what you call exciting,” she says, touchy. “We had the Garden Club meeting on Wednesday. There was a bridge party at Wah-Wah’s on Thursday. That’s about it.”
“How was the Garden Club meeting?”
“All right. Though I don’t know how Bambi Johnson got herself elected president, the woman is the very worst executive I’ve ever heard of. Most of the members won’t speak to her any more. She ruined the benefit last year, single, handedly.”
“Well, at least she’s good at something,” I offer, but Mother won’t have it.
“Good at what? What do you mean?”
“Ruining the benefit,” I say, but I know she won’t laugh, and she doesn’t. My mother suspects my offerings. There is a pause, and I have the feeling that she has turned the television set back on, low, so I won’t hear it.
“Do you want me to call you back?” I ask.
“What? No, why?” she says.
“I thought you might be in the middle of something.”
“No, nothing a tall.”
“Well, I just wanted to check in with you. We’re all fine,” I say, since my mother hasn’t asked, “except the garden is a nightmare with all this rain. There are slugs all over the place.”
“It’s getting pretty bad,” she says ambiguously; I’m not sure if we’re talking about the slugs or something on her program.
“How’s Bacon?”
“Bacon’s fine,” says my mother, animated at last. “He’s right here at my feet, snoring his head off. Eats like a pig. Keeps me awake all night, and sleeps all day.” She is devoted to the dog.
“The reason I called was to tell you that I’m coming out next week to see Linda, and I thought I’d spend the night with you.” Linda is a friend I grew up with in Southampton.
“What day?”
“It would be Tuesday.”
“All right,” she says neutrally. “I’m out to dinner, though.”
“That’s fine,” I say, “I’ll spend the evening with Linda.”
When I hang up, I go back into our bedroom. The sight of it is a relief: cool and spare and muted; there is no chintz in my house. John is already asleep, lying like a friendly boulder in our bed. He goes to sleep early, though it doesn’t last: later, in the small, deadly hours of the morning he will be awake. But now he is fathoms deep, and I move quietly, turning off the light on his side of the bed. I go into my bathroom to undress, and while I brush my teeth I look at the small photographs on the wall next to the mirror. There are pictures of John, of our children, Nat and Amanda, my sisters, Kate and Joan, my friend Linda, a few other favorites; they are like amulets, emblems of my life. There is one of Mother, taken at a party, years ago. She has her hands on her hips; she is wearing a rose-colored dress with big puffy sleeves, and laughing.
I climb into bed next to John. Our sheets are cotton, and solid white, not the scratchy flowered Porthault linens I grew up with. John’s legs are warm and solid. I turn my back, get out my book, and press myself against the length of him.
My father was well-born, impecunious, and wonderful to look at. It is easy to see why Mother married him, and easy to see why she divorced him. My father talks with a little tiny smile hovering about his mouth: he is already charmed by what he is about to say. Most other people find him charming, too. My sister Joan told me that women used to call up and ask for him. Mother would say, “Would you like to leave a message? This is his wife.” The other woman would say, “His wife?” In spite of my father’s charm, he is hard to live with. He is now on his fourth marriage, and each wife is richer than the last. My mother was the first, and she had no money at all. When I was three, the fourth child, my mother divorced my father and married Harry Satterthwaite. Harry had lots of money, and we moved to a big duplex apartment on the corner of Park and Seventy-ninth Street.
We all hated Harry: me, my sisters, Joan and Kate, and even Ted, our older brother, though he pretended to be above our concerns. Harry was only ten years older than my mother, but when I was little he seemed from a different age. His skin looked as if it had been put in storage: his cheeks were smooth and ancient, as though their living was over, and he had loose, thick rolls of flesh underneath his chin. The top of his head was bald, with brown spots on it. There were deep gullies from his nose to the corners of his mouth, and his teeth were yellow. His clothes were beautiful: soft leather loafers, cashmere jackets, silky cotton shirts. A man called Edwards, whom we also hated, came in the mornings to look after Harry’s clothes and polish his shoes. When Ted acted like a stinker Joan would ask him when Edwards was going to start coming in to look after his moldy moccasins, his torn sweaters and stained Madras jackets. This made us collapse with laughter, but Ted could not answer without either aligning himself with us or with Harry, so he would punch us.
One evening at dinner Harry said loudly, “There will be no more chewing with open mouths at this table.” I was six, and had just recently been allowed to eat with the grownups in the dining room. We all preferred the big white-tiled kitchen, where we ate with Sally, the cook, when there were dinner parties. The dining room was large and gloomy; at the windows were tall gray curtains that swooped back halfway down, and the table was long and dark and shiny, with a glass chandelier over it. In the middle of the table were two silver pheasants, fierce and spiky. Still, it was a privilege to sit there.
When Harry made his announcement my mother didn’t say anything, she went on buttering a roll as though she hadn’t heard. She wore her light brown hair in a shoulder-length page boy, turned under at the ends and parted on the side, with a narrow velvet ribbon holding it smoothly in place. At dinner she wore a cashmere sweater over her dress, with the arms loose over her shoulders like a cape. Mother always had a certain look to her: slim and smooth and polished, her linen dresses ironed, her hair neat. It seemed lovely to me, effortless and silky, as though my mother, just by being, happened to be perfect.
We looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes, and Joan kicked me under the table. Joan was three years older than me. She remembered living with my father, and she was unbelievably brave. She now sat up straight at the table, holding the heavy silver fork easily, and looked back at Harry with interest, as if she were going to discuss it with him. “Why on earth not, Harry?” she might say. I always felt as though Joan were a seawall between me and the waves, breaking the shocks for me.
“It’s disgusting, and I won’t have it,” said Harry, gaining confidence. He picked up the heavy crystal glass and took a courageous swallow of Scotch. I watched his throat move as he swallowed. The lump in it rose sluggishly, suddenly bobbled, and then disappeared mysteriously, as his short neck vanished and he lowered his head. “You,” he said, looking at me. I wondered if he knew which one I was. He often confused us, calling us by each other’s names. Joan and Kate were the easiest to mix up, as they were close to the same size, and they looked alike, with their round faces, sleek honey-colored hair, and blue eyes. “Did you hear what I just said?” said Harry.
I nodded, fearful, but kept on eating. It didn’t occur to me that I was doing anything to bring on this attack; Harry’s temper seemed unrelated to the real world. My big linen napkin was on my lap, where it was supposed to be, my silverware was on the plate as I ate, my milk had not slipped over the rim of the glass when I set it down, but clearly I was in for it, whatever it was.
“Well, stop it.” He glared at me. “Leila, do you see what that child is doing?” he said loudly to my mother. She glanced briefly up at me, and down again at her plate. It was pot roast and carrots. “Hmmhmm,” she said, and addressed the meal.
“I am in earnest,” said Harry, and leaned forward in his mahogany chair, gripping the arms with his hands. His chair and mother’s had arms; the rest of us were left defenseless from the sides. Harry looked at me again, and I wondered what name he would use. “Susannah, leave this room,” he said, and he waved his hand briefly, a high, short, weak wave, not as though he really expected me to leave. He looked down at his plate at once, and began sawing away at the pot roast. When he started talking again it was a sort of warning grumble, a retreating storm. “You can finish your meal in the kitchen, and don’t come back until you have learned properly how to eat your food. It’s disgusting, watching someone else’s dinner wallow around in their mouth.”
I didn’t move, because I still wasn’t sure what was going on, and he didn’t sound serious. Harry looked up and saw me. “Didn’t you hear me?” he said, and looked down the table at my mother again. She was staring with a look of intense concentration at an empty space on the table, as if she had gone mad.
“Can’t find it,” she announced. “Don’t know how they lose it. There it is.” Underneath the table she found the bell with her toe and pressed. The door to the kitchen swung open and Harry fell silent as Maureen came in. “Could we have some more water, in the pitcher, and I think we’re ready for seconds, Maureen.”
When Maureen left Joan said, “Mother, I—” and I knew she was trying to run interference for me, but at the same time Harry said, “Leila.” He was really angry now.
“Susannah, you heard Harry,” my mother said, without looking up. “Finish your dinner in the kitchen.” I slid off the scratchy needlepoint seat and picked up the heavy plate carefully, trying to keep the carrots from rolling off.
After dinner I went up to Joan’s room. Kate and Joan were lying on the beds, and Ted stood in the doorway, not committing himself.
“He’s such a pig,” Kate said. She was two years older than me.
“I am in earnest,” Ted said querulously, and drank from an imaginary glass.
“Just pass me some more of that whisky,” said Joan, “and I’ll be even more earnest. I’m earnest and thirsty, all at the same time. I’m thirnest. I’m earsty.” She threw herself back on her bed and let her tongue hang out, rolling her eyes whitely. “This is really earnest,” she announced. She was still wearing her school uniform, a dark plaid jumper and a white blouse, and her green knee socks were rolled down to her ankles. Her loafers, which were scuffed and dull, hung moronically off her feet.
“Biscuit likes carrots,” I offered. Biscuit was our big apricot poodle, who could be counted on to appear noiselessly under the kitchen table and dispose discreetly of unwanted items.
“Maybe he’d like Harry,” said Kate, “maybe we could feed Harry to him.”
“Ooof,” said Ted, wrapping his arms caressingly around his stomach. “Poor Biscuit.” This started us all laughing, and we began to imitate Biscuit making various responses to the offer of toasted Harry. While we were doing these hilarious things Mother came along the hallway, getting her glasses. She walked with her head slightly down, as though she were watching her neat small shoes, with rosettes on the toes. Mother was going back down to play backgammon with Harry in the library. She looked in at us but did not say anything.
“Hi, Mom,” Ted said easily. He was her favorite. She paused and smiled.
“Having a good time?” she asked, and Ted, who had no conscience, grinned and nodded. “What are you all up to?” she asked, which made us laugh harder, as we imagined actually telling her. Her smile now included us all, and she laid her rare approval on us, on Ted lounging in the doorway, grinning, Joan and Kate rolling goofily on the beds, me holding my stomach on the floor, on all of us as we had frozen in our poses, miming the disgusted response of a poodle to the offer of her husband.
I arrived in Southampton around noon that Tuesday. I had told Mother I’d be there before lunch, but unless I arrived early she’d go out. Later she’d tell me I had said I was coming after lunch.
The house is made of whitewashed brick. It was built in the thirties, on part of a bigger property that had been split up. Like all Southampton houses it has a luscious velvet lawn, and those dense hedges. There are a few perfunctory flower beds, but Mother doesn’t like gardening herself. She has Johnny Rubetti put in the garden for her, and every year he plants the world’s most boring display of yellow, pink, and orange—dahlias, marigolds, and zinnias.
Mother was in the summer room, at the back of the house. The room was originally an open porch, then it was screened in, and now it is glassed in. It’s meant to feel like part of the garden, so it’s furnished with uncomfortable garden furniture, things that could, though they won’t, be rained on. There are rattan sofas with flowered plastic-covered cushions and big porcelain elephants with flattened backs as end tables, and on the brick floor are woven straw rugs. When Joan first saw it she asked Mother, “Why don’t you get some plaster gnomes, too?”
Mother was sitting in the comfortable chair, talking on the telephone. I waved, and she blinked at me in a friendly way, but went on talking. I went to the window and looked out. Johnny had been at work: there were the zinnias, starting up. The lawn was very lush, a deep, dense green like a mat, and that brilliant electric color made me think of our old house on the beach. We used to spend all our summers here in Southampton. Our house was huge: gray shingled, with white trim, and its roofs were thick with gables and dormers and clusters of brick chimneys. At the back of the house there was a lawn, and in the front there was the wide white beach, and beyond that there was the wide gray ocean, and beyond that there was Spain.
We children slept on the top floor, and all our windows looked out on the ocean. The rooms were small, with sloping eaves and rickety white-painted furniture: we loved them. The floors were painted a shiny gray, the white curtains blew in and out of the windows, and the air in our bedrooms at night was full of salt and freedom. Alone up there we were in our own country; we knocked messages on the walls, we had water fights, we slept in each other’s rooms. No one knew what we did, only the maids came up there.
If we felt, during the winters in New York, as though we were members of the Underground, violent subversives whose activities were secret, we felt during the summers as though the liberation had come. In that wild salt air, the wind off the sea blew our tangled hair back off our faces as we rode our bikes up and down those narrow lanes, to the beach club, to the tennis club, to our friends’ houses. We had our bikes, we had our friends, the days were long, and Harry came out only on the weekends. There were no rules that we cared about: don’t put your wet bathing suits on the bed, be in by six or call. We had never heard of drugs, and the wickedest things we ever did were watching the boys smoke behind the beach club house, playing strip poker in whoever’s house had no parents in it on rainy days. Sometimes we took surreptitious snorts out of someone’s bottle at a beach party: a disgusting mixture of everything in someone’s liquor cabinet, so that no one bottle would be diminished.
It wasn’t so much what we did but the spirit in which we did it. In New York we had to obey Harry if he made one of his petulant announcements, but in Southampton we barely looked at him. We walked past him to say good night to Mother as though his chair were empty.
“Who’s that girl won the junior tennis tournament?” Harry asked us. While he was still talking, still in the middle of his sentence, Joan turned and asked Kate a question in a low voice, which neatly removed them both from general conversation. This left me and Ted, neither of whom played tennis. This, plus the fact that I was five years younger than the girl (whose name I knew perfectly well), absolved me from answering. Ted looked intently into the middle distance, as though he were trying to remember the girl’s name. Harry waited, watching us all, for a response. “Know who I mean?” he continued, “blond, kind of a cute girl? Think she’s Jewish. Pretty sure she’s Jewish. She go to the beach club or not?” At this point Joan and Kate very quietly asked my mother something, politely not interrupting Harry’s conversation with the rest of us. I discovered a truly interesting bite on my leg. Ted continued to look deeply into the middle distance; if pressed by Harry now he would slowly shake his head, as if to show a respectful ignorance of the entire issue. Harry never acted snubbed, and he would finally turn his questioning to my mother. “Think she is. Think the whole family is,” as though this were some sort of remarkable deductive leap. “Got to ask Bobby Woodward what’s going on down here.”