Enchanted August (17 page)

T
here was no excuse, really, for Robert to visit Little Lost. He had never, ever disturbed a tenant before. He'd waited for an invitation from his various renters for lo these many years but had not received one. This year he needed to make a visit, invited or not. He didn't want to spoil the magic of the house by arriving unannounced, but at the same time he had a sense that the island wasn't working its magic for this year's guests. For Rose, actually. Just for Rose.

It was enough, mostly, to have peace at his own place as well as time and money to play his music. But she needed magic, and frankly so did he.

Don't be pathetic, Robert.

The pursuit of love had driven people to schemes far more mad than driving up to Maine on a lovely August morning. He actually enjoyed bombing up through Massachusetts and the corner of New Hampshire and over the Piscataqua River Bridge to Maine. Even though it was a summer Friday, he hadn't encountered much traffic. He'd gotten in the car just a little after six thirty a.m. and it was only eleven thirty when he stopped for a stretch at the welcome post at the start of the Maine Turnpike. He'd do as he'd said he would when he wrote to Rose: visit a guitar maker he was friends with in Brooklin for a few days. Then if his ardor was still pricked, he'd go up to Little Lost.

The engine ticked as he turned off the ignition. He opened the door and took his first deep breath of Maine air. Sharp and thin and fresh, even in the dead of August, it woke up his body every time. He stretched his legs out of the car and made use of the facilities. He didn't spend long at the place, but took note of the pleasant-faced retiree behind the information counter and nodded as a longtime visitor to a real Mainer. He knew his place.

Robert indulged himself in a long reverie on the next leg of the journey. He imagined showing Rose the whole island, walking the periphery at low tide. He'd will a seal into view as they gazed out over the water at sunset. He'd look at her in the light of every room in the house. And he'd take her up to the third floor, the part of the cottage that was truly his home.

The traffic still wasn't bad, so when he got to Brunswick he decided to go up Route 1 instead of pounding up 95. He was only going to Brooklin tonight, not all the way to Little Lost. He thought about what it would be like to introduce Rose to the other islanders. They always liked couples more than single people there. Especially single people who hadn't grown up on the island.

Red's Eats traffic held up everything outside Wiscasset, as usual. He didn't mind, though. It was a pretty day, and the water, when he could see it, gleamed. If things with Rose didn't work out, maybe he would rent out in July next year and save August for himself. You really can't beat August in Maine.

The traffic was at a standstill, so he checked his phone as inconspicuously as he could while he still had a signal. He'd take a break before Brooklin at the Farnsworth Art Museum. Perfect idea. He could go see some Andrew Wyeths. He'd visit the paintings of Rose before he saw Rose herself. If they had any there. He couldn't remember.

He typed in “Wyeth Helga Maine Farnsworth Museum” and was surprised to see they didn't have Helga paintings in their collection. But among the search results appeared one from the Colby College Museum of Art:

Currently on View:

Andrew Wyeth: Helga on Paper
.

He just caught the turn for 27 North. Waterville was practically on the way.

 • • • 

Over the next few days after the hat party, Lottie made more friends on the tennis courts and was the first to be invited to tea in the Little Lost Tearoom. “It's like being in a village in eighteen eighty-two,” she said, “but with teeth whitening.”

“I don't even think they whiten their teeth here,” Jon said. “They're just born with those genes. And then they're out in the sun all the time getting tan, so no wonder their teeth look so white. Lots of wrinkles, though. Unlike you.” He squeezed her from behind again.

“
My
mom!” cried Ethan.

“Mine, too!” said Jon.

“Mommy is not your mommy,” said Ethan. “Mommy is my mommy.”

“Who's
my
mommy?” asked Jon.

“Grandma?” Ethan answered.

“Yes, Grandma! Let's call her, Ethie,” Jon said. He really should phone in to see how his stepdad was doing. “Want to take the fast ferry into town with Dad? That way you can have some time to yourself, Lottie. You've earned it. And I,” he said, picking Ethan up and lifting him overhead, “can call in to the office to see what happened at the meeting this morning, if they remember who I am.” It had been a full week since he gave them the fake pneumonia excuse and now he was going to miss the client meeting. Time was hard to calculate here.

“Wait!” said Lottie. “I'll come with you.” She gathered up her bag and sunglasses. “I hope in a way they don't remember who you are, Jonnie. We could all move up here and become glassblowers in town and sell Christmas ornaments to summer tourists.”

“Dream on,” said Jon. He took Ethan's hands and swung him down the porch stairs. The screen door banged as they left.

 • • • 

Lottie, Jon, and Ethan were a happy, goofy unit: the three of them with their dark hair and big eyes and loud voices. Now that Caroline had recommitted to Hopewell Cottage, she took more of an interest in them as a family. She would never have been friends with them in real life, but here, she was.

She watched them go. She'd heard enough of the conversations from her upstairs porch to know that Jon did not much like his job. She'd love to just give him and Lottie a year's salary, but he wouldn't take it. (Lottie might.)

“They're not a bad bunch,” Beverly called up to her. He was below her, knee-deep among the ferns.

“Beverly,” she said. “You have emerged from your lair.”

“It's such a beautiful day. I wanted to take a walk but then I saw this.”

Caroline couldn't see what he was referring to. He was standing in a patch of weeds.

“This garden needs seeing to. Come help.”

If anyone was going to summon Caroline, it would have to be Beverly. She took her own large-brimmed hat from a peg on the wall and descended the stairs to the garden. Or what Beverly called the garden.

“This is not what I would call a garden,” she said.

“Have you ever had a garden?”

“No. We never stayed in one place long enough.”

“It's what I call a garden. See? Here's a peony trying to hang on. And on that other patch, you can see a trellis.” She could just make out a wire frame among the overgrown ferns. “That was a vegetable garden. There must have been tomatoes once upon a time.” She liked that he said
tomahtoes
so unself-consciously. “We should turn that bed for next year. And pull out the weeds in this one. Trim back the
Rosa rugosa
, too. Those roots will be a bear to pull up; they spread everywhere. I hope you are strong.”

Caroline was not at all sure what he was talking about. The only thing she recognized was the black-eyed Susans, which Wills had written into their
Frozen Peter Pan
, which reminded her that she needed to do something about costumes for their play next Wednesday. She was actually glad she'd caught a ride back to Hopewell from the library that night.

“If anyone took the time to come in the spring they could plant some nice flowers here. Look, these lupines have reseeded. Catnip would grow like a weed here. Of course it practically is a weed.”

“Beverly, how do you know so much about everything?”

“I know very little about anything,” he said. “I did not enjoy the privilege of a university education.”

“You cook, though, so beautifully, and you know about flower gardening.”

“And vegetable gardening. And herbs, actually. We could set up a modest kitchen garden while we're still here. Since none of you is particularly good at remembering to bring me herbs from the dock.”

“Did your father teach you all this?”

Beverly rubbed the bridge of his nose and bent down to pull up some weeds. “If you don't mind too much, perhaps you could help me. An herb garden is simple enough that we might achieve it in the time we have left here.”

“Which ones are the weeds?”

He sighed and pointed. “Start here,” he said, “in the flower bed. In the vegetable patch we should dig everything up. Then you could call that young lunk, Max, to work the soil. There must be compost on this island somewhere. Then we can plant herbs for right now and bed the rest down for the winter. I imagine there's more nitrate in the kelp on the beach than in horse manure.”

“Come on, Beverly. Were you a landscape gardener? Did you run a large household in England?”

He kept pulling up plants. Weeds. “If it's not too much trouble—”

Caroline resumed pulling. If I pull he'll talk.

“Get them by the roots, Caroline, if you please.”

She let the only sound be the ripping up of plants for a while. She was careful to take only what Beverly pointed at, and to get them by the roots. It was satisfying work.

“If you must know,” he said, “I went to the garden when I was a boy to get out of the
way
of my father. He did not like that I was a ‘different' little boy. He didn't mind, either, that my brothers pushed me around. They were younger than I was, but he considered them manlier.”

Caroline kept silent.

“We had a staff. It was more common back then. Bridey was the cook and Joe Meade was our gardener. They were married. Irish. Her face was a map of Clare, she used to say.”

“Vivid,” said Caroline.

Beverly sat on a stone wall that Caroline had not noticed before.

“Theirs was a mixed marriage. I didn't understand it till later, but he was from the North, and Protestant, and she was deeply Catholic. Both sets of parents were against it. So they understood something about being not quite up to expectations.”

Caroline nodded and kept weeding.

“My mother had to back my father so Bridey took care of me. She cooked and I chopped. Joe gardened and I weeded. After a while I picked up quite a few things.”

“You certainly come in handy around this house, Beverly. This cottage.”

“It's quite pleasant here,” he said. “Even now with Lottie's Jon here. And the boy.”

“Ethan.”

“He's afraid of me, I think, which is just as well.”

“They're not doing awfully well, Lottie and Jon,” said Caroline.

“I think they're doing quite well,” said Beverly, “from the tousled way she emerges in the morning. Quite well indeed.”

“They seem to be happy, but Jon seems awfully weighed down by his job.” She wanted to sell it, but not too hard.

“He's a lawyer, is he?”

“I think he is, yes.”

“If he doesn't like his job, he should be happy that he doesn't have to attend to the kinds of things Gorsch expected me to attend to. Papers, letters,
e-mails
.”

“That is right up his alley,” said Caroline.

“If it's up his alley, he should do something about it.”

“Sounds like a fine idea,” said Caroline.

 • • • 

Saturday morning, Beverly opened the suitcase he had been dreading looking at the entire time he was there. Two and a half weeks already. He had barely settled in, but it must be dealt with. The conversation with Caroline had stirred him up.

Gorsch had left an ironclad will that gave Beverly very little to do. The instructions were clear: Frank E. Campbell and then a benefit at Weill Recital Hall. Done. The old lawyer took care of everything, and his last official act was to move all the accounts to Beverly's name. So many death certificates. The one thing Gorsch had asked him to do—
one
thing, in all the years—was to act as musical executor when he was gone. And Beverly had agreed. Anything to stop Gorsch talking about death. Yes, I will be your musical executor even though I have barely a musical note in my body, said Beverly, stroking Possum, and so now he had a job. He'd never really had a job in his life.

This suitcase was his job. Letters from ASCAP. Letters from high schools and community theater companies. And God knows how many e-mails. Those he could not even look at. He despised the computer.

This Maine cottage was to be his refuge, if not his strength. He would apply himself to all these needy people and decide who could sing what, and how they could sing it. The new lawyer had told him more than once that he'd do anything he could to help him. “Just give me some avails and we'll set something up.” But what were avails?

He wanted to be kind to all these people who were so needy, and who loved Gorsch's music so much. Goddammit, he missed Possum.

A cup of coffee would help him get started, but dammit if Lottie had not taken the coffeemaker out of his room, where it by rights should have stayed. She was enforcing community and he wanted none of it. Beverly was paying his fair share for this place and if he wanted a coffeemaker for himself, he should have it. Now he would have to go downstairs and talk to people before he'd had his own cup of coffee in his own room. He was quite sure it was deliberate on the girl's part. She was forcing them to be a group of people who actually spoke to one another before breakfast. Well, he'd show her.

Beverly pulled on his bathrobe, a gift from Gorsch (“It's raspberry, not brown”), and slipped on a pair of striped espadrilles that he'd bought for next to nothing when they traveled to Sanary-sur-Mer to taste the bouillabaisse. (Gorsch had been a good millionaire: he'd had no trouble spending his money once he got used to having it.) They were shot to hell but he could never replace them. He trundled downstairs. The knees, the knees.

Someone had already been in the kitchen, as the pot of coffee was minus a generous cup. He opened the cupboard door to locate his favorite mug,
HARVARD
1955, the year he might have graduated from the august institution had he had a different father, and not been a pervert.