Off Season (4 page)

“But Granddaddy didn’t like it. He wanted you to be a judge like he was.”

I had heard the story many times.

“No, he didn’t. He wanted me to go on to Harvard Law like he had, carry on the family tradition and all that. Luckily my brother Gregory came along and filled that position beautifully, so the heat was off me a little. Anyway, the start of my second year at the university, the dean of the department hired a new secretary to replace the old battle-ax who had ruled over us all, and—”

“It was Mother!” I shouted.

“It was your mother,” he agreed, hugging me lightly. “Well, the minute I saw her I was a goner, along with everybody else in the department and half the students, but she was very reserved and proper and wouldn’t give anyone the time of day. Lord, she was pretty! I used to stand just outside her office and watch her work. She was quick and quiet and very good at her job; for the first time in living memory the department ran like clockwork. I don’t think I ever would have worked up the courage to ask her out if I’d known how young she was.”

“Tell how young!”

“She was barely eighteen,” he said. “But she never seemed young in the silly sort of way that some young girls do. She had just graduated from high school and the aunt and uncle she lived with couldn’t afford college and probably wouldn’t have sent her anyway—they were none too gracious about taking her in when her parents were killed in a trolley accident, when she was only ten—and so she knew she’d have to get a job. Well, she’d wanted to go to college in the worst kind of way, and she figured the next best thing would be to work for one, and George Washington was easier for her to get to on the trolley than any other school in D.C., so she marched right in and up to the English Department and asked to see the head, and the dean hired her that day. I still don’t know how she got past the old gorgon who was her predecessor. But your mother had her ways. Still does, don’t you think?”

“And then . . .”

“And then the rest is history,” he said, kissing the top of my head and depositing me on the floor. “We eventually got married and had Jeebs and you and moved into this house when my parents were gone, and here we are. If there’s a happier ending to a story than that, I haven’t heard it.”

“But Grandmother and Granddaddy didn’t like her at first . . .”

“No,” he said slowly. “But it wasn’t that they didn’t like her. They just had never met anybody like her, a very young girl from a not-so-well-off family who was making her own way in the world. They had wanted me to marry a society girl, you know, the kind you see in the papers, and have a huge wedding and all that stuff. But then Gregory did that; he married Susannah Carter of the Virginia Carters, and they immediately set about producing gilded offspring, and so I was off the hook again. Besides, when they really got to know her, they both came to like and love your mother. My father told me the day before he died that he couldn’t have asked for a more loving and appropriate wife for me than your mother, and he reckoned he’d been a hardheaded old fool about her in the beginning.”

“And you said . . .”

“And I said yes. You hop down now, Lilly. I’ve got to get changed.”

I got down, but lingered, still troubled. Then I said, “If somebody tells you a lie about somebody else and you know it’s not true, what should you do about it?”

“Depends on the lie, I guess,” he said, “and who told about whom. Did somebody tell you a lie?”

“Yes. And I knew it was. I was really, really mad. I thought I might hit her.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Good. It’s rarely a solution. Who told you a lie, and about whom?”

“That stupid Charlotte Glover. It was about Mama. She said her mother told her.”

“Ah, the Glover ladies,” he said, smiling and sighing. “A pair of she-hounds in full spate, as they’ve always been. You did the right thing. It wouldn’t have done a bit of good to swat Charlotte. Her kind never learns.”

“I can still go back and hit her, you know,” I said.

“Heaven forbid,” he said. “Then you’d become just like her. You don’t want that, do you?”

“No. But maybe a little poke . . .”

“No pokes,” he said, and went out of the drawing room and up the stairs. It struck me only later that he had not asked what Charlotte Glover had said about my mother.

“You must have been a handful,” Cam said. “I don’t see much of that side of you.”

It was the same season, the season of the great tide of talking, and we were sitting in a small café on M Street that had cheap hamburgers. Since I lived at home and Cam shared a ramshackle apartment with a med student at Johns Hopkins, cafés and the breath-fogged Porsche were about the only places we spent much time together. Yet we two were a universe. There was no room there for others. Nor had I visited his family in the big old country house on the James River, near Williamsburg. The McCalls had a pied-à-terre in Alexandria and a summer place in the Caribbean, but since the Judge’s retirement they spent most of their time at River House. I knew the family had money, but I had not yet thought much about it. Almost everybody our family knew in Washington “had money,” or that even more luminous asset, “family.” Cam and I were still wrapped tightly in the glove of ourselves; our contexts would come later.

“I rarely saw the lovely and talented Charlotte again, though I got regular bulletins about her,” I said. “Her mother still came to visit, but not nearly so often, and my mother dropped their weekly bridge game. Not many of her friends made the cut. She started to paint in earnest after that afternoon, and I became a spy.”

“Did you lose any friends in the brouhaha? If it had been my mother, I would have been fiercely forbidden any consorting with the offspring of the enemy. Amelia McCall didn’t take no shit from anybody. Still doesn’t.”

“Oh, no, I had my own crowd,” I said, thinking back. “There was a little bunch of us from Cathedral who were inseparable. We snubbed everybody else who might have been benighted enough to want to join us. I can see now that we were obnoxious and mean-spirited, but back then that little coven was the central fact of our lives. We called ourselves the T Club, and told our parents that the T stood for Thursday, since our once-a-month formal meetings always took place on Thursday afternoons after hockey practice. We were together constantly, but that Thursday was not to be missed.”

“What did the T stand for?”

“Thieves. We stole things and brought them to the meetings and voted on who’d made the best heist.”

He laughed. The deep dimple that creased his left cheek flashed, and I felt my stomach go warm.

“What in God’s name did a bunch of eleven-year-olds steal?”

“Well, sexy things, I guess, or things we thought were sexy. I stole a bra from Woodward and Lothrop. It was one of those padded, pointed things that looked like the bumper of a ’fifty-two Studebaker. I wore it to the meeting and won the prize for the month. I didn’t need a bra for another two years and I never wore it, but I still have it.”

“What on earth for?”

I leaned against him in the wire chair next to me and rubbed against his shoulder.

“To see if it would get guys like you excited when I got older.”

I felt his thumb trace my nipple and my breath came up into my throat.

“You don’t need to do that,” he murmured. “Christ, we’re going to have to find a place. So what else did you-all steal?”

“Margaret Canfield stole a package of rubbers from Peoples Drug Store at Chevy Chase Circle. We spent the whole meeting trying to decide quite what you did with them. Christine Dawson stole a copy of
Playboy
from the same drugstore. It had just come out. It was wrapped in brown paper: she had to sneak behind the counter to get it. We laughed knowingly at the cartoons, but I don’t think any of them really made sense to us. By the time spring came we had quite a collection of erotica. I don’t remember where we kept it. I usually dropped out in the spring.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. Things just . . . changed. I wanted to be alone; I spent a lot of time in my room, reading or listening to records. The thought of the club—or, rather, the things we stole—made me feel a little sick. I usually got asthma about that time, too. I remember my mother saying to my father after one of my attacks that it was time to go to Edgewater.”

“So the sea could breathe with you.”

“And when we got there, and it did, I was different again. I was a child, a real one. There was nothing left of that thieving little pseudo-sophisticate. I didn’t even remember her.”

He held up a finger for the check and turned to kiss me lightly. It morphed into a rather unseemly kiss for a public place, as they all did. When he drew away from me he was grinning.

“What?”

“I was just thinking of your little gang at Edgewater, and their names: Randall, Wentworth, Gardiner, Constable—almost a caricature of the entire WASP gene pool. Names that ring in New England history. I’ll bet a black or a Buddhist or a Jew, or even a Catholic, never set foot on the soil of Carter’s Cove. I bet the earth would have crumbled.”
Before my next breath, thick, lightless silence fell down over me like a glass bell jar. Sound imploded; I could feel the wind of it on my face. I could hear nothing; I could see only dimly. My throat closed and my breath gargled in my chest. In the foggy airlessness I heard sounds: the hollow thudding of running feet on our dock at Edgewater; faint, anguished cries; the high crooning of the wind in the tops of the pointed firs; the bay, which was not breathing now, but howling out its anger. I smelled blowing salt fog and felt rain stinging my face, and saw flashlights and lanterns bobbing in the darkness. I heard a child crying, wildly, inconsolably, and knew it was me. The whole thing was torn from someplace so deeply buried inside of me that I thought if I could touch it, it would be sticky with my blood and viscera.

By the time Cam was on his feet and pounding me on the back, I could begin to breathe again, and sat taking deep, sobbing gulps of stale air, coughing. People were looking at us. A few had half risen from their chairs.

“Lilly, what in the name of God! We need to get you to a doctor.”

“No,” I protested, taking deeper, slower breaths. My sight cleared and my ears no longer rang with awfulness. I felt, simply, hollowed out, forever hollowed and empty.

“I swallowed the wrong way. I’m okay. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah—well, as a matter of fact, we did have a Jew at Edgewater once. But at first you couldn’t really tell, and he didn’t stay long.”

CHAPTER 2

T
hough I told Cam, in one of those confession-filled winter nights when we were first together, that the summers at Edgewater were perfect, seamless, and endless in their salt-steeped sameness, it was not true. That summer of 1962, even before I became a spy in my mother’s house, the changes began. Some were so small, almost infinitesimal, they hardly rippled the skin of consciousness. But some rang like bells. The first of these came on our first day at the cottage, one of the very first of the gilded days that hung like heavy fruit just within our grasp. On this day, after I had dashed to the seawall and had been given breath, flying came back to me.

From the first moment of my life I remember, I knew that people could fly. I knew it in a way deeper and wider than dreams, though I often dreamed of flying, too. I knew it by the dying stir in the streaks of sunlight, in which golden dust motes danced, made by the bars of my crib, the light, soft wafts of air left by people who had flown in to visit me and then departed. My mother? My nurse? My father, or brother? A stranger? I never knew, only that someone had been there and flown away, someone who left comfort and beneficence in his or her wake. It did not seem to matter a great deal who it was.

I knew it in the little warm wind smelling of high space that eddied around my carriage or, later, around myself and a companion when we were playing in my backyard, or, perhaps, in nearby Rock Creek Park. The air above and about me then would seem alive with unseen wings and the almost palpable brushings of fabric and fleeting human fingers. Before I could talk, my mother and father told me later, I would often point into middle air or a sun dazzle and smile and crow and cry out, “Fy! Fy!”

It was a long time before they figured out I was saying “Fly.” And when they did, I gather there was no little concern about me. It is one thing to have a baby daughter who sees iridescent dust motes dancing in sunlight, or scudding clouds, and believes that they are corporeal beings flying by. It is quite another when that daughter gains years and speech and presumably intelligence a bit higher than normal, and still insists that people fly. My delight in my airborne entourage might have been downright eerie, but I recall that it was a calm, matter-of-fact delight, such as a child would feel at the appearance of a pet puppy or kitten. After a while, my parents gave up trying to disabuse me of my extraterrestrial notions and simply chatted with me when I brought them up, or questioned me gently and with real interest. Once I overheard my father say to my mother, “If she is still talking about it when she is sixteen it’ll be the time to worry. Right now I’m sort of enjoying it. It’s quite a lovely turn of fancy.”

I don’t remember what my mother said to that. At any rate, no one whisked me to a child’s shrink, or consulted with my teachers and attendants in preschool or kindergarten. So my flying visitants were largely the property of my family, and a few chosen and gullible friends, and remained so until well into grade school. I’ve always felt fortunate that my parents, whom I came later to know were considered by some to be eccentric and far too permissive when it came to child-rearing, were as they were. Flying was a wide gilt skein of joy in the fabric of my childhood.

“Do you see them fly?” my father would say, leaning over my bed at story time and smiling at me.

“No, but I see where they’ve been, and I almost see them. I don’t think they let you really see them. People would talk about them and then they couldn’t do it anymore!” I said.

“Good point,” he would say. “Do other people ever see them? Can everybody do it? Can you?”