Summer House (5 page)

She’d known when she married Worth that she was taking on the entire Wheelwright family, but she had been too ferociously in love to worry about it. As an only child, she’d welcomed belonging to a large family, especially a family like the Wheelwrights, so well known and respected. Worth’s parents, Anne and Herb, had a kind of glamour, and they were very much in love with each other. That seemed like a good omen for Helen’s own marriage.

And who could complain about spending two months every summer in the wonderful old Wheelwright house? Grace and Kellogg played doubles tennis with Helen and Worth, and the four of them joined Anne and Herb for dinner dances at the yacht club. They played badminton and croquet on the neatly mowed lawn, and when the wind was calm they sailed on a rippling silver path in the moonlight.

It was when their three children—Charlotte, Oliver, and Teddy—were born that Helen truly fell in love with the summer house. There, the long summer days were glorious. Grace’s three daughters—Mandy, Mellie, and Mee—were close in age to Helen’s brood, and the children all tumbled around like puppies in the spacious sunlit rooms in the big old house on the harbor. If it rained, they’d do jigsaw puzzles or play wild games of hide-and-seek and board games. When the sun was out, the hours of the day were like honey.

Years ago, when Worth and Bobby and Grace were young, their father had had sand delivered to make a small beach where the harbor waters lapped at the grassy shore. Over time, as the wind whipped low dunes along the lawn’s end, beach grass and wild roses found homes there, creating a natural wild seaside garden, which in the
summer, when the roses bloomed, filled the air with a sweet perfume. Anne and Herb’s children played on the beach and then, as the years passed, Anne became Nona, and Herb became Grandpa and their grandchildren played there.

Grace married Kellogg and had three children. Worth married Helen and had three children. Like their parents, the children built elaborate fantastical sand castles or spread their towels on the hot sand and lay soaking in the sun and warming up after a dip in the shimmering blue shallows of the harbor. Later, they learned to sail from the Wheelwrights’ wooden dock and played beach volleyball in the shallows, coming in for dinner drenched and salty, their smiles flashing white against their tanned skin.

Over the years, Grace’s husband, Kellogg, and Worth stayed in Boston at the bank all week, so Helen and Grace were thrown together without their husbands. This was usually okay, although Grace could be a bit intimidating and officious. Grace had such high standards. Helen didn’t really mind if the children had mac and cheese two nights in a row, but Grace wrote out menus for the week and stuck to them, rain or shine. With her own children, Grace was a bit of a dictator, but while she often made “suggestions” to Helen about how she should raise her children, she was never pushy. She just sort of exuded a smug perfume of superiority.

Helen had always
liked
Worth’s family. But she could never
be
like them. She remembered the time, ten years before, when she told them at Family Meeting she would like to run an art gallery on the island. They’d reacted as if she’d suggested boiling puppies. Wheelwrights were bankers! Their bank had been founded in 1878 by Worth’s great-grandfather. Once simply named The Fourth Bank of Boston, over the years it had changed names and added owners and directors. Worth was co-CEO, sharing duties with his old friend Lew Lowry and Grace’s husband, Kellogg. Grace had chosen to remain in the background, running their home but always keeping informed. The bank was the hub of the Wheelwrights’ lives. No Wheelwright did anything as frivolous as run an art gallery.

“Well, I think you’re all stuffy and unimaginative,” Worth had told the others at that Family Meeting. “Helen’s got a great eye for art
and she’s a wonder at networking. I’ll stake her the start-up money personally, and I’ll bet you I get it all back and more.”

Helen had been pleased that her husband had championed her, but after that meeting she lost her momentum. Even then she was aware that her children were breaking away from the Wheelwright traditions, and she didn’t want to seem to be widening the breach. And perhaps she didn’t want to risk failure; perhaps that was a small part of her decision.

Now a small bolt of pain forked through Helen’s head. Could it be nervous tension? Because she was headed for another season on the island?

She focused on her engagement calendar. When her three children grew up and left home, Helen had joined several volunteer organizations, helping with church fairs, volunteering in libraries both in Boston and on the island, and tutoring students in English as a Second Language. All this work brought her great pleasure, a sense of accomplishment, and—she could never admit this to anyone—a kind of self-awareness she hadn’t even realized she was missing.

In July the Nantucket library would hold a book sale. She was co-chair. She was also in charge of the auction of the needlepoint quilt for the church. But she wasn’t worried about these responsibilities. She had them well in hand. Her volunteer work was not the cause of her headaches.

Helen closed her calendar and allowed herself to admit the truth.

For the first time ever, she was dreading the two months at the summer house. Dreading being around Worth’s sister and her perfect family. Helen’s own children seemed so feckless in comparison.

All three of Grace’s children had made good marriages with people from Nona’s circle. Mandy and Claus had presented Nona with two healthy great-grandchildren. Mandy and Mellie’s husbands both held prominent positions at the bank.

But Helen and Worth’s children showed no interest in banking. They were, at the best, eccentric and at the worst—well, the worst didn’t bear considering.

Charlotte, the eldest child, had tried working at the bank. Charlotte adored her father and wanted to please him. She had put in
three years before suddenly handing in her notice. At the next Family Meeting, she’d surprised them all with her naïve little scheme for an organic garden. Helen sympathized with Charlotte, who was trying to save the world, as Worth secretly joked, one head of lettuce at a time. And she thought Charlotte appreciated the fact that the family were all being supportive of her oddball endeavor. Well, they were all
comfortable
with Charlotte in an oddball endeavor. Charlotte’s enthusiasms were always genuine and passionate but seldom long-lasting. The family could indulge Charlotte one more time. She’d settle down eventually—she was their best hope for being what the family would consider normal. Perhaps she would return to the bank.

Oliver, Helen’s second-born and secretly her most beloved child, would never work at the bank. Staggeringly handsome, Oliver had always been the most like his mother, interested in art and music, bored with sports and banking, mild-mannered and dreamy. Helen and Worth had not been surprised when, at sixteen, Oliver announced that he was gay. Back then, Worth was still trying to groom Oliver to take over the bank, but Oliver combined his father’s facility for numbers with his mother’s love of art and became an architect. Now, at twenty-eight, he was living and working in San Francisco with his partner, Owen. Oliver and Owen were planning a commitment ceremony this year.

Their third child, Teddy, was the real problem. He was becoming—could she actually say it?—a drug addict and alcoholic. Harsh words. Painful, frightening words. She wasn’t sure they were accurate. Teddy had always been moody, volatile, and, she had to admit it, spoiled. Possessed of the same charismatic good looks all her children had—the shining maple sugar hair, the sapphire eyes rimmed with thick dark lashes—Teddy was the baby of the family. If Helen had spoiled him, so had everyone else. Helen had often wondered just how much difference it made that Herb, Teddy’s grandfather and the stern commanding patriarch of the Wheelwrights, had died during Teddy’s teenage years. She’d always believed that Herb might have talked some sense into Teddy. She and Worth had not managed to do that, no matter how hard they’d tried.

Since they couldn’t change Teddy, somehow they had, without
conscious agreement, changed themselves. Changed their standards. Teddy hadn’t been subjected to the tongue lashings and groundings they’d imposed on the two older children. But Teddy was so sweet!

As a child he was simply a mischievous elf, playing pranks. Somehow all that had blurred, until, when he was eleven, he’d sneaked out one night and driven Worth’s Mercedes around the neighborhood and into a wall. That time, they’d been so glad he wasn’t injured that they hadn’t gotten angry. And really it was hard to be angry with Teddy. He had an infectious laugh and a lightning-quick wit. He had the same easy charm Worth and Oliver had, too. He was kindhearted and gentle, never mean. At boarding school he got into trouble for all kinds of silliness, but he was always simply playful, roguish, not destructive, at least not on purpose.

Worth thought it was his fault, the way Teddy had turned out. Worth had a sense of humor—Helen thought he’d gotten Grace’s share, as well—and especially with his family he indulged his flippant side. He loved pounding on the piano, and all through the years Worth had often entertained his family by spontaneously transforming their daily activities, successes and woes, into a musical comedy. He’d roll up his shirtsleeves, seat himself with a flourish at the baby grand, and bang out the theme from
Sound of Music
as if it had been written by Wagner. “Teddy wants a dog, but Mom’s allergic, Oliver has a cold, but Charlotte’s fine!” he’d bellow, or something just as silly.

When the children were learning to sail, Worth had concocted elaborate pirate fantasies that lasted for days. He’d arrive at the island with a multitude of plastic “gem”-encrusted swords, ravage the trunks in Nona’s attics for dress-up clothes, and charm Nona into turning her old hats and scarves into tricornes and black eye patches. Grace had always scoffed at her brother’s foolishness, but her daughters followed Worth into his games with stars in their eyes.

Worth had taught his children to ski, to play tennis, and to sail. During blizzards, he’d spend hours playing board games with them, and if it rained for several days during the summer, he’d invent an indoor scavenger hunt that involved the entire family, Grace and Kellogg
and their daughters and Nona, too. He worked hard, and he played just as hard.

How had that love of fun been transmuted into an addiction to drugs and alcohol for their third child?

A year ago, Teddy had dropped out of another college—the third he’d been admitted to after failing out of the first and being banned from the second for being drunk and high and mooning a professor on campus. He’d raided his college fund to travel around the continent, phoning from time to time to assure them he was okay. He’d phoned three weeks ago, and he’d promised to arrive on Nantucket, in time for Nona’s birthday.

Perhaps when they were all together, all her children, safe on the island, enfolded in family routines as polished by the years as soft-buffed silver, perhaps then Helen’s headaches would cease. She would be so grateful for that, even if it lasted only a few days.

Nona’s birthday.
Helen would focus on that. She needed to get ready for the trip. She rose. Worth might be awake now, might enjoy sitting down to a proper breakfast for once. She’d ask him.

Worth didn’t often eat breakfast, even though Helen reminded him that doctors said it was the most important meal of the day. Her husband sprang from bed wide awake and energetic, ready to take on the world. Even coffee didn’t interest him. But then, Worth was a good sleeper, not a continually exhausted insomniac like Helen. Worth fell asleep when his head touched the pillow around eleven at night, and he snored, twitched, and slumbered luxuriously in what was obviously a refreshing, rejuvenating state until, around seven thirty, he awoke in full consciousness, threw back the covers, and strode into the bathroom for a brisk shower. He dressed entirely, crisp shirt, cuff links, suit, tie, and wingtips, without even a sip of juice. If Helen tried to press breakfast on him, he told her he’d grab something when he got to the office, and he’d snatch up his briefcase, peck her on the forehead, and march out the door.

It still seemed wrong to her, separate bedrooms, even though it had been her own relentless insomnia brought on by hot flashes that, a few years ago, drove Worth out of their marriage bed and down the
hall to one of the guest rooms. It suited them both, really, since they went to sleep and woke at different times, but she missed the warmth and weight of Worth’s body in the bed, missed the accidental touch of his knee against the back of her leg, which often inspired them toward lovemaking.

Although, now that she thought about it, in the first few months after his move, they had made love more than usual. And it had been better. Worth had taken the trouble of seducing her, and she had returned the favor. It had been like having a lover.

When had that changed? They still made love occasionally, not as often as Helen would like but, as Worth reminded her, he was sixty. He showed affection in other ways—he brought her flowers, and books, he complimented her on her hair, he noticed when she looked good—but it seemed to Helen that marriage was not just about dutiful displays of fondness but profound physical encounters. Perhaps not as often now, but still, even at their age.

Worth must be awake by now. She could make eggs Benedict. Or even pancakes. Her spirits rose as she headed up the stairs and down the hall to Worth’s bedroom.

As she drew close to Worth’s door, she heard him talking on his cell phone.
Good
, she thought, because he was awake, and then,
Oh, dear
, because she hated it when his work, his important overriding work, invaded their home on weekends.

“Come on, Sweet Cakes, don’t be that way. You know I’m thinking about you every minute. You know the only thing I want to do is take you back to bed.”

What?
Helen stopped dead in the hall, as if she’d run into an invisible wall. What was Worth saying? Who was he talking to?
Sweet Cakes?