The Beach Club (6 page)

After Love finished her lesson about the phones and the fax and the credit card machine, and after she impressed Mack with her knowledge of the island, he left to take care of a lock in one of the rooms. Love drummed her fingers on the polished wood of the desk, stared down at the phone console, gazed out at the lobby, and thought,
This is where I’m going to meet the father of my child
.

She heard a voice in the back office. She tiptoed through Mack’s messy office and listened at Bill’s door, which was still ajar.

Love held her breath and knocked. Bill cleared his throat, then said, “Come in!”

He was the only one in the office. “I heard you talking,” she said. She smiled at him. “Do you always talk to yourself? I do.”

“I was reciting Robert Frost,” he said. “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches’ and all that. I didn’t realize anyone was still here.”

“Sorry I startled you,” Love said. “The poem you were reciting, is that a favorite of yours?”

“They’re all favorites,” Bill said, thumping the cover of his book. “This one is called ‘Devotion.’ I just stumbled across it.”

Love moved farther into the office. There were two wicker chairs by the windows. Love sat down. “Read it to me,” she said. “I don’t read nearly enough poetry.”

Bill closed his eyes and leaned back in his creamy leather chair. He was so thin his wrist bones protruded like knobs. “’The heart can think of no devotion, greater than being shore to the ocean, holding the curve of one position, counting endless repetition.’” He opened his eyes. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

My first day of work, a man reads poetry aloud to me
. “What does it mean?” she asked.

“He’s talking about love,” Bill said. “He’s saying the greatest demonstration of love is devotion, being there with your beloved day in and day out. Have you ever been married?”

“No,” Love said.

“I’ve been married thirty years, and I love my wife more now than ever. It’s like all those days, even the really boring, awful days, have added up. Each day I love her yet more.” He closed the book. “So I guess I’m what Frost would call devoted.”

“Sounds like it,” Love said. Her feelings a bit crushed.

“How about you? Are you devoted to anything?” Bill asked. “Anyone?”

“I’m devoted to having a baby,” Love said. “I’m devoted to finding someone to father my baby.”

Bill’s eyebrows arched, his mouth formed a silent O. Love’s personal life was a woman popping out of a cake,
Surprise!

“A baby is certainly a noble devotion,” he said.

Love put her hands on her thighs and stood up. “Too bad
you
can’t help me,” she said.

Bill laughed nervously. “Endless devotion.” As Love walked by his desk to leave, he held out his hand. It was a frail hand, but warm and sincere. “Someone is going to be very lucky,” he said.

Mack had been running the Beach Club for twelve years, Bill had owned it outright for twenty, but it was Lacey Gardner, the Grande Dame of Beacon Hill and Nantucket, who had true bragging rights. She had joined the Beach Club in the summer of 1945—fifty-three years ago—did she need to say it? Seven years before Bill’s father, Big Bill Elliott, even bought the place. Lacey had been around longer than anybody.

At eighty-eight, she was the oldest living graduate of Radcliffe College and that earned her a permanent seat in the front row at Harvard’s commencement. Every year on the day following commencement she drove from her apartment in Boston to Hyannis and put her car on the 9:45 ferry to Nantucket.

Lacey’s tenure on Nantucket seemed to her like many different lifetimes. Her parents had brought her over to the island in 1920, when she was ten years old. She remembered the ferry docking and the hoteliers standing on the wharf calling out the names of their establishments: Sea Cliff Inn, Beach House, Point Breeze. Years later, she came to Nantucket for weekends with her chums from Radcliffe. On summer evenings they danced on the open porch at the Moby Dick in ’Sconset. Back then, ’Sconset was a refuge for actors and actresses when Broadway closed for the summer; Lacey still remembered productions of
Our Town, Candida
, and
The Bride the Sun Shines On
out at the ’Sconset Casino. Dancing on the porch, lobster and chicken dinners for a dollar fifty a plate, cabaret fashion shows—this was the lively, carefree summertime Nantucket of Lacey’s youth. And she was the only one left to remember it.

In 1941, her gentleman friend Maximilian Gardner proposed to her on the beach in Madaket. Lacey was thirty-one years old and still not married. She worked for the Massachusetts Board of Health. Men called her feisty and independent, and women called her a career girl and a snob. But she loved Maximilian Gardner. At first he was just one of the young men in her fun-loving crowd, but then she noticed the way he looked at her. It was when Maximilian Gardner looked at her that Lacey felt most like a woman.

Lacey and Max were married by a justice of the peace on Madaket Beach, in November 1941, a month before the bomb fell on Pearl Harbor, a week before Max left for basic training. When he came home from the war three years later, they had a church wedding, but by then Lacey was thirty-four, and too old to start having children.

Lacey and Maximilian became permanent fixtures in Nantucket in the summer. They joined the Beach Club—and the Yacht Club and Sankaty Golf Club—and Lacey opened a hat shop on Main Street, called simply Lacey’s. She and Max bought a house on Cliff Road, and they split time between this house and their town house on Beacon Hill. They were married for forty-five years, and they held hands every night as they fell asleep. Lacey was holding Max’s hand on February 14, 1986, the night he died. She had never been a sentimental woman, and yet heart was broken on Valentine’s Day.

This was how her life on Nantucket seemed like a life divided: her life before Max, her life with Max, her life after Max. After Max, she sold the house on the Cliff and the town house in Boston. She rented an apartment in Boston, and asked Big Bill Elliott for a permanent room at the hotel.

“Don’t forget,” she told him, “I’ve been here longer than you have.”

Big Bill didn’t forget. He gave Lacey her own cottage, behind the lobby of the hotel. The view wasn’t great—it looked out at the laundry room and the back of the parking lot—but it had three bedrooms and most importantly, it was her own place—Lacey Gardner’s—bought and paid for with pure longevity. In Big Bill’s last will and testament, he left the cottage to Lacey; it was hers to pass on when she died.

Well, she wasn’t dead yet. She was alive enough to drive her new Buick off the ferry. Always, this thrilled her. She loved shooting down the ramp and feeling her tires hit Steamship Wharf. From the wharf, it was one mile exactly to the Beach Club.

When she pulled into the parking lot, she saw Mack standing on the tiny deck of her cottage, waiting for her with the same smile he wore in the photograph she kept on her refrigerator all winter. The first summer Mack worked at the Beach Club he had knocked on Lacey’s door to introduce himself. This was the summer after Maximilian had passed away, a mere four months later. When the boy said his name, “Hi, I’m Mack,” Lacey nearly tumbled out of her chair. Because of course, what she heard was “Hi, I’m Max,” as though her husband had returned to her in the form of this boy. Now she knew better, but she believed in divine intervention; she believed that somehow, Maximilian had sent her Mack.

Lacey beeped the horn with abandon. She reached for the power window switch and suddenly Lacey and Mack were face to face. He kissed her through the open window before she could even pull into her parking space.

“Hey, Gardner,” he said. “Welcome home.”

Tears rose and she shooed Mack’s face away. Pulled the car into her spot and put up the window and took a deep breath. Mack opened the door, gave her his gentleman’s hand.

“You look wonderful, Lacey. I swear you’re getting younger.”

“Nonsense,” she said. But she took Mack’s face in her hands and gave him a kiss for saying so. Truth was she felt as alive and vital as ever. “Eighty-eight and still kicking.”

“New car?” Mack asked, as he lifted her suitcases out of the trunk.

Lacey nodded. “They were hesitant to give me a loan down at the bank. I told them I’d pay it off in two years. That did the trick. So I’ll be out of debt by age ninety.”

Mack laughed and walked with Lacey toward the cottage. “Everyone’s back. We have a new woman at the front desk and a new bellman. The bellman is very handsome, Lacey, so watch out. He’s on his way to California.”

“Don’t tell me there’s been another Gold Rush? See there, if you live long enough, everything will start to repeat itself.”

“Vance is back. He went to Thailand and shaved his head. I’m warning you in advance so you don’t make some kind of comment. You know Vance is sensitive.”

“Goodness, yes,” Lacey said.

“Bill and Therese are fine,” Mack said. “Cecily got into the University of Virginia, but she has a Brazilian boyfriend, so who knows.” Mack swung the door to her cottage open.

“Here we are,” Lacey said. The place had a familiar smell, a mingling of Pine Sol and her scented talcum powder. She put down her pocketbook and looked around—her Spode on the kitchen shelves, her Maggie Meredith prints. The original sign from her hat shop hanging jauntily over the leather sofa seemed to announce her arrival: Lacey’s. “Pour us a drink. Oh, wait, I forgot—there’s a case of Dewar’s in the trunk of the car.”

“Be right back,” Mack said.

Lacey wobbled down the hall to her bedroom. She touched her pillowcase, crisp and white. It was disturbing to look at the bed, however. She couldn’t look at it without thinking,
This could be the bed I die in
. She supposed this was true for everyone; her odds were just greater.

Mack mixed a Dewar’s and water and poured himself a Coke while Lacey took a seat in her armchair.

“The cottage looks marvelous, dear,” Lacey said.

“The new chambermaids tried to clean the place, but they didn’t know that in Therese’s vocabulary, clean is an absolute—like truth, or peace. I had to go in behind them and finish the job myself.”

“That makes me feel all the better,” Lacey said. She tried to straighten her dress hem around her knees. That was the darnedest thing about sitting down as an old woman—getting comfortable and looking good were nearly impossible. “You’ve given me an earful about everybody else, but I haven’t heard about you. How, Mack Petersen, are
you
doing?”

Mack handed her the drink and settled himself on the sofa. There was something he wanted to tell her, she could tell right away. Lacey was a confidante to Mack, and to practically everybody else on the property for that matter. She joked about hanging a shingle, but secretly she liked imparting her wisdom. What good was she if she couldn’t share with people what she’d learned? She had eighty-eight years of experience stored inside her like volumes of an encyclopedia.

“Is there something wrong?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he said, but he didn’t meet her eyes. He wasn’t ready to tell her what it was just yet, but she could wait. They had all summer.

The day before the first guests arrived, Mack took some time off and went for a drive in his Jeep with the top down. He bumped along the cobblestone streets of town, looking at the historic homes: red geraniums in the window boxes, antique onion lamps, flags snapping in the wind. Painters hung off the sides of houses, and landscapers planted hydrangeas. The air was rich with the almost-Iowa smell of freshly cut grass, and Mack’s Jeep with the top off was an almost-tractor. Growing up in Iowa, he’d learned to appreciate the seasons, and spring on Nantucket was the equivalent of planting time. Getting the land ready, laying seed, and waiting for growth.

He twisted through the narrow streets until he reached the top of Main Street, then he headed west toward Madaket. He hit the gas and sped up, enjoying the wind and sun on his face. He thought about what Maribel said about profit sharing. Asking Bill to profit-share made Mack anxious. What if Bill thought Mack was anticipating his death? What if Bill died thinking Mack wasn’t grateful for all Bill had done for him already? Worse still, what if Bill said no? Bill, his almost-father. But not his father. Mack was thirty years old and he supposed the time had come to expect more from himself. If he weren’t brave enough to ask Bill to profit share, if he weren’t brave enough to make Nantucket his own, then he should return to his five hundred and thirty acres in Iowa.

When Mack reached Madaket, he stopped at the wooden bridge named for Madaket Millie. A sliver of blue ocean showed beyond the dune grass to his left, and Madaket Harbor, with sailboats bobbing on their bright red moorings, was to his right.
Speak to me
, he thought.
Speak to me now
. But it didn’t work this way. He never asked to hear the voice, it just presented itself the way it had his first day on Nantucket. Mack listened, hoping. He needed help—anyone could see that. But Nantucket was quiet. All Mack heard was the wind in his ears.

Therese Elliott was only interested in the unhappy people who stayed at her hotel. She, like Tolstoy, found happy people all alike; they were boring, dullards, plukes. And so, Mack dealt with the happy guests (except for Andrea, the woman with the autistic son, but Therese sensed this was a different matter altogether) and he left Therese with the damaged and wounded, the guests who suffered despite their money. They had lost a wife, or a child, or their leg or their breasts to cancer. They assumed responsibility for a parent with Alzheimer’s. They were divorced, widowed, married but alone. They had been abused. They fought suicide, depression, alcoholism.

Therese worked the reservation phone over the winter in Aspen and she heard all kinds of stories as she booked the rooms. She vividly remembered the day she spoke to Leo Hearn—February 6—it snowed eleven inches the night before, fresh powder, and Bill left the house at nine-thirty for Buttermilk Mountain. Therese’s daughter, Cecily, called at ten—noon on the East Coast where she went to boarding school—to say she had the flu and was puking her guts up. Therese felt both upset and angry—upset that Cecily was sick and so far away, and angry that Bill wasn’t home to worry with Therese because he was too busy skiing the green slopes. It was horribly sad to think of Bill, who had once raced down Jackpot with the best of them, limited to skiing with awkward beginners.
Why don’t you stay home with me?
Therese had asked.
We’ll play cards, go shopping
. But Bill got a thrill out of feeling his skis cut through the snow, just a few sweet turns. Therese imagined Bill falling, his body shattering like a teacup. She would be a widow, left to raise a headstrong teenage daughter and run the hotel all alone. Tragic possibilities always lurked near the front of Therese’s mind, just behind her common sense.

At one o’clock, Leo Hearn called.

Leo Hearn wasn’t a new client. He’d been coming to the hotel for four or five years and he’d always been Mack’s domain—he was hale, robust, a Man’s Man. He had started a second family in his late fifties: a young wife, two small children. He was a lawyer. In other words, someone who held very little interest for Therese, until this phone call.

She noticed something new in his voice right away. A softening, a surprising deference.

“Hello, I’d like to make a reservation for Memorial Day weekend, please,” he said. “I might be too late, but, oh, heck, I hope not. This is Leo Hearn calling from Chicago.”

“Leo Hearn?” Therese said. The man whose voice boomed through the lobby, making the staff cringe? The man who broke one of Mack’s fingers with his crushing handshake? “Leo, this is Therese Elliott.” She flipped through the reservation book to May, Memorial Day. “I’m looking at Memorial Day right now and it’s wide open. What do you need?”

“I need a better shrink and a better nanny,” he said. “In fact, I think what I really need is to start over. You know, with my life.”

Therese looked out her floor-to-ceiling window at the back of Aspen Mountain. “I see.”

“My wife is gone,” Leo said. “You remember Kelly? She left me. And I mean
left
. She left without any money and she left without the kids.”

“The babies?” Therese asked.

“Whitney is ten months and Cole is almost four,” he said. “She left them.”

Therese’s throat soured as she thought of Cecily, puking into a plastic bucket in some awful dorm room two thousand miles away. That was bad enough. She couldn’t imagine a mother abandoning her children, her babies, forever.

“My doctor said I should keep everything as normal as possible. So that’s why I’m calling. I want to bring the kids to the island. All my kids. I have two older boys too, did you know that? Boys, ha!” Leo said. “They’re grown men. Of course I fouled everything up with them in the eighties when I divorced their mother. But they say they’ll come to Nantucket. Humoring me, probably. I think my oldest son is gay. He’s an attorney and he works on gay rights and the kid’s never had a girlfriend that I’ve known about. My other son, Fred, is a third-year at Harvard Law, but Fred is tricky, see, because Fred’s still angry with me from what happened with his mother. I was hoping if the kids spent time with their older brothers maybe they would stop crying.” He paused, and Therese wondered if Leo Hearn weren’t so boring after all. “I just want my children to stop crying.”

Therese gazed out at the mountain, thinking,
Please, Bill, come home
. “I understand.”

Leo cleared his throat. “Do you have three rooms available?”

Therese was puttering around the lobby on the Friday of Memorial Day, perfecting it for opening weekend, when Leo Hearn and his children arrived.

“Leo,” she said, walking over. “I’m glad you got here safely.”

“Therese,” Leo said. He hugged her and kissed her cheek awkwardly. He turned to his family. “Meet the gang. You know Cole and the baby. This is our nanny, Chantal, and my sons Bart and Fred. We’re quite the entourage.”

Entourage indeed. An attractive blonde held the baby girl. Then the sons: the one named Bart, tall and thin, dressed in a suit, and the one named Fred a younger replica of Leo Hearn himself—broad shouldered and stocky. Weaving between everyone’s legs was the little boy, Cole. Therese crouched down, and said, “Hello, Cole. Welcome back.”

Cole stopped a second and looked at her, his brown eyes suspicious. Then he went back to his aimless weaving. An unhappy child was the sign of an unhappy family; no one could convince Therese differently.

“Come here, Cole,” Leo said. Cole ran and hid under the piano. Leo shrugged. He looked at his other two sons and rubbed his hands together. “So, what do you say, guys, should we play some tennis this afternoon?”

“I don’t know,” Fred, the young Leo, said. “We just got here. Maybe we could relax.”

“Maybe,” Leo said. “Or maybe we could play tennis like I suggested. You want to play, don’t you, Bart?” he asked the son in the suit.

Bart loosened his tie. “Sure, Dad, I’ll play.”

“Well, then, we need a fourth,” Leo said.

Slow down, Leo, stop trying so hard
. Therese’s mother instincts kicked in like adrenaline. She went back to watering her plants.

“We need a fourth,” Leo repeated. His eyes scanned the lobby as though someone might magically materialize.

“I don’t have to play,” Fred said. “I’d really rather relax. You can play with Bart.”

“This is a family weekend,” Leo said. “I’d like to play tennis with both of you. We just need a fourth.”

“I was third seed singles at Bilbo High School in 1958,” Therese said. “But you probably don’t want to play with an old woman.”

Leo smiled. “No, that’s great, that’s perfect. We’d love to have you join us, Therese. Wouldn’t we, guys?”

Fred and Bart rustled around and made gestures that looked sort of like nods.

“Shall we say four o’clock?” Leo asked.

“That gives you time to relax,” Therese said. “Why don’t you check in and Vance can show you to your rooms.” She set her watering can down on the piano. Cole was stretched out on the carpet underneath, pretending to be asleep. Therese whispered to him, “When you wake up I have some beach toys you might like.” She waited a few seconds and Cole raised his head.

“What kind of toys?” he asked.

“Toys for building castles,” she said. “Want to see?”

“I want my mom back,” Cole said. “She’s not coming back.” He had thick black eyelashes, the kind grown women envied.

“I know you want to see your mom,” Therese said. “But what I have are beach toys. Do you want to see the beach toys?”

Cole nodded.

Therese held out her hand. “Come with me.”

After Therese gave Cole a bucket, shovel, and a large inflatable lobster, and delivered him safely to his room, she went into Bill’s office and collapsed in one of the wicker chairs by the window. Bill typed at his computer.

“The Hearns are here,” she said. “Remember I told you the wife vanished and left mister with those two tiny children? Plus a couple of grown sons from the first marriage?” Out the window, she was glad to see both Bart and Fred spreading beach towels under an umbrella. “Remember I told you? Well, I’m playing tennis with them this afternoon.”

Bill stopped typing. “Call me crazy, but it sounds like you’re meddling, Therese. Or getting ready to meddle.”

Cole and the nanny trudged onto the beach. Cole ran for the edge of the water with his pail and shovel. Just a normal little boy. Therese’s mother instincts whistled like a tea kettle. She looked at Bill, and at the volume of Robert Frost poems on his desk. The two of them had known so much pain. Therese’s way of dealing with it was to sniff out other people’s sore spots, wanting to make them better. Bill’s way was to read his poetry.

“I am meddling,” she said. “But they needed a fourth.”

“Be careful,” Bill said. “These are people’s lives you’re dealing with. Not lab animals set up for one of your psychology experiments.”

Therese stood up, smoothed the folds of her silk skirt. “I take great offense at that.”

“I know you do,” he said. “But will you please be careful?”

“I’m always careful,” she said.

“When have you been careful?” Bill asked. “I have never met anyone more willing to get involved in the jumble of other people’s lives. It’s your insatiable need to clean everything up, to create order, to make things lovely again. You can’t stand to see a mess.”

“I want to help,” Therese said. “I’ve never done anything except try to help.”

“What about Mrs. Ling leaving her husband last year at the end of her stay? Are you going to tell me that wasn’t any of your doing? What about convincing the Avermans that they should send their son to military school? What about arranging the wedding in the lobby for the woman who was dying of lupus?”

“She wanted to get married!” Therese said. “I helped make that woman’s life complete. And Mrs. Ling is happier without her husband—you read the card she sent during the holidays.”

Bill held up his palms. “Therese, I’m only asking you to think about pulling back a little this year. To begin with, think about letting Leo Hearn deal with his family problems on his own. What do you say to that?”

Therese put her hands on her hips. She and Bill were opposites: Bill liked numbers, and the cool, lofty images he found in poetry—and not just any poetry but the poetry of Robert Frost, who wrote about the woods, lakes, paths, leaves. Frost: the man’s very name dripped icicles. Bill wasn’t equipped to deal with the guests—happy or miserable.

“Tennis is at four,” she said. “So if anyone’s looking for me, that’s where I’ll be.”

“Be careful!” Bill said.

Nantucket in May was funny as far as the weather was concerned. It had been fair and breezy all day but at four o’clock fog rolled in. Therese changed into her whites and she was standing on the front porch of the lobby when Fred popped out of the gray mist.

“Dad and Bart are going to be a minute,” he said. “They were the ones who wanted to play and now they’re not even ready.”

Therese bounced her racket off her knee; she still used a wooden racket, with a frame. “So, have you been to Nantucket before?” she asked.

“No,” Fred said. “Nantucket was a place where Dad brought his new family. We only got invited this year because the crisis hit.”

“The crisis?”

“Dad’s wife, Kelly, left him and the kids high and dry. I hate to say it but that’s what you get for marrying someone twenty-five years younger than yourself. Dad deserved it. What goes around comes around and all that.” Anger lifted off Fred like a bad smell.

“What do you do, Fred?” Therese asked.

“Me? I just finished law school. I’m studying for the bar.”

“So you’re going to be a lawyer,” Therese said.

Fred shoved his hands in the pockets of his white shorts and bowed his head. “I don’t know,” he said. He looked at her. “Have you ever met a lawyer you liked?”

Therese laughed. “What a question. If I didn’t like lawyers, I’d be out of business.”

“I don’t like lawyers,” Fred said. “Actually, my brother’s okay and he’s a lawyer. But he’s different.” He swung around to look at the lobby. “Hey, do you own this place?”

“My husband and I do.”

“Man, it must be a gold mine.”

“It is,” Therese said. Fred smiled as she hoped he would. And then Leo and Bart came around the corner with Chantal, Cole, and the baby.

“The kids are going to come with us,” Leo said. “I thought I’d make this a real family affair. Cole can chase the balls.”

Cole started to cry. “I was having fun on the beach,” he said.

Fred kicked a hermit crab shell across the parking lot. “Great,” he said. “Just great.”

They reached the courts at four-fifteen. The fog was thickening.

“Is this even worth it?” Fred asked. “In a few minutes we won’t be able to see the ball.”

Leo opened a can of balls and whacked one across the net at Fred’s feet. “You need to change your attitude, Buster.”

Chantal sat in the grass near the net while the baby toddled around her. Cole was crying.

“This is spectacular,” Fred said. He turned to Therese. “Have you ever seen such a happy family?”

“Would you like to be on my team?” she asked.

“Okay,” he said. He yelled across the net. “Hey, Dad, we’re going to play mixed doubles. Me and Therese against you and Bart.”