The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (12 page)
All of my dolls had faces. I knew each one intimately. This wasn’t my doll, so whose doll was it? The base of my head began to pound. It was hard to breathe.
I don’t know how long it took me to realize that the sporadic tapping on my window glass wasn’t the wind. Doll in hand, I walked over to the window, drew the curtain aside and opened it up wide. Gula was standing in the grass far below, light from the back deck illuminating him in the darkness, a fistful of stones in his hand.
“Do you like her?” he called up to me.
Leaning forward, I let the doll fall from my hands. Lightweight and insubstantial, it soared upward on the robust wind, drifting this way and that, wavering slightly, struggling to stay aloft before beginning its gentle hypnotic descent to where Gula stood waiting with his arms outstretched to catch it.
I looked down at the doll, hanging limp and affectless in Gula’s hands, and in the darkness I could see her face forming, see her staring back up at me.
Blinking.
T
HE SUMMER CONTINUED TO PUT ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE
other, dragging me resistant and rebellious along with it. I awoke each morning, riding boots at my bedside, committed to hours of rigorous cross-country work with Eugene and weighted down with the knowledge that Charlie Devlin was still missing.
Private protests aside, my mother, semi-dutiful but with a kind of violent resentment, reluctantly fulfilled my father’s campaign obligations during his weeklong absence in Southeast Asia. Never one to suffer in solitude, she blackmailed me into accompanying her glowering to a sailboat race in Hyannisport designed to raise money for multiple sclerosis research. The event, held in the second week of July, was organized by a New England industrialist whose wife had been diagnosed with the disease.
“Just once I would like one of these people to work on behalf of an illness they don’t have,” Greer groused after threatening to cancel my dressage lessons with Gin.
“Don’t you ever put me through anything like that again as long as you live,” she said to my father, confronting him mere moments after he walked through the door after making the long journey from Vietnam, his forehead creased with fatigue. “You know how much I loathe good works.”
The fact-finding mission was national news, and within hours of his return Camp was on the phone and in front of the camera, making the rounds of politically focused network talk shows and radio programs, until his voice was reduced to the sore sound of tires across gravel.
Camp was the kind of man who just naturally attracted attention. He couldn’t help it. If you could write a prescription for charisma, it would resemble my parents’ alchemical mix: a composer, an academic, a writer, a war hero, a tough union-minded guy with a blue-blood pedigree, acres of debt and a full head of hair, married to a chilly beauty, shiny, remote and unknowable, ruthless as a mirror, a movie star! Reporters covering the election campaign loved him because every time he opened his mouth, he said something worth recording.
My mother, an incredible asset or a devastating liability depending on how high the moon hung in the night sky—speaking to a journalist, she once referred to Cape Cod as a “straitjacket with topography”—was sparingly applied, her provocative layers of cachet apportioned out meagerly: subliminal flash of perfect smile, artful hint of perfect profile. Camp possessed an intuitive grasp of the aesthetics of persuasion as an apparatus of power. His campaign team was terrified of Greer, what she might say, what she might do, but Camp was smarter than that.
“Bush-league concerns,” he labeled them. “You leave Greer to me,” he continued to instruct immoderately timid staffers whom he privately disparaged as “conventional thinkers, unenlightened planners, ditherers. Carefully handled, your mother is not a problem. In fact, she may even deliver me a particularly resistant elitist constituency.”
As for me, kids weren’t taken very seriously in that era. Nobody was recruiting my thoughts or opinions, which is probably just as well. Sometimes reporters glommed on to the fact that I was named after Jimmy Hoffa; otherwise, I was generally relegated to the final paragraph of the story, along with the basset hounds.
Predictably, I hated anything to do with campaigning—at that stage of my life, my likes were so few they could have comfortably fit through the eye of a needle—and all things to do with getting Camp elected to office had begun to boil over. My father’s trip to Vietnam and the resulting furor had inspired ferocious comments from those who supported his conclusions and those who opposed them. The harder they came at him, the harder he roared back, declaring to the world that he’d take on all comers with one hand tied behind his back.
U
NTIL THE SUMMER OF
seventy-two, my main goal was leaving childhood officially behind me and becoming a bona fide adolescent. I realized the dream on the last day of July, when I officially turned thirteen. Camp surprised me the day before with an Irish draught horse, a fantastic eventer he named Mary Harris, in memory of the labor activist otherwise known as Mother Jones.
“There goes the Pollock,” my mother commented at the unveiling.
It was decided that Mary’s stall mate should be a Shetland pony that Greer defiantly insisted on calling Henry Clay, after the notorious antiunionist Henry Clay Frick.
“Have you people never heard of Blaze?” Gin complained when he heard about the ensuing domestic uproar.
When I blew out the candles on my cake, I surprised myself by wishing that I could go back in time. I wanted nothing more than to be the twelve-year-old girl in the hammock that Sunday afternoon in June in what I had come to view as my last carefree moment.
There were so many things happening that I couldn’t explain to myself, let alone my parents. The day after my birthday, I walked into a drugstore in Provincetown, killing time waiting for Greer and Camp who were giving an interview to a lifestyle reporter over lunch. A group of people were standing in line waiting to pay for their purchases when a man in a Hawaiian shirt picked up a newspaper from the nearby rack, an article about Charlie Devlin on the front page.
“Boy, I don’t know what the big mystery is there. That kid is long dead and gone,” his companion said, pointing to the large shot of Charlie that dominated the front page. “Just another kid who got drunk and got into some kind of jam he couldn’t get out of. Mark my words, he’s going to wash up on shore one of these days. Or parts of him anyway,” he added with a chuckle.
“Anybody consider that maybe his family knows something? If it were any kid other than a Devlin that disappeared, the cops would be all over the family,” his friend announced, to murmurs of agreement from other customers.
I was outside the store when I heard a man call out to me. I turned around. It was the store manager. “Excuse me,” he said. “Did you forget to pay for those Life Savers?”
Reaching into my pocket, I retrieved three packages of cherry Life Savers that I had stolen. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to take them. I have the money to pay for them.”
“Okay,” he said, leading me back into the store.
“Isn’t that the Camperdown kid? Nice values her parents teach her,” someone whispered as I paid for the Life Savers and ran from the store out onto the congested summer streets.
If I was crying for help, no one was listening. If I was crying at all, I had only myself to blame. In reality, the universe was telling me to put a sock in it. I could have committed hara-kiri on the front lawn of the White House without attracting any attention.
Everyone was so taken up with the election and the campaign. Charlie Devlin’s disappearance was still big news—God knows my mother and Gin had plenty to say on the subject, and the newspapers kept up a regular reportage though there was no new information to sustain the front-page coverage he continued to get. Most people, including the police, seemed to feel that he had suffered some sort of accident—drowning was the most frequently mentioned possibility. Even Camp seemed less inclined to believe that he was on a rich boy’s reckless escapade. As for the fire, well, nobody talked about the fire anymore. All that was left of the old yellow stable was hidden away in the far corner of my underwear drawer.
I kept to myself the secret of the miraculous medal, tiny silver sliver of light, and contemplated its mystery, the sole survivor of a conflagration. Holding it in my hands late at night, my head on my pillow, I pressed it to my cheek, untidy reminder of all that I concealed, faithless emblem of my secret nature.
T
WO DAYS HAD PASSED
since my birthday. I came downstairs for breakfast, ready to spend the day with my new horse. I found my father at the dining room table in animated conversation with Gula, who stood up to greet me as I entered the room.
“Jimmy!” Camp was smiling. “Look who’s here! We have another campaign volunteer and I couldn’t be more delighted to welcome him aboard.” He put his hand on Gula’s shoulder. “It seems Gula and I share a common experience of sorts. We’ve been discussing the war. Turns out he was a boy in Belgium during the battle of the Ardennes. He lived through the nightmare of Bastogne in forty-four. Jesus, that’s one Christmas we’ll both never forget, isn’t it?” He posed the question to Gula, who had somehow perfected a method of nodding and shaking his head simultaneously.
“Unfortunately, I have limited time to give because of my obligations to Gin, but if you have a need, I will endeavor to fill it,” Gula said.
“Look, we’re having a huge fundraising evening tonight in Provincetown. It should be fun. Gin’s going to be there. Please come as my guest. I can introduce you to the head of our volunteer committee and he can get you started if you’d like.”
“Thank you. I will do as you suggest.” Gula hesitated. “Though, if I may be frank, I had hoped for a more informal relationship. Considering the circumstances of our living arrangements, I thought it might suit us both better if you could simply ask me to help out whenever you feel the need personally. I’m a great driver,” he said, laughing.
“You know,” Camp said. “That’s not a bad idea. I might just take you up on that.”
I slunk off into the kitchen and started mindlessly banging cupboard doors and opening and shutting the refrigerator. On his way out, Gula popped his head in through the open doorway. “Looking forward to seeing you tonight, Riddle. I hope you’ll save the first dance for me.”
“I’m not going,” I said, eyes lowered, head averted, my voice barely audible.
“Yes, you are,” my father said, sounding surprised.
The two men exchanged knowing glances as my father, socially amused but privately annoyed—I recognized the familiar tones—wrapped things up by saying that Gula could expect to see every member of the Camperdown family in Provincetown that night.
“Not me,” I said, flouncing up to my bedroom where I prepared to do battle. It appeared, however, that my father meant business. He sent in Greer. An hour after I had made my declaration, my dispirited floundering collided with my mother’s epic prickliness.
“Riddle,” she said, briskly violating the privacy of my bedroom, thumping on the door and throwing back the bedcovers. “Get up. You’re going with us tonight. Enough.”
“I’m not going and you can’t make me,” I said.
“You have a couple of hours to exercise your new horse, get washed and get dressed, and then start preparing for the inevitable. I mean it. Or no more riding.”
She had my interest. “You can’t stop me from riding. No one can stop me from riding.”
“Watch me.”
“I hate you,” I snarled at the back of her head. Frightened and aggressive at the same time, striking out, I had become a monosyllabic fear-biter.
“What in God’s name has happened to you? Where have you gone? I can almost see you shedding IQ points with every passing day this summer. You sound like a fugitive from
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
. I knew that adolescence could be difficult, I didn’t know that it was a form of lobotomy.”
“Shut up!” I shouted, rewarding her allegations with proof of what I had already come to suspect. Charlie Devlin wasn’t the only person to disappear that summer. A big part of me had gone missing and I had no idea how to put myself back together again.
T
EN MINUTES LATER, I
bumped down the stairs, white blouse an accordion of wrinkles, riding pants retrieved from beneath the bed in a ball of dog hair.
“You should have something to eat—though a part of me hesitates to feed the beast,” my mother said as Lou, looking on in bemusement, offered to make me a sandwich. Refusing, I huffed and puffed my way out of the house. After waiting outside the stable for all of three minutes, my brain working overtime, I made my decision. I took off running for the beach.
“Riddle!” my mother shrieked from the kitchen window when she spotted me hotfooting it along the trail among the tall trees at the back of the house. She ran onto the back deck, tripped down the steps and tore across the yard after me as I shot across the grass, heading for the dunes and from there the beachfront. Before I could descend the ladder dug into the sandy bluff, she caught me.
Seizing me by the shoulder, she spun me around. “You’re going to this goddamn fundraiser tonight if I have to drag you all the way there by your hair.”
“I’m not going. You can’t make me!” Wrenching myself free, I ran to the nearest tree and started to climb. Not to be outdone, she grabbed me by my riding boots and yanked me back down and onto the ground.
“No!” I went officially nuts, hitting, spinning and swinging. To my amazement, my mother started to swing back, the two of us wildly flailing away at each other as the waves roared below. It might have ended in murder if my mother hadn’t abruptly stopped, a look of shock and dismay on her face.
“What am I doing? Beating up my kid over a Democratic fund-raiser? Has it really come to this?”
Bent over at the waist, hands on her knees, she took several deep breaths, stood back up and gave her head a shake. “You listen to me, Riddle James Camperdown. I’m through. Finished. Go. Don’t go. It’s your choice. You can live with the consequences. This is between you and your father. I’m out. Do you hear me?”
