The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (15 page)

“There’s Gin,” she said, spotting her son at the fringe of the crowd near the entrance door. “Oh, Gin! Over here, Ginger darling! You won’t believe what you’ve missed.” She waved her hand over her head.

“Oh, no,” my mother said, moaning theatrically, jaw set as if it had been nailed in place.

I looked for Gin, or pretended to anyway, in between sneaking protracted glances at the Devlins, as the melodramatic tango of the crowd degraded to an insistent vibrant hum. I got caught doing an inspection.

“Do we know each other?” Harry asked me.

Panicked, I had no idea how to talk to this boy whose father was the enemy of my father. I looked around the ballroom, contemplating my escape, trying to formulate an answer. That’s when I saw Gin, arm extended over his head, waving, yoo-hooing. He plunged into the crowd and seesawed through, making his way toward us.

Directly behind Gin, Gula lingered in the gloaming that he wore like a cape, looming and murky, louche and intriguing, inhabiting his own dense pocket of darkness—night seeming to follow him like a feral odor. I took a step back. My mother noticed and tracked my gaze. Harry intuitively turned to look. My father, briefly pausing at the entranceway to the kitchen, did the same. Michael Devlin glanced around to see what or who we were all looking at.

Gula, smiling, sought me out with his eyes.

“Are you all right?” Harry came up alongside me. “You don’t look that great.”

“I’m fine,” I stammered, conscious that Gula was watching me.

“I’m Harry Devlin, by the way.”

“I know who you are,” I said. “I’m Riddle Camperdown. Godfrey Camperdown is my father.”

“I figured. Sorry about this thing with my dad. I knew he wanted to talk to your father about something but I had no idea it would turn into a fight. Jesus.”

“Your father must have said something pretty bad to make my father want to hit him.”

“Well, he hasn’t been acting like himself lately.” He paused and swallowed with difficulty, as if he was trying to digest something bitter. “I’ll tell you one thing, I never expected the evening to end with my dad in a dustup with your dad. Crazy.”

I was trying not to look at him except indirectly. His resemblance to his missing brother was disconcerting but compelling. Finally, I could resist no longer and turned to face him. He was massaging the back of his neck with his hand, displacing his shirt collar, his fingers fiddling with the silver chain that he wore. Tugging at the chain, playing with it, he pulled it up around his chin, tiny silver medallion reflecting the overhead light of the chandelier.

“Where did you get that?” I said.

Harry popped the necklace back inside his shirt. He looked at me, quizzical expression on his face, but answered, “A baptism gift from my mother. She gave one to my brother, too. It’s supposed to keep you safe from harm. That’s what my mother believed anyway. I’m not so convinced.”

I felt as if I was going to throw up. My mouth was dry. My eyes fluttered. That’s when it happened. No delicate perfumed swoon for me, no pretty feminine buckle onto a velvet chaise. No, I teetered like an old drunk, eyes wobbling, stomach churning, and keeled over as if someone had yanked my feet out from under me, hit the ground with a backward thud, blacked out and came to just in time to find Harry discreetly trying to adjust my skirt to its original position around my thighs rather than leave it in its current inelegant location somewhere around my collarbone.

On the plus side, I didn’t vomit.

“Are you okay, kid?” Harry asked, a crowd gathering.

“I’m not a kid.”

“So, do you do this often?” Harry asked me. “Faint, I mean.”

“Never. I never do this . . . Shit,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows, waving away his extended hand, sinking into a plush tub chair.

“Tough guy, eh?” Harry said.

If only he knew.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.

“What?” He looked perplexed. Obviously Harry had never before met a teenage girl hell-bent on persuading the world that she moonlighted as a Screaming Eagle. Taking a deep breath, I worked to stave off lumbering waves of personal mortification. It was like trying to swallow bleach. Then something darker than mere embarrassment settled inside me. I remembered what it was that had caused me to pass out.

“Good Lord, Riddle, what have you done now?” Hands on her hips, her hair smooth as satin—my hair, meanwhile, looked like it was being held up at gunpoint—high points of her cheeks flushed, my mother expended little effort to contain her contempt for the crowd’s expectations. She made it clear to all within earshot that maternal solicitude was not on the menu. “Honestly, you’re making a spectacle of yourself. Are you ill?”

“I tend to have this effect on women,” Harry said, trying to make light of my embarrassment.

“Like father, like son,” my mother said, batting her verbal eyelashes, unable to resist any invitation to banter.

“Forget power. Forget money. Forget reputation. You can bring no greater currency to any party than sophisticated banter,” my father had once proclaimed to guests over an after-dinner drink.

“Well, then again, there is beauty. Beauty will fly you to the moon,” my mother had demurred, ever the contrarian, indirectly proving my father’s point.

“So sorry, dear, about your brother,” Mrs. Whiffet said, springing forward, talent to dismay shining like her nose. “Any news about what’s happened to him?”

“Thank you. No. Nothing.” All levity gone from his face, Harry straightened up, reflexive formality taking hold as if he had suddenly been enfolded head to toe in a white glove.

“What a shame.” Mrs. Whiffet tsk-tsked, blowing up like a flotation device. “Well, you must be strong. Try to focus on all the good things in your life. You have so many blessings, haven’t you? I was just saying to Greer, if I were a few years younger . . .” The color drained from Harry’s face. “I think Riddle agrees with me, don’t you my dear? I mean, I’ve had my share of crushes too, but I never swooned over one of them, did I?” She laughed lightly and then covered her mouth in a conspiratorial whisper.

Too horrified to respond, I briefly wondered whether it was DNA-mandated or hormonally fated that every woman of a certain age decides lasciviousness is a kind of wit.

“Gin once fainted when Emma Meldrum kissed him at his tenth birthday party,” his mother carried on, oblivious to her effect. “Adorable!”

“Riddle, where do you think you’re going?” my mother demanded, her hand folded like a handkerchief at her brow, a flimsy gesture of pseudo-distress, watching me intently as I ungracefully pole-vaulted to my feet, retreat uppermost on my mind. I needed to get away, to escape the hollow pop and fizz of all that party chatter and counterfeit exchange. I needed a moment to recover, to find a private place where I could process all that had just happened.

“I’m going to get a glass of water,” I said, stumbling toward the back of the room, resisting all offers of help along the way.

Alone in the kitchen, I closed my eyes and leaned against the sink, head sagging, my arms outstretched, hands gripping the sides of the stainless steel cabinet for support. I heard the grandfather clock toll, familiar Westminster chimes echoing from inside the inn’s front entranceway. “Dum dum da dum dum dum dum dum,” small bells reverberating, polishing the air until it shone like the memory of the leather topsider that I had found in the yellow stable. I knew. I knew. I can never say that I didn’t know. It wasn’t a rabbit or a puppy or a pony. It wasn’t a Belgian sheepdog. It wasn’t my overactive imagination. It was Charlie Devlin in the barn that day.

The bells rang out. One. Two. Three. Four times. I stopped counting.

Taking a deep breath, I opened the cupboard and reached inside for a glass. My hand on the faucet, I was about to turn on the water—and the waterworks—when I heard my father’s voice coming from behind the wall in the adjacent butler’s pantry. The civility of his tone surprised me.

“Do the police have any idea?”

“No. Well, just what you might expect. Runaway kid.” Michael’s tone was bitter.

“What do you think?”

“Oh, I think Charlie is dead. What happened to him? I don’t know. I know this much. He didn’t run away from home. I don’t give my boys reason to jump ship. All I know is that he’s gone and he’s not coming back. As for why, well, I stopped asking myself those kinds of questions a long time ago.”

Charlie’s father, convinced he was dead? His hopelessness felt airborne, as if futility were a contagion and I was being overwhelmed by its toxic effects.

“I don’t understand you. Giving up on the kid that way. If it were Riddle I would search the world before I’d surrender hope.”

Eyes tightly shut, I fought to block the flow of tears. I have never felt so unworthy as I did in that moment.

“It’s easy enough to imagine what you would do or how you would feel when it’s not happening to you.”

“True enough, if you are a blowhard or a fabulist, and I am neither.” Camp hesitated. I could almost feel my father pumping the brakes, steering into the spin, trying to maintain control. “He looked like a nice boy. I’m sorry, Michael. What is there to say? Life is cruel.”

“You’re wrong. Life is random, life couldn’t give a shit. People are cruel. Which brings me to my point. What in the hell makes you think that you’re fit to hold office?”

Screech of tires, smell of smoke and rubber, I braced for the crash.

“Go to hell, Michael. You want me to crawl into a hole and pull a rock over my head, because you can’t face the truth about what kind of man you are.”

“Oh, I know exactly what I am.”

“No. I’ll tell you what kind of guy you are. The kind of guy who can talk about his missing son with all the emotion most people reserve for the discussion of a disappointing golf score. You see, I know you better than anyone. Is that what you can’t forgive?”

Michael Devlin laughed, though he wasn’t amused. “Hard to believe. At one time I would have walked through fire for you. Camp, you’re making this very easy for me.”

“Don’t threaten me, Michael. I don’t respond well to threats, especially under the circumstances.”

“Well, that’s where I have the advantage over you. You can’t threaten me. The worst has already happened to me.”

I hardly dared to breathe. The door opened, then closed—high-pitched chatter from the ballroom briefly funneled into the butler’s pantry, making its muffled incursion into the kitchen.

“Your son is missing and this is what you think about? I thought we resolved all this years ago. You never could stand to see me pull out ahead of you.”

“Desperation doesn’t become you, Camp.” Devlin cleared his throat. “Listen. I’ll do this much for old times’ sake. For Greer. Step down. Plead personal problems. Resign from the campaign and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“Are you kidding me? Forget it. I won’t go down without a fight. You know that better than anyone, Michael! I’m not the only one with something to lose here. It’s my word against yours.” He was shouting. Then just as quickly he wasn’t, his voice gradually becoming a low rumble. “Why are you doing this? What’s to be gained for either of us? Think of your sons. Think of Riddle. What’s behind all of this? Is it malice or madness? Jealousy?”

“Jealousy? Ha! You really want to go there?”

“Tell me. Why? You owe me that much. After all I did for you. Worst mistake of my life.” Camp sounded tired, and there was something else in his voice but I didn’t understand its meaning.

Leaning forward, I struggled to hear the answer that never came. The door clicked shut as Michael Devlin made his exit. In the ensuing quiet my father began quietly to whistle as I had heard him whistle so many times before.

He was whistling a show tune under his breath. I covered my ears. I had heard enough.

Chapter Fourteen

I
BROKE OFF FOUR SMALL PIECES OF MY BAGEL AND TOSSED
them one after the other to the dogs who sat lined up expectantly in a neat row at the dining room table, their begging a ritualized staple of our family life.

“Interesting,” my mother said, referring to something she was reading in the paper.

My father looked up from his coffee. “Uh-oh,” she said a few minutes later. “Take a deep breath. Just remember, Camp, bad publicity is better than no publicity at all. Isn’t that what they say?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Listen to this,” she prefaced before reciting one of the paper’s blind items:

“Who has a checkbook the size of New England, movie-star good looks, a tragic personal history and a black eye? Ask the Democratic congressional hopeful with the stunning left hook and the gorgeous, brainy, icy-blonde wife. (We’d say more but it would blow her cover.) Rumor has it that when these three old friends talk ‘triangle,’ the subject is biology not math.”

“Good to see the fourth estate is on top of things,” my father said. “Jumped to a melodramatic conclusion, too. That’s what we like to see in our opinion makers, predictability and dearth of imagination. Trust the press to get it all wrong.”

“Well, now, I wouldn’t say that,” my mother said wryly. “They got some important details right.”

“Yes, you’re right, I do have a great left hook,” Camp teased.

Squirming in my chair, I couldn’t figure out why they were so nonchalant about what had happened. Finally, I worked up the courage to ask, “Why did you punch Michael Devlin, Camp?”

“I lost my temper. It happens.”

“Your father’s sympathy for the plight of others only extends so far,” my mother said.

“Look,” Camp said, growing angry, “no one disputes what an awful thing this kid’s disappearance is, but . . .”

“But?” My mother interrupted. “There’s a but?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Greer, the kid was a Devlin. Too bad what’s happened to him, of course, it’s terrible, but think for a moment about all the kids that have suffered as a result of his family’s history of lousy labor practices.”

“I don’t understand, Camp,” I said. “You’re upset over people that you don’t know, people you consider to be innocent bystanders, and that’s fine, but you think what’s happened to Charlie Devlin is okay? Why do you think it’s okay to hurt some people but not others?” I bit my lower lip, trying to keep my emotions from becoming apparent.

“I’m not suggesting that what happened to the Devlin boy is right or good. I’m merely yielding to the power of greater forces. Sometimes these incidents are tied to a history of events, and within the context of that history they are, if not morally defensible, an inevitable if bitter form of correction or atonement.”

“Careful, you might miss a stitch, Madame Defarge,” my mother muttered, patting her lips with a napkin.

“What if someone talked about me that way?” I said, aware I was sounding a little desperate. “What if what happened to Charlie Devlin happened to me? What if he was better than his family? You don’t know.”

My father looked at me for a moment before answering. “Nothing like that is going to happen to you because I won’t allow it. And you’re right. I don’t know anything about Charlie Devlin. I’m sure he was a good kid and I’m sorry for him.” He sighed. “Surely we can think of more pleasant things to discuss on such a beautiful day?”

My mother laughed in disbelief. “I can’t think of a single thing. Your insensitivity is a showstopper . . . Riddle, where are you going?” she said as I pushed my chair back from the table, scraping the hardwood.

“My room,” I said glumly, making my glowering exit. Did anyone ever tell the truth about anything? The adults around me loomed like tall trees that resisted climbing, pendulous, dark and mysterious. I was lost in their forest. I was lost to myself.

Kneeling on the floor, my head in my hands, elbows on the windowsill, I looked out over the blue waters of the Atlantic. The beach was empty except for the hundreds of seagulls congregated on the sand. The view from my room was as it had always been. I was the one that was different. The fundraiser the other night had changed everything. There was no more pretending to myself anymore. Charlie Devlin had been in the yellow barn that Sunday in June. I knew that now and that’s not all I knew. This was no longer just about me not wanting to tell. It was about me not wanting to be found out.

“Y
OU HAVEN’T BEEN SENTENCED
to your room, you know, Riddle,” my mother said, referring to my increasingly strange love affair with solitary confinement. My life as I knew it had stopped. My training regimen fell apart. I was riding only sporadically. Mostly I had begun to hang around the house in a stupor, a self-imposed state of disgrace, which my mother viewed as a grave indicator of the state of my character.

In this and all other matters, big and small, she wasn’t inclined to keep her thoughts to herself. “Slouching churlishly toward depression by way of dodgy personal hygiene and potato chip crumbs in the sheets doesn’t exactly bode well for your future prospects,” she called out after me as I followed the familiar flight pattern to the third floor.

For an exuberant elitist such as Greer, whose tongue seemed to lead an independent, terrifying life of its own, scorching the earth daily, my abrupt refusal to leave my bedroom, my unwashed hair, generalized dreariness, the dramatic shuttering of my social life, alarmed her more than if I had started coughing up blood.

Grabbing the morning newspapers on the few occasions that I ventured forth from my top-floor sanctuary, I spent the first part of every day the same way, scouring in vain for references to Charlie Devlin.

“Is she mentally ill? Is that the problem?” From where I sat reading in the living room, I overhead my mother talking to my father in the kitchen.

“Remember Harriet Townsend’s boy? He locked himself in his bedroom for months and when he finally emerged he announced to everyone that he was a werewolf. Though with that underbite, I dare say he was one.”

“Greer, she’s just turned thirteen years old. She’s a little moody. It comes with the territory. Anyway, she’s a different type than you. She’s contemplative. She’s more intellectual, introverted. People like Riddle need a lot of downtime.”

“Perhaps I delude myself, but I like to think that my intellect, inadequate though it may be, isn’t adversely affected by my attention to personal appearance or my aversion to grunting as a form of communication. I have it on good authority that you don’t need to be melancholy to be considered an intellectual—though undoubtedly it helps.”

“Don’t be so hard on her. Give her some space. You’re going to have to face the fact that you and Riddle are two very different people. You’re only going to drive her away if you don’t learn how to respect your differences.”

My heart warmed to hear my father take up my cause.

“Riddle and I are more alike than you know, though right at the moment it pains me to concede the resemblance.”

“Back at you,” I said, walking into the kitchen, raw and conspicuous, bruising the air around me. “I’m nothing at all like you.”

“Oh, good, I see that you’ve finally decided to rise from the dead,” my mother said, unfazed by my eavesdropping or my black-and-blue attitude. She was leaning against the counter, watching my father as he sat at the kitchen table looking over some documents. “Just in time, too. You can walk over to Gin’s with me.” She smiled slyly.

I popped open the refrigerator door and, leaning forward, pretended to search for something to eat. “No. I don’t want to go to Gin’s. I hate spending time with you and your wicked stepsister.”

My father looked up and laughed. “Nothing wrong with her powers of observation,” he said, directing his comments to my mother, who ignored him in favor of continuing to harass me.

“Well, unfortunately for you, you’re not living in a democracy so you don’t get to decide. You’re coming with me whether you like it or not. Don’t worry. It won’t interfere with your predilections. That’s the one nice thing about pouting, you can do it anywhere.”

I pulled out a quart of milk and thumped shut the refrigerator door.

“Why do I have to go? Why can’t you just go alone? Gin’s your friend, not mine. Anyway, it’s not like you enjoy my company.”

“It’s not as if I enjoy your company,” she corrected. “Misery loves company, or hadn’t you heard? If I have to go, then you have to go. Now put on your best scowl and let’s get this over with. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

“Why do you have to go? What’s the big deal? Since when do you do anything you don’t want to do?” I said, attempting to annoy her by drinking directly from the carton.

“I don’t understand you. You’ve gone from spending all your free time over there to never setting foot on the place. Did something happen? Good God, Riddle, if you tell me that Gin asked about your bra size . . .”

“No! Jesus! Mother!” I banged the milk carton down on the table. “How many times do I have to tell you? Nothing happened.” I was squeezing the carton in my hand so hard that milk squirted out of the open spout. I gripped it tighter, wishing it were a grenade, milk running down my fingers. “Why does everything around here have to turn into the Spanish Inquisition?” Winding up, I pitched the carton against the wall, its contents spurting across the room and streaming onto the floor, the dogs rushing in as a single unit, delighted to fulfill the role of cleanup crew.

“That reminds me, Camp,” my mother said, “I’d like a Judas chair for Christmas this year.” She paused to consider the noisy slurping of the basset hounds as they lapped up the deepening puddle of milk in the middle of the room, then turned her attention back to me.

“Is this something Midol can handle?” I gasped in horror and reflexively looked over at my father, who thoughtfully feigned deafness. “Or shall I put in a call to the Vatican for an exorcist?”

“Jimmy, you don’t need to go if you don’t want to go,” my father said.

“I thought you were an advocate of solidarity,” my mother said.

“I am,” Camp said, looking over at me, grinning.

“Why don’t you come, Camp?” I asked him. “I’ll go if you go.”

“No,” he said, his voice pleasant but firm.

“Why?”

“I am not going to the old Devlin farm today, or tomorrow, or ever. Is that clear?” His voice was no longer pleasant, and the firmness had reconfigured into something resembling hostility.

I nodded, protest levels rising within. “Why are you getting mad at me?”

“I’m not angry with you.” He took a more moderate tone. “I’ve got some people coming over this afternoon to go over a few things.” He looked at my mother. “This Watergate break-in is picking up a little steam, especially after the
Washington Post
piece the other day. You wait and see, there’ll be evidence of Kissinger in a balaclava with a skeleton key in his pocket before this thing is finished.”

I was committed to making my case and stubbornly refused to yield the floor. “I don’t see why you can decide you don’t want to go to Gin’s but I still have to. I don’t want to go to Gin’s either.”

“I’m not forcing you to do anything you don’t want to do. You’re welcome to stay at home with me,” he said. “I’ll crack open the Ovaltine and we’ll get drunk.”

“Are you quite finished?” My mother snapped shut her cigarette case, anger clicking tightly into place. “May we get back to the matter at hand? Look, you two, Gin has some tedious secret he’s mad to reveal. I promised under duress that I would come. He absolutely insisted.” Her white skin was getting pinker by the moment.

Warning. Warning. I braced for the inevitable transition to code red. She threw her hands in the air. “So selfish. I can’t abide self-centered people.” Her eyes swept the counter, searching for something to decapitate, her ferocious gaze finally focusing on me. I’ve rarely been more grateful that human heads are not a screw-top design. “Dammit! This is the problem with having friends.” She had begun to pace back and forth, puffing away on her cigarette. “It really is too much to be borne. The truth is I need you to come with me, Riddle, so that I can use your inevitable bad behavior as an excuse to leave early, otherwise I will be stuck over there forever.”

Camp and I looked at each other and laughed.

She stopped and stared at us. “You should be grateful the rifle is under lock and key upstairs, because if there were guns anywhere within easy reach I would murder both of you.”

“Like to see you try it,” I said, bolstered by my father’s proximity and his expert way with a choke hold.

“Ha! That’s my girl,” Camp said, reinforcing my uneasy sense that evisceration was the true shortcut to his heart.