The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (27 page)

“I thought he died of a heart attack,” Harry said, as Michael looked on helpless and angry.

“That’s the story your father concocted to conceal the truth about what happened. He recruited Greer’s silence and support by playing the sympathy card. His usual modus operandi. Just another day in the lie of Michael Devlin.”

“My God,” my mother said, struggling to light her cigarette in the wake of the aroused offshore wind.

Chapter Twenty-Four

W
HACK!

“Greer, for Christ’s sake.” Camp held his hand up to his cheek. We were in the living room. Michael and Harry had barely pulled out of the driveway before my mother launched her attack. Unheeding, she wound up and slapped him again.

Her palm must have been burning. I could practically feel the imprint of her hand on my cheek. Tears streamed down her face, but she wasn’t weeping in any traditional sense. She was crying bloody murder. Camp’s arms dropped to his sides in standoff. They stood still and their eyes circled one another.

“If only that spirit could be harnessed for good instead of evil,” he said finally.

“How could you?” my mother shouted at him, echoing Michael’s words to her.

My father looked over at me where I stood frozen in place across from them.

“Go to bed, Riddle,” he said. “This is between your mother and me. It has nothing to do with you.” Paralyzed, I couldn’t seem to make anything work. Walking seemed to be out of the question.

“Do you think she’s an idiot? Do you think you can bundle her off to her room the way you did when she was a toddler and she’ll forget all about what happened here tonight? That she’ll carry on blissfully assuming her father is the heroic figure he pretends to be?”

“Go to your room, Riddle,” my father said. I would have liked nothing better than to disappear but I was immobilized.

“Yes, go to your room, Riddle, and put your fingers in your ears. Cover your eyes and hold your nose, too. Put a goddamn bag over your head, while you’re at it.”

“Stop it,” my father said.

“How dare you humiliate me that way! How dare you violate my confidence! And for what? Because you’re jealous? For years I’ve had to tolerate you whining and mewling and fuming with jealousy over Michael Devlin. You had no right to attack him that way. His son is missing. His father killed himself. You weren’t there that day. I was. He was devastated. It was horrible. So what if he pretended his father died of natural causes? People have been lying about that sort of thing since the beginning of time. Have you no feelings? Have you no heart? You should be ashamed of yourself. Pretending to care about Harry! Say what you will about Michael, he isn’t afraid to be wealthy. He isn’t afraid to let me in. You know what else? He actually likes me just the way I am.”

My father, resigned to my presence, decided to my horror to include me in the conversation.

“You see, Riddle, your mother never loved me at all. Her heart, such as it is, always belonged to Michael Devlin, but he wasn’t in it for the long haul. He was smart. He got out while the getting was good. As for me, well, I didn’t have enough power or money to hold her attention for longer than it took for the signatures on the marriage license to dry. All your mother has ever cared about is the almighty dollar.”

“Please,” I said, wanting to be anywhere in the world but where I was.

My mother laughed and reached out to touch the lapel of his jacket, pure cashmere and imported from Italy. “Oh, I see. That’s right. It’s all me.” Now it was her turn to recruit my support. “Your father pretends to have dirt under his fingernails while living like a second-rate pasha and taking my name in vain.”

She started furiously pacing the room, Dorothy worriedly trotting alongside her. The other two dogs and little Vera were curled up hiding under the sofa. I looked longingly in their direction. She stopped abruptly, spun around and resumed her attack.

“Am I laboring under a delusion or is the cost of the clothes you’re wearing equal to the gross national product of a third world country? Who paid for them, Camp? I did. Who asked me to? You did. So what? News flash, Camp: you’re not perfect. Human beings weren’t meant for perfection. Why do you insist on trying to change the unchangeable? Why don’t you forget the greater world and devote a little time to working on yourself instead?”

“Don’t.” My father held up his hand as if he was holding back traffic.

“Don’t tell you the truth? You don’t have a monopoly on point of view here, Camp. I have a few thoughts of my own. I know the idea of being a hypocrite terrifies you. You think by punishing yourself with labor history and public service, by committing death by boredom, maybe you’ll even stop wanting to go to parties. Is that what you think?

“What would you have me do, Camp? Quit washing my hair, wear flats, and wrap myself in a cardigan with holes in the sleeves? Will that make me good? Will that make you better by association? You know something? I’m not that bad and you’re not that good.”

It was as if a lifetime of grievances, expressed in daily trickles of archly expressed resentments, had swollen into a tsunami of plain unvarnished fury.

“You’re hysterical. Calm down.”

“You think because you’re quiet for the moment you’re not frantic? I’ve got news for you. You’re berserk. You’re so busy pretending to be a humanitarian you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be human. And you and I both know that you are all too human, don’t we, Camp? All the secrecy and the denials and the lies can’t make it otherwise.”

Camp gradually slid downward under her barrage until he was sitting sideways on the cushioned seat of an armchair, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Slightly shaking his head from side to side, he ran his hands through his hair and loosened his tie. He sighed loudly and lay back on the seat.

“Hand me that pillow, will you?” he asked, pointing to the sofa. I was standing next to the fireplace. Moving automatically, I walked over, picked up the small yellow pillow and gave it to him. He reached behind the back of his head and set the pillow in place. He relaxed into it and stared up at me. “Thanks, Jimmy.”

I knelt down on the floor beside him and stared into the open hearth.

My mother, seeming depleted, sank down into the sofa across from us. “What a mess everything is. Why did you do it, Camp? Confront him that way? Nothing will stop that book from coming out now.” She paused, reviewing matters silently. “I think you need to act preemptively if you’re to survive.”

“It’s too late, Greer. The time for candor has long since passed,” my father said quietly. “I was a fool. I made the wrong decision all those years ago and I’m going to pay for it.”

“What did you do, Camp?” I said.

“It’s what I didn’t do, Jimmy,” he said.

“But he says you’re the one who did something bad.”

“He’s lying. It’s been eating him alive, knowing that I know the truth about him.” He seemed contemplative. “Well, I suppose I did do something bad, too.”

“It was war, Camp,” Greer said, mildly exasperated. “You all did what you thought you had to do to survive. What the hell difference does it make who did what?”

“It makes a difference. I didn’t come home just so I could answer to people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

“I’m telling you that I understand. I don’t hold you accountable,” my mother said. “You can’t see that. You don’t get it. You never will.” She reached into the silver cigarette case and, withdrawing a cigarette, she got up and walked over to the fireplace. She reached into the fire, lighting the tip of her cigarette in the flames.

“For Christ’s sake, Greer,” Camp said, a mix of despair and horrified recognition on his face. “You think it was me. You believe him, don’t you? You believe him and you don’t believe me.”

Even now, all these years later, I can’t stand to think of the pain I saw in my father’s face that night.

Standing up straight, my mother briefly lost her bearing. She leaned against the end of the mantelpiece.

“Mary, Mother of God,” she said, staring over at my father, the smoke from her cigarette seeming to freeze the air around her, crackling and bursting into tiny pops of ice. “What do you want me to say?”

Chapter Twenty-Five

C
AMP WAS GONE BY THE TIME I GOT UP THE NEXT MORNING. I
came downstairs and went into the kitchen where my mother was sitting at the table reading the newspaper. She looked up briefly, said hello and resumed her reading. I went to the pantry, opened the cupboard door and tried to decide what I wanted for breakfast. Lou was visiting her family in Chicago.

“I’ll make pancakes, if you’d like,” my mother said, an offer so unexpectedly maternal I was temporarily speechless.

“Well?” she prompted. “It’s a yes or no question, Riddle. No need to prepare formal remarks.”

“Yes,” I said. “Please.”

She put down the paper and slid back in the chair, stood up and went over to the refrigerator where she retrieved a quart of milk and a carton of eggs.

“Please bring me the pancake mix,” she asked, searching for a mixing bowl.

“It’s in the bottom cupboard,” I said finally, after listening to her systematically open and bang shut the same cupboard doors over and over again.

“Where’s Camp?” I finally worked up the nerve to ask, half afraid that he might be in pieces in the bathtub.

“Washington,” she said. “No need to panic. It was a planned trip. He decided at the last minute to drive himself to the airport in Boston. He’ll be home in a few days.”

“Are you two speaking?”

“We’re speaking. Whether we’re enjoying it or not is a whole other conversation.” She inexpertly cracked an egg on the edge of the mixing bowl, small shards of the shell spraying the pancake mix. “Dammit. How does anyone do this?” she said, helpless and annoyed, scraping the contents of the bowl into the garbage bin and preparing to start over.

“Here, let me,” I said, sensing a lifetime of culinary failure ahead, taking the new recruit from her hand and tapping it on the side of the rim, the shell splitting neatly down the middle, the egg landing in a perfectly formed oval in the center of the mixture.

Having stumbled her way through the rest of the preparation, she turned off the heat under the skillet and wiped her hands on a dish towel, sighing with relief.

“Thank God that nightmare is over,” she said, pancakes made at last. She looked wrung out—knots of hair poking out from behind her ears in disarrayed tufts and twirls. If her hair had been a sweater, it would have been missing a few buttons. My mother could have led the siege of Iwo Jima while balancing a book on her head, but don’t ask her to boil pasta unless you’re prepared to spend the evening talking her down from a ledge.

I sat down at the table and sprinkled brown sugar over my plate of buttermilk pancakes, four of them, one on top of the other, all varying sizes and irregular shapes, slightly burnt on the outside, the inside lumpy, wet and runny.

“They’re good,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, looking at me as if she couldn’t imagine what I was talking about, pouring herself half a glass of grapefruit juice. She took a sip and then another and dumped the rest down the sink. Breakfast. Eating gave her no pleasure. For the most part, she appeared to view it as a form of weakness, a vaguely vulgar display of human frailty.

“So, I need to drive into Provincetown and run a few errands,” she said, letting the water run in the sink. “Would you like to come?”

“Sure,” I said, reaching for a glass of milk, finishing off my pancakes as she took a few moments to restore order to the kitchen before going to her room to change, the four dogs thumping up the stairs behind her, the water still running in the sink.

She came back down wearing a calf-length, licorice-colored cigarette skirt with a kick pleat in the rear and a form-fitting gray sweater with an envelope neck. She had on black high heels. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail. Her lips were tulip red and her skin was white.

“You look nice,” I said in solemn understatement. I wasn’t being stingy. I was enjoying the novelty of a domestic encounter conducted in lowercase for a change.

“Thank you, Riddle,” she said. “You’re just full of compliments today. What’s the occasion? Are you and Harry planning to elope?”

“You always have to spoil things,” I said.

Dorothy came toward me, wagging her tail, holding up her right hind leg, lifting it off the ground as she walked. Panting, she stopped and smiled up at me before limping off to her bed in the corner of the kitchen.

“I spoke to the vet the other day about Dorothy,” my mother said. Chattiness, however awkward, constituted her best attempt at an apology. “You know all the problems she’s been having . . .”

I nodded. Dorothy’s health had been on a steady decline over the last few years.

“He doesn’t know what’s wrong. She has so many different symptoms, but they don’t point to a single obvious conclusion. He prefers not to attempt a diagnosis since even educated guesses are invariably wrong and an incorrect treatment can be worse than no treatment at all.”

“I hope it’s nothing really bad,” I said, kneeling down beside Dorothy and stroking her head.

“Me, too.” She was rooting around in her bag looking for her sunglasses.

“What do we do in the meantime?”

“The vet said we’ll just have to watch and wait and see, nothing else to do in these complicated cases. Her condition will manifest itself eventually. Whatever is wrong will become clear in time. It always does.”

T
HE CAR WAS CLIPPING ALONG
, windows open, sun and wind streaming in as we drove up and down the narrow curving roads. My mother drove too fast, piloting the car as if it were a sailboat heading into the wind. With Greer at the wheel, I always felt as if we were hurtling toward something. We drove in silence, both of us thinking about what had happened the night before but declining to discuss it directly.

“Why did you marry Camp?” I asked her, breaking the impasse, my oblique way of addressing what was on my mind.

She shifted her gaze away from the road and toward me. She was wearing sunglasses but I didn’t need to see her eyes to read her expression; the slightly bitter curve of her mouth told its own tale of resignation and disappointment.

“Because he showed up,” she said, looking away, eyes focused straight ahead as she navigated the sharp turns of the road.

“I don’t want to be like you when I get older,” I said.

“Oh, come now,” she said. “There are worse fates.”

“Like what?” I said.

“How would you like to be a chocolate eclair alone in a room with Mirabel Whiffet?”

I stared out the window for the next five miles.

“For God’s sake, Riddle, I loved him. I couldn’t live without him. All right? Are you happy now?”

“Did you love Michael Devlin more?”

“That’s for me to know,” she said.

W
E SPLIT UP ONCE
we reached Provincetown—it was safer that way. I wasn’t interested in clothes and was especially resistant to my mother’s persistent desire to remake me in her likeness. Around noon I walked into Crunchies, a gentrified hamburger joint on the main drag, where we had agreed to meet for lunch before heading back home. The restaurant was nearly full. Loud and exuberant, it crackled and popped like an accidental collision of hot oil and water in a skillet.

“Hey, Hoffa, over here!” I heard Harry shouting at me, his voice rising up over the collective din of tourists and hungry regulars.

Harry was here? At first, I couldn’t believe my bad luck, then I couldn’t believe my good luck. His hand over his head, he was waving at me from a crowded booth at the rear of the restaurant. Still mortified from the events of the night before, I looked around for an escape route. It was a reflex destined to pass quickly. My desire to spend time around Harry overrode any impulse I had to flee.

I walked toward him, feeling intimidated when I realized that he was with a bunch of friends. Six or seven of them, maybe more, sat jammed into the booth. Windburned and steamy, they were an industrial-strength wrecking crew, with a talent for making a bright Saturday afternoon seem like a dingy 4 a.m. downtown prowl.

“Sit down,” Harry said, standing up in greeting, seeming remarkably unaltered after last night. “What are you doing wandering around unattended?”

“I’m meeting my mother for lunch,” I said. “She’s shopping.”

“Your mother eats here? Must appeal to her wicked sense of adventure,” Harry said, making a spot for me next to a girl sitting beside him. How had I missed seeing her?

“This is my girlfriend, Jemima,” he said.

Girlfriend. I blinked rapidly. I didn’t dare cry. There wasn’t an ark big enough to protect the world from the flood of my tears. Was it just me or did the sky seem suddenly beige? Swept free of color and no breeze to lift the terrible stillness that covered everything like crepe, all blessings mislaid or turned to stone.

Harry had a girlfriend.

“Have something to eat,” Harry invited, unaware of my devastation, gesturing toward a plate of French fries and onion rings in the middle of the table.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“I like a girl with no appetite,” Harry said, grinning over at Jemima.

“Harry,” she said, pretending to sound annoyed. She smiled up at me and said hello. My heart sputtered and backfired. I had never seen a prettier girl. She looked like Snow White, which only succeeded in making me acutely conscious of my own status as a dwarf.

Despite her feigned shock and disapproval, she was transparently charmed by his antics, but then again so was I. I sat in silence for the next twenty minutes, checking the door constantly, looking for my mother as Harry and his friends engaged in the conversational equivalent of arm wrestling.

“Harry tells me that you’re quite an equestrian,” Jemima said, as she made a point of not eating what was in front of her.

“Not as good as he is,” I said, truthfully.

“Is he really as good a rider as people say?” Jemima asked.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Don’t you ride?” I already knew the answer to that one. An experienced rider who had seen Harry on horseback would never have asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m terrified of horses.”

I was just young enough and ruthless enough in my judgments to hold such an admission in contempt. For the first time I understood what Patton felt like when he slapped that soldier suffering from battle fatigue. “He should have pulled out his revolver and shot him on the spot,” my father said, as he held me to the same standards of attitude and performance.

She had her hand on Harry’s knee and was running one long, slender finger casually along the inside of his thigh. He was laughing at something someone said, not even paying attention to her. She leaned over and kissed him on the ear. She looped her leg over his. How could she be so blasé about being so brazen? Did boys really like that sort of thing? I finished off my chocolate milk shake feeling like the table mascot—feeling, for all the world, like a pygmy among giants.

“Jesus, it’s almost 1:30, my old man is going to kill me. I was supposed to meet him an hour ago,” Harry said, grinning over at Jemima before he dove for the last onion ring. “We’re driving into Boston. We’re supposed to fly to Palm Springs tomorrow morning.”

“How long are you going to be gone? To Palm Springs, I mean,” I asked.

“Couple of weeks,” Harry said.

“I’ll miss you,” Jemima said. “I wish you weren’t going.”

“I guess you won’t be coming to Gin’s hunt tomorrow then?” I said. Harry shook his head.

“Nah. I don’t like hunting. Killing animals for sport is not my idea of a fun way to spend the day.”

“Most of the time the fox gets away,” I mumbled, staring at the table.

“You don’t admire it, but you’re going to do it anyway? What’s that all about, Hoffa?” Harry wouldn’t let me off the hook.

“I just love riding to hounds so much,” I whined. It was a pitiable response and I knew it. Every year Gin held two major events at the farm—a hunt in August and a horse auction in early September, the highlights of the summer as far as I was concerned. Hunting was illegal in the off season, but Gin didn’t let that worry him. He considered himself above the law. “If there’s any trouble, I’ll just pay the fine and be done with it,” he used to say.

Harry was just getting wound up when a server approached, his latent contempt preceding him to the table like a charmless cologne. “Devlin?” He sniffed, surveying the table.

“You’re looking for me?” Harry asked.

“There’s a phone call for you,” the waiter said, lip curling in the direction of the front desk.

“Shit. Gotta be my dad. Tell him I left, okay? Will you do that please?” Harry jumped to his feet and reached for his jacket.

“Well, no, I won’t do that. You can do that yourself. Follow me.”

Harry amiably took his direction and loped along after him. He was amused by the waiter’s intransigent snobbery. It would never have occurred to him to raise hell about anything. Jemima followed him with her eyes and then she turned around, took a sip of her drink and leaned into me. “I’m surprised your mother lets you wander around Provincetown all by yourself,” she said. “At your age.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, though I knew exactly what she meant.