The Summer We Read Gatsby (17 page)

I felt slightly dizzy, reading that letter, and I handed it to Peck before leaning back against the door to regain my equilibrium. My mother’s few stories rushed through my brain, a torrent of words always delivered, as I remembered them, in the slightly ironic tone that allowed her to keep her distance and turn them into anecdotes. She’d take on a conspiratorial tone, as though sharing a confidence. But then she’d end up revealing so little. I knew next to nothing about any of them, not my father, not her parents, or his. “It could have been worse,” I could hear her saying, with a laugh ready to burst forth each time. “They could have played ‘Bertha.’ ”

Peck read through the letter quickly and then looked up at me, her eyes shining with tears. “You didn’t know.” It wasn’t a question but a statement of fact. She gave me a look of frank sympathy.

“Did you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I didn’t realize she left you here. Mum did tell me about your parents as a cautionary tale. She told me they fell out of love and that your mother went to Europe to get away from a needy husband who quickly grew too demanding. Mum wanted me to know the truth, that no matter how much in love you think you are, it fades. Inevitably it fades, even the grandest of loves.” She paused, as though thinking of her own situation. “I was only seven when he died, so it was later, of course, when she told me this as a warning. By the time I started to get to know you, there didn’t seem to be any reason to share this information.”

“I wish I’d known,” I said simply.

“What difference did it make if they were still in love or not when he died?” She reached out and patted my knee with one hand. “You couldn’t change the ending of that story.”

“I called my mother the queen of the unreliable narrators,” I said, as the rush of words in my brain abated.

“I thought
I
was the queen of the unreliable narrators,” Peck said, only half kidding.

“I suppose we all are,” I said. “That’s what I’m starting to realize. We all tell our stories the way we want to. And sometimes those stories have nothing to do with reality.”

Peck was clutching a handful of letters and she shook them in my face. “That’s
exactly
what happened with me and Miles. I got stuck in my version of the story. And I could never move on. I believed this fiction about the one true love. That’s a bullshit story if there ever was one. Why is the whole world obsessed with this myth of true love?”

I nodded. “I’ve wondered that. Even as I read these letters, they sound like fiction to me.”

“That’s because you’ve never been in love,” she said matter-of-factly. I must have given her a look, because she added, “Don’t get your panties in a wad. You know it’s true. You got married because you thought it was time and you didn’t want to be alone. You told yourself a romantic story—talk about an unreliable narrator—and you wanted to believe it. Of course you did. You’re a writer, aren’t you?” Peck shrugged. “We’re all storytellers. We choose to tell ourselves the kind of tale we want to hear.”

I took up another of the letters, ready to continue. “I don’t remember Lydia ever mentioning that I’d lived with her. Not even after my mother died.”

“She probably didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” Peck said gently. “It didn’t mean your mother didn’t love you. She must have been going through a lot.”

According to Julian, who, in some of the letters, seemed to be writing from a kind of sanitarium or rehab center where telephone privileges were limited, Lydia used me, the darling niece, as an excuse not to see him. He complained that she was always giving him the brush-off, that he’d opened his heart to her and she’d tossed it into the wastebasket, much as he predicted she would toss his letters into it after reading them.

Then we came to another revelation: Lydia had been married. It was a brief alliance, no more than a year from the sound of it, with a younger man she met at the school where she worked. He was the father of one of the students, and his first wife had died in a fire. She married him to spite Julian, or that’s what Julian seemed to want to believe. The marriage fizzled in a short time, and when they were divorced, Lydia surprised Julian, who was himself still married, even more by not rushing to be with him again.

“Wow,” I said, after I read through to the end of the letter for Peck’s benefit. “Another thing she never told us. Lying by omission.”

“Doesn’t this sound like That-Awful-Jean-Paul? The first husband who didn’t work out?” Peck glanced over at me. “Everyone makes mistakes. Even Lydia.”

“We talked so often when I was going through my divorce,” I said, thinking about the phone conversations with Lydia. “I can’t believe she wouldn’t have mentioned this then. She was so sympathetic. And encouraging. I kept wanting to believe there could be a happy ending. And she’d say, ‘Sometimes you have to scrap your first draft and start over.’ ”

When we’d finished reading all the letters, I gently placed the stack back into the safe, leaving the door open. “Seems kind of anticlimactic, doesn’t it?” I said. “An affair with a married man? That was the big secret hidden in the safe?”

“I know,” Peck said. “Kind of trite for someone with Lydia’s imagination. The cheating husband, the tiny cottage by the beach where the lonely mistress would wait for him to be free, feeling justified when her attentions were drawn to other company.”

“I was expecting something more dramatic,” I said.

“Stella,” Peck intoned, “I go through
life
expecting something more dramatic. That’s
my
downfall. And yours is that you don’t expect
enough
.”

We sat there for a while, crouched on the floor near the open closet door in Lydia’s cluttered bedroom, filled with things we needed to make decisions about. Most of it would go to charity— there was a thrift shop affiliated with the school where she had taught for so many years—but what of the rest? The strange thing was, I kept feeling like Lydia would be home soon, so we could ask her about it. That’s what went through my mind: we can ask Lydia when she gets home. My brain had played the same tricks on me when my mother died.

Peck suddenly jumped up. “Literally, if I don’t get some grease in me I’m going to pass out. Let’s get out of here.”

Later, after we’d stuffed ourselves on eggs and bacon, we sat quietly on the porch together. The rain had stopped but the sky was still a cozy pale gray. Peck lit a cigarette and when she put the pack down on the table I took one for myself. She would never comment on such a decision. She wouldn’t welcome it too exuberantly, the way some smokers would, making you want to quit right away before the thing was even lit. She wouldn’t raise her eyebrows in question or nod knowingly or look shocked or do anything to acknowledge the cigarette in the hand of a nonsmoker. I loved this about her.

I inhaled deeply, enjoying a newfound feeling of closeness between my sister and me that was almost tangible. We fell into a companionable silence, rocking back and forth in the old chairs, looking out at the small raggedy lawn and the tennis court, smoking. Something had shifted between us.

“Our family was fucked up,” she said, after a while.

“All families are fucked up.” I took comfort in that knowledge, and in the obvious but suddenly poignant realization that my sister and I were each other’s family, fucked up or not. She was all I had. “I’m named after a Grateful Dead song they didn’t play the night I was born. For all I know, they weren’t even at the show. Maybe he didn’t even
like
the Dead!”

“Oh, he loved the Dead all right,” Peck said. “It was when he started getting into music that everything went south with Mum. She was
never
going to go to a Dead show with him. She blamed the music. All of a sudden her husband grew his hair long and started playing the guitar and claiming his great lament was that he hadn’t gone to Woodstock. She didn’t know who he was.”

“That’s pretty funny,” I said. “Because my mother said he was very square. But she said it like it wasn’t a bad thing.”

After a pause Peck waved her cigarette in my direction. “Did I ever tell you about
my
first Dead show?”

I nodded.

“It was the last show Jerry ever played,” she intoned, beginning the story as she’d always told it. I remembered that she’d begun with this erroneous detail the last time I’d heard it. “I was—”

“It wasn’t,” I interrupted. “The last show was in Chicago. You saw them at the Meadowlands.”

She sighed, a deep and distraught expulsion of heavy breath, as though the weight of my interruption was more than she could bear. “Okay. It was the last show Jerry ever played . . . at the Meadowlands. God, Stella, no wonder you’re divorced.”

“Ouch. Was that necessary?” I asked her with a laugh, but she’d taken another breath and moved on with her tale.

“It was 1995. Bob Dylan opened for the Dead.”

The words that constructed the story of her first and only Dead show washed over me with soothing familiarity. When she was through we fell silent again, basking in the calm of the early afternoon on the porch. All the emotional turmoil I’d lived with since my mother died and the divorce and then Lydia’s death seemed to drift away.

After a few minutes of quiet, Peck spoke again, this time sounding just like Lydia. “There’s a great tradition of writers out here, you know.”

I nodded. This had been a favorite topic of Lydia’s, the writers and the artists on the East End, and I knew what Peck was trying to do by bringing it up. The legacy of the arts was what drew Lydia out here in the first place, she always said, long before it was considered “a playground for the haves and the have-mores,” and Peck sounded like she was hoping she could use it to draw me out there too, intimating that I would finally become a writer, if only I stayed. If only we could keep Fool’s House.

“Truman Capote lived in Sagaponack,” she added, after a pause. “John Steinbeck was in Sag Harbor. There were so many artists, photographers, even theater people. That was when this was a place for true eccentrics.” Clearly she placed herself, as Aunt Lydia always had, in this category. And I do believe considering yourself an eccentric is the first step toward becoming one. “Willem de Kooning lived out in Springs,” she continued wistfully, as though she were speaking of old personal friends of hers. “That’s also where Jackson Pollock lived. And where he died.”

“Did you ever notice how Lydia always mentioned Pollock when she talked about Dad’s car accident?” I said, remembering. “She always added, ‘Like Jackson Pollock,’ when she’d say he died in a car accident. And then she’d say, ‘He was forty-four years old, exactly the same age as Pollock was when he died.’ ”

“I know. What was she implying?” Peck lit another cigarette with the one she’d just finished. “That he had talent to match? Ha.”

“I wanted to believe it was true, speaking of fictions we tell ourselves,” I said. “All evidence to the contrary. Lydia wanted to believe it too. She always said he hung out at De Kooning’s studio, remember? As though he were one of them.”

Peck nodded, exhaling thoughtfully. “In her mind, he was. She had such reverence for artists. What did she say? There was nobody more poignant than a failed artist?”

“Hitler was a failed artist,” I pointed out. I’d known my share of them, even married one. Jean-Paul had never gotten over the fact that he’d inherited no musical talent whatsoever, despite his determination to become a guitarist.

“I am too,” she said softly. “I might as well face it.”

I looked at her sharply. I’d never heard her question herself. She took a drag from the cigarette in her hand, elbow clasped elegantly at her waist, and then her eyes met mine. “All these years I’ve been telling myself I was destined for extraordinary things, to be an acclaimed actress, a movie star, a
legend.
” She smiled. “I told myself I was unique, that what Miles and I had was this rare, literary sort of love, and that it was indicative of this rare, literary sort of life. I believed myself a
student
of the theater, rather than just a wannabe.” She paused, looking up at the night sky. “There comes a point in life, I guess, when you can’t keep believing your own tales.”

When Peck’s cigarette was down to the filter she stubbed it out and continued, as though she’d been thinking about her old friends. “All the writers used to go to Bobby Van’s in Bridgehampton. They’d get drunk there after a hard day’s work. That was before the paparazzi were out here and the celebs. Before the tacky night-clubs and the promotional parties and those awful reality housewives.” She paused, as though recalling it. “The artists’ and writers’ softball game had real artists and real writers back in those days.”

You’d have believed she was there. Like we always believed Aunt Lydia.

8

 

 

 

 

T
he next day I was on the living room floor surrounded by paper when the phone rang. Aunt Lydia had not only saved her love letters from the passionately devoted Julian, but also, apparently, every piece of correspondence she’d ever received, including, for some reason, hundreds and hundreds of Christmas cards, some crinkled and faded with age, others more recent and crisp, with marketing-brochure-style photos of families or just their children, wearing Santa hats and gap-toothed grins, or on safari in Africa in matching khaki shorts.

There were so many of them, all those families with at least two children, sometimes as many as five, smiling for the camera. I tried to imagine what those families were like and what kinds of houses they lived in—in some I could see a fireplace or a bit of staircase in the photo and could extrapolate. I found them fascinating, these mini promotional pitches for each family. Some of the parents seemed to go out of their way to create a specific mood, while others just seemed to have grabbed any old photo, even ones where all the eyes were red and devilish from the flash-bulb. I sorted through the deep container filled with cards and photos, unsure what I was looking for, or what I should be doing with them. They were worth nothing, obviously. But I couldn’t imagine throwing them away when Lydia had carefully stored them over so many years.