Summer of '69(106)

Wilder Foley and Lorraine Crimmins?

Jessie thinks back to the puberty talk at the end of the school year and she feels herself flush because she suddenly knows what her mother wants to talk to her about.

Jessie hasn’t been paying attention to her mother, who’s been talking about how Kate and David brought Jessie everywhere that summer in her carriage and her baby basket. They had even taken her on a cabin cruiser all the way over to Tuckernuck.

“Mom,” Jessie says, interrupting her. “Is Pick…” She doesn’t know how to ask what she wants to ask but it hardly matters because she knows the answer is yes.

“Pick is Wilder Foley’s son,” Kate says matter-of-factly. “Wilder got Lorraine Crimmins pregnant. She ran off to California and had Pick, and I haven’t seen her since then. Until today.”

For a second, Jessie is suspended in sheer panic, thinking she has fallen in love with her own brother—but then she recalculates. Pick isn’t her brother. His parents are Lorraine Crimmins and Wilder Foley. Her parents are Kate and David. Pick is, however, the half brother of Blair, Kirby, and Tiger, just as Jessie is their half sister. Pick is her, but on the flip side.

Jessie is dizzy. “Does Nonny know?” she asks.

Kate shrugs. “I’m sure she suspects. Although, actually, I have no idea. Your grandmother and I haven’t talked about it because we don’t talk about anything. I’ve had a very lonely life.”

“You have?” Jessie says. In her mind, Kate is the center of everything. She’s Exalta’s daughter; she was Wilder’s wife and now she’s David’s wife; she’s Blair’s, Kirby’s, Tiger’s, and Jessie’s mother. How can she be lonely?

Kate’s eyes fill with tears and Jessie gazes at her with wonder. Her mother is so beautiful, even in her bathrobe and pink silk pajamas, even without pearls or lipstick. Jessie knows her mother is sick with worry about Tiger but now it appears she’s sad about all sorts of other things, older things.

“The night Wilder died…” Kate says.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Jessie says.

“I have to tell someone, don’t you see?” Kate says. She squeezes Jessie’s hand, and for the first time ever in her life, Jessie understands that her mother is real.

It’s a revelation. Her mother is a human being who feels pain—sadness, loneliness, confusion. Jessie thought all grown-ups lived in a different atmosphere, one that was like a cool, clear gel. Adults had problems, Jessie knew—money and their children—but one of the benefits of reaching adulthood, she thought, was that you outgrew the raw, hot, chaotic emotions of adolescence.

“The night Wilder died was a couple of days after I received a letter from Lorraine telling me that she was pregnant with his baby.”

Jessie’s stomach drops.

“I wanted to confront him while the children were asleep,” Kate says. “I found him in his workshop, cleaning his gun.”

Jessie bows her head and closes her eyes. She knows she should be honored that her mother has chosen her as a confidante…but she doesn’t want to hear another word. Already the story is different from the one Jessie believed to be true her whole life. She thought that Kate had walked into the workshop and found Wilder dead.

“I let him read the letter from Lorraine,” Kate goes on, “and I said, ‘It looks like you’re to have a bastard child. I’m taking the children and leaving you. I’m moving back to Beacon Hill with my parents. I’m through, Wilder, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ve contacted a lawyer and I’m filing for divorce.’”

Jessie holds her breath. She had been told long ago—by whom, she can’t remember—that Wilder shot himself accidentally and that Kate had hired David Levin to prove it wasn’t a suicide and he had done that.

“I closed the door and walked away,” Kate says. “But do you know what I regret?”

Jessie senses that she’s not expected to answer, and she can’t find her voice anyway.

“I regret not slamming the door,” Kate says. “If I’d shown anger, Wilder might have snapped to his senses and come after me to argue or plead his case. He had…dramatic mood swings, problems with pills and whiskey…but I didn’t realize how low his low points were. Honestly, Jessica, I wasn’t thinking about him in that moment. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking that he had betrayed me. He had been unfaithful with someone I knew, someone I liked. And he’d been careless enough to get her pregnant, which meant that the whole wide world would know that Wilder preferred Lorraine Crimmins to me, and I would be humiliated on top of my heartbreak.”

“What happened?” Jessie asks.

“A split second after I’d closed the door quietly but firmly, with a click, and walked away, I heard a shot.”

“He killed himself,” Jessie says.

“Yes,” Kate says. “I wasn’t a hundred percent certain at first because Wilder was prone to drama. I thought it was possible he’d fired a shot into the wall to make me think he’d killed himself. And he was so unstable that I also thought it was possible that I’d open that door and he would be pointing the gun at me.”

“What did you do?” Jessie asks.

“I waited a few minutes and when I heard nothing but silence, I opened the door and I saw what he’d done.” Kate eyes are dry, her face calm. She might be telling Jessie that she opened the door to find Wilder had fixed the vacuum. “My first emotion was completely irrational: anger. I was furious that Wilder had taken the easy way out. I wanted him to face what he’d done. I wanted him to feel shame in front of my father, in front of my mother.”