Summer of '69(13)

“You’re thinking too much,” Blair said. “Your mind needs a rest, Angus.”

“No, that’s not it,” he said. “It happens. It’s an affliction.” He then confessed that he had been visited by these “episodes” since he was an adolescent. The paralysis—mental and emotional—came and went capriciously, like a ghost haunting a house; there was no predicting its cause or its duration. He had been to hospitals, tests had been run, pills prescribed—but nothing made it better.

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to think you were marrying damaged goods,” Angus said.

“I would never think that, darling,” Blair said. She remembered Joey calling Angus a “crazy genius.” She’d thought Joey had been jealous.



The rest of that summer passed in a blissful haze. Because the MIT students were on summer break, Angus had been able to join Blair on Nantucket. While she sunned herself on Cliffside Beach, he worked on his research at Blair’s grandfather’s desk. They often met in the late afternoons in the shaded garden next to the Nantucket Atheneum, stopping at the Island Dairy Bar for one chocolate-and-vanilla soft-serve cone that they shared as they strolled back to All’s Fair. In the evenings, they ate with the family, then either drove out to the beach in the Galaxie and made love in the back seat or walked up Main Street and sat side by side on a bench, sharing a cigarette and looking out over the twinkling lights of town. Once a week, they had date night at the Opera House, with its proper European waiters, all of them old and with heavy accents, or the Skipper, where the college-age servers sang show tunes. One day Blair and Angus rode their bikes all the way out to Sankaty Head Lighthouse; another day they puttered Exalta’s thirteen-foot Boston Whaler over to Coatue, where they sat on the beach under an umbrella. They were the only people there that day, so Angus untied Blair’s bikini top and kissed the length of her spine, then flipped her over and made love to her right out there in the open where passing boaters might see them. Blair had to admit, that only made it more thrilling.



When they arrived back in the city after this extended honeymoon, they had their first argument.

Angus told Blair that he didn’t want her to return to Winsor.

“What are you talking about?” Blair said. She had been working on lesson plans since the first of August; she had ordered thirty copies of Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Angus knew this! There were girls who had written to Blair on Nantucket to tell her how excited they were about taking her class. “Of course I’m going back.”

“No,” Angus said. “I need you to stay home and handle things here.”

“Handle what?” Blair said, though she knew he meant the house—cleaning, cooking, shopping, laundry, errands. “I’m more than capable of teaching and running the household, Angus.”

He’d kissed her nose and she nearly swatted him away, the gesture was so patronizing. “You are more than capable. But you don’t have to work. I make plenty of money and we have your trust fund.”

The trust fund was fifty thousand dollars that Blair had gotten when she graduated from Wellesley. It was now in an account at the Bank of Boston under both her and Angus’s names.

“That money isn’t meant to be squandered on day-to-day expenses,” Blair said. “You know that.”

“Blair,” Angus said. “I don’t want a wife who works. My job is very taxing. Please, I need you at home. I realize every marriage requires compromise, which is why I gave up my place in Cambridge.”

“Wait,” Blair said. It was true that she had lobbied to live in Boston proper, and now she and Angus were renting a modern two-bedroom on Commonwealth Avenue. But she hadn’t realized that decision would put her job at risk!

“Blair,” Angus said. “Please.”

“What am I going to do all day?” she asked.

“Do what other women do,” Angus said. “And if you have any spare time, you can read.”



Blair opened her remaining wedding presents. Some of them she returned (toasters, teacups, an angora blanket that shed like a St. Bernard), and some she placed around the apartment (crystal vases, candy dishes, a Moroccan tagine pot that they would never use but that looked stylish on the open shelves of the dining nook). She wrote thank-you notes on stationery engraved with her new monogram, BFW. She set up an account at Savenor’s on Charles Street, at the liquor store, at the hardware store. She placed the photos from the ceremony and reception in the white album that said Our Wedding in foil-pressed letters on the front.

When all of that was completed, Blair found herself at a loss for something to do. Angus had suggested she read, but now that Blair had hours to read, entire days to read, potentially an entire married lifetime to read, books lost their luster, and she grew resentful. Angus said he wanted her home, but for what reason? He worked all the time. He had classes to teach and graduate students to oversee but what gobbled up most of his waking hours was the Apollo 11 mission. He was never home, and it didn’t take long for Blair to wonder if she’d made an error when she’d traded one Whalen brother for the other. Joey Whalen had given Blair a secret wedding present, a slender silver lighter engraved with the words I loved you first. Eternally yours, Joey. Every time Blair smoked a cigarette, she felt secretly, deliciously desired. Really, was there any better gift? Blair half wanted Angus to discover the lighter; she started leaving it out, engraved-side up. But Angus couldn’t be bothered with the minutiae of Blair’s life, so if there was one small secret between them, it was his own fault, she thought.