Summer of '69(28)
But Bill requested a favor in return.
The drama about the television served as good cover for the drama about the boy. Kate glimpses Pick from her bedroom window as she unpacks her suitcase. He’s getting on his bicycle. Kate notes the shape of his shoulders and the golden glint of his hair. She finds she’s trembling.
Kate thought Exalta would prove to be an obstacle to the plan, but that wasn’t the case. Kate had explained the situation to her a few weeks ago—Mr. Crimmins had discovered that Lorraine had a son out in California; Lorraine (now called Lavender) had vanished, and Mr. Crimmins had gone out to fetch the child, but he had no room in his efficiency on Pine Street to house the boy—and Exalta had easily been led to the solution: Bill Crimmins and his grandson would both live in Little Fair.
“It’ll be nice for us to have a man around,” Exalta said. Kate didn’t bother pointing out that David would be coming every weekend; she was simply relieved that Exalta didn’t oppose this new arrangement. In fact, Exalta proceeded to act as though inviting Bill Crimmins and his grandson to stay in Little Fair had been her idea.
Everything will be okay, Kate tells herself. Bill Crimmins wrote to his brother-in-law last week, just before he and the boy moved in, and he would likely hear back this week or next. Tiger would be plucked from danger as suddenly as he had been dropped into it. He would come home.
Following the boy out of Little Fair is someone else, a young woman. It’s Jessie, Kate realizes. The way Jessie stands as she talks to the boy, with her hand on her waist and her hip cocked, looks very mature. Well, Kate thinks, she is thirteen…today. Poor, sweet Jessie has had to sacrifice her birthday to the task of arriving and settling in. Kate is too addled to do anything more than take everyone to Susie’s for dinner, and that isn’t a birthday ritual but a first-night-on-Nantucket ritual. However, she supposes they can stop at the Island Dairy Bar on the way home for a sundae.
It’s a pathetic effort to celebrate the beginning of her youngest child’s teenage years. Kate decides she’ll make it up to Jessie next week, once things have calmed down. They’ll have dinner, just the two of them, at the Mad Hatter, Jessie’s favorite.
Kate shoves her suitcase to the back of the closet the way she always does, an attempt to avoid thinking about the reality that she will have to pack it up again. She then takes stock of the room, her summer bedroom for as long as she has been alive. She lived here as a little girl, back when America was happy and prosperous; she lived here as a teenager during the Depression, when men from around the island would knock on the door to see if Kate’s parents needed any work done on the house. It was in this era, Kate recalls, that they hired Bill Crimmins to do odd jobs and Lorraine, his daughter, to serve as maid and cook. The Crimminses had moved to Nantucket year-round after Bill lost his job at the textile mill up in Lowell, Mass. Bill’s wife died when Lorraine was a baby.
Kate had lived here as a young wife to Wilder Foley with his manic-depressive disorder, his pathological lies, and his undeniable magnetism. She can remember sitting in the window seat waiting for Wilder to come home on one of the many nights he insisted on staying late at Bosun’s Locker. She’d lived here as the bereft mother of three fatherless children during the awful summer of 1953. Lorraine Crimmins had run off to California, and Kate spent the better part of July and August without anyone to mind the children. She cut out paper dolls with Blair and Kirby; she taught Blair to ride a bicycle on Plumb Lane; she dug holes in the sand at Steps Beach with Tiger, crying behind her giant sunglasses. Next, she had lived here as the wife of David Levin, the Jewish attorney whom Exalta had never accepted despite the fact that he was a good, kind, stable man—as sane and calm as Wilder had been reckless and unpredictable—willing to take on three children not his own and treat them the same way that he treated his own daughter, Jessica. And now Kate is forty-eight years old, an age she only properly feels when she’s in a place that holds all of her different lives together, as this room does.
On the dresser, there’s a photograph of the family taken in the dunes of Steps Beach: Kate and David in the center back row, Blair and Angus on their left, Kirby on their right, and Tiger and Jessie sitting in front. They’re all smiling and glowing with their summer coloring—lighter hair, darker skin. Exalta had enjoyed too many Hendrick’s and tonics that day at lunch and had fallen asleep, missing this excursion to Steps Beach. Kate, frankly, is glad she wasn’t there. This is her family; she is the matriarch. She studies her own face and feels heartbroken at her own naive sense of security.
Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.
Tiger’s absence is only temporary, Kate tells herself. She will have faith in Bill Crimmins. She will do her best to make the boy feel welcome, and she will be duly rewarded. Mr. Crimmins will find a way to get Tiger home. They will be a family again.
Suspicious Minds
In Boston, the temperature hits eighty degrees, and Blair, just entering her third trimester, has outgrown all of her maternity clothes. She has only one dress that still fits. It looks like a yellow circus tent and yet she has no choice but to wear it every time she leaves the house, which she now does as infrequently as possible. Angus agreed to pay extra to have Savenor’s deliver the groceries and he has held his tongue about the skyrocketing electric bill; Blair keeps the air-conditioning unit running twenty-four hours a day. The apartment feels like the North Pole and still Blair perspires as she sits in front of the television watching That Girl and eating grilled-cheese sandwiches followed by Hunt’s Snack Pack butterscotch puddings, one after the other.