Summer of '69(33)

She is just reaching for Joey’s belt buckle when Angus bursts into the apartment holding a huge bouquet of lilacs and peonies, Blair’s favorite flowers.





Young Girl



Bright and early on Tuesday morning, Jessie and Exalta walk to the Field and Oar Club for the first day of Jessie’s tennis lessons. It’s so early that the shops aren’t open yet, though there is the smell of bacon coming from the Charcoal Galley and there’s a gentleman sweeping up pieces of a broken bottle on the walk outside of Bosun’s Locker.

“Bar fight?” Exalta asks the gentleman.

“Good a guess as any,” he says, and Exalta laughs in such a carefree way that Jessie isn’t sure if she should be pleased or worried. She glances at her grandmother out of the corner of her eye and sees what appears to be a genuine smile. Maybe her grandmother is happy because she’s back on Nantucket for the hundredth summer in a row, or maybe she’s happy because she has finally gotten her way and Jessie has agreed to take tennis lessons. She resisted until now—her one small act of defiance—but this year, right after Tiger was deployed, Kate had begged Jessie to reconsider (“It would mean so much to Nonny”), and Jessie, unable to disappoint her mother, had acquiesced.

Jessie is uncoordinated, bordering on clumsy. She’s certain tennis will only highlight her athletic shortcomings. She would rather spend every morning of the summer sitting in the dentist’s chair having her teeth drilled.

Jessie decides to take advantage of Exalta’s good mood. “Why is Mr. Crimmins living in Little Fair?” she asks.

“Oh!” Exalta sings out. The day isn’t yet bright enough to require sunglasses, so Exalta’s are perched in her blunt-cut silver hair. This allows Jessie to study her grandmother’s expression. She looks like she’s trying to decide whether to tell Jessie the entire truth or just part of it. “Well, he needed a place to live for the summer.”

“Doesn’t he live on Pine Street?” Jessie asks. “In the house with the church windows?”

“The old steamboat-terminal building,” Exalta says. “Yes, he’s rented the unit in the back for years and years, but that’s an efficiency, big enough for only one person. And this summer, he has his grandson with him. Pickford. Bill says the boy was named after some tenth-rate musician. I had rather hoped he was named for Mary Pickford, the greatest actress of our time.” Exalta seems to drift off in a reverie. “America’s sweetheart…the girl with the curls. Pickford is a strong name, even if there aren’t any family ties behind it. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised to find Lorraine hadn’t named her child something like Oleo or Bangladesh.”

“Lorraine is Mr. Crimmins’s daughter, right?” Jessie says.

“That’s correct.”

“You know her?”

“Knew her, years ago,” Exalta says. “She used to clean for me. And cook. She was quite a baker, very precise with her measurements. It’s a shame she ran off; she could have made something of herself.”

“She cooked and cleaned for you?” Jessie says. “I never knew that.”

“It was before you were born,” Exalta says, and Jessie knows what that means. She often feels like everything important happened before she was born, back when Wilder Foley was alive and her siblings were young and her mother was happy. It’s unsettling how much envy Jessie feels for a stretch of time. Those years, in the retelling, always sounded golden, like they could never be matched or recaptured.

“I just found out Mr. Crimmins had a daughter yesterday,” Jessie says. “He’s never talked about her.”

“Her time here didn’t end well,” Exalta says. She seems to realize she’s revealed too much. “Come along, we don’t want to be late.”



The Field and Oar Club occupies five acres of precious real estate on Nantucket Harbor. Jessie understands that it’s a fancy club, meaning exclusive, but the actual clubhouse is a simple wooden building that even Nonny admits has seen better days, though it’s given a fresh coat of white paint each spring. The club is populated by old people like Exalta who have children Kate’s age and grandchildren Jessie’s age, and all three generations are supposed to care about only two things once they cross the club’s threshold: excellence in tennis and dominance in sailing. Jessie once asked Exalta about the name of the club and Exalta said, “It’s charming, isn’t it? But anachronistic. Field refers to the tennis courts, which used to be grass.”

“Really?” Jessie said. The courts were orange clay now.

“And the Oar refers to boats, of course,” Exalta said.

Of course, Jessie thought, except there wasn’t a rowboat, canoe, or kayak in sight. Instead, there were motorboats, cabin cruisers, and sailboats of every size. Jessie grew up seeing groups of children yoked in bright yellow life preservers heading out for sailing lessons; she supposed she should be grateful to have escaped that fate.

Jessie’s mother adores the club because the Field and Oar is all she has ever known. She and Exalta come here for lunch on the patio two to three times a week, and Kate enjoys the dinner dances; she claims the club is the last bastion of elegance on this island; the hippies and the freethinkers have infiltrated every other institution.