Summer of '69(55)

Sailing on a yacht. Cocktail party at a Vanderbilt mansion. This could have been Blair’s life if she’d married Joey instead of Angus.

Rain check sounds vague and far away. Where is the man who hunted down whipped cream for her cake? She needs that man…now. Blair chastises herself—ten minutes earlier she yearned to be her own person, and yet here she is, pining away for a man, any man. But both of the Whalen brothers are proving unavailable.

“No problem,” Blair says coolly. She can at least sound nonchalant. “Have fun in Newport.” She hangs up and imagines Joey on a rolling green lawn with a Tom Collins in his hand, chatting up girls in patio dresses with hair piled high on top of their heads and long, dangly earrings. She knows there is no way he will give a second thought to his brother’s hugely pregnant wife.

She bows her head. She has made such a mess of things. She should have listened to her mother and kept her mouth shut, let Angus’s little affair run its course. She’s so bewildered that she considers just giving the twins up for adoption. She will take a lover and disappear for days! She will go to parties with socialites and sail on yachts! She will pretend that none of this ever happened!

She turns around in time to see Pick slam down the receiver of his pay phone in obvious frustration.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

He clenches his fists and stares at the phone like he might sock it.

“Pick?” Blair says. It occurs to her then that the person he was trying to call was his mother. “Were you trying to reach Lorraine?”

“Lavender,” Pick says. “She changed her name to Lavender.”

“Oh,” Blair says. “I see.”

“I thought maybe she’d be back home by now,” he says. “But she’s still on the road, I guess.” He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”

Who would have thought she and Pick would have so much in common? “My husband asked me to leave,” Blair says. “And I thought by now he would have come to his senses, but he hasn’t been to work in two days and he wasn’t in our apartment. I’m pretty sure he’s with his mistress.”

“Really?” Pick says.

Blair knows she’s being inappropriate but if Pick has seen a woman deliver triplets, then news of a mistress can’t come as too much of a shock. “Really,” she says.

“My grandfather told me your husband was incredibly smart,” Pick says.

“Book smart,” Blair says. “Not people smart.”

“I’d rather be people smart,” Pick says.

Despite her aching heart, Blair smiles at him.

Pick offers Blair his arm and they walk all the way back to the house in a bubble of respectful silence. When they reach All’s Fair, Pick peels off. “I’m going to the beach before work,” he explains.

“Where do you work?” Blair asks.

“The North Shore Restaurant,” he says. “I want to be a chef when I grow up.”

“You know what I want to be when I grow up?” Blair says.

He cocks his head, amused. To him, of course, she probably seems grown up already. Little does he know. “What?” he says.

“The mother of someone just like you,” she says.





White Rabbit



Jessie expects her mother to forget about their dinner date, but on Thursday morning, before Exalta and Jessie leave for Jessie’s tennis lesson, Kate pokes her head out of her bedroom and says, “Mad Hatter tonight, Jessie. Seven o’clock.”

This announcement immediately brightens Jessie’s mood. She and Exalta take their usual stroll down Main Street, past the Charcoal Galley and Bosun’s Locker, but instead of crossing the street where they usually do, Exalta leads them down to Buttner’s department store and stops in front of the window.

“How about we buy you a new sundress for tonight?” Exalta says. “We’ll stop in after your lesson.”

Jessie tries not to let her surprise show on her face. “Thank you, Nonny.”

“I love nothing more than a new dress,” Nonny says. “It cheers the soul. And everyone is so glum these days. Have you noticed?”

Yes, Jessie has noticed. Blair is a basket case, alternately stuffing her face, sleeping the days away, and weeping in front of the soap operas on television. (Search for Tomorrow is her favorite, followed by The Edge of Night. She has started talking about the characters as though they’re friends of hers.) Kate isn’t much better. She’s in a fog for the first half of the day and busy getting drunk the second half. It has been nearly two weeks since they’ve received a letter from Tiger.

The only person who has been in good spirits—unusually good—is Exalta. She saunters down the street humming “I Get a Kick Out of You,” her favorite Cole Porter song. Humming! Jessie can’t understand it.

“Are you excited about bridge tonight, Nonny?” Jessie asks. She doesn’t know the first thing about bridge, although she’s fond of the snacks—peanuts, pretzels, cheesy crackers, and a rainbow of Jordan almonds—that Nonny puts out in heart-, diamond-, club-, and spade-shaped cut-glass dishes when she hosts bridge back home. Here on Nantucket, Exalta plays bridge at the Anglers’ Club, which is a dim, dark-paneled bar overlooking Straight Wharf and the docks of the boat basin. The Nantucket Anglers’ Club has mostly male members—Mr. Crimmins belongs to it, and Jessie’s late grandfather did—but Nonny is a member as well. However, if it weren’t for Thursday-night bridge, Nonny says, she would quit the club. She has never fished a day in her life.