Summer of '69(74)

“Were you…sad when he died?” Blair asks. She had often imagined the moment when Kate went searching the house for Wilder and found him shot dead in his workshop. Kate would have let out an ear-piercing scream. Or maybe not. After all, she had children sleeping.

“There aren’t words to describe how I felt. There just…aren’t words. A person is alive one minute, dead the next. The human mind really can’t process it. Sadness comes long after all of the other, more difficult and destructive emotions have passed. But, yes, at some point, I was sad. Profoundly sad.” Kate says. She lights a cigarette and offers one to Blair, who declines. She’s having enough trouble breathing as it is. Blair does pull her silver lighter from her purse to light her mother’s cigarette and this gesture threatens to deliver Blair back to her despair over Angus and Joey, but after the first drag of her cigarette, Kate adds, “We’d had quite a blowout. Right before he died.”

“Blowout?” This isn’t a word Blair has ever heard her mother use. “About what?”

At that moment, their lobster rolls arrive, with a third gimlet for Kate. The delicate moment pops like a soap bubble; Blair can tell from Kate’s expression that she has no intention of disclosing the anything further.

Blair regards her beautiful lunch—the toasted, buttered roll overflowing with snowy chunks of lobster meat tossed with mayonnaise and a pale dice of celery to add crunch, and crisp golden fries. The lunch nearly has sexual appeal. Blair vows to go slowly and enjoy every bite.

“Mother?” Blair asks. She is angry that Kate has broached a subject then left it to die in the sun. “Tell me about the blowout.”

Kate dips a fry in ketchup. She always looks elegant no matter what she’s doing, Blair thinks. It isn’t fair.

“The point,” Kate says, “is that I don’t want you to be afraid of me the way I was afraid of Nonny. Angus is conducting an affair, he’s admitted to it, and you don’t have to tolerate it.” She lifts her lobster roll and takes a bite, then dabs the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “That’s why I sent him away.”

“Sent who away?” Blair asks. She, too, starts with a French fry but she doesn’t have the restraint to nibble just one. She pinches a few and does her best not to cram them into her mouth.

“Angus,” Kate says. “He showed up at the house a few days ago. Friday. I saw him on the way home from my travesty of a dinner with Bitsy Dunscombe.”

Blair fights to swallow. “Angus showed up at which house? Not All’s Fair? He wasn’t here on Nantucket, was he, Mother?”

“Yes, darling,” Kate says. “But please don’t worry. I sent him away and told him never to come back.”

Blair could dress Kate down for meddling in her marriage, then rise from the table, storm out of the restaurant, and hail a taxi back to Fair Street. But what she actually does is pick up her lobster roll and take a huge, satisfying bite. Also on the plate is a side of peppery coleslaw and a kosher dill spear.

Angus had come to Nantucket and Kate sent him away. Yes, Blair thinks, serves him right. She is secretly delighted—and very, very relieved—that Angus has not completely forsaken her. Although she supposes it’s possible that Angus came to ask for a divorce.

She’ll call him later. She needs to tell him about the babies anyway.



That evening, Kate and Exalta go to the Straight Wharf Theater to see a production of Damn Yankees. They’ve had their tickets for weeks, since long before Blair arrived, and they purchased one for Jessie, but Jessie is grounded for losing the necklace. They ask Blair to go, but Blair can’t possibly sit for two hours wedged into one of those narrow seats, so they invite Mr. Crimmins. Once they’re all out the door, Blair picks up the phone. The line is being used, so she hangs up and tries again after five minutes, then ten, all the while cursing Exalta for not spending the extra dollar a month for a private line.

When Blair picks up the phone the third time, the line is free. It’s half past six, the hour that normal people sit down to eat, but Blair knows Angus will still be at work. She dials the office but Ingrid must have gone home because the line rings and rings. Eventually Blair is put through to the university’s answering service but she declines to leave a message.

She takes a breath and chastises herself for not calling earlier in the day, but this house affords no privacy.

She calls the apartment on a lark. No answer. She hangs up and calls Joey Whalen at his hotel. He picks up on the fourth ring. In the background there’s music playing and Blair hears a woman laughing.

“Blair?” he says. “Is everything okay? Is it time?”

“No,” she says. “Not yet. I was just hoping to talk. Ask how Newport was. But if you’re in the middle of something—”

“I’m entertaining right now,” Joey says. “How ’bout I give you a call tomorrow—hey, hey, pass that over here—from the office?”

Blair can practically smell the marijuana smoke and taste the martinis and see the svelte body of a sexy brunette in a clingy red dress with a plunging neckline. A girl Joey met in Newport, no doubt, who works at the cosmetic counter at Filene’s. That’s who Joey should be dating. He was never really interested in Blair. Well, maybe at first, when she was single and free, but all of his recent attention, she realizes suddenly, is just old, unfinished business between him and Angus.