The High Season(19)
It was a little clunky and she liked the weight of it. She went back to the full-length mirror and posed. The tailored pants said Jackie O on a Greek island, the pink said summer fun. The heels winked flirty. Yet the man’s watch made her look like a kickass Amelia Earhart—grounded, maybe doomed—but with an action plan.
“Nailed it,” said Jem, and they were friends again.
From: Ruth Beamish
To: Michael Dutton
Jem said you boned with Adeline
From: Michael Dutton
To: Ruth Beamish
WHAT?
From: Ruthie
To: Mike
I meant bonded! BONDED
…
oops! Ha ha. Anyway do you think if you r still fixing step etc you could encourage her to come to Spork? I need her. Will tell you why. Fire up that Dutton charm offensive.
From: Mike
To: Ruthie
The Dutton charm is tattered at the edges these days, but ok.
10
SPORK HAD ALWAYS been Ruthie’s favorite event of the summer, unlike the gala, which was always fraught with tension as the board ladies made their thrust-knee poses for the photographer, tucking their wineglasses behind their silk tunics. Spork was food held in fingers, people in shorts and hats, and the fizzy kickoff to summer pleasures.
The Belfry Museum was a hybrid of a place. It was named not for an architectural feature, but for a person, Vivian Clarke Belfry, who in 1972 left three million dollars and her house and barn to her son with the directive to create a “significant museum” to highlight “both local history and visual art” and, incidentally, kick Hampton ass. The historical collection, referred to in official publications as “choice” and by villagers as “dinky,” was housed in a small side gallery. It was built around a few artifacts of Benedict Arnold, who had set up headquarters in Orient during the Revolutionary War. The Belfry family was descended from Arnold’s secretary, who had served the general, been pardoned, and stayed to farm. It was a small collection, including the buttons of a coat reportedly worn by Arnold.
As in small towns all over the nation, a few dusty relics were enough for a start. An endowment was born, more money raised, staff was hired, a renovation completed by an architect who summered in Orient, and the buttons, tankards, musket balls, and a flintlock rifle displayed to busloads of yawning schoolkids. The Belfry lurched along for decades, open half the year, sleepy and striving, exhibiting watercolors and duck decoy collections, nudged by a succession of devoted board members who did much of the administrative work. When Ruthie moved to Orient she applied for a job in education and talked herself into creating a new position as chief curator. Three years later the director, an amiable scholar with a tendency to drunkenly topple into bushes at openings, retired. Ruthie took over temporarily and then permanently, after a cursory meeting with a board grateful to have her.
Since then she’d turned the barn into a modern open space for big projects by contemporary artists, the most notable being when Dodge filled it with vellum cut in undulating shapes that blew in the wind of a hundred or so vintage fans hung on wires, all lit by a ravishing blue light. Titled Heaven, it was ecstatically reviewed by the Times and put the Belfry on the map.
The trick, as director of a small regional museum, was to be scrappy, to find time to squeeze in some thoughts about Art while you brooded about Money. “Let’s do it frisky, and let’s do it cheap” was her motto, and over the years she’d managed to beg, borrow, steal, recruit, entice, shame, and flatter enough people to increase the small endowment, triple membership, quadruple school visits, start art camp and art classes, and, along with her curator Tobie, mount frisky and cheap shows that got them noticed. She’d hired smartly, fired kindly, and occasionally even kicked Hampton ass.
Ten years ago the summer picnic had been a desultory affair decorated with potluck pasta salads brought by the board ladies and a large crystal bowl full of lemonade with a few cartons of blueberries dumped in. Ruthie had changed the name to Spork, gotten the local farms and wineries to donate food, and introduced fun to the party equation. She’d ordered Spork T-shirts that became more prized as they grew faded from sun and salt. Now it was one of the main summer kickoff events on the North Fork.
Ruthie parked next to Gloria’s and Mindy’s SUVs, nestled in Teutonic twinship, but she didn’t see them among the early arrivals. She inspected the tent, joked with the cooks in the food trucks, thanked the purveyors she had charmed into donating wine and beer, and cast an uneasy glance at the sky. It had been a changeable morning, banks of heavy clouds blowing past with occasional pockets of blue, and she hoped the showers would hold off. She greeted a few guests as she made her way into the coolness of the museum and climbed the stairs to the offices.
In the hallway outside her office Mindy stood, planted like a tuber on the carpet. Her thick blond hair was held off her face with a patterned green-and-yellow headband, chosen, Ruthie surmised, to match the Spork invitation. Mindy was the type of person who would plan this. Tiny Gloria leaned in, Mindy’s pocket-sized factotum. In her early seventies, Gloria still projected a clenched vitality. Her hair was a spun-sugar cage of platinum privilege, and although the summer had just begun, she was already deeply tanned. Today she was dressed all in white, and Ruthie had a sudden image of the ghost dolls Jem used to make at Halloween out of tissues and a walnut.