The Last Book Party(3)
In the living room, Henry danced with a slim, long-necked woman in a floor-length halter dress patterned with swirls of orange and green, her graying hair swinging in a thick braid down her back. I assumed she was his wife, Tillie Sanderson, whose poems I had tried to understand when I was at Brown. Henry and Tillie and the rest of the older set looked loose and happy in a way that made them seem not only younger than my own parents, though they were ostensibly the same age, but ageless, as if being artists and writers freed them from anything as conventional as growing old. Henry and Tillie, laughing, looked like they were doing “the bump.” I tried to imagine my parents dancing to the Talking Heads or doing the bump, but it was impossible. Just then Franny appeared and grabbed my hands.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, spinning me beneath his arms.
“This,” I said. It was clear he had no idea what I was talking about.
Once every summer, my parents had a party too. Instead of barefoot dancing, rolled-up rugs, and old women in Birkenstocks, a cocktail party hosted by my parents demanded a strict headcount, from which would be calculated the number of mini quiches required to guarantee four per person; tailored summer outfits purchased at Filene’s in the Chestnut Hill mall; and, in every bathroom, freshly ironed embroidered hand towels and trays of soaps shaped like scallop shells.
I had been vacationing in Truro since I was a child, and each summer was as predictable as the tides. On sunny days, we would go to Ballston Beach, where we would spread our blankets to the right of the entrance, never the left. If the ocean was stinky with mung, we would go to Corn Hill to swim in the bay, where, when the wind died, it was easy to skip a flat rock six times over the water’s glassy surface. My parents would unfold beach chairs and read: my mother multigenerational, from-the-shtetl-to-Scarsdale family sagas, my father the latest Book of the Month Club presidential biography or the stock tables. My brother, Danny, and I would dive for fiddler crabs or swim. The pattern adjusted, without really changing, as we got older. Instead of frolicking in the water, I would lose myself in novels while Danny tackled the problems in the Mathematical Games columns in Scientific American.
On the last night of our vacation, we would buy lobsters and boil them in a big black pot. When we returned home to Newton, we’d shake the sand from our beach clothes and, like someone had flicked a switch, restart our old routine: work, school, dinner at six, my parents’ praise for Danny’s genius at math, and their gentle annoyance with my dreamy bookishness. This mold, set so long ago, endured.
Even now, my parents obsessed about Danny’s trajectory through grad school at MIT, their hopes for familial greatness fully staked on him, while they waited for me to abandon my dream of becoming a writer and buckle down to go to law school or get a teaching degree. Lately, I also had been doubting my path, wondering how I could be serious about an ambition that had yet to yield results more notable than the piles of paper scattered about my room.
But watching Franny dance, his long hair flipping around him, I was buoyed by a sense of possibility. A tentative belief that I could have a creative life too. It was intoxicating to have spun my way into Franny’s orbit and this other Truro. And now that I had, I didn’t want to let it go.
2
Late the next morning, I awoke to the drippings of a rain that had passed through while I slept. A thick fog hung in the air, hiding the marsh and the harbor beyond. The way it surrounded the house, blurring the view outside, added to my sense that the night before had been a dream, leaving me with vivid yet unconnected images: being swept into an improvised tango by an old man who looked like Albert Einstein; crowding onto the screened porch when Henry recited a creepy yet mesmerizing old poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”; wandering the second floor in search of a bathroom and coming upon Henry and Tillie’s bedroom, which was adorned with so many half-burned candles that it looked like a shrine.
On the way downstairs to our kitchen, I heard my mother on the phone.
“Yes, the Head of the Summer party. Yes, head—like Head Of The Charles, I think. I suppose it’s their idea of humor. No, I didn’t get details. She came in very late.”
My mother would want to hear about the party but would probably feign only mild interest. She hadn’t hidden her surprise that I’d been invited—in fact, she’d made it clear that she thought Henry had extended the invitation without the expectation I would go. Her reaction was in keeping with her odd fascination—she was both enamored and scornful—with Henry and Tillie’s crowd.
When I’d begun working at Hodder, Strike, she’d seemed impressed by my connection to Henry. But she never failed to tell me when she’d read something about The New Yorker having passed its prime. She sent me articles about the recent ousting of legendary editor William Shawn, circling with a red pen where Henry was cited as an example of how stale and indulgent much of the magazine’s writing had become. Just recently, she’d told me with barely disguised glee that Henry’s three-part series on the interstate highway system had been brutally ridiculed in Spy magazine.
“They said that he’s never met a fact he didn’t fall in love with, that he’s infactuated,” she’d said.
“Since when do suburban interior decorators read Spy?” I’d asked.
She’d frowned at my jab. “I like to stay current.” And then, “A client of mine gave it to me. Her son-in-law sells ad space in Spy.”