The Goodbye Summer (31 page)

That passed, the passionate revulsion passed, dissolved as fast as it had formed. Cornel’s and her grandmother’s bodies became themselves again. She loved them again. Her old world righted itself, and all she had to do was learn to live in it without her friend.

Some early start. Parked in front of Wake House, Caddie drummed her nails on the steering wheel, taking note that her watch and the Pontiac’s broken clock happened to say the same thing: twenty after ten. Finney stopped crossing from one window to the other in the backseat and jumped into the front. Her window was open; he climbed into her lap and stuck his head out to sniff the air.

The angle of the sun picked out every white or shiny black or doe-brown hair on his lithe body. She watched idly as his face changed with each sensation he took in. His nostrils flared, his almond eyes blinked and stared, his whiskers twitched. A car honked, and he twisted his head, cocking one brown ear. She loved to pet him, stroke his rough fur, scratch under his collar until he fell over on his side in ecstasy. She even liked his smell, a sort of doggy-manly, devil-may-care musk.

Finney could take her out of herself for a few minutes, the perfection of his body, his thoughtless affection. So could a certain piece of music or the wild sound of wind at night, somebody’s unexpected smile. This is what we get, she would think, these hedges against the knowledge of our fast-approaching ends. With nothing else to occupy them, her thoughts started down a familiar track. What was the best way to get through this? She needed a philosophy, a better religion. How should we live? Aging and dying: what a strange combination of commonplace and extraordinary. Everybody got old and died, it was as simple as—peeing, and yet still the biggest mystery, top secret, dreadful and alien, more wrenching than
birth. And so sad, so sad, it broke your heart.
Goodbye.
Never again. The stinging pain of
you are gone and I am left.
How could you reconcile with that and still find peace?

She was glad when she saw Cornel, finally, lugging an old Samsonite suitcase, scuffed white and hard as a coffin, down the porch steps. She got out to open the trunk and move her small bag and Finney’s fleece bed and his cardboard box of supplies out of the way, but she knew better than to ask Cornel if he needed any help. “I thought this was a two-day trip,” she had to say, though, as he flung his giant suitcase into the trunk with a grunt.

“It’s not full,” he said, which she thought missed the point. “You’re not bringing that dog, are you?”

“I have to. Nana won’t let me leave him in a kennel. He’ll be all right, he loves to ride in the car. He’ll probably just sleep. You look very nice, Cornel.”

He had on the same dark brown suit he’d worn to Thea’s funeral, but with an old green army sweater instead of a shirt and tie. “It’s going to get windy on that ferry,” he warned, “you better have a coat. I got this
plus
a coat.”

“So are we about ready?”

“
I’m
ready. Except I can’t find my damn glasses, I gotta go back in.”

“They’re on your head.”

He looked startled, then disgusted. “These are my reading glasses, I need my long-distance glasses. What do you think, I’m crazy?”

Watching him trudge back up the steps, she started to get back in the car, then changed her mind. “I’ll be right back,” she said to Finney through the window. “Stay put and
no barking.
” She’d already told everybody goodbye, including Nana, but she was restless out here with nothing to do but contemplate the meaning of life.

“Back already?” Bea joked from her blue rocker on the porch. She had her fringed plaid shawl tucked to the chin against the morning chill, and Edgie, in the green rocker, was wrapped in a trench coat and a pink scarf. Caddie had fussed at them half an hour ago for coming out too early, they could take cold in this wind, but Edgie said she was so sick of being cooped up she’d risk it.

“You two sure are a sight for sore eyes,” Caddie said impulsively. “I’m so happy you’re back.” She meant Edgie, who’d moved out of rehab and back to Wake House a week ago, but in a way she meant Bea, too. “This porch was lopsided without you.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” said Bea. She reached over to adjust the pillow on the arm of Edgie’s chair; Edgie had to keep her elbow on it or she had a hard time staying upright, not slumping over sideways. “We’re like two old bookends, take one away and the whole shelf collapses.”

“How come you’re still here?” Edgie’s speech was much clearer than before, but for some reason she’d lost an octave; she spoke in a breathy, gravelly rasp everybody told her was sexy. She loved that.

“Oh, you know. Men. And Cornel forgot his glasses.”

Bea said, “Well, I think it’s mighty nice of you to drop everything you’ve got to do and drive all the way out to Cape May for that man.”

“I’m not really dropping that much.” Tomorrow was Sunday, no lessons; she’d only had to cancel today’s. “And it’s not just for Cornel, it’s for me, too.”

Cornel wanted to go to Cape May in October, bird migration time, because of Thea. It had been the last thing on her life’s to-do list, he said, and since she couldn’t go, he was doing it for her. Going in her place. “Really, it’s no sacrifice,” Caddie told the sisters. “If it doesn’t rain it’ll be beautiful, and it’s only for one night.”

“Don’t forget what I said,” Edgie grated.

“I won’t.”

She wanted Caddie to say a prayer for Thea when they got to Cape May. “I mean it. I don’t expect I’d be here right now if it wasn’t for her.”

That was the rumor. Caddie didn’t know if it was true, but people were saying Thea had left money in her will to Wake House. How much, nobody knew, but Edgie wasn’t the only one who thought Brenda’s turnaround about taking her back had something to do with a sudden windfall.

“You all be careful driving,” Bea told Caddie again. “And make sure to rest whenever you feel like it.” A delicate reference to her condition. “Too bad neither one of those men can help you with the driving if you get tired.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine.” Her back hurt, though. Just enough to be annoying.

Inside, she cruised the two parlors and the dining room, even asked in the kitchen, but nobody had seen Cornel’s glasses. She said hi to Bernie and Mr. Lorton, who were reading the papers in the Red Room. Susan Cohen had moved out, gone to live with her boyfriend. Nobody had taken Thea’s tower suite yet, but last week a woman called Mrs. Shallcroft had moved into Susan’s old room. She seemed nice enough.

Caddie stopped in the foyer, drawn to the framed photographs on the wall. She’d always liked looking at them, but now that Thea’s secret was out, they had a stronger fascination; she couldn’t walk through the hall anymore without stopping to look. The grand old man, the white-haired, potbellied paterfamilias standing on the front steps or under a thick-trunked, long-gone oak tree in the front yard, surrounded by wife, siblings, sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters—old man Wake, town father and founder of the venerable Bank of Michaelstown, amasser and loser of the vast Wake fortune, was Thea’s grandfather.

And she was the little girl in the white dress at the family lawn party. The date at the bottom said July 15, 1939. The picture was crowded with Wakes of all ages, but that was Thea, could only be Thea, not just because she’d have been five in 1939, but because that lovely, pale-gowned, pregnant lady holding her hand couldn’t be anyone but her mother. And the man sitting on his heels beside her, dark-haired, roguishly handsome in striped shirtsleeves and suspenders, must be her father.

Little Thea had ringlets, shiny as gold—maybe they were the same reddish-blonde she’d dyed her hair last summer—and a pixie face with a shy smile. She looked well loved and contented; she looked as if she knew she was lucky. “Blissful,” she’d called her childhood. It wouldn’t last long enough—a few years after this picture was taken her mother would die and her father would “move west”—but she’d had a fine start. Nine years to learn lessons for life about trust and optimism, and faith that the world was a safe place. In the end, they’d make her who she’d turned out to be.

When she’d read Thea’s letter, Caddie hadn’t known at first what to think or feel.
Why didn’t you tell me?
her first reaction, had given way very
quickly to acceptance, even an intimation that in some oblique corner of her mind she’d already known. Thea had never lied to her, only sidestepped. “So this isn’t really where you grew up?” Caddie had asked, that day in front of the aunt and uncle’s house. “It’s where I moved after my mother died,” she’d answered. Eager to hear that story, Caddie hadn’t noticed the blurring of details. Eventually she’d come to see that Thea’s reasons for not telling who she was were so inseparable from her reason for coming home—which was, simply, to die (although she’d have put that another way;
to live to the end,
or something else positive)—that she couldn’t have revealed one without the other. Not even to Caddie.

“Are you still here?” Brenda bustled down the corridor from her office. “I thought you’d be gone by now.”

“I did,
too,
” Caddie said, wide-eyed with surprise. Half an hour ago she’d told Brenda she couldn’t stop in her office and talk about Nana because she didn’t have time, oh no, she was on her way out the door. An exaggeration, obviously, and now Brenda had caught her. “And they say
women
are always late,” Caddie joked for a diversion. She wasn’t ready for a showdown over Nana this morning.

“Well, we’ll talk when you get back, because it’s definitely—oh, here’s Cornel.”

“I can’t find ’em,” he grumped before the elevator doors were all the way open. “Somebody took ’em, and it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“What?”

“My goddamn glasses.” He stalked over to Brenda like an irritable goose. “What we need is a lost and found, I keep telling you.”

“We have a lost and found.”

“Yeah, but nothing of mine’s ever in it.”

Watching them bicker reminded Caddie of Nana’s first day at Wake House. They’d argued about the hot-water supply right here, under this chandelier. And then a barefooted Magill had come around the corner, bumped into the wall, and broken the glass in one of the picture frames.

Here he came—around the corner.

Not barefooted. He had on hiking boots and corduroy trousers, a denim jacket over a T-shirt, and a bulging backpack on his shoulder.

“Is that it?” Cornel demanded. “That’s all you’re taking?”

“Sure. It’s just for one night, isn’t it? Hi,” he said, smiling at Caddie. “Sorry I’m late, I got a phone call at the last second. Hey, look at your hair. What did you do?”

Thank goodness
somebody
noticed. “Highlights,” she said, patting her head, shy. “Subtle, right? Supposed to look like the sun did it.”

“It’s
great.
”

“Thanks.” She was so glad to see him. Among other things, the thought of two days on the road with nobody but Cornel and Finney had started to take time off her life. “I was afraid you were sick, or you’d changed your mind or something.”

“No way, I’m feeling terrific. Will you miss me?” he asked Brenda, surprising her with a smacking kiss on her cheek.

She laughed; she might’ve blushed. “Somebody’s feeling his oats. Watch yourself with this one, Caddie. Where’s your cane?” she asked him.

“Don’t need it.”

“Sure?”

“Abso—” He lurched forward, stopping just short of head-butting her.

“Funny,” Brenda said. “Cornel, have you got your blood pressure pills?”

At eleven o’clock, they finally got on the road.

Magill had to sit in front by the open window or he might get carsick. In the back, Cornel commandeered the map and announced he was the navigator. He took the job seriously, so Caddie kept it to herself that she already knew the way. Finney couldn’t decide which man’s lap he wanted to sit in, so he jumped back and forth, annoying both of them, front seat, backseat, front seat, backseat. Caddie explained all the things on her car that didn’t work. “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” In spite of the somber purpose of their trip, she was in almost as good a mood as Magill. It felt fine to be flying down the interstate at seventy miles an hour with her two good friends and her dog. They had no particular schedule, just an easy half-day’s drive to Delaware, where they’d catch the ferry in Lewes to Cape May. They didn’t even know where they’d stay when they got there. She
caught Magill’s eye; the wind mussed his hair and put pink color in his cheeks. They grinned at each other. This was going to be fun.

They talked about inconsequential things, not the reason for the trip, until the Baltimore beltway, when Cornel mumbled something from the backseat.

“What?”

“Said, I wrote something down. It’s a poem.”

“A poem?”

“For Thea.”

“Oh, Cornel.” Caddie looked at him in the rearview mirror. “That’s wonderful. She’d’ve loved that.”

“It’s not finished.” He fished a piece of notebook paper out of his jacket pocket.

“Can we hear it?”

“Heck, no, it’s personal.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Read it,” said Magill.

“Out loud? Naw.”

“Let’s hear it. I bet it’s good.”

“Nah, I don’t wanna read it.”

“Let me, then.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll read it.” Magill held out his hand.

“You can’t read.”

“Come on, Cornel.” Like Magill, Caddie could tell he wanted them to hear his poem, he just didn’t want to admit it.

More coaxing and cajoling. Finally, “Oh, all right, read it if it means that much to you,” and he handed the paper up to Magill. “But it’s not finished, I’m telling you. It’s a rough draft.”

Crabbed handwriting covered both sides of the paper, Caddie saw from the corner of her eye. A long poem. She hoped reading it in the moving car wouldn’t make Magill sick.

He squinted his eyes, holding the paper close.