The Summer Wives: Epic page-turning romance perfect for the beach. Beatriz Williams
course, the Catholic church. I didn’t think.”
Isobel sat between us on the front seat, tilting her long legs at an acute angle to fit them under the dashboard. Clayton, a tall man, had taken down the top, and the draft blew warmly over our hats and ears. Isobel rummaged in her pocketbook for a cigarette and lit it clumsily. “Here’s a funny thing about the Island, Peaches,” she said, as she tried to get the lighter going in the middle of the crosswind. “I think it’s telling. The Episcopal church only opens during the summer season, see, May to September, while the Catholic church runs all year round. Don’t you think that’s telling, Clay?”
“Telling what, darling?”
“I mean, the way things work around the Island. Who does what, and where, and when.”
Clay propped his elbow on the doorframe and tilted his head to one side, so he could rub his left eyebrow. His right hand gripped the wheel at twelve o’clock. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say, Izzy. Sure, most of the fishermen happen to be Portuguese around here. Portuguese folks happen to be mostly Catholic.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, you’re trying to make out like it’s some kind of crime, that’s all.”
“It’s not a crime,” she said. She’d finally succeeded in lighting her cigarette, and she now smoked it with a peculiar ferocity.
“Well, we all get along, don’t we? They’ve got their religion, and we’ve got ours—”
“And never the twain shall meet,” Isobel said softly.
“—and everybody respects each other. Nobody’s got a thing against Catholics, around here.”
I spoke up timidly. “I think what Isobel’s trying to say is that the summer residents, the ones with all the power and the money—”
“All right,” Clay said. “All right. Fine. Look, it’s a Sunday. Let’s stay away from politics for one day, okay?” He straightened and reached for the radio dial.
Isobel, looking out the side, past my nose toward the blurry meadows, the occasional house, said, “Have you noticed there aren’t any trees, Peaches? Old, native ones, I mean.”
“Now that you mention it.”
“It’s because of some hurricane.” She sucked on her cigarette. “Some hurricane, over a hundred years ago, that flattened everything. Now the Island’s like a Scottish moor or something. Or Ireland. One of those. Isn’t that right, Clay?”
“I guess so.” He was still working the radio dial.
“Do you get any stations out here?” I asked.
“We get a couple out of Providence, when the wind’s right. Sometimes Boston.” He turned the dial millimeter by millimeter, listening carefully to the pattern of static.
“Oh, why bother?” said Isobel. “Honestly. We’re almost there.”
I waved away a stream of smoke. “This might be a good time to mention that I don’t play bridge.”
“What’s that?” said Clay.
“She doesn’t play bridge!” Isobel shouted in his ear.
“Not play bridge? But I thought all you girls played bridge.”
“Miranda doesn’t. She’s an intellectual. Did you know she was named after a girl in Shakespeare?”
“Is that so? Now that’s grand. Which one? Which play, I mean?”
Isobel turned to me. “Which one, Peaches?”
“The Tempest,” I said, just as the car slowed and began its turn down a long, slender, curving drive toward a house plucked right out of the half-timbered Elizabethan countryside and onto a cliff overlooking the entrance to Long Island Sound. At that instant, whether by design or coincidence, a bank of black clouds swallowed up the sun.
14.
WHEN IT COMES to bridge, the punishment for ignorance is apparently banishment, which suited me well enough. For a short while, I hung around the well-appointed drawing room, holding my iced tea, watching the rain shatter violently against the French windows while the Monks, unconcerned, set up the bridge table. Lucky for them—or again, maybe by design—there were two other guests, a mother and daughter, who made up the other sides. They were the Huxleys, Mrs. Huxley and her daughter, Livy, and Isobel explained that it was Dr. Huxley, husband and father of same, who had come to Popeye’s rescue in the Fisher kitchen yesterday. We exchanged the usual bland pleasantries. Livy and her mother were perfectly nice, perfectly pretty, like two round, full scoops of vanilla ice cream, the younger one wearing a dress like a lemon meringue. I remember thinking, at the time, how utterly harmless they seemed, how absent of tooth and claw. Clay had disappeared somewhere with his father. Isobel had mixed herself a drink from the liquor cabinet and now sat in her bridge chair, next to Mrs. Monk, wearing an expression of sharklike intensity.
When the rain died away to a drizzle, I called over my shoulder that I was going for a walk to see the cliffs and I slipped through one of the French doors to the bluestone terrace and the lawn beyond. The wet grass soaked my shoes and stockings. When I reached the cliff’s edge, I took them off and laid the stockings to dry across a large, white rock, and then I sat down on a neighboring rock and watched the clouds storm angrily away to the northeast. The cliffs weren’t especially high, maybe forty or fifty feet, but they were steep and rugged, and the path snaked carefully down the least forbidding side to end in a pale beach. Out to sea, a lone sailboat picked its way along the coast, about a hundred yards from shore.
Now that the sun shone unobstructed, the heat built once more, sinking into my skin and bones and the rough surface of the rock beneath me. I removed my jacket—I’d left my hat and gloves indoors—and thought I should really find some shade, before I burned. But I didn’t want to move. There was just enough breeze to make it bearable. The air was rich and damp with the smell of the sea, and there was something hypnotic about the movements of that lone, brave sailboat, something graceful and eternal. I could just make out the man who sat in the stern, next to the tiller. He had dark hair that flashed from time to time against the white of the triangular sail, and at some point, as I watched, I began to realize that the sailor was Joseph. Or maybe I was only hoping it was Joseph? Maybe it was just longing.
I straightened and squinted, and as if he felt my scrutiny, the sailor turned his head toward shore.
Joseph.
I raised my hand and waved, even though he couldn’t possibly recognize me from there, not sitting as I was on the opposite corner of the Island from the house where I was supposed to be sitting. Up went Joseph’s arm, returning the wave, and then he rose from his seat at the tiller and reached for a rope. A sheet—wasn’t that what they called ropes on boats? Sort of confusing, if you asked me, because something you called a sheet ought logically to be a sail. Whatever it was, Joseph did something to it, adjusting its pitch against the wind. When he turned back, his arm lifted again, in such a way that he seemed to be beckoning me toward the water.
I stood and glanced at my shoes and stockings, drying on the nearby rock. I glanced at the path, snaking its way to the beach below. My skin was flushed and damp, my skirt creased, my blouse stained with perspiration. The salt breeze tumbled my hair.
“Miranda. There you are.”
I pitched forward. Clayton’s arm shot out to catch me.
“Careful!” he said.
“Sorry! I didn’t hear you come up.”
“No need to apologize. Shouldn’t have snuck up like that. Gosh, who’s that crazy fellow out there?”
“Just some sailboat,” I said.
“He’s not afraid