Bittersweet. Miranda Beverly-Whittemore
was good to roll up my sleeves and see results. But it wasn’t lost on me that part of why I was burrowing, so gamely, into the cleaning – beyond the time alone with Ev and what my elbow grease might secure for me – was that it gave me a reason to hide. I could taste the humiliation anew every time I thought of Ev’s brother’s face in the window. Saturday loomed, when Birch would descend and give us the thumbs-up or -down. As the week drew to a close, I comforted myself in knowing I wouldn’t have to step beyond the walls of Bittersweet at least until after our inspector arrived.
But on the fifth day, after Ev tromped in from her morning walk and declared, ‘I’ve decided that I’m much better as an early bird than a night owl, so from now on, I shall go to bed at ten o’clock sharp’ (which we both knew was a lie but which we nodded at together in fiendish denial), she further announced, ‘And I’m going to scrape the porch on my own today, so you’re free, free, free!’ I realized that what she was saying in her Ev way was that she wanted the cottage to herself, and, although I took the news somewhat grudgingly, I had known all along that I’d have to leave Bittersweet someday. It was Friday morning. If Ev was right about Galway only coming up on weekends, then he wasn’t at Winloch yet. A stroll through the woods wouldn’t do me any harm, and I’d get to finally explore the place I’d been dreaming of and, yes, researching, for months.
Although Vermont is frigid in the winter, its summertime shimmers. That’s stating the obvious to anyone who knows New England, but it was my brave new world. The mud season that begins in March and lasts well through May buffers one’s mind from winter’s ravages, so that, by the glorious day when neon-green leaf buds first appear on every tree, one can barely remember the bitter February winds streaming off the lake in great, frigid sloughs. Every year, the lake freezes solid around the shoreline, groaning and cracking under the push of the shifting wind, but, in the century-long life of Winloch, the winter had been heard only by the workingmen, men called in to plow the roads, or plumb frozen pipes, men who had the north country in their blood and the dried-up curl of French Canadian on their tongues. Winloch was a summer place, built of pine and screen and not much else, and the Winslows its only, rarefied, inhabitants.
It had been that way for over a century. Ev’s great-great-grandfather Samson Winslow, 1850–1931, paterfamilias – captured in black-and-white photographs, arms akimbo, on the deck of a sloop, in front of a bank, beside his blushing bride – looked at once a dinosaur and a modern man. Only the clothes set him back. The shape of his face – high cheekbones, wry smile – was full of twentieth-century vigor. His mother was Scottish, his father a Brit, and his was iron money, invested in coal money, invested in oil money. Once Samson had made himself a good fortune, he moved his young family to a grand manse in Burlington proper, washed the coal dust and sticky oil from his hands in the limpid lake, and bought himself a tract of farmland that stretched beside its waters. The lake, laid out at the foot of the Green Mountains that gave Vermont its name, reminded him of the lochs of his mother’s homeland. He married that name with his own, and called his paradise Winloch.
Even though the tract Samson obtained was only fifteen miles from town – practically next door, in our car-choked era – in his day, getting there required a migration. White winters were passed in the banks of Burlington and Boston, tranquil summers on sailboats that skimmed the depths. And in between, a twice-yearly trek, first in buggies, then in Model Ts, of wives, sons, daughters, dogs, dresses, chairs, apples, potatoes, novels, tennis rackets. And a twice-weekly delivery of groceries.
Samson envisaged a village peopled with Winslows in the land he named Winloch. He had hundreds of meadowed and forested acres to work with, and set out to build the Dining Hall with his own two hands (he was helped by those same workingmen who braved the roofline and replaced burst pipes, but to mention them was to lessen the Winloch mythology). The cottages sprouted up, in turn, around the great hall, like the plants they were named for – Trillium and Queen Anne’s Lace and Bittersweet and Goldenrod and Chicory – and were soon peopled with Samson’s descendants and their companions: a parade of loyal, soggy Labradors, Newfoundlands, Jack Russells, and a few memorably morose basset hounds, ears permanently sodden from their daily wades.
Soon, dinghies littered the low-lying sandstone outcroppings and the rocky beaches of the shoreline. As more land became available, Winloch acquired it, so that, by the time Samson’s great-great-great-grandchildren were learning how to swim off the docks that stretched like fingers from the thirty-some-odd cottages into the water, the compound occupied two miles of the shore of Lake Champlain in sheltered Winslow Bay, a favorite of the mooring yachts down from Canada.
I had gathered a few of these snippets from Ev and her nonchalant boarding school friends who’d visited us during the spring, but those conversations had mostly centered on which of Ev’s cousins was cutest or the nearest place you could drive for underage booze. Once I felt sure Ev’s invitation was airtight, I conducted my own research, a stealthy interlibrary loan with the help of my friend Janice the librarian, and Samson Winslow: The Man, the Dream, the Vision and The Burlington Winslows both found their ways from northern libraries into my hands. I’d spent one damp March weekend in the gothic Reserve Room of the college library, poring over photographs of Winloch in the early part of the twentieth century, as rain lashed the windows in a satisfying thrum. Samson had been aptly named – his hair was so positively mane-like toward the end of his life that one couldn’t help wonder if his idyll would have crumbled had his locks been cut. He seemed to my imagination to be the sort of man who’d loom large in family stories, but the few times I dared prompt Ev for a really great Samson tale she’d rolled her eyes and muttered a ‘You’re so weird.’
It had stopped raining, but I slipped on Ev’s muddy rubber boots at the back door and made my way down the narrow path that led to Bittersweet Cove, our private bit of lake. It was a small cove, hugged on three sides by wooded, rocky land. A stairway cut down to the small beach directly below the kitchen, or one could take a more precarious route – continuing along the left arm of the hug on slippery pine needles (and, after a rainstorm, diminutive mudslides) and, finally, out onto a low, flat rock just above the waterline that offered one a magnificent view of the outer bay. That was my intended destination, but, as I slid and cursed, the rubber boots offering no traction, I was startled at the sight of a slender, magnificent creature skimming along the surface of the larger lake, then alighting, soundlessly, upon the very spot I’d been aiming for.
The bird stood perfectly still. A great blue heron. We’d had them at the river back in Oregon, but they’d always looked so scrappy. This one belonged here. Long lines, calm face, elegant – a Winslow. The heron regarded me coldly, reminding me of how Ev had merely tolerated my presence in the early months we’d shared a room, before Jackson’s death had brought us close. I watched until the bird’s long wingspan silently lifted it away. I dug my muddy toes in and climbed back up the embankment, backsliding with nearly every step.
I resolved to climb down again when the land was dry. As soon as the wind was warmer, and didn’t send me goose bumps off the surface of the water, I would swim off the heron’s rock. Even though it seemed hard to imagine it would ever be hot enough to want to swim – the summer was still newly born – I’d liked the running Ev and I had done in New York, and the new strength in my legs. I needed a bathing suit, and the confidence to pull it over flesh that had never known the sun, because this was the kind of place where one swam boldly, daily, and made a body one had never had.
I set out back up the dirt road John had driven us down that first night. It curved more sharply than I remembered, so that soon Bittersweet was out of sight, and all I could see were maples, pine, and sky. The fresh leaves shook down drops of water in little bursts, and crows cawed at each other somewhere atop the trees – a jarring, comical sound, too common for this beautiful place. I had worn the cashmere, but soon it was tied around my waist. The rain had washed the world clean. Rafts of freshly cut grass began to filter down the road, followed by the sound of a lawn mower.
As I caught sight of the Dining Hall – which I now knew was the great white structure looming at the intersection of the Bittersweet driveway and the main Winloch road – I saw a phalanx of workingmen sweeping the tennis courts, cinching the nets, mowing the lawn, and hammering at loose nails on the wide wooden steps leading up to the building. Two compact white pickups