Providence Island. Gregor Robinson
car. “We’re out at Providence Island. Your mother —”
He stopped mid-sentence. I suppose he didn’t want to sound condescending. After the death of her husband, Mrs. Applewood had started doing a little work for some of the summer people, including the Millers. She had asked Mrs. Miller if Jack and Quentin would like to come to her daughter’s party. Mrs. Miller would have wondered how she could say no.
I had met Jack’s brother Stephen once when he chased Phil and me when I was about thirteen. We used to throw milkweeds in clumps of earth at passing cars from the bluffs above the highway. Sometimes a car would stop, and we would run into the woods. One time a man in a convertible — he would have been about eighteen years old then — screeched on the brakes, jumped from the car without opening the doors, and ran up the bank. Phil headed for the underbrush, while I ran across an open field. I heard the man panting behind me — then he leaped through the air and caught me by the foot; he grabbed me by the shoulder, turned me over. He was about to hit me, but when he saw the split in my lip from the fall, he held back.
“What’s your name?” He was red in the face and panting. “The police will be by your house later.”
“No appetite?” asked my father at dinner that night.
“What have you been up to?” Aunt Beth asked. “How did you get that cut lip?”
The police never came. The next day in Phil’s cellar we smoked a couple of his father’s Export “A”s and split one of his beers.
“You know who that guy in the fuckin’ convertible was?” asked Phil. “One of those Miller assholes.”
“Who are they?”
“Who are they? They only own pretty near the biggest fuckin’ place in the islands. That’s who.”
That had been my first meeting with the Millers. The man in the convertible was Stephen Miller, Jack’s older brother. Seven years later he was killed in Vietnam, near the Cambodian border.
There was a squeaking in the ceiling above us. Phil’s father was home, back from one of the summer cottages he looked after. We heard him stop dead in the middle of the room. Sniffing the air, Phil motioned me not to speak. We carefully buried our cigarettes in the dirt of the basement floor and rolled the empty beer bottle along the pipes under the water heater.
The kitchen door opened, throwing a beam of light down the wooden stairs.
“Boy, you down there? Jesus Christ, answer me!”
Mr. Havelock started clumping down the stairs. He was a gnarly little man with red hair. Years of work on the farm and then at the gravel pit had given him a stoop, but he could move quickly. He held his broom above his head like a sabre. As soon as I saw his feet on the stairs, I ran for the ladder that led to the cellar door and the yard. I heard him as I left: “Goddamn it, boy, I told you to stay out of my beer,” and the sound of the broom as he swiped at Phil.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said to Marjorie. “Sorry we’re late. I shouldn’t have brought my friends along. I thought it would be a bigger party.” He looked toward the house, to the little group standing around the porch steps and on the lawn, the boys clutching their stubby brown beer bottles.
“Come on, Jack,” said the girl. “Let’s go.”
Because of the run-in with his brother, I had known about Jack and the Millers, known about Providence Island — that it was there, like the other summer places — but it had had nothing to do with me. Now I’d seen them: drunk and tanned, carelessly dressed in their expensive clothes. They were around my age. Hard to believe. Jack was supposed to be some kind of schoolboy hockey star, headed for Harvard or Cornell.
What they must have seen, I couldn’t help thinking — hated myself for seeing it, too: the gate off its hinges, the overgrown drive, Donny’s wrecks up on blocks in front of the barn. As they neared the house, they would have seen a few people dancing to a tinny record player on the porch, mosquitoes and moths fluttering around the yellow bulbs. Donny, Phil, Henri, and Jerry Reed in their jeans and T-shirts. Charmaine Ault: perhaps they would have recognized her from the store where some of the people from the islands and the summer places had accounts. Charmaine and her famous sloppy tits. And Monica and Clarrisa, hiding in the shadows, giggling. Watching.
Marjorie Applewood didn’t hide. She stood on the lawn watching the red tail lights vanish into the night.
I watched, too — hidden in the upstairs window.
| Chapter 4 |
Marjorie came up the stairs. She snatched the scribbler from my hands and locked it away in the drawer. She had lost interest in me, in the party, in her poems. She was annoyed, not because the Millers had come, but because they hadn’t come — and because her mother hadn’t told her that she had invited them.
A few days later, Phil showed me the dark green clapboard garage behind the Merrick Bay Hotel. “This place belongs to Providence Island,” he said.
We peeked through the windows. The 1942 Packard limousine and an old Morgan sports car were kept at Merrick Bay year-round. There was also a late model Cadillac and a station wagon. These cars were put away at the beginning of the summer, after the Millers arrived; the ones they used every day, including the maroon Buick that we had seen at the party, were kept at the Bellisle Club.
Back home, I was ashamed of our house: it wasn’t on the lake nor was it a summer house. It was a farm that had stood ramshackle and abandoned until my father bought it. I felt he had been duped.
I rode my bike out to the highway, past the village of Merrick Bay, and down the dirt road to the landing at Bellisle. I watched the mahogany launches cruise in from the islands. Boxes of groceries from Ault’s or Merrick’s Butchers were loaded into the boats. And liquor, cases of it. I loved the throaty roar the launches made as they sped away from the pier. In the parking lot were big sedans and station wagons from Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New York State. From the landing you could see some of the boathouses, but most of the big places were out of sight, beyond the pine headlands and the open waters of the bay.
I would see them arrive for the sailboat races, or with their tennis racquets and golf clubs. The boys wore Bass Weejuns, faded madras shirts, and Bermuda shorts of pale cotton. The girls — long-limbed, tanned, and clear-skinned — wore polo shirts or men’s oxford shirts and sweater-coats from prep schools whose names I didn’t know. Downy blond hair on their arms.
I mentioned at dinner that I thought I might take up golf.
My aunt snorted. “What you need is a summer job. I’ll ask around.”
It did not take her long. Mrs. Applewood, for whom my father had done a little legal work around the time of her husband’s death, telephoned a week later. She was working on Providence Island, helping the French-Canadian girls in the kitchen (she was an excellent cook, famous in Merrick Bay for her church suppers) and looking after old J.D. Miller, who had suffered a stroke and needed help making his way around the island. The Millers were celebrating seventy-five years on Providence Island and there was to be a big party. Mrs. Applewood said they were looking for extra staff.
She told me more about the place; I had the impression that Mrs. Applewood knew quite a lot about Providence Island. Behind the latticework and screening of one of the side verandahs of the big house, she told me, there was a games room for rainy days (Ping-Pong, billiards, darts), a barbershop, and laundry facilities big enough to serve a small hotel. The houses on the mainland that the Millers used to provide for the chauffeur and the butler were larger than the houses most people lived in year-round. There had at one time been a housekeeper, a cook, an assistant cook, two maids, a full-time gardener, a garden helper, and two men to polish and tend to the fleet of boats.
Now the only people who worked there were a couple of shy girls from rural Quebec, a gardener-handyman, a couple of boys from the village who worked around the boathouses in return just for being near the boats, and Mrs. Applewood.
And now, seventy-five years later, Mrs. Applewood and