The Summer Guest Page 10

  “Am I to take it,” Kate said, looking into her mug, “that this means something is up?”

  Joe shushed her with a frown, sipped from his drink, and nodded in my direction. “Jordan, Hal here has something to tell you.”

  Hal set his drink down on the table to his right and gave his knees a little slap. “Well. I guess the upshot is, my father is dying. The particulars aren’t important, Jordan, but the doctors say he’s very close to the end. It makes no sense at all for him to be here, and I tried to talk him out of it, but he’s fished here thirty years and that’s what he wants to do. He was actually in the hospital until yesterday morning, when the doctor called and told us he was checking himself out. He’d pretty much decided what he wanted to do, and there’s no law saying you have to stay in the hospital if you don’t want to. Sally’s out of town, so it was all I could do to get January at the day care and hightail it up here.” Hal paused and rubbed his face, dusted with a day-old growth of silvering beard. “Frances is in a state, and I can’t blame her. But I can hardly blame my father either. It’s an awful place to die.”

  “I’d feel the same,” I said, thinking: Attaboy, Harry. Hang a sign on the hospital room door, a silly picture of some old geezer bagging carp, and the words Gone fishing. “If it were up to me, I’d say let him do it.”

  Hal took his Scotch from the table, seemed about to sip, then stopped. “I’m not sure, Jordan, that you know how important you are to my father. But a lot of this actually has to do with you. He needs something from you, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe I don’t have to, and in any case, it amounts to this: tomorrow, you need to take him out, and do what you need to do to make sure he has a good time, the last good time. If that means he catches anything, great. If not, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Make sure he’s comfortable, and if there are any problems, come straight back here. He’s very sick, so don’t tackle anything you can’t handle.”

  “It’s okay, Hal,” I said. “I’m happy to do it. You don’t need to worry.”

  “Like I said, just understand how sick he is. And, in case you were wondering, I don’t know what to make of this dry fly business any more than you do. I suspect it doesn’t much matter. Just getting something in the water would be a pretty neat trick for him.”

  I looked across the room at Kate, sitting on a folding chair by the cold woodstove, but she was watching Hal, and I couldn’t catch her eye.

  “Maybe he just wants to make a few of the rules,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s it,” Hal said, though I could tell he didn’t think so. “Like I said, he’s relying on you to understand some things I don’t.” Here he looked at Joe, who seemed to nod.

  “I’ll do my best, Hal,” I said. “Is that it?”

  “Actually, no,” Joe said. He silenced me with a raised hand. “Hang on, Jordan. There’s more. Go ahead, Hal.”

  Hal leaned forward on the sofa. He looked at the tips of his fingers, then back up at me. “The other thing I have to tell you, Jordan, and this may come as some surprise, is that my father bought the camp four weeks ago. Bought it outright. And he plans to leave it to you.”

  So there it was, and the first thing I thought was: mystery solved. Then: Buying the camp. Leaving it to me. In his will? Yes, in his will, in the last will and testament of one Harrison Wainwright, he of Business Week and Fortune and the Forbes 500 and all the rest, inventor of the deep-discount pharmaceutical superstore: that Harrison Wainwright. A chain of ideas so completely unlikely, so crazy, in fact, that I couldn’t, just then, open my mouth and say a blessed word. And—a sudden intuition—I glanced up at the clock to note the time: 9:03 P.M. Sunday, August 19, 1994, at a little after nine on a fine, cold evening in the North Woods of Maine.

  “So?” Joe tapped my knee with the back of his hand. “Jordan? What do you say?”

  “Jesus, Joe.” I looked back at Hal. “He’s leaving it to me?”

  “That’s right, Jordan. When he dies, it’s yours, free and clear. There’s a provision to protect it from inheritance taxes, which the rest of the estate will absorb. Sally drew it up, so I’d guess it’s pretty airtight, knowing Sally. And you should understand that Frances and I are okay with this. I’d be lying if I said we didn’t try to talk my father out of it, and probably we could make a case that he was pretty sick when he made this decision, not in his right mind, yada-yada-yada, and maybe make it stick. But in the end it wouldn’t be a fair fight, and it wouldn’t be the truth, either. My father may have cancer, he may even be a little eccentric, but he’s not crazy. So the way this breaks down, there’s plenty to go around, and some of it is going around to you, a nice little chunk actually, but nothing that’s worth an ugly and expensive scuffle. Understood?”

  I nodded. I was actually barely following any of it. “I guess I do.”

  “Incidentally, he doesn’t want you to know about this. My thinking is—and Sally and Frances both agree—it’s crazy for you not to. There are no strings attached, and you can do whatever you want with the place. But what he’s hoping is that the camp will always be here, that you can stay up here the rest of your life. He wants to take care of you, Jordan.”

  I turned to Joe. “You really sold it?”

  Joe shrugged, turning his mouth down in a pained half-frown. I thought he might be about to cry, and who could blame him? Even if Harry had given him one zillion dollars for the place, the camp had been in Joe’s family for almost fifty years. My eyes moved upward to the wall behind his head, covered with old photos, including a faded black-and-white of Joe himself, just a kid of six or seven with one front tooth missing and a haircut that looked like it had been done with pinking shears, holding up an Atlantic salmon just about as big as he was and beaming like a maniac. Joe Sr., the old man himself, stood beside his boy, one hand over his brow, the other, big as a catcher’s mitt, tousling little Joe’s hair. The photo was taken on the dock below the lodge; I guessed it was Joe’s mother, Amy, who had taken it. Looking at the picture, I knew without being told that it was one of the happiest moments of Joe’s life, as this was one of the saddest.

  “He gave me a fair price. More than fair. You know that Lucy and I have been thinking about selling for a while, anyway.” The corner of his mouth gave a tiny twitch, his eyes glazed over with a thin film of tears, and I would have moved heaven and earth at that moment to let him know that, basically, I loved him. He put his cup to his lips and drained the Scotch in one hard swallow. “I’m just glad we didn’t have to sell it to the loggers. Or someone who would carve it up.”

  “I won’t, Joe. Jesus. I absolutely won’t.”

  “We know you won’t,” Hal said. “That is,” he said, “the point.”

  I looked at Kate, sitting cross-legged in her chair and watching us. In her hand, her cup was tipped at an angle that told me it was empty, but I couldn’t read her face. “You knew?”

  “Some of it.” She nodded. “That the camp had been sold.”

  I thought about what she was saying. “But not the rest.”

  “That it’s yours?” Her eyebrows rose. “I’d have to say no. That I didn’t know.”

  “And is it okay?”

  “Hell, Jordan.” I would have liked a smile right then but didn’t get one. “Of course it’s okay. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I don’t rightly know.” And I didn’t. As far as I could tell, everybody had gotten just what they wanted, without even asking. “This is going to take a while to sink in,” I said.

  Hal rose from the couch, and I noticed for the first time how tall he was, nearly a full head taller than Joe, or his own father. He fixed his eyes on me, squinting a little in the weak, yellow light of the office. “It’s a lot to think about. But it’s all right to be happy, too, Jordan. It’s a great gift.”

  Which was, of course, precisely true. That’s exactly what it was.

  I said, “Thank you.”

  He gave me a weary grin. I thought he was about to shake my hand, sealing t
he bargain, but instead he fixed one hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

  “You’re welcome, Jordan.”

  FIVE

  Lucy

  H e was a beautiful man, Harry Wainwright. I thought this even before I knew who he was, before he made the fortune that made him famous, or famous to some. I was a waitress, seventeen years old, so sheltered you would have thought I was twelve anywhere else: a girl from an inbred town in northwest Maine where, as we said, half the people spoke French and the other half yelled. The summer began in May, when Joe kissed me behind the metal shop at school. My parents, who owned the sawmill in Norbeck Pond, were friends with Joe’s dad; when Joe told me they were hiring a waitress at the camp, I knew they’d let me do it. So, a summer of firsts: my first real job, my first kiss from Joe, my first vision of Harry, for that’s what it was: a vision.

  I had also become pretty, and knew it. I had started my junior year just another gangly girl from nowhere, big-boned and big-nosed, so plain and unpromising with my drab skin and oily hair that you might have missed me standing against a freshly painted wall. But between the last of the leaves and the first of the blackflies, somebody somewhere had said the magic word, and this new thing about me, this prettiness, was something I could suddenly see everywhere I went: in puddles and windows, in the slow smiling eyes of boys at school and the men who worked at my parents’ mill—a different look, more respectful but also more afraid, like I was a bomb that might go off any second. I saw it in the way my friends treated me, like I was somebody they wouldn’t mind becoming, and planned to, someday soon. I saw it in Harry that day.

  So in walked Harry for breakfast on a June morning in 1964; he stood a moment in the open doorway, his eyes roaming the room, letting me have a look at him. Not an especially tall man, but he made me think so; slender and strong, his skin flushed pink with fresh air, deep sleep, and a good morning on the water, his eyes so blue that these days I would assume he was wearing contacts, but not back then. I followed those eyes as they scanned the dining room like two blue searchlights, taking everything in; there was the first sprinkling of silver in his hair, which he wore just a little longer than the respectable men I knew but not as long as the drunks at Wiley’s, our one bad bar, or the trappers who came into town twice a year, stinking of themselves, to stock up on jerky and rifle shells before beating it back to the woods they’d come from.

  The word I might have thought as I looked at him was handsome, or even cute, what we said of boys we liked, a shorthand for all the new feelings of desire that danced inside us like sparklers on the Fourth of July. Joe was cute; Joe was, with that little bit of a beard he was growing and the way he strutted around the place, knowing everything, even a little bit handsome.

  Harry was: beautiful.

  “Screen door, hon,” I said. I was calling everybody “hon” and “sweetie” that summer, a habit I’d cribbed from the real waitresses at the Pine Tree Café downtown. He met my eyes, and in his face I saw it: that look.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Blackflies.” I waved a finger at the open door. “You’re letting them in.”

  “Oh, right.” A laugh that crinkled the skin around his eyes. “Stupid of me. Hang on.” He backed out the door and I heard him call out from the pathway, “Hal? Hal, where’d you go?” I thought he might be calling a dog, which would have been fine; lots of folks brought dogs with them, and they were more than welcome in the dining hall if they didn’t smell too bad and knew how to mind. But then the door swung open again and in marched a boy somewhere between eight and eleven, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and bright red Keds, his hair all whichway, Harry bringing up the rear. They took a table by the big windows and I busied myself with menus and a coffeepot and took them over.

  “Cream on the table there,” I said, pouring. I raised the pot over the boy’s cup, having fun. “What do you say, hon, coffee for you too?”

  “How ’bout it, Hal?” The boy blushed and mumbled something; Harry lifted his face to me and shrugged. “Just milk for him, I guess.”

  “I want chocolate.”

  Harry shot him a fatherly frown—pure theater, done for me. “Listen to you, with the I wants.” He tapped his son’s elbow with the back of his hand. “Would it kill you to be polite to the young lady?”

  Hal sighed and rolled his eyes. “May I have chocolate milk, please?”

  “Better.” Harry lifted his face to me once more. “You’ll have to excuse him. The truth is, he’s just some kid I found in the woods.” He leaned over the table in my direction and lowered his voice. “Raised by wolves, I think.”

  “Dad!”

  “What?” He widened his eyes in mock alarm. “It’s some kind of secret? Better we come clean, Hal.”

  Now I was the one laughing. “It’s perfectly all right, we’re pretty informal around here.” I pointed at the menu with the back of my pen. “Don’t know how hungry you are, but the raspberry pancakes are everybody’s favorite. Fresh berries from the farm down the road.”

  “How about you?” Still with those blue, blue eyes on me.

  “How about me?”

  He cleared his throat: had I embarrassed him? “Do you like the raspberry pancakes?”

  Thirty seconds of chitchat, and I felt like I was riding a swing with my shoes off. I cocked one hip and shrugged. “More of a blueberry fan myself. But they don’t come in till August.”

  He looked at Hal, who gave another of his silent nods.

  “The raspberry pancakes, then,” Harry said.

  I took their menus and tucked them under my arm. “You won’t be sorry, because no one is. Have a good morning on the lake, gentlemen?”

  He paused and smiled at me and there it was again. Even I could tell he was deciding how far to take this.

  “Terrific,” he said.

  In the kitchen I gave their order to Mrs. Markham, the cook. My brain was buzzing a little, the way a cigarette made me feel, minus the nausea. Joe was sitting at the big kitchen worktable, pulling apart a cinnamon bear claw, and a tang of guilt shot through me: things were moving along with us, we had entered the first, tentative weeks of boyfriend-girlfriend, and here I was, half breathless from flirting with a man as old as my father.

  “What’s gotten into you?” Joe said, looking at me.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He pointed at me and whirled his finger around. “You’re all pink.” He munched the roll and took a drink from his mug of coffee. The air in the room was heavy as the inside of a hive, thick with the smell of airborne grease and dough baking in the oven. “You got that thing that’s going around?”

  “Never mind me. I’m fine.”

  I peeked through the door and saw two more parties arriving. For the next hour or so, as the late sleepers straggled in on top of the early risers who’d already been out since dawn, I’d be running without a moment to spare. Mrs. Markham disappeared into the pantry, leaving everything popping and steaming on the stove, and Joe came up behind me and put his hands on my waist.

  “I’ve got some time off after lunch,” he said quietly. “What say I put together a little picnic for us? We can take one of the canoes for an hour or two.”

  I leaned back a little and gave him a noncommittal “Hmm.” When things had started to change for me that winter, my mother sat me down one night after dinner over a plate of Toll House cookies for what she called “the boy talk,” and the one thing she said that stuck was not to jump at offers like Joe’s too quickly; a little hesitancy, she explained, was part of the game. It was sensible advice, and though I’d heard it a thousand times in other ways, I liked the way she said it—“the game,” as if the whole history of men and women, garden to grave, was as unserious as a game of Parcheesi on a rainy afternoon. This was the kind of thing my mother was good at, putting your fears at ease with a turn of phrase and a well-timed plate of cookies, though in this case I also knew she was speaking from the kind of second-guess work that all of us eventua
lly do: game or no, she’d married my father right out of high school and had my older brother Lucius (Lucy and Lucius; I still shake my head at that one) about nine months and ten minutes later.

  I was thinking about this and looking across the dining room to where Harry was hunched over the table, talking earnestly to Hal, who, after all the surliness, was finally smiling. A first big trip with Dad, I figured. Fish stories over breakfast.

  “Say, who is that guy?” I was pleased at how casual I managed to sound. “Over by the windows.”

  Joe followed my look. “Who, Harry?”

  “Yes, Harry.” I gave him a little bump with my shoulder. “If that’s his name. And get that beard out of my neck. It itches.”

  Joe stepped back, embarrassed but not very, and rubbed a hand over his cheeks. “Jeez, you’re in a mood today. I thought you liked it.”

  At that moment Mrs. Markham returned from the pantry. During the year, Daphne Markham was a librarian at the elementary school—a woman with a thick waist and glasses on a chain who could shut you up with one steely-eyed glance that went through you like a spear. We were all terrified of her and assumed she’d never married because she was just too mean, but I later learned that this was not the case: she had been married, long ago, in Africa, where she and her husband were missionaries. What became of her husband I never learned, but earlier that summer she had shown me a photograph of herself, much younger, thin as a whip, standing in front of a small timber-framed church and wearing, of all things, a pith helmet.

  For a large woman she was surprisingly fast, and she could handle a breakfast rush with the coolheaded precision of a bomber pilot; in one continuous motion she stepped to the stove, flipped a line of pancakes, dropped two slices of bread into the toaster, pulled a plate of rolls from the warmer, and cracked two eggs into a bowl for beating.