Beatriz Williams - A Hundred Summers - The ultimate romantic escapist beach read

I thought of my father in his pristine room, staring at the wall of books that used to give him such pleasure. “That’s not nice , Aunt Julie.”

“Life’s too short for nice, Lily. The thing is, you’re wasting yourself. Everyone has a little bump in the road when they’re young. God knows I had a few. You pick yourself up. Move on.” She offered me the cigarette, and I shook my head. “Let me cut your hair tonight. Trim it a bit. Put some lipstick on you.”

“Oh, do it, Lily!” Kiki turned to me. “You’d look beautiful! Can I help, Aunt Julie?”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Everyone knows me here. If you put lipstick on me, they won’t let me into the club. Anyway, dress myself up for whom? Mrs. Hubert? The Langley sisters?”

“Someone’s bound to have an unmarried fellow down for the weekend.”

“Then you’ll have him running for your gin and tonic before I can stick you with my hatpin.”

Aunt Julie waved her hand in dismissal, trailing a coil of smoke. “Scout’s honor.”

“Oh, you’re a Girl Scout now, are you? That’s rich.”

“Lily, darling. Let me do it. I need a project. I’m so desperately bored out here, you can’t imagine.”

“Then why do you come?”

She wrapped her arms around her knees, staring out at the ocean, cigarette dangling ash into the sand. The wind ruffled her hair, but only at the tips. “Oh, it keeps the beaus on their toes, you know. Disappearing for a few weeks every year. Even I wouldn’t dare bring a boyfriend to Seaview. Mrs. Hubert still hasn’t forgiven me for my divorce, the old dear.”

“ None of us have forgiven you for your divorce. Peter was such a nice fellow.”

“Too nice. He deserved better.” She jumped to her feet and tossed the cigarette in the sand. “It’s settled, then. I’m taking you in hand tonight.”

“I don’t remember agreeing to that.”

Aunt Julie’s crimson lips split into a thousand-watt smile, the one the New York papers loved. She was nearing forty now, and it crinkled up the skin around her eyes, but nobody really noticed the crinkling with a smile as electric as Aunt Julie’s. “Darling,” she said, “I don’t remember asking your permission.”

LIFE IN SEAVIEW revolved around the club, and the club revolved around Mrs. Hubert. If you asked any Seaview resident why this should be so, you’d be met with a blank stare. Mrs. Hubert had been around so long, no one could remember when her reign began, and considering her robust state of health (“vulgar, really, the way she never sits down at parties,” my mother said), no one would hazard a guess to its end. She was the Queen Victoria of summertime, except she never wore black and stood as tall and thin as a gray-haired maypole.

“Why, Lily, my dear,” she said, kissing my cheek. “What have you done with your hair tonight?”

I touched the chignon at the nape of my neck. “Aunt Julie put it back for me. She wanted to cut it, but I wouldn’t let her.”

“Good girl,” said Mrs. Hubert. “Never take fashion advice from a divorcée. Now, Kiki, my sweet.” She knelt down. “Do you promise to be a good girl tonight? I shall have you blackballed if you aren’t. We are young ladies at the club, aren’t we?”

Kiki put her arms around Mrs. Hubert’s neck and whispered something in her ear.

“Very well,” said Mrs. Hubert, “but only when your mother’s not looking.”

I glanced back at Mother and Aunt Julie, who had been stopped by an old acquaintance in the foyer. “Are you sitting out on the veranda this evening? It’s so lovely and warm.”

“With this surf? I should think not. My hearing is not what it was.” Mrs. Hubert gave Kiki a last pat and rose up with all the grace of an arthritic giraffe. “But off you go. Oh, no. Wait a moment. I meant to ask you something.” She placed a hand on my elbow and drew me close, until I could smell the rose-petal perfume drifting from her skin, could see the faint white lines of rice powder settling into the crevasses of her face. “You’ve heard about Budgie Byrne, of course.”

“I’ve heard she’s opening up her parents’ old place for the summer,” I said coolly.

“What do you think of it?”

“I think it’s high time. It’s a lovely old house. A shame it sat empty so long.”

Mrs. Hubert’s eyes were china blue, and hadn’t lost a single candlepower since she first spanked my bottom for uprooting her impatiens to decorate my Fourth of July parade float when I was about Kiki’s age. She examined me now with those bright eyes, and though I knew better than to flinch, the effort nearly did me in. “I agree,” she said at last. “High time. I’ll see she doesn’t give you any trouble, Lily. That girl always did bring trouble trailing behind her like a lapdog.”

“Oh, I can handle Budgie. I’ll see you later, Mrs. Hubert. I’m taking Kiki for her ginger ale.”

“I’m getting ginger ale?” Kiki skipped along behind me to the bar.

“Tonight you are. Gin and tonic,” I told the bartender, “and a ginger ale for the young lady.”

“But which is which?” The bartender winked.

College boy.

He plopped a cherry in Kiki’s ginger ale, and I strolled out on the veranda with her pink palm in mine, waiting for Mother and Aunt Julie to join us.

The surf was high, crashing in ungentle rollers into the beach below us. When I set my drink on the railing and braced my hands against the weathered wood, the salt spray stung like needles against my bare arms and neck. The dress was Aunt Julie’s choice, a concession made necessary to avoid the threatened haircut, and though she’d clucked with dismay over the sturdy cotton and floral print, she accepted it as the best of a bad lot, and did her damnedest to yank the neckline down as far as physics allowed. “We’re going to throw out the whole kit tomorrow,” she’d said. “Burn it all. I don’t want to see a single flower on you, Lily, unless it’s a great big gerbera daisy, a scarlet one, pinned to your hair. Just above the ear, I think. Now, that would be splendid. That would out-Budgie goddamned Budgie herself.”

Kiki popped up between my arms and leaned back against the veranda railing, staring up at me, her hand tugging my dress. “Who is Budgie Byrne,” she asked, “and is she really as much trouble as Mrs. Hubert says?”

“You shouldn’t listen to grown-up conversations, sweetie.”

She sucked her ginger ale and made a show of looking around. “I don’t see any other children here, do I?”

She was right, of course. For whatever reason, my generation hadn’t taken up in our parents’ houses in Seaview, as had every generation past, filling the narrow lanes and tennis courts with screaming young children and moody teenagers, with sailboats racing across the cove and Fourth of July floats festooned in contraband impatiens. I could understand why. The things that attracted me back to Seaview every summer—its old-fashionedness, its never-changingness, its wicker furniture and the smell of salt water soaked into its upholstery—were the very things that turned away everyone else. You couldn’t satisfy your craving for slickness and glamour and high living here at the Seaview Club. During Prohibition, the liquor had been replaced by lemonade, and now that the gin and tonic were back in their rightful places, the young people had moved on.

Except me.

So Kiki was the youngest person at the club this evening, and I was the second-youngest, and the two of us stood there on the early-evening veranda, watching the surf come in, with nowhere else to go. I didn’t mind. There were worse places to spend your time. The veranda stretched the full length of the club and wrapped around the sides, with the long drive at one end and the rest of the Seaview Association on the other, cottage after cottage, porch lights winking out to sea. I knew this scene in my bones. It was safety. It was family. It was home.