Elin Hilderbrand - Summer People

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Tell me then,” Winnie said. She stared at her plate, then to prove to Marcus that she could do it, she devoured her potato until the empty brown skin sagged like an old shoe.

Marcus dragged the last slice of steak through the juices and popped it into his mouth. When he’d left the dinner table earlier that evening, he’d gone up to his room, pulled out his legal pad and tried to write, but nothing happened. He groaned at the memory of the five hundred squandered dollars and the items he now owned in their place. The spent money was a shackle on his creative spirit. Now the writing felt like a job at Mc-Donald’s-he had to do it to earn money! He closed his eyes and conjured the face of Ms. Marchese, her full Italian lips painted dark purple. You’re a gifted writer, Marcus. He’d even considered opening his mother’s letter, thinking it might give him a place to start other than with the blood-splattered sheet, dead bodies in your own apartment . There was far more to the story than Zachary Celtic knew. But just looking at his mother’s handwriting on the envelope pissed Marcus off. How could you? You killed them! Before he went to bed, he wrote one line at the top of his tablet: “My mother is a murderer.”

Now here he was being egged on to write the next sentence. Only this time by Winnie, and she wasn’t paying him thirty thousand dollars. The murders: How? When? Why? He felt his eyes drooping closed in defense, even though the reason he came downstairs was because he couldn’t sleep. Maybe if he started slowly, it would come to him. “My mother killed her sister-in-law, Angela Bennett, and Angela’s daughter Candy. My uncle Leon has basically killed himself, but you could hold Mama responsible for that one, too.”

“Why did she kill them?” Winnie said. “Do you know why?”

“Well, the newspapers made it sound like she woke up one morning and decided to kidnap and kill people, but it wasn’t like that.”

This much Winnie knew. Her father hated the newspapers. He even went so far as to suspend their delivery of the New York Times ; Winnie hadn’t seen a single edition the whole time leading up to the trial-until the day her father’s obituary came out. Arch used to rant, They’re making her out to be a monster! The most esteemed paper in the country and they aren’t reporting the facts! Thankfully, Danforth was a liberal school. Most teachers and kids thought Arch was doing the right thing. The death penalty is abominable, inhumane , everyone said out loud. Still, Winnie sensed a lack of understanding because murder was also abominable and inhumane and Constance Tyler was guilty of murder. She could almost hear everyone’s unspoken thoughts: How did Arch Newton get involved in this mess?

“What was it like?” Winnie asked. She wanted details so badly, but she was embarrassed to pry. She turned her attention to finishing what was left on her plate.

Because Winnie wasn’t looking right at him, demanding an explanation, Marcus felt okay to speak. “First you need to know who Angela Bennett is. Angela Bennett was married to my uncle Leon, my mother’s older brother.”

Winnie nodded, head down. She had only two bites of steak remaining.

“Uncle Leon and Angela were married for twenty years.”

“I didn’t know that,” Winnie said. She was mortified to find this surprised her. But why? Lots of black people were married for that long and longer. She needed to get in touch with reality. As Arch used to say, The world includes more than Park Avenue and Nantucket.

“They met in the seventies. At a party somewhere. Angela was white, Italian, and her parents had some money. Not a lot of money… not like you people… but some money. Except Angela’s father disowned her when he found out she was marrying Leon.”

“Because he was black?” Winnie asked. “That is so backwater.”

Marcus waited until Winnie finished her last two bites and then he cleared their dishes. Doing something with his hands made talking easier.

“It was the seventies,” he said. “Everyone was supposed to be in tune with civil rights, but nobody was.”

“So what happened next? The father disowned her…”

“And she moved into my grandmother’s apartment with Leon. My mother was a senior in high school.”

“Our age,” Winnie said.

“Yeah. And she told me about the weird stuff that happened when they all lived together. Like one time my mother woke up in the middle of the night and Angela was sitting on the end of her bed staring at her.”

“What do you mean, ‘staring at her’?”

“She was just staring at her. It really freaked my mother out. She thought from the beginning that Angela was bad news. But then, a while later, my mother found out that Angela was into drugs and the reason she was in my mother’s room was because she had lifted money and jewelry and stuff from my mother’s dresser. Angela and Leon basically robbed my grandmother of everything she had and spent it on smack. Somehow Angela accessed my grandmother’s savings account and emptied it. My mother’s college money. That was why she only stayed a year at Princeton. Angela spent Mama’s college money on drugs for her and Uncle Leon.”

“Your mother must have been angry,” Winnie said.

“That was only the beginning,” Marcus said. Oh, was it ever. He washed the plates and left them to dry in the rack, then he turned off the light over the sink and came back to the table and sat next to Winnie. The kitchen was dark now and they could hear the sound of the waves through the open window. Marcus lowered his voice.

“Angela was like a disease in the house, my mother said. She basically caused my grandmother to die of a heart attack, and once my grandmother was dead, Angela and Uncle Leon kicked Mama out of the apartment. But she said she was glad to go. She married my father a little while later and then I was born.”

“It must have been the proudest day of your mother’s life,” Winnie said.

Marcus smiled sadly. “Except my mother never wanted to be young and married with a child. She wanted a career, you know, something better.” This was easy for Marcus to understand but difficult to swallow. What his mother had dreamed of her whole life was something other than Bo Tyler, Marcus, and LaTisha. Constance was the smartest person Marcus knew-she had a near-perfect score on her SATs, a fact she’d reminded Marcus of since he was in the ninth grade. She used words like “egregious” and “polemic.” She did the puzzle in the back of the Times magazine. Once Marcus was old enough to understand how smart she was, he began to wonder what she was doing still living in Queens. In his earliest memories, Constance’s favorite topic of conversation was what her life could have been like. Her year at Princeton had taken on a romantic shimmer that Marcus was pretty sure hadn’t existed at the time-the tailgate parties, the eating clubs, the fireplaces in the living suites that they kept lit as they studied for finals. One of Constance’s English professors reading aloud from a paper Constance had written on James Baldwin. Constance had sung madrigals in Latin and Italian and French. She ran the one-hundred-meter hurdles for the track team in the spring.

From his father, Marcus also knew a few of the less glamorous details. His mother had a work-study job in the dining hall that required her to wear high rubber boots and long rubber gloves and spend fifteen hours a week scraping trays and loading an industrial dishwasher with a crew of university-employed food service workers, all of whom were black women from Trenton. Marcus learned that Constance had initially been assigned to a living suite with a girl from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who pitched such a fit about having a Negro roommate that Constance was moved, for her own good, the dean of students said, to a living suite with twin girls from Pakistan. But to hear Constance tell it, if it hadn’t been for Angela and Leon, her life would have been a cake walk. It would have meant a real career as a college professor; it would have meant a brownstone apartment in Manhattan filled with books and leather furniture. It would have meant a husband, possibly even a white husband, who sat on boards and took her to the symphony.