Page 23 of The Last Book Party

“Indeed, and we feel so betrayed. Do we not?”

Lane was singing along; it was Bonnie Raitt.

“We? Are you using the royal we now?” I asked.

“Most certainly not,” Malcolm said. “We all miss you, pine for you helplessly. Don’t we, Jeremy?”

My stomach twisted. I was caught off guard by the news of Jeremy’s presence. I heard their muffled voices. Malcolm must have had his palm over the receiver.

“Scratch that. I spoke too hastily,” Malcolm said, his voice now clear. “Jeremy does not pine for you helplessly, which would be a silly indulgence. He has just informed me he will see you before summer’s end.”

I stepped outside, walking as far as the phone cord would allow.

“He will?” I asked.

“Yes, apparently your mutual friend has invited our young wunderkind to Henry and Tillie’s book party.”

So Franny would be returning for Labor Day weekend. I couldn’t help hoping that he was coming to see me, even if his complete lack of communication clearly suggested otherwise. Would he bring Lil? I cursed myself for feeling jealous.

“It’s a legendary party,” Malcolm continued. “I went once,but haven’t been on the guest list in years, which is probably my own fault, but nevertheless a shame, considering the concentration of literary talent there.”

I saw my opening.

“I might be able to finagle you an invitation, but you’ll have to return the favor.…”

Malcolm whistled. “I hear you loud and clear, sister.”

When I went back upstairs, Henry was writing in longhand on a yellow legal pad. Picking up my research notes as if looking for my place, I said, “So, have you thought about inviting Malcolm to the book party?”

Henry stopped writing and looked up. “That scoundrel? Why would I do that?”

“Because Malcolm is all about good manners,” I said slowly. “He knows his delays are bad form, and he wouldn’t dare show up without your edited chapters.”

Henry pursed his lips and then broke into a big, appreciative smile, which made me feel surprisingly good. “Consider it done,” he said, with a wink. “And thank you.”

I went back downstairs and called Jessica Blanken. I asked her to convey the invitation and to put reminders in Malcolm’s calendar to edit the manuscript and bring it to Truro on Labor Day weekend.

18

It was raining the next day, so instead of taking my lunch outside on the back porch, as I usually did, I settled into an armchair in a corner of the living room to eat my turkey and cheddar sandwich. A wicker basket by the chair held a pile of old magazines, covers curled by the humidity. I grabbed an issue ofYankee Magazine, a surprising find in Henry and Tillie’s house, as it was a far cry fromThe New YorkerorThe New York Review of Books.

I’d never readYankee Magazinebut I had the impression it was the magazine for people who crocheted potholders and went by bus on fall foliage tours. I flipped through the pages, reading the captions on a spread about the covered bridges of the Connecticut valley and on the photographs accompanying a long profile of a straight-jawed boatbuilder from Bar Harbor. He and his wife were tall, thin, and clean-cut. They reminded me of the grown-ups in the Robert McCloskey books I’d read as a kid—men who wore button-down shirts and khaki pants while driving old motorboats and women who wore shirtwaist dresses to pick blueberries.

Then I turned the page to discover a full-page column, “My Pamet,” by “Tillie Sanderson, poetess and Cape Cod resident.”Surprised, I flipped back to the cover of the magazine, which was from September 1982. When I gathered the rest of the magazines from the basket and stacked them on my lap, I discovered they were all from the early eighties and that each featured a column by Tillie. The oldest was from May 1980. I decided to start there.

I was immediately taken with the tone of the writing, which was as accessible as Tillie’s poems were not. The first column described a spring walk along the abandoned railroad track from the Corn Hill Beach parking lot to Pamet Harbor. Layered in with Tillie’s descriptions of walking through the scratchy wildflowers, the water of the incoming tide sparkling “bright and cold” as it flowed between the rocks of the jetty, were reminiscences—snippets, really—of Tillie’s childhood, far from the ocean in a tough, working-class neighborhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

In clear, beautiful prose, each column chronicled a single walk—down Ballston Beach to Brush Hollow, through the cranberry bog to the ocean, out by the cemetery off Old County Road—and each column revealed a little more of the hard life Tillie had left behind. A father who couldn’t hold down a job, a mother who reserved her scant affections for her sons. An “unimaginative” family whose reading rarely extended further than the comics pages of theScranton TribuneorReader’s Digestand who scoffed at Tillie’s interest in poetry. The escape of a scholarship to Bryn Mawr College and a move to Manhattan.

An hour later, I had finished the columns. My turkey sandwich half-eaten, I sat in the empty living room, the pile of magazines in my lap, marveling at how Tillie had managed to put into words so much of what I loved about being in Truro. She described how the splendor made her—and me—feel closer to believing that our futures would be as magnificent as the landscape around us. She wrote with a lover’s eye for detail about “the throaty roar of thesea,” the tumble of foam when the waves rolled in, the barely noticeable scent of a slick of blue fish approaching the shore.

I returned the stack of magazines to the wicker basket and listened to the rain drumming on the roof. Tillie seemed to have grown used to my presence in that she often didn’t feel compelled to acknowledge my existence. When we crossed paths in the kitchen while she was pouring herself a cup of coffee or grabbing a handful of the almonds she kept in a bowl in the refrigerator, more often than not she didn’t say a word. Her columns, though, renewed my hope that we might find common ground.

19

Right before leaving that afternoon, I finally got up the nerve to ask Tillie about her columns. I found her rooting around in the armoire by the front door, mumbling about what a mess it was. I asked if she needed help. Without taking her head out, she said, “Only if you can conjure a goddamn umbrella.” I’d seen one that morning outside the kitchen door and went and got it.

“Here you go,” I said.

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