Page 10 of Summer of '69
Blair was offered a glass of Chablis, which she gratefully accepted, and then a celery stick stuffed with salmon cream cheese and topped with paper-thin slices of olive, which she originally declined but then changed her mind and accepted.
She turned to the person next to her, a woman who wore turquoise eye shadow that exactly matched her silk bolero jacket. “Have you read anything interesting lately?” Blair asked. She hoped that this woman—Blair thought she was one of the Joannes—wouldn’t mentionCancer Wardby Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn because Blair had twice tried to read it but found it too bleak.
Maybe-Joanne said, “Oh, please, the only thing I’ve read in the past twelve months isPat the Bunny.”
The very next day, Blair applied to the graduate English program at Harvard. She didn’t say a word to Angus, telling herself it was a lark; she merely wanted to see if she could get in. She received a letter three weeks later—she had been accepted. Classes started in January.
When Angus returned home that night—at quarter to eleven—Blair was awake, waiting for him with a couple of glasses of good scotch that she’d bought to celebrate and the acceptance letter. Angus had been displeased to find Blair still up.
“Whatever it is will have to wait until morning,” Angus said. “I feel an episode coming on.”
“Just read this quickly, please,” Blair said, and she thrust the letter into his hands.
Angus read the letter; there was no change in his expression. “This is lovely news,” he said when he finished it, and Blair clasped her hands to her heart. “But you’re not going to go.”
“What?” Blair said. “But it’s Harvard. I got intoHarvard,Angus.”
“Didn’t you tell me your grandfather went to Harvard?” Angus said. “That probably helped.”
It was all Blair could do not to slap him. “I didn’t mention my grandfather,” she said in a tight voice. But the arrow had hit its mark: Angus didn’t believe Blair could be admitted to Harvard on her own merits. This pointed to a deeper, more disturbing truth: Angus didn’t think Blair was as smart as Blair thought Angus was.
“We agreed you wouldn’t work,” Angus said.
“It’s not work,” Blair said. “It’sschool. Surely you, of all people—”
“Blair,” he said. “We’ve been over this. Now, good night.”
Blair kept the acceptance letter in her lingerie drawer, where she saw it every day. She decided she would revisit the topic with Angus in a few weeks, during the morning hours, on a weekend perhaps, when it was less pressing for Angus to get to the university early. She would make sure he was feeling okay. She would cook corned beef hash with poached eggs, his favorite, and inform him that she was enrolling at Harvard despite his objections. After all, it was 1968; he couldn’t tell her what to do.
They spent their first Thanksgiving at Exalta’s house in Beacon Hill. Blair made Julia Child’s Tarte Normande aux Pommes and presented it proudly to her grandmother, who handed it off to her cook. Exalta then linked her arm through Angus’s and escorted him to the library for cocktails and canapés. At Thanksgiving, Exalta always served cherrystones on the half shell, a relish tray with French dressing, and cocktail peanuts. Blair helped herself to a clam and then a few moments later bolted for the bathroom in the back of the house, the commode the servants used, because she was going to vomit.
A week later, it was confirmed: she was pregnant.
Her dream of attending Harvard would be put on hold. Blair wrote the admissions committee a letter explaining that she found herself with child and would like to defer enrollment until the following year or the year after that. She heard nothing back; probably, they felt they didn’t need to respond because they accepted as a matter of course what Blair could not: she would never attend Harvard.
Indeed, the pregnancy disrupted even the meager routine Blair had established for herself on Commonwealth Avenue. She was absolutelyflattened. Entire days slipped past when she didn’t even leave the apartment. The nausea set in at five in the afternoon, like clockwork. Blair spent at least an hour on her knees in front of the toilet, retching. The only things that kept the nausea at bay were smoking and a small glass of scotch, which was odd because normally Blair drank gin, but her pregnant body craved brown liquor, the older and more complex, the better.
On the day Blair chose to put up the Christmas tree, her mother came over to help. Between the two of them, they managed to wrangle the tree onto the stand, and then Kate went about stringing the lights while Blair collapsed on the divan with a cigarette and two fingers of Glenlivet, willing the nausea to just leave her alone for once. She had invited her mother and David for dinner and planned to serve cheese fondue; she’d painstakingly cubed a loaf of sourdough and sliced some cured sausage, both provisioned that morning from Savenor’s. Angus had called at lunchtime and said he would be working lateagain,and Blair wanted to cancel the dinner altogether, but Kate insisted that Blair needed company, so now Blair could look forward to a lopsided fondue dinner with her parents.
She watched her mother wind the lights around the tree, infinitely patient, careful, thorough, and competent in her task. She wore a dark green shirtwaist and pumps and had pearls at her throat; her blond hair was in a smooth chignon, her lipstick perfect. Kate was always put together, always impeccable. How did she manage it? Blair knew that her mother had suffered dark times. Blair’s father, Wilder Foley, had been fighting in Korea for much of their early marriage, and then when he came home, there were, as Kate put it, “adjustments” to make. Blair remembered her father’s homecoming: They picked him up at the airport; he was wearing his dress uniform. She remembers him at the breakfast table in a white undershirt, smoking and eating eggs, pulling Kate down into his lap and growling at Blair to take her sister and brother upstairs to play. Wilder didn’t drive Blair to school or ballet; her mother did. Her mother prepared their food, administered their baths, read the stories, and tucked them in. Blair remembered one night her parents had gone out for dinner. Her mother wore a red sheath and her father his dress uniform, and Janie Beckett from down the street had come to babysit, which had been a matter of great excitement. Kate had bought Coke to offer Janie, and Blair had sneaked peeks at the three exotic green bottles in the icebox; the Foley children weren’t allowed soda. That night, Janie gave Blair one sip of the Coke; it had been so crisp and spicy and unexpectedly fizzy that Blair’s eyes had teared up and her nose tingled.
She had retained all of those details but relatively little about her own father. And then, suddenly, he was dead. Kate had found Wilder’s body in his garage workshop, a gunshot wound to his head.
On that morning, Blair had been taken to school by her grandfather, which was unusual indeed. When she got home, there had been men at the house, so many men—neighbors, Mr. Beckett (Janie’s father), a swarm of policemen, and, later, bizarrely, Bill Crimmins, the caretaker for the house in Nantucket.
Blair doesn’t remember being told that her father was dead; possibly, she overheard something or just intuited it. Nor does Blair remember her mother screaming or even crying. This struck Blair as unusual only when she was older. When Blair was sixteen, she and Kate had an argument about Blair’s public displays of affection with her boyfriend, Larry Winter, and Blair turned Kate’s composure during this time against her, saying,You didn’t even cry when Daddy died. You didn’t shed one tear!
And Kate had spun on her in an uncharacteristic show of anger.What do you know about it? Tell me please,Blair Baskett Foley. What. Do. You. Know. About. It.
Blair had had to admit that she knew nothing about it, really, and that was true to this day. Kate must have been devastated, haunted, and set adrift by her husband’s unexpected death. Blair was tempted to ask her mother now what it had been like to find him, how she had coped afterward. Blair wondered if she could learn something about her own marriage by asking Kate those questions. But at that moment, her mother held her hands up to showcase the tree. The lights were evenly hung at different depths on the branches in a way that created a glowing, three-dimensional marvel.
“What do you think?” Kate asked.
Blair admired her mother so much, she couldn’t summon words strong enough to praise her. She nodded her approval.
Everyone promised Blair she would feel better during her second trimester, and this proved to be true. The month of April delivered the sweet spot in her pregnancy. The nausea was gone, and the exhaustion had abated somewhat. Blair’s hair was long and shiny; her appetite for both food and sex were prodigious. But Angus was even more distant and remote and he suffered his episodes more frequently. The only days he took off from work, he spent lying in bed, despondent.
On Tuesday, April 8, two days after Easter, Blair woke up and immediately consumed two grilled-cheese sandwiches, a butterscotch pudding, three chocolate-coconut eggs, and a handful of black jellybeans from the Easter basket that Exalta still prepared for all four of her grandchildren even though three of them were adults. It was a glorious spring day, warm for the first time in months. Blair, energized by the sudden sugar rush, decided to walk from their apartment all the way over to the MIT campus and surprise Angus at work. She wore one of her new maternity dresses, a full-term size even though she was only five and a half months pregnant. Her girth was a source of private embarrassment. She wassobig. Exalta had commented on it with disapproval at Easter, and Blair had feared that Exalta might even withhold her Easter basket. Blair had no explanation for her size except that everything about her pregnancy had been extreme—she had beensosick andsotired, and now she wassoenormous. She assumed it meant that the baby would be a strapping, healthy boy—smart like Angus, handsome like Joey, athletic like Tiger.
