Page 21 of Summer of '69
It takes Kirby a moment to process this—eleven at night until seven in the morning. Mrs. Bennie is offering her the graveyard shift.Isthat going to be a problem? Kirby quickly calculates. She will get back to Narragansett Avenue in time to eat breakfast with the girls, and then she’ll go to sleep. If she sleeps from eight to two, she’ll still have afternoons to go to the beach and her evenings free. It’s not optimal, but she knows better than to turn this offer down.
“Weekends off?” she asks hopefully.
“Mondays and Tuesdays off,” Mrs. Bennie says. “You’ll leave here Monday morning at seven and return Wednesday night at eleven. The job pays ninety dollars a week.”
Ninety dollars a week! Kirby is appalled at herself for bending to the power of the American dollar, but there’s no denying its allure. She has to give up her weekends, but considering her troubled past, this might not be a bad thing. She has to prove herself worthy; she has to develop a work ethic. Mrs. Bennie is offering Kirby a chance to demonstrate that she’s a responsible adult. Also, with this schedule, she’ll avoid the log jam for the second-floor bathroom, and her parents will have no reason to complain.
Kirby is going to be a front-desk clerk!
“I’ll take it,” she says.
Those Were the Days
She has made a deal with the devil.
She had no choice.
Kate is no stranger to military sacrifice. Wilder died when he was back home on American soil, but Kate knows he never returned from Korea, not really. However, sending a son into battle is different, and Vietnam is a different war. The jungle is nearly impenetrable, the heat murderous, the insects predatory, the swamps thick and green with murk. It’s hard enough to battle the country itself, never mind the ruthlessly immoral Vietcong. They set savage booby traps—punji sticks, snake pits, grenades in a can.
Kate and David had been quietly antiwar since 1965. A paralegal from David’s firm enlisted, and this young man—twenty-two years old—was killed in the Battle of Ia Drang after only a week in-country. Kate had feared that Tiger would enlist as soon as he graduated from high school but he’d halfheartedly enrolled at Framingham State. Now she wishes that he had enlisted; then, at least, he might have had choices. He might have been able to train for a job that kept him off the front lines.
But Tiger took his chances and now he is a grunt, one of thousands. He is expendable.
Kate’s only hope for getting Tiger home quickly—possibly as soon as September—rests with Mr. Crimmins. When Kate wrote to Bill Crimmins to let him know that Tiger had been drafted and wouldn’t be coming to Nantucket that summer, Bill had written back to say that his brother-in-law had served with Creighton W. Abrams in the Battle of the Bulge and that he still corresponded with the general weekly about matters both military and personal. Bill said he would ask his brother-in-law to use his influence with the general to get Tiger out.
But Bill requested a favor in return.
The drama about the television served as good cover for the drama about the boy. Kate glimpses Pick from her bedroom window as she unpacks her suitcase. He’s getting on his bicycle. Kate notes the shape of his shoulders and the golden glint of his hair. She finds she’s trembling.
Kate thought Exalta would prove to be an obstacle to the plan, but that wasn’t the case. Kate had explained the situation to her a few weeks ago—Mr. Crimmins had discovered that Lorraine had a son out in California; Lorraine (now called Lavender) had vanished, and Mr. Crimmins had gone out to fetch the child, but he had no room in his efficiency on Pine Street to house the boy—and Exalta had easily been led to the solution: Bill Crimmins and his grandson would both live in Little Fair.
“It’ll be nice for us to have a man around,” Exalta said. Kate didn’t bother pointing out that David would be coming every weekend; she was simply relieved that Exalta didn’t oppose this new arrangement. In fact, Exalta proceeded to act as though inviting Bill Crimmins and his grandson to stay in Little Fair had beenheridea.
Everything will be okay,Kate tells herself. Bill Crimmins wrote to his brother-in-law last week, just before he and the boy moved in, and he would likely hear back this week or next. Tiger would be plucked from danger as suddenly as he had been dropped into it. He would come home.
Following the boy out of Little Fair is someone else, a young woman. It’sJessie,Kate realizes. The way Jessie stands as she talks to the boy, with her hand on her waist and her hip cocked, looks very mature. Well, Kate thinks, sheisthirteen…today. Poor, sweet Jessie has had to sacrifice her birthday to the task of arriving and settling in. Kate is too addled to do anything more than take everyone to Susie’s for dinner, and that isn’t a birthday ritual but a first-night-on-Nantucket ritual. However, she supposes they can stop at the Island Dairy Bar on the way home for a sundae.
It’s a pathetic effort to celebrate the beginning of her youngest child’s teenage years. Kate decides she’ll make it up to Jessie next week, once things have calmed down. They’ll have dinner, just the two of them, at the Mad Hatter, Jessie’s favorite.
Kate shoves her suitcase to the back of the closet the way she always does, an attempt to avoid thinking about the reality that she will have to pack it up again. She then takes stock of the room, her summer bedroom for as long as she has been alive. She lived here as a little girl, back when America was happy and prosperous; she lived here as a teenager during the Depression, when men from around the island would knock on the door to see if Kate’s parents needed any work done on the house. It was in this era, Kate recalls, that they hired Bill Crimmins to do odd jobs and Lorraine, his daughter, to serve as maid and cook. The Crimminses had moved to Nantucket year-round after Bill lost his job at the textile mill up in Lowell, Mass. Bill’s wife died when Lorraine was a baby.
Kate had lived here as a young wife to Wilder Foley with his manic-depressive disorder, his pathological lies, and his undeniable magnetism. She can remember sitting in the window seat waiting for Wilder to come home on one of the many nights he insisted on staying late at Bosun’s Locker. She’d lived here as the bereft mother of three fatherless children during the awful summer of 1953. Lorraine Crimmins had run off to California, and Kate spent the better part of July and August without anyone to mind the children. She cut out paper dolls with Blair and Kirby; she taught Blair to ride a bicycle on Plumb Lane; she dug holes in the sand at Steps Beach with Tiger, crying behind her giant sunglasses. Next, she had lived here as the wife of David Levin, the Jewish attorney whom Exalta had never accepted despite the fact that he was a good, kind, stable man—as sane and calm as Wilder had been reckless and unpredictable—willing to take on three children not his own and treat them the same way that he treated his own daughter, Jessica. And now Kate is forty-eight years old, an age she only properly feels when she’s in a place that holds all of her different lives together, as this room does.
On the dresser, there’s a photograph of the family taken in the dunes of Steps Beach: Kate and David in the center back row, Blair and Angus on their left, Kirby on their right, and Tiger and Jessie sitting in front. They’re all smiling and glowing with their summer coloring—lighter hair, darker skin. Exalta had enjoyed too many Hendrick’s and tonics that day at lunch and had fallen asleep, missing this excursion to Steps Beach. Kate, frankly, is glad she wasn’t there. This isherfamily;sheis the matriarch. She studies her own face and feels heartbroken at her own naive sense of security.
Those were the days, my friend,we thought they’d never end.
Tiger’s absence is only temporary, Kate tells herself. She will have faith in Bill Crimmins. She will do her best to make the boy feel welcome, and she will be duly rewarded. Mr. Crimmins will find a way to get Tiger home. They will be a family again.
Suspicious Minds
In Boston, the temperature hits eighty degrees, and Blair, just entering her third trimester, has outgrown all of her maternity clothes. She has only one dress that still fits. It looks like a yellow circus tent and yet she has no choice but to wear it every time she leaves the house, which she now does as infrequently as possible. Angus agreed to pay extra to have Savenor’s deliver the groceries and he has held his tongue about the skyrocketing electric bill; Blair keeps the air-conditioning unit running twenty-four hours a day. The apartment feels like the North Pole and still Blair perspires as she sits in front of the television watchingThat Girland eating grilled-cheese sandwiches followed by Hunt’s Snack Pack butterscotch puddings, one after the other.
Instead of seeing Angus’s acquiescence about the extra expenses as kind, Blair understands them as a manifestation of his guilty conscience. He’s unwilling to tell Blair the truth about where he was the day she surprised him at the office; he resolutely maintains he was at a meeting, although the nature of that meeting has changed three times, and he can’t explain why his hair was mussed or his shirt misbuttoned.
Blair also noted a suspicious phone call. She answered the phone in their apartment, and a woman’s cool, melodious voice asked for Mr. Whalen—this when everyone at MIT calls Angus Dr. Whalen or Professor Whalen. Blair acted on her hunch and said, “I’m sorry, he’s not home at the moment. Is this Joanne?” The woman hung up.
One evening in early June, the phone rings and Angus answers the kitchen phone at the same time that Blair picks up the extension next to the bed. She’s lying there in her underwear beneath one thin sheet, morosely waiting for Angus to warm up a TV dinner and deliver it like room service.
