Page 41 of Golden Girl
“Youcanstay for the summer,” Savannah says. “I just have to speak to my father in person.”
Mr. Hamilton lives and works in Boston during the week; he arrives on Friday afternoons and leaves on Monday mornings.
“What if that doesn’t work?”
“It always works,” Savannah says.
“But what if itdoesn’t?” Vivi says. “Just give me the plan for the worst-case scenario.”
“Worst-case scenario?” Savannah says. “Listen, my parents never, ever come up here. And they go to bed early. We could just say that you’ve found a place to rent and that every once in a while you sleep over. I’ll take care of cleaning your room, doing the sheets, and whatnot while my mother is at the club—”
“You’re suggesting Ihidehere all summer?” Vivi asks. “Like…likeAnne Frank?”
This makes them both laugh—but is it really funny, and is Vivi really so far off base?
After spending a few days on Nantucket—lounging on Nobadeer Beach, driving around town in Savannah’s bare-bones Jeep (no top, no doors, no back seat), riding a couple of the old Schwinns in the garage out to Sconset to see the first bloom of the climbing roses, dancing all night at the Chicken Box—Vivi is ready to consider the hidden refugee plan.
When Mr. Hamilton shows up on Friday afternoon, still in his pin-striped business suit—he’s the managing partner in a big law firm on State Street—the household becomes far more festive. Mr. Hamilton makes his famous frozen margaritas and they drink them while sitting at a table by the pool.
“How are you liking Nantucket?” Mr. Hamilton asks Vivi.
“I love it,” she says. “I never want to leave.”
“Ah, but leave you must,” Mrs. Hamilton says. “Monday, yes? Have you booked your ferry?”
“Can’t Vivi stay a few more days?” Savannah asks. “Please?”
“A few more days won’t hurt,” Mr. Hamilton says, filling enormous tulip-shaped glasses from the blender.
“You’ve both clearly forgotten that Patrick and Deborah are coming with the children,” Mary Catherine says. She offers Vivi a close-lipped smile. “My brother, his second wife, their blended family of six children. I’m afraid there won’t be an inch of extra space.”
Vivi mumbles, “Excuse me,” and slips away from the table. The margarita is churning in her stomach. Patrick and Deborah and their six kids are family and Vivi is not. She has to go. Bromley follows Vivi into the house—he has become her devotee this week, always at her heels, and she has to shoo him away so she can close the powder-room door.
Of all the rooms in this remarkable house, the downstairs powder room is the one Vivi loves the most. The walls are plastered from floor to ceiling with framed snapshots of the Hamilton family on Nantucket. There must be over two hundred pictures, and Vivi has spent a long time studying them. Most are from when Savannah was growing up. There are photos taken on the beach, on sailboats, at picnics, on the tennis court, in the pool, at the Fourth of July festivities on Main Street; there’s a picture of Savannah’s old dachshund, Herman Munster, lying across the sofa in the library. There are pictures of a younger Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton hugging, kissing, hoisting cocktails. Vivi has scrutinized each photograph like a detective looking for clues.
Now, she scans the wall for people who might be Patrick and Deborah or Patrick and his first wife.
There’s a knock on the door: Savannah. “Are you okay? Please don’t hate me. This is all my fault.”
Itisall Savannah’s fault. Who invites someone to spend the summer at her parents’ house withoutchecking with them first?Savannah knew the family rule about houseguests and yet made no mention of it. She led Vivi to believe that this Nantucket life could, for one summer, be hers. This wouldn’t be so bad if Vivi hadn’t fallen so completely, irrevocably in love with the island and all its wonders.
“I’ll be right out,” Vivi says in a carefree, singsong voice.
She studies the Hamilton family picture that is right above the light switch. It’s of Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton and Savannah when Savannah is seventeen or eighteen, so maybe the summer before Duke, which was the summer that Vivi spent every waking moment with Brett Caspian. The Hamiltons are at a bonfire on the beach; they’re all end-of-summer tan, and Savannah appears to be shoving the last bite of a hot dog into her mouth.
Vivi’s and Savannah’s lives could not have been more different that summer, but since then their lives have converged, and now, four years later, they are best friends. Change happens in an instant—one girl offers another her bottle of Breck shampoo, and a friendship is formed.
Vivi has money in the bank. She can use some of it to rent a room and buy a secondhand bike. She can get a job. She can stay here on her own.
She will stay, she decides. Somehow, some way, she will make this island hers. She will become a Nantucketer. Twenty or thirty years from now, she will be able to tell the story of how she refused to overstay her welcome at the Hamiltons’ and so she forged her own way.
Between us,she imagined saying to friends,it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It was the defining moment of my life.This week has been about more than Vivi from Ohio being exposed to wealth and privilege. It has been about Vivi finding a home.
And someday, she tells herself, she will have a powder room just like this one—with pictures of her and her husband and their children, all of them smiling in gratitude at their own good fortune.
Well!Vivi-in-the-sky thinks. She had forgotten the intensity of her emotion when she’d learned she would have to leave the Hamiltons back in June of 1991. Savannah has never forgiven herself; she has apologized at least a hundred times over the years.
Vivi succeeded. She stayed on Nantucket and created a life and family. How that happened is a memory for a different night.
