At the moment, and in her present condition, Isobel Fisher did bear an uncommon resemblance to Grandmama Schuyler, who was also longboned and lean, and whose hair had been blond before it turned a rusty, streaked silver. I hadn’t seen my stepsister since the previous night, when she’d stumbled onto dry land, vomited over the grass, and staggered into the house under Joseph’s protection. His arm had held her shoulder, and his face wore an expression of stern pity, mixed with maybe a little remorse. He must have cleaned her up and put her to bed, but you could still read the history of the night before in that wan, tanned skin, in that dull hair, in those lavender half-moons beneath her eyes, which squinted against the sunshine. She wore an immaculate suit of dandelion yellow and a pair of matching shoes, and one hand rested against the doorframe to hold the whole act upright. The other hand contained her white gloves and pocketbook.
“What time does it start?” I asked feebly.
“Eight thirty.” She glanced at her watch. “You’d better hurry. I’ll get the car.”
11.
“THE THING IS, everybody goes,” Isobel called, above the roar of the engine, as we hurtled down the road toward St. Ann’s Episcopal Church at the eastern end of the Island. “If you don’t turn up, they’ll wonder why.”
“I don’t care about that!” I called back.
“You will, believe me.”
She drove wantonly, wastefully, rushing down the straight stretches and then slamming the brakes into the curves, so that the tires of her father’s sleek Plymouth convertible whined and slid against the faded asphalt. All the while, she clutched a cigarette between the first two fingers of her right hand, and along the straightaways she sucked long currents of smoke between her clenched, red lips.
I kept my hands fixed in my lap. The sun packed its heat into the car’s interior—Isobel had put the top up, in order to save our good hats from the draft—and my flesh still glowed from the haste of getting dressed. Underneath the suit and blouse, a trickle of perspiration ran down my left armpit and along my side. The smell of hot leather and cigarettes made me want to vomit. By the time we reached the neat white church, sitting against a field of green and surrounded by cars, I’d begun to feel faint for the first time since that terrible flu in my freshman year at Foxcroft. Isobel slammed to a stop in the grass and I threw open the door to inhale the clean, green-smelling air. The swollen chords of an organ billowed past.
“Damn it all to hell and back again.” Isobel threw her cigarette into the grass and stomped it with her toe. “We’re late.”
We ran across the meadow, holding hands, weaving between cars until we reached the wooden steps of the church and slowed to a reverent pace. Isobel turned in the vestibule and ripped off her glove to fix my hat. By some strange trick of the sunlight, her engagement ring threw a shower of glitter on the wall just above the altar, and all the inhabitants of the packed pews started and turned, searching for the source of this otherworldly fireworks. They found us soon enough.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience, a churchful of well-dressed strangers all staring at you in astonished disapproval. I don’t recommend it. Sometimes, in my nightmares, the image of those faces still returns to me, except I’m naked and grossly pregnant, and Isobel’s left me to face them all alone, instead of clutching my hand in a firm grip—as she did then—and leading me to a pew in the last row, wedged up against the side aisle. The organ tootled on from above, oblivious, and the faces turned away, one by one, because the singing was about to start and none of those great ladies wanted to miss her cue. On Winthrop Island, as I learned, the singing of hymns was a competitive exercise, preferably in a high, godly soprano to reach Heaven itself and—coincidentally—drown out the efforts of both your neighbor and the choir in the small balcony above. (The choir, you understand, had room for just ten members, filled by a ritual of cordial, bitterly contested auditions at the beginning of each summer season.)
As for the men? I don’t know. I don’t think they cared as much. Even so innocent as I then was, I noticed how they kept slipping impious glances at Isobel and me, young and animal, glowing with perspiration in our shapely pastel suits. That space of ours at the end of the pew had lain empty for a good reason, because it stood square in the path of a block of sunlight, and as Isobel flipped hastily through the hymnal I found myself gasping for air once more. The notes and words swam before me. The hymn ended, the blessing began, the congregational responses, and at last—at last—we lowered ourselves to the hard wooden bench and allowed the service to swallow us.
12.
AFTERWARD, THE CONGREGATION gathered in the churchyard and greeted each other in the hot sun. Everybody was so nice. Said such pleasant, vague things about my mother and the wedding yesterday, how they wished Mr. and Mrs. Fisher all the happiness in the world, such a beautiful couple. I realized I must have been entirely mistaken about those hostile expressions at the beginning of the service.
Mrs. Monk invited us over for bridge. “Of course,” said Isobel, kissing her cheek. “I’ll drive Miranda.”
Clay regarded Isobel with a slight frown. “I’d be happy to drive.”
“But we’ll be all squished in front, and I won’t have Miranda in back all by herself.”
“She wouldn’t mind. Would you, Miranda?”
A word or two about Clayton Monk, as he aimed a respectful pair of eyes at me and awaited my reply. At the time, I thought he was too good for Isobel. Not too handsome and dashing and rich, I mean, but too good. She was probably going to ruin him. I thought he had no natural defense against her, no edge at all. I mean, just look at him as he then was, made of pleasant, bland good looks that would inevitably grow red and jowly in middle age, but not before he’d passed them on to a pair of sons, whom he taught to sail. (I could picture them all, father and sons and sailboat.) He wore a double-breasted navy jacket and tan slacks, a white shirt with a crisp collar, a sedate silk tie the color of hydrangeas. Looking at him, you wouldn’t imagine that he’d once spent his days crisscrossing Europe in a B-17 Flying Fortress, dropping bombs all over the place, and that on a nice summer midnight in 1944 he’d crashed said Flying Fortress into a French field, so expertly that only one man was killed, and Clay himself had gotten away with a broken arm and a concussion. Afterward, as I said, he went to Harvard and then Harvard Law School, and he now occupied an office in some blueblood law firm or another, working his way toward the partnership, one dry, passive sentence at a time. Which might sound boring to you and me, but at least he was doing something, wasn’t he? Earning his own living, instead of idling his days atop the Monk department store fortune. Anyway, in the summer of 1951, Clayton Monk was all that was pink and well-scrubbed. Just looking at him made you feel clean, inside and out, like a wholesome breakfast cereal.
I smiled back and said, “I don’t mind a little squishing. My skirt’s all creased anyway.”
13.
ON THE WAY to the Monk estate, which was perched near the eastern tip of the Island, right next to the Winthrop Island Club and exactly opposite to Greyfriars, I asked Isobel whether she’d seen Joseph at church, because I hadn’t.
There was a little silence. “Joseph?” said Clayton, who was driving. “Joseph who?”
Isobel said quickly, “Don’t be silly, Peaches. Of course not.”
“Didn’t you say everybody goes to church on the Island?”
She started to laugh. “Darling, he goes to St. Mary’s, in the village. The Catholic church.”
“Oh, Joseph Vargas,” said Clayton. “I didn’t realize you’d met the locals yet.”
“Yesterday morning. He brought in another lobsterman who’d fallen overboard. And then last night—”