Page 19 of The Summer Club
Despite the heaviness in her heart, Tish smiles to herself; if only her own mother-in-law could see her now. Protecting the Darling family lineage. The “anyone but her” girl their son had tragically fallen in love with, who they’d seen as unworthy of both Morty and the family name. Who’d been an embarrassment to them all, but now held the keys to their once magnificent kingdom. Oh, how her mother-in-law would hate it. She’d spin in her grave!
Tish decides she best unpack as she waits for her dinner. Her suite at Chatham Bars Inn is its own brand of coastal New England luxury. It is not the Ritz or the Savoy, and it does not endeavor to be. Set atop the highest point of Chatham’s Shore Road and framed by sapphire sky and emerald dune, the great Atlantic view is the crown jewel. The resort does not need to try harder.
Tish knows how lucky she is to have gotten a reservation at the high point of the summer season, and she wishes she could sink into the downy recesses of the oversized four-poster and relax. But she can’t.
At the dresser she slides her rings down her narrow fingers and deposits them into the small velvet jewelry case Morty gifted her all those years ago. From her wrists, the Cartier watch and her three signature gold bangles, stopping only at the diamond tennis bracelet. That one she never takes off.
She changes into silk pajama pants and stares out the bay window. Such a strange feeling it is being back here. The Cape had always been Morty’s place. From the beginning it was his vision for their family, his escape. But not for her. A lifelong urbanite, the flat ocean expanse alarmed her. So bottomless, so endless; and Lord knew what creatures lurked beneath. “All that fresh ocean air,” her mother once joked, not very kindly, when Tish returned to Yonkers and told them about the little Massachusetts shack Morty had discovered on their trip. It had been an excessively humid day in the city, the cramped apartment veritably humming with body heat. The family had crowded into the living room upon hearing Tish and her new husband arrive to visit, the younger ones eager to learn about their trip to Nantucket and the Cape. Their family never left the city of Yonkers unless it was to go to the boroughs of New York City.
Her mother had served them iced tea, her smile tight. It was then Tish noticed the silver serving tray. The tray was a family heirloom brought from Ireland. It was also something she never once used in Tish’s entire childhood. Not for Christmas or Thanksgiving. Its place was on the wall in the kitchen, as decoration; “real silver,” their mother always told the children. Tish glanced at the kitchen wall where the outline of it was impressed upon the paint, the silhouette a slightly darker pigment of the wall color, and filled with shame. “The tea is delicious!” Morty proclaimed. Tish could not bring herself to take a sip.
Her little sisters crowded them, questions trilling from their mouths like small birds. Tish tried to make conversation, to show her appreciation. But she couldn’t focus on anything beyond the oiled edges of Morty’s wingtips. The greasy smell of boiling chicken; the basket of wet laundry waiting by the door to be hung. She stared at her hands.
Before she could stop him, Morty told her family about Riptide. With sweeping gestures and wide eyes he regaled them with the romantic details that suddenly sounded foolish. How they’d stumbled across the cottage. How they’d bought it the next day. And how he’d named it Riptide, after her.
Her mother’s eyes widened. “You bought a house? Just like that?”
The children were excited, her father listened with a wary expression. When Morty was finished, Tish tried to reel some of his excitement back in from the room. “It’s just a little thing,” she demurred. “In the middle of nowhere, really.” She did not want to seem like she was boasting. Her parents had not raised her like that. But even as the words tumbled from her freshly painted lips, she realized it was not a little thing, this having a second house situation she found herself in. She glanced around and her cheeks burned: the tiny cottage she was downplaying was the same size as her family’s apartment, where all nine of them had lived.
“It has a great ocean view out the back!” Morty said.
No one said anything. From outside came the sound of a horn over the rumbling of traffic. Finally, her mother had lifted her moist collar away from her throat and gazed at her daughter. “All that fresh ocean air. How ever will you survive?”
Tish realized how she looked to them now and burned with shame. Her mother had always been a practical and busy woman, short on affection, but it seemed whatever ease shared between them had hardened since her marriage to Morty. Tish had mistakenly thought it would make her mother happy. After all, she was doing exactly what her mother had always wanted: marry a nice man! Have a house of your own! She’d even thought her parents would be relieved by what Morty was able to give her. Things they had never had themselves: financial stability, a beautiful home, security. But her marriage had had the opposite effect; instead, it had cast her in an unrecognizable light. They looked upon Tish now as they would a stranger.
“This is so pretty,” her sister Amelia said as she reached up to touch Tish’s candy straw hat. As Tish caught her hand, she felt her father’s eyes on her. He too was staring at the hat.
“Where did you get it?” he asked.
Tish swallowed hard. Her father was a hatter. He recognized it for what it was: an expensive import. Finer than anything produced in his factory. “It was a gift. From Morty’s mother.”
Morty, not understanding, had smiled broadly. “Why, yes! My parents just returned from abroad. They picked it up in Greece. Doesn’t Tish look lovely in it?”
Her father’s eyes traveled from the brim of the hat down to her own, then away.
The hat probably cost more than he made in an entire month of wages at the hat factory.
“We should go,” Tish said, rising suddenly.
Her mother did not try to stop her. Morty seemed confused, but followed obligingly.
When they left, she stood outside on the landing catching her breath. “Too hot, sweetheart?” Morty retrieved a crisp monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket. He was so polite, so genuine with her family. He would never understand why they did not warm to him. The unbridgeable differences between them were something he couldn’t seem to see.
“Yes, too hot,” she lied, dabbing her forehead with his handkerchief.
From that visit on, Tish made excuses, or cited headaches or busy schedules whenever Morty asked about her family. They did not visit her parents again together at the apartment.
Now as she looks out the window at the harbor, she laughs sadly to herself. How had she, a girl who didn’t even know how to swim, ever shed her urban skin and embraced the wilds of the Cape? For Morty. Because he loved it so.
Having spent his life traversing the starched-collar margins of boarding schools and cityscapes and familial expectations, the barren beaches and scrubby landscape of Cape Cod were where Morty Darling was most himself. To love him was to fall in love with the Cape.
Cora
My family is falling apart right in front of my eyes and I can’t do a damn thing about it.
Cora slipped silently from the bed while Charley slept on. She glanced back at her husband, doused in slumber and the dim light of early morning, before she took her bathrobe from the back of the door and tiptoed out into the hall. Unlike her spirits, the hallway was already filled with morning sun. Cora blinked at its audacity. She stood a moment, very still, listening for sounds of anyone else stirring, just like she used to when the kids were young. How many times had she stood outside these very doors over the summers spent here, both night and day, tiptoeing out of bedrooms after the last (and hundredth!) good night kiss? Slinking silently past their doorways to her own, hoping not to wake them. Hugh was always such a light sleeper and Andi too. How she stressed if anyone roused because it would be hours before she could get them back down to sleep. But not Sydney, she remembers. Syd was the heaviest sleeper of them all, even more than her father. Cora used to ascribe it to her being the youngest raised in a noisy house. A fresh plume of sadness bloomed in Cora’s chest: maybe it wasn’t because Sydney was the youngest. Maybe it was because Sydney was Charley’s real daughter.
No one else seemed to be awake yet, so she took the steep staircase gingerly. Her knee ached on humid mornings. Charley teased her about it; called her the barometer. Swore it could predict the weather accordingly.