Page 22 of The Summer Club
“Are you sure?” Charley ran a hand through his graying hair. “They’ve got to be pretty upset,” he said. “Shouldn’t we sit tight and try to talk to them, again?”
Cora scowled. She’d tried. While Charley slept. “Give me a hand making sandwiches. We’re going to the beach.”
By 1:30, with the sun high overhead, her hopes were dashed. Cora and Charley sat on the sand under one of the three umbrellas they’d gone to the difficulty of digging holes for and setting up, the large picnic basket unopened at their feet. “I’m getting kind of hungry,” Charley said, reaching for the lid.
She swatted his hand. “Not yet.”
It was ridiculous, she knew. A complete charade, this playacting their way through the day like business as usual. As though they could save their beloved family vacation, and thereby, just maybe, themselves. But she was not willing to give it up yet.
“They need time,” Charley said, reaching over for her hand and then for the picnic basket lid again. This time she did not swat him away. When he handed her a ham and cheese sandwich she took it. So she’d have the traditional first-day-of-vacation beach picnic without them. They’d come around.
As he tore into his sandwich, and the seagulls circled overhead, Cora studied her husband’s profile from under the brim of her straw hat. Charley was everything his overprotective mother, Tish, had always proclaimed him to be. Honorable. Loyal. A kind and decent man who had reached out to Cora and fallen in love with her, despite her swollen belly that cradled another man’s babies. Charley, who Cora had bumped into many times as her boyfriend Robert’s roommate, but whom she’d barely noticed. A man who’d never have seized her attention in a crowded party, as Robert had.
As she looked out at the ocean, her mind drifted back in time to Robert. She was a junior at Vassar and he a senior when they met; they could not have been more different. Robert, a native Californian to her sleepy Midwestern background, was as magnetic in charm as he was in his movie-star looks. She’d spied him at a few parties her own roommate had dragged her to, always from a distance, always surrounded by pretty girls and boisterous guys. Robert was vocal and funny, the center of any spirited conversation, with firm convictions on everything from politics and the news to free love. Ideas she found fascinating, just as she was fascinated by his confidence in sharing them. Cora was an only child raised in a quiet, religious household where dinner conversations centered around her marks in school or the intricacies of running the shoe store her father owned. Growing up in a small, rural community where church events were the center of town life, she’d been raised to smile politely and listen and to wait her turn in the potluck line. Her future, as her father saw it, was to get married and work in the shoe store, which he would hand down to her husband. A future as bleak, to Cora, as one of her high school art paintings she’d titled Storm Cloud: a swirl of gray and dark umber acrylic on canvas. Her “artsy pictures”—as her father called the paintings and charcoal sketches she labored over—were a mere hobby. Nothing practical; nothing with a future. But her mother had other ideas. Quiet ideas that bloomed privately within her and were shared in whispers with Cora when her father was at work. “You have a vision,” her mother told her. Cora was never sure if she meant the canvases themselves or the future Cora dared imagine. Regardless, her mother was how Cora had ended up applying to schools in the Northeast: liberal arts schools, where Cora could escape the confines of her dreary childhood town and stretch her legs and her ideas in the wider world.
Getting an art scholarship and going away to college at Vassar had been a personal dream, but meeting a guy like Robert had been a private awakening. In their small pond of Vassar Robert was a whale; he was the popular radio personality of their small college station. Tuned into WVKR, just about every girl on campus went to sleep with Robert’s velvety voice in her ear, and many claimed to dream of him. To a reserved late bloomer like Cora, he was the ticket to a slice of life she’d never experienced. One night, as Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” rolled across the crowd at a campus dance, Robert crossed the floor and took her hand. “Dance with me.” He didn’t ask her name, but Cora already knew who he was. Pressed against his chest, hips swaying to Andy’s vibrato, Cora fell into a daze. By the end of the dance, he knew her name and her phone number. And Cora knew he liked to French kiss.
Robert took her to plays and protests and parties. On Robert’s arm, Cora felt both sexy and smart. No longer a shy small-town girl from Ohio whose parents ran a shoe store. For the whole of her junior year Robert wooed her, and she let him. Why not? There was a line of girls across the quad who’d have jumped at the chance and Cora felt it was her turn. To be not just noticed, but seen.
“You are the sexiest woman I’ve ever met,” Robert whispered to her that first night at the mixer in the college house. “And I’m going to make you feel like it.” He had done exactly what he promised, and despite their breathless six-month-long love affair, Robert did what she should have known he’d do all along: he grew bored and left her for a redheaded freshman interning at the radio station. When she found out she was pregnant, a month later, Cora traipsed from the campus infirmary straight to his dormitory door. Robert did not answer, nor did his roommate, Charley. Rather, a girl pulled the door open; not the redheaded freshman, she noted with detached amusement.
“We need to talk,” Cora said, looking over the girl’s shoulder to where Robert sat at his desk.
As soon as he learned the reason for her visit, Robert sat a long while in silence. And then, in the same velvety tones he used to sign off on the radio station each night, he questioned how she could be sure the pregnancy was his. Cora was floored.
They argued bitterly, but she did not cry. She refused to cry.
In the end, Robert told her it didn’t matter: he wasn’t interested in becoming a father. Not then and not with her. If she wished to have the child, she was on her own.
Cora had not wished to have the baby, at least not then. She was in a state of shock herself and was desperate for another person to weigh in. Especially hoping that other person would be the father. But it was clear Robert was not who she’d thought he was, nor was he ever going to be.
Afterward, Cora wandered across campus in a daze. She did not notice the storm clouds brewing overhead. Nor did she feel the first pelts of rain against her face. Instead, tentative hand on her belly, she kept walking until she reached a park bench outside the library. It was where Charley found her.
When Charley stopped to ask if she’d like to borrow his umbrella, she looked up at him in confusion; she’d not even noticed it was raining.
Charley held his red umbrella over her head and insisted on walking her back to her dorm, out of the cold, wet weather. Cora did not want to go and face her roommate or the phone in the hall, where she would soon have to call her parents back in Ohio with the news, but there was nowhere else to go. Back in her dorm, she was relieved to see her roommate was out. And suddenly exhausted. Still soaked, she left the door ajar and headed straight for her bed, where she collapsed in a fit of tears, unable to keep them in any longer.
Charley did not shrink away from the outpouring. Nor did he duck out. Instead, with quiet gestures, he draped a blanket across her narrow shoulders and heated the tea kettle on the hot plate in the corner. Moments later, he handed her a cup of hot cocoa.
Cora stopped crying and accepted the cup. She did not know why her ex-boyfriend’s roommate was being so kind, but she didn’t question it. The hot cocoa was warm and comforting. She sipped it gratefully and managed a smile.
Charley looked relieved “Better?” he asked.
But Cora could not answer. A wave of nausea rolled through her. The hot chocolate rumbled in her stomach. She’d barely had time to run down the hall to the bathroom.
When she returned, running the back of her hand against her lips, Charley looked up at her with startled concern.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
Now sitting on the beach these forty-five years later, she took a bite of the ham and cheese sandwich and let her gaze fall on her husband’s hand as he set it upon her own. Charley’s hands were capable if not beautiful. The sandwich felt gummy in her mouth, and tasteless. Cora swallowed hard. Her kids would come around. She’d explain herself and they’d come around. They had to.
Andi
There were four empty stools at the Chatham Squire bar, and before Andi could slide onto one Hugh had already signaled the bartender. “Four shots of Patrón and the cocktail menu, please.”
“Wait, whoa,” Sydney said, sitting down to Andi’s right. “I’m not doing a shot in the middle of the morning.”
“Then I’ll have yours.” Hugh took the cocktail menu from the bartender and slid it across the wooden counter in her direction. “But you’d better pick something. This conversation requires booze.”