The Summer People

On the second Saturday in August, Bea cooked for three days and the house was opened from the front parlor to the west terrace, and sixty people came to Coldbrook, and I was one of the people who carried things.

The Ashcombes came first, because they were the ones the party was for, although nobody would have said so. Corinne Ashcombe was sixty, a widow for eleven years, and her money was old and in land, and she shook my hand the way a person shakes a hand they were told to shake. Her daughter was named Blaire.

Blaire Ashcombe was twenty-six and had been beautiful since she was fourteen, and she had the manner of a woman who has never once been the least interesting person in a room and has no plans to start now. She wore a white dress and a thin gold bracelet, and she drank two glasses of wine in the first hour and put nothing in her mouth after that, which I noticed because I was the one going around with the plates.

Nobody my age was there except the two girls who came up from the village to serve, and Bea’s granddaughter, who made a game out of it.

He wanted Mila there. He brought her down at seven in a blue dress Bea had made her wear, and she stood at his elbow for an hour and said her yes ma’ams, and then at eight he told her she could go, and she went to find Otto and did not come back.

At twenty past eight Blaire Ashcombe handed her a glass to take inside.

She did it the way a person hands a coat to a doorman. She did not look at Mila when she did it. She said, “Would you take that in for me, sweetheart,” and when Mila had gone she turned back to the woman beside her and said, “She is very good at that.”

I was six feet away with a tray. I set the tray down and went after Mila and took the glass out of her hand at the door and drank what was in it myself and said, “Go find Otto,” and she went.

That is all. It was one sentence from one woman at a party, and I have heard worse. It was the first time I understood what Blaire Ashcombe thought Mila was for, and understanding a thing early has saved me money more than once.

At nine the talk on the terrace turned to him, the way water finds the low place in a field.

“He is thirty-nine,” said the man who handled the land. “Men like that marry late or they do not marry, and either way the property stays in one piece.”

“He has the child,” Corinne Ashcombe said. “That is what he has.”

“Then he will have to have a wife.”

“He will,” she said, and she said it the way a person reads out a figure they have already checked.

Nobody said the daughter’s name. That is how you knew. I stood at the end of the terrace with an empty tray and listened to four people arrange a man’s life, and then I went to the kitchen for more ice, and when I came back they were talking about a bridge.

Madame Ines came at ten.

She was a woman in a black shawl with rings on eight fingers, hired out of Geneva for the evening, and she sat at a small table under the lanterns with two candles on it and read hands for money. It was a party game. Blaire sat down first, and Madame Ines took her hand and told her she would travel by water, and that a tall man would come back into her life, and that her line was long. Blaire laughed the way you laugh when you are being told exactly what you paid to hear.

Bea sent me over at eleven with a plate.

I set it down and said the plate was for her, and while I was telling her where the kitchen kept the salt she reached out and took my left hand out of the air the way you take a tool off a bench.

She turned it over. She put her thumb along my palm.

“You do not sleep,” she said. “And you never have, not since you were small.”

“That is every waitress in the county,” I said.

“You were raised in a house where the price of everything was written down in a book. Bread. Shoes. The doctor’s visits. You were on the list.”

I did not say anything.

“That is the life line,” she said, and she ran her thumbnail along it. “It is a clean line. It was cut once and it healed straight.”

Then she stopped and held my hand a moment longer and looked at it the way a mechanic looks at a part that does not match the diagram.

“Somebody has been keeping you,” she said. “Kept, and counted. And not for your sake.”

“I have no family left,” I said. I put that sentence away with the other things she said that evening, and I told myself she had made it up out of the shape of my hands, and I have never entirely believed that either.

“The water side,” she said, and she let my hand go, and she was already smiling again. “The water lines lie. They always have.”

I asked who had hired her. She said the house had. I asked what the house was paying and she told me, and it was high for a party but not for what she was doing, and I went back to the kitchen and carried dishes for another hour.

The last car went at one, and I sent the girls from the village home and did the rest myself. At ten past two there were two people in the kitchen: myself at the sink, and a woman in a black shawl sitting on the stool by the stove with a plate on her knees.

She ate with her left hand, the way she had all night. Under the lanterns I had put that down to the rings.

Then she reached up and took the wig off and set it on the counter, and it was him, and he kept eating. He had come up the back stairs at eight and sat in the booth the rest of the night; the shawl was from a theater box in the attic and the rings were Bernice’s mother’s; the woman who was supposed to read palms had come at seven, gone at eight, and been paid in full, and I had carried her a plate myself.

I washed one plate and put it in the rack. I washed another one.

“You are not going to ask,” he said.

“Ask what.”

“Whether I do that often.”

“It is your house.”

He finished the plate and set it down. Without the wig he looked like a man who had been in a chair for four hours, which he had. He had sandalwood on him, which was the shawl.

“You were on the terrace,” he said. “At nine.”

“I was.”

“What did Corinne say.”

“That you would have to have a wife.”

“And what did you think.”

I told him what I thought, which was that a woman with money in land and one daughter will say that sentence at a party for as many years as it takes, and that he had heard the tenth reading of it and not noticed the first nine. He laughed once, out loud, and it was the first time I had heard that sound in that house, and I did not know what to do with it, so I kept washing.

“When Blaire put her hand on my sleeve in the hall,” he said, “what did you do.”

“I carried the tray.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“That is what I did.”

He stood at the sink with a dish towel and did not use it, and then he said he was going to ask me a question, and that he wanted the answer that was true and not the answer that was polite.

“Would you stay,” he said. “If it were not the money.”

“It is the money.”

“It is not only the money.”

“It is the money, and it is Mila, and it is the work,” I said. “And none of that is the question you are asking.”

“No.”

“Then here is the answer. I will stay for the work and the pay and the child, and I will not stay for anything you cannot write down on a page and show me. You keep a woman in the north wing and a woman to read hands at a party, and both of those are ways of having a person and not having them. I am not going to be the third one.”

He looked at me for a while.

“Ask me something else,” he said.

“There is nothing else,” I said. “That was the question.”

He picked the wig up off the counter and went out by the back stairs, and I heard him go all the way up.

I went up the front way and put the bolt across my door, which I had not done once since April and did every night of my life after August. Then I sat on the bed and did the arithmetic I do.

I had watched Blaire Ashcombe put her hand on his sleeve at nine o’clock, and carried a tray across a terrace to keep from watching it, and taken a glass out of a child’s hand so that nobody would say a word about her in front of her. That is jealousy. There is no other word for it, and I am not going to look for a softer one.

I wrote the date in the notebook and the sentence under it. In the morning I found I had written the sentence twice, which I have done exactly once in my life, on that page.