Page 1 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

CHAPTER ONEBetsy

Morningside Heights, Manhattan

June 1978

The city in summer was something you escaped, or at least that’s what her mother had always told her. That June, though, there had been so many perfect sunny days, such an endless whirl of dreamy dates and good night kisses, that entire weeks began to blend. Her neck sticky with heat, Betsy impulsively stepped into the cool spray of an opened fire hydrant near her off-campus apartment, watching a few children splashing in the water. She had just finished an early shift at the diner near Columbia, hurrying home so she wouldn’t miss the possibility of his call, when she decided that she didn’t care if her pink-aproned uniform or brown ponytail grew damp. She’d been so anxious about seeing him, so excited for what he might propose between them, that even the water dappling across her bare arms felt like possibility. If he didn’t call tonight after class, she’d see him tomorrow, and then tomorrow would be the first day of the rest of her life.

Climbing the three flights to her studio in the dim stairwell, Betsy opened the door to her unmade bed, a tornado of shoes at the center since she’d had to hunt for her tennis shoes that morning. She swept her eyes to the hot plate where she cooked, the rickety kitchen table,and the shower wedged in a corner by the shabby desk where some other graduate student struggling in this impossible university had sat for hours too. When her father had visited during her sophomore year, he’d winked at Betsy’s mother and said, “Why do small spaces always seem so full of dreams?” Her mother had been putting fresh sheets on Betsy’s dorm bed: “Because you cooked up a plan to be a United States senator while sleeping in an orphanage janitor closet.”

Betsy smiled, remembering how proud her father had looked when she graduated from Barnard, carrying his suit jacket over his shoulder. How he’d pressed a letter into her hands telling her he admired her perseverance in her Latin classes, the way that she’d studied twice as hard to keep up with her classmates. What her father didn’t know was that Betsy had only worked as hard as she did in the hopes that he would notice. Her mother too. But Virgie Whiting didn’t only advocate for perfect grades; she wanted Betsy to be a leader.Organize a march to get Columbia College to admit women, Betts! Write an editorial for the newspaper!Itwashard to believe that in 1978 the Ivy League university still didn’t allow women to enroll in their undergraduate programs, but many women liked having a separate college in Barnard, even if her mother saw a single-sex education as hypocrisy. Lucky for Betsy, Columbia admitted women for graduate studies. “Those crusty old men on the board are afraid that young women will distract their virtuous male students with their pretty faces,” Betsy’s mother had told her when Betsy had gotten into the graduate psychology program last April. “As if women aren’t there to sharpen their brilliant minds too. Well, you’ll show them, won’t you, Betts?”

Sometimes she heard her mother’s voice at the oddest of times, like when she crossed the quad and lifted her shoulders back to stand straighter. Or she’d be reminded of her after passing a Barnard classmate wearing a T-shirt quoting her mother’s iconic words delivered after the historic women’s march down Fifth Avenue: “The decade is hers too.” It was an odd conundrum to want to be everything yourmother expected, and nothing at all. Betsy had worked hard this past year to distance herself from her mother and two older sisters, and she’d started to believe that she was happier without their nagging. Going home had started to feel like a battlefield, with someone in the family typically annoyed with someone else. She and her sisters would spend the entire visit tiptoeing around tensions, going to the movies and out for dinner, while whatever simmered below the surface remained. Her family was broken, and without her father, they weren’t even a real family anymore. Betsy didn’t know how to put them back together again. Instead, she bowed out of plans and avoided their phone calls.

Besides, she had Andy now.Her boyfriend, she reassured herself.

Betsy took a cool shower, ate cold pasta, and lay in her underwear on the crisp sheet she’d arranged on her dormitory-style couch. She clicked on the television, adjusted the rabbit ears to get less static, and waited for the cheery opening song ofThe Love Boat. Halfway through the show, the phone rang. Finally. Andy was calling. She dove for the handpiece, already anticipating his voice.

“Betsy, honey.” Her heart deflated. It was the great Virgie Whiting, hero of the feminist movement, the voice of her generation—and to Betsy, just Mom. Her mother launched into a series of questions about the heat. At least she wasn’t talking through one of her latest cover stories forMs.magazine.

Betsy said a pleasant hello. “Yes, I’m melting, Mom. It’s awful but I’m fine.” She braided her fine brown hair to get it off her neck as her mother started going on about drinking juice to retain energy, then jumped to the possibility of blackouts, like last summer when the lights went out in Manhattan for twenty-four hours and all hell broke loose. Then came her mother’s lingering fears about the serial killer who had been caught. “It’s like the city goes crazy in summer.”

Betsy hated when her mother’s anxiety unraveled like this.

“Stop worrying. I’m safe and sound in my apartment.” Betsy couldn’t hear what Captain Stubing was saying on the television,so she leaned closer to the small speaker, momentarily tuning her mother out.

“Did you hear me, Betts? I don’t think I can do this summer alone.” Her mother’s voice sounded unsteady, like her voice box was crackling with its own kind of fever. “Please come to the island. Dad is everywhere, and I just think—I think having you here would help.”

Betsy turned down the volume dial. When Betsy’s father died last year, her mother hadn’t cried at the funeral. Her voice hadn’t trembled when she’d insisted on delivering the eulogy at his wake. But Betsy had heard it a moment ago, the way her mother’s words slipped into shakiness.

“Mom?”

Her mother coughed—she was an elegant smoker, her head tilted back, her lips releasing pretty threads of smoke—then cleared her throat. “The Senate asked me to go through Dad’s papers, and it’s been harder than I expected. Anyway, you can’t possibly stay in Manhattan all summer. It’s a certain kind of hell.”

“I love the city in summer,” Betsy lied. “You can finally eat outside at the cafés.”

Her mother sniffed. “Yes, with a rat running over your foot.” Somehow her mother could lace a simple sentence with a dozen years’ worth of guilt trips.

“That’s an exaggeration, Mom.” What Betsy didn’t say is that she needed to sign her summer lease for July and August this week, but she’d been putting it off on account of Andy. Dr. Andy Pines, the man she was going to follow to New Hampshire and hopefully marry. When he left for his new job at Dartmouth in two weeks’ time, she planned to be with him, but she needed to be certain before she gave up her Manhattan studio.

Betsy pictured her mother calling from the small white cottage in Martha’s Vineyard with its white picket fence and arbor with roses growing in tangles. It was her family’sonlyhouse. When she wasgrowing up, Betsy’s parents had rented a series of New York apartments and later, Kalorama rowhouses in Washington, where they’d lived when her father was in the Senate, each of them plagued with some problem, whether it be a roof leak or rodents. Money had never flowed through the coffers like it did for many of the other elected officials that they knew, so they’d relied on the Vineyard house to anchor them as a family. Betsy had always loved the way the sun spread across the wide-plank pine floors each morning, how she’d sail most of the day at the local yacht club and return home to do cartwheels on the lawn overlooking Edgartown Harbor. She still kept a few old sundresses hanging in her closet and two changes of clothes and bathing suits in the dresser so she could show up at any point and enjoy the island, although it was rare to get there for more than a week these days.

“I’ve been working with a professor on a research project,” Betsy fibbed, knowing this would placate her mother. Anything that proved she was working toward a shining goal got her attention. “It’s not that easy to pick up and leave, Mom.” Betsy sucked on a piece of ice from her glass of soda.

“If it’s about money, I can send some Western Union.” Her mother waited for her to say something, a lull on the line. Betsy’s eyes drifted back to the television.Why isn’t Andy calling me?She would see him tomorrow morning when they spoke about her thesis paper, sure, but they had bigger things to talk about. She was hoping he’d stop by tonight and ask her to dinner. Pull a small velvet box out of his pocket and get down on one knee.

Betsy spit the ice back in the glass, then fanned herself with a newspaper. She was about to say she couldn’t come, that her research was too darn important.

“It’s a bit of an emergency, honey.”

A flash of heat, her head spinning. The same reaction Betsy had when Louisa called her last summer with the news of their father’s plane careening from the sky. She was suddenly walking down the hallin the dark, feeling for the light switch, afraid what she might find when she turned it on. “Mom? Is Louisa okay? Is Aggie?”

An inhale, a big exhale. She was definitely smoking. “Oh, it’s not your sisters, Betsy. It’s the house. Dad, he… left us in a bad way. Louisa and Aggie are coming home too. I need the help, but Louisa can’t stay very long, and Aggie has the kids.”

The implication that her sisters had more important things to do annoyed Betsy. “I have a job too. I can’t just leave.”

“You’re off for the summer, and you never even mentioned the research project until five minutes ago.”

It wasn’t that Betsy didn’t love Martha’s Vineyard. It was that she couldn’t stand the thought of being trapped in the house with her family again, her mother and her sisters bossing her around. And yet, she had to go. You didn’t say no to someone you loved.

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