Page 34 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

The next few days passed in a blur of summer. Long beach days, invigorating bike rides. The sweet smell of honeysuckle. Juicy red tomatoes sliced and sprinkled with salt. Reprimanding unruly kids. Running her hand over the sea when it was still and glassy. Crisp cocktails on the porch. Naps on the lawn. The bluest sky of the year. A scatter of shells collected at Lighthouse Beach. Homemade blueberry jam spread on fluffy pancakes. The first ears of summer corn. A game of Horse with Aggie. The baby with his enormous eyes watching them from the stroller. Tender lobster dipped in melted butter. Sunsets overSenatorial. Tabby’s tiny hand in hers. Soft summer tablecloths and pale pink water glasses. Hydrangeas arranged in pitchers.

There were boxes too. Stacks of simple cardboard boxes they’d collected from behind local stores and stowed in the garage to use for the packing. Betsy parked her bike inside the garage after work that afternoon and grabbed a Campbell’s soup box the size of a typewriter, carrying it inside through the back door. She tried to spend an hour or two each weekday helping her sisters organize the house so the weekends could be more fun, but they had started to do a little every dayanyway. Later in the week, she and her sisters finally had that meeting at the bank in Vineyard Haven to talk about a personal loan, but for now, Betsy looked forward to tackling the coat closet.

Betsy dropped the paper bag with the cleaning supplies her mother had asked her to pick up on the kitchen counter. She followed her sisters’ voices to the narrow stairwell, and then up the crooked steps to her mother’s study. Inside, Louisa and Aggie were nestled around their mother, who was sitting at her desk and flipping through a photo album. On the navy Oriental rug, Tabby colored in a Wonder Woman coloring book while the baby slept in his bouncy seat.

“What are you guys doing?” Betsy said. Aggie waved her in with a dreamy expression.

“You have to see these pictures of Mom and Dad’s wedding.” As children, the girls used to pull the same quilted white photo album off the shelf in their mother’s study, smudging the sticky laminated pages with their small fingers. Betsy could lose herself in those albums when she was knobby kneed with braces, trying to imagine how she would ever morph into something as lovely as her mother. Sometimes she and her sisters had pretended to get married after putting down the album, Louisa acting as the priest, while Aggie was the bride in her Easter dress and Betsy the groom in her father’s bow tie. At the end of the ceremony, they’d make their Barbie and Ken dolls kiss.

Betsy stood behind her mother, taking in the smooth bright faces of her parents in 1948. She pointed to a square black-and-white picture with teeny, scalloped edges. “That dress! So sensible, Mom!” Her mother’s tailored white skirt and jacket were paired with a glamorous mid-length veil that she’d glued to a headband layered in statuesque flower petals. She wore nylons and crisp white pumps, a corsage of dahlias pinned to her lapel.

“The war was over by then, and some of my fellow brides had these long silk dresses that were so beautiful since you could finally get real fabrics again, but your father and I didn’t want that kind of wedding.We wanted a quick ceremony at the courthouse, and then a very big party.”

Louisa leaned toward the page. “Was it legal to be married this young?”

“I was twenty-three!” her mother laughed. “Wewereyoung though, and several years later, we had a huge thirtieth birthday party as a combined anniversary and birthday thing. Dad was in the Senate then, and it doubled as a fundraiser for voting rights. For good publicity, of course, but he serenaded me in front of everyone, singing ‘My Girl’ into the microphone in the most tone-deaf voice. Louisa, you must remember that?”

Louisa shrugged like she didn’t care for the memory. “Didn’t Dad call me up onstage?”

“Yes,” Virgie said with a smile, “and you helped him sing a few bars. People went wild.”

“?‘I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day… ’?” Louisa sang in the quiet room, turning the page of the photo album. Her sister always sang along to the radio like she was Ella Fitzgerald reincarnated. It was a bit much.

Each photograph had a thin gold line creating a frame around it, the pictures set up to look antique. Or maybe it was the venue, since they’d had their reception at the Harold Pratt House, an old beaux arts mansion in Manhattan that housed the Council of Foreign Relations. One of her mother’s closest friends at the time, Melody Fleming, got them a deal on the lavish, wood-paneled space. In one photo, her father grinned alongside her mother at a long banquet table. He wore his finest suit, the same gabardine pairing he wore during his most important meetings in his job as the mayor’s chief of staff. His thick crown of brown curls was slicked flat with pomade. He held up a glass and looked to be mid-sentence, her mother squeezing his arm. A toast.

“Look at how confident Dad looks with his hand on your back,” Louisa said. “He was a salesman even then.”

Betsy swatted at Louisa’s obnoxious comment. “He’s not selling something. He’s just enjoying his wedding day. Mom was his one great romance.”

“Your fatherwascharming from the start,” her mother said, chuckling and pointing to a picture of an older man with a receding hairline, a large mole on his cheek. “Oh, goodness. Look at your grandpa in this photo. He’s probably only a little older than me now. How strange, to catch up with your parents in age.”

“You look better now than Grandpa did back then though,” Louisa said. She went to stand by the window.

Aggie picked up the album to look closer, then lowered it down. “Dad’s expression in this one is so practiced though, even before he ran for office. Do you think he knew back then that he would become a senator?”

“This was probably his first campaign speech.” Her mother pressed the pictures’ edges flat where the corners had lifted with age. “Everyone clapped when he finished, some dabbed at their eyes. Your father was a natural. He spent a lot of time imagining that he was a senator, practicing talking into the mirror. He liked to think that if you believed something enough, it would happen, and he was right.”

Aggie picked up Tabby and showed her a picture of her own grandfather. Then she kissed her cheek and set her back down on the ground. “What was Dad saying in the speech?”

From the window, Louisa moaned. “I can’t think of a single interesting wedding speech, and I’ve been to about a dozen weddings this year.”

Her mother gazed at a distant point in the room like she was watching a movie. “He told them about the orphanage, how lonely he’d been growing up there as a teenager, and how he used to lay in his bunk bed and stare at a photo of himself as a child with his parents and dream about creating his own family someday. He told the crowd that when he met me, he met the love of his life, and better than that, he’dfound himself a family, which of course, won him the heart of every aunt and cousin I had, whether distant or close.”

Similar notes had made their way into many of her father’s stump speeches. Betsy knew one of the lines by heart: “Just like you, I realized early on that hard work, grit, and determination would get me to where I was destined to go, and hard work, grit, and determination will help me get this country where it needs to go. But we need to do it together.”

His stock line on the campaign trail, whether he was in a factory town upstate or the hallowed halls of the Plaza.We need to do it together.

Her mother turned the page to another one of Betsy’s favorite pictures. An eight-by-ten black-and-white photo of her mother and her maid of honor, Melody, with her pretty Irish complexion and dark green flowing dress, laughing together about something her mother couldn’t remember. “Whatever happened to your friend Melody?”

“I don’t know,” her mother said. “We just lost touch sometime before you were born. I ran into her once on the Cape, and we promised to keep in touch. She even gave me an address in Boston.” Her mother sighed. “But we were just too busy.”

“That’s disappointing,” Aggie said, sitting beside Tabby and coloring with her. “I’m sure Dad didn’t make it easy to stay in touch with people.”

Her mother closed the photo album and handed it to Betsy, who dutifully stacked it back on the shelf. “Yes, well, his work certainly shaped much of our lives.” Pulling off her reading glasses, she set them down on a stack of freshly typed pages.

“Your work shaped our lives too, Mom,” Louisa said, as some sort of consolation. Her mother nodded and opened her mouth to say something, then didn’t say anything at all. Louisa moved toward the doorway. “Well, I’m going to keep packing.”

“I’ll be right there,” Betsy said. She spoke like a teacher insistent that a student wait to begin a test. “And don’t start without me like some martyr and then yell at me because I didn’t help.”

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