Page 9 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

She slammed down the phone, lifting the handpiece and slamming it down again. She didn’t notice how much noise she’d made until Louisa’s voice carried out beside her; her white knitted socks pulled up to her knees. “Is everything okay?”

Virgie flinched. She wouldn’t cry. She would show her daughters only strength. One day they might be in as much pain as she was now, and she wanted them to know how to bear it. Virgie forced herself to stand straighter, turning to wipe down the counters she’d already shined.

“I’m sorry you had to hear that, darling. Daddy and I are just having a little disagreement.”

Louisa took the rag from her mother, wiping the kitchen table. “He doesn’t want you to write anymore?”

It wasn’t something you could tick off on a grocery list, and Virgie seethed at the fact that Charlie thought it was. “No one can stop a writer from writing, honey. No one can stop anyone from doing anything at all.”

But it wasn’t true, was it? This decision wasn’t hers to make.

A part of Virgie wanted to ring Mrs. Betsy Talbot Blackwell atMademoiselle, but she was too proud for that kind of phone call. What would she even say? That she wanted to write for her again, nearly twenty years later, since her husband had canceled the one thing that brought Virgie personal satisfaction, other than mothering her three girls. She and the editor-in-chief had kept in loose touch since Virgie was a guest editor at the magazine in 1947 when she was twenty. She’d worked twelve-hour days then, and Blackwell had favored her among the eleven other college editors for her work ethic and unique voice, which Blackwell said evoked a modern perspective.

“It’s not only how you write that gets a reader, but the worldview you share with them,” Blackwell typed onMademoisellestationery last year in response to a letter Virgie had sent to share news of the Dear Virgie column. “Do you remember the ‘About Town’ story where you spent an evening with Ernest Hemingway at the Grand Central Oyster Bar, showing his chauvinism without uttering one judgment of him? Use that same clever eye, and you will succeed.”

Virgie and Charlie began dating a few months before she started atMademoiselle. She was sitting on the steps of the campus library at Columbia eating a cream cheese and jelly sandwich in the sunshine when she’d noticed a gentleman with a soft pomade wave in his hairsitting nearby. He smiled at her, waved a friendly hello, and she waved back, then darted her eyes away, focusing on a point in the distance. She sensed him edging closer a few inches at a time, and once he was beside her, she said, “Hello,” noting that his cheekbones were chiseled but his suspenders goofy and unfashionable. He was holding a legal notepad, his writings filling an entire page, and he set it down, introducing himself.

“I’m Charlie Whiting, a graduate student at the Divinity school.”

“Nice to meet you, Charlie Whiting. I’m Virgie. I go to Barnard.”

A divinity student?She liked the thoughtful nature that implied. He was cheery and curious and more than handsome, wanting to know at once: What was she studying? Did she like her classes? Where was she from, and what kind of music did she listen to? Every time she answered, he seemed delighted by what she said. She giggled with nerves—mostly because she could imagine moving through the world on his arm.

“What kind of music do I like? I dunno, jazz.”

He’d blinked twice, then grinned. “I play alto sax in a jazz band at Sonny’s on 125th. Will you come see us Friday night?”

She brought a gaggle of girlfriends with her into the smoky underground club with its red velvet curtains and small stage, Virgie feeling incredibly grown-up sneaking in underaged with her patent leather heels and bright red lipstick. When Charlie finished the two sets, they left hand in hand, him giving her his wool trench coat as they walked the city on foot for hours, talking about their favorite spots on campus and what they wanted to do with their lives, ending up at an overlook to watch the George Washington Bridge at dawn. He said he wanted to run for office someday; she wanted to write. That’s when he’d lifted a lock of wavy hair off her face and said, “I’ve never met anyone like you.” He kissed her softly, then passionately, and Virgie grew so lost in his adoration that she wasn’t sure she’d ever find her way home.

She supposed that was the moment he became her home, parking herself square in his heart and he in hers.

Two years passed. By then, Charlie’s interests shifted entirely to politics and he was an upstart in the New York mayor’s office. They’d meet after work at Tate’s on Second, a cheap watering hole where they’d munch on peanuts and watch the city whiz by, longing someday to take charge of the blur. Charlie talked about the mayor’s mistakes; Virgie, full-time at the magazine since graduation, outlined her dreams for climbing the masthead. When Virgie thought of herself in those years, she saw her pinned blond hair and column of pearls, her square-shouldered jacket and skirt below the knee, everything about her riding the wave of possibility, everyone jubilant that the war years were over, and life had returned to something special.

Her first real assignment for the magazine had been a story about the uptick in designers launching sophisticated trouser lines. She’d titled it: “A Wardrobe Staple Women Actually Want to Wear,” which Blackwell told her was “clever.” She wrote about a suffragette named Tilly Fowler and a story about the mysterious disappearance of a finance tycoon’s wife in Newport. Virgie had just finished writing the Hemingway piece when she discovered she was pregnant with Louisa. She’d told Charlie the news in a booth at Tate’s, sipping water, her stomach a swirl of nausea and nerves.

Charlie loosened his necktie and stared into her eyes, his irises narrowed and stunned. “We don’t have to have it,” she muttered.

“Virgie!” He squeezed her hand. “This is perfect. It’s the most perfect thing to ever happen.”

He got down on one knee on the sticky floor of the bar, fishing a small velvet box out of his suit pocket, flashing her the same dazzling smile she remembered from the day they met. “I’ve been carrying this around for the last few weeks, unable to ask your father permission because I was afraid he’d say no because I have nothing to give you. Not even a set of in-laws. But now…” His eyes glistened. He could get emotional, but she’d never seen him cry. He held up a small ring with asingle ruby, and she imagined her mother frowning at the petite stone. “Will you marry me?”

Virgie had placed his hand gently on her belly. “I won’t just marry you, Charlie Whiting. I will give you a family.”

He slid the ring on her finger. “And neither of us will ever be lonely again.” With this marriage, she would put all his missing pieces back together for good.

“Yes,” she said with a cry-laugh, since she knew she’d never be forced to clear an empty glass of gin from her mother’s nightstand either. The past would become the past.

“You can continue to work,” Mrs. Blackwell reassured Virgie after she shared her good news, and Virgie had reported to the office, even as her belly grew, and men gave her dirty looks as she stepped into the Condé Nast elevators looking like she had a camping tent clipped around her. Charlie wanted her home, too, particularly after a cramping scare in her sixth month, but she didn’t give in until a month before her due date.

Even as Virgie had gotten the baby blues—perfectly normal, the nurses had told her—and she’d walked around the city like a zombie, Charlie had announced he wanted to run for office. Her last article for the magazine was written in despair a year after Louisa’s birth, as she tried to eke out the words while struggling to get out of bed on some mornings. “How I Survived My Motherly Blue” turned out to be a groundbreaking piece. She’d quoted multiple nurses in the magazine, supporting the idea that the emotions surrounding childbirth were tumultuous, and gave women ideas for how to tame the depression.Soak myrtle in the bath. Walk as much as possible.

“What are these men scared of?” Virgie railed to Charlie back then, baby Louisa cradled in her arms. “That women aren’t going to have babies anymore? My article was to help people.”

“Your writing is so vivid, Virgie,” Charlie had said. “Your article scared the hell out of me. I didn’t even know a woman could feel that low.”

The final time that Mrs. Blackwell tried to lure Virgie back to the magazine as a staff writer was over lunch at Barnaby’s. She’d given her the name of a wonderful day care that was near the office and encouraged her to drop off Louisa and her second baby, Aggie, with her tuft of blond peach fuzz, in the morning; a wonderful team of elderly Irish women would care for the children like their own.

“I’ll think about it,” Virgie had said, and she had, but then Charlie had entered the race for congressman of the first district. From that point on, everything about their lives revolved around his campaigns. How frustrated he’d been as a young congressman four years later when they’d accidentally gotten pregnant with their third, Betsy, the year he ran in a special election for the empty Senate seat. But it turned out that having a pregnant wife on the campaign trail (and then a new baby girl) only helped cement his image as a clean-cut family man who was bringing morals and progressive change to the great state of New York. He won the Senate seat handily in 1955, and he’d won again in 1959. Now he was up for election once more, and rather than helping his chances, Virgie was being told she was ruining them.

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