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“Yes.” Her arms are crossed.
I bend down next to her. “Why aren’t you over by the pool, with the other kids?”
She shakes her head.
“Would you like me to get Mommy for you?”
She presses her lips together and shakes her head again.
“Okay, then.” I ease myself down next to her on the stones, careful not to snag my stockings. “We’ll just sit here.”
We stare companionably at the beach, where the seagulls seem to have found an object of dispute, some rotting marine carcass or another. The air fills with acrid squawks. Vicious things, seagulls. I wiggle my toes inside my satin shoes and wonder if I could possibly take them off. (The shoes, not the toes.)
“What’s that smell?” says Kitty.
I cup my hands over my mouth and puff out a breath. “It’s my martini, I think.”
“It’s yucky.”
“Yes. Yes, it is, isn’t it?”
“Then why do you drink them?”
“Oh, it’s just what grown-ups do, I guess. We do a lot of silly things. Maybe we just wish we were still kids, like you.”
She chews on this for a moment. “Mommy drinks martinis.”
“Does she?”
“She drinks them in the nighttime. Then she takes her pills and sometimes she gets mad at Daddy.” She says this in the same matter-of-fact way she might describe a game of marbles with her cousins.
“How do you know this, honey? Shouldn’t you be in bed at nighttime?”
“Sometimes I need a glass of water.”
I draw an invisible circle on the stone next to my foot and think of Mums and Daddy, sometimes getting along and sometimes not, lubricating the Fifth Avenue evenings with vodka and courtesy. “Well, you know. Grown-ups fight sometimes.”
“One time they took off their clothes and Mommy kissed Daddy’s wee-wee.”
I open my mouth and nothing comes out.
“Nancy wouldn’t let me play with her horse.” She starts to cry.
“Oh, honey. Is that why you’re sitting here, all by yourself?”
Sniff. “Yes. She said I couldn’t play with it because I had germs.”
“We all have germs. It’s okay.”
“Do you have germs?”
“Yes. We all do. I think Nancy just didn’t want to share her horse.”
“That’s not very nice.”
“No, it isn’t.” I rise on my knees and take her hand. “Let’s go over to the pool with the other kids, and I’ll tell Nancy she has to share her toys with her cousins.”
“Okay.” She jumps up and tows me along the terrace at a skip. The afternoon sun lights her hair like a nimbus. “It’s a white horse with black dots on its bottom.”
“An Appaloosa.”
She swings our linked hands. “Sometimes Daddy kisses Mommy’s pagina.”
“Her what?”
Kitty chants, “Boys have penises, girls have paginas.”
“Oh. Vagina, honey. With a V.”
“Vagina, vagina!” she shouts, all the way to the pool, while I try to shush her. Probably not hard enough.
When I return to the party, fully refreshed, Pepper has just descended the stairs in splendor, her bosom not quite overflowing from an iced violet dress cut on an extremely expensive bias that ends a good four inches above her knees. She looks even more delicious than usual.
Delicious, that’s the word for Pepper. If I were a man, I’d want to gobble her up and lick my chops afterward. Nature’s just devious that way, giving Pepper all the sex appeal, as if to lock us in our preordained places and watch, breathless, to see if we can break loose.
To the Hardcastles, Pepper is a rare dish, never before seen at the table. This is my younger sister Pepper, I say, by way of introduction, presenting her with garnish.
Why do they call you Pepper? the men usually ask.
She usually winks. Because I’m that bad.
As a rule, the women don’t see the satirical curve of her lip when she says this, and they harden up instantly into those frozen polite expressions you get when a wind-and-surf clan of females like the Hardcastles—no makeup, horsey leather faces—encounters the cultivated variety.
I watch Kitty’s mother, Constance, tighten her mouth at Pepper, and I realize in that instant that I have more in common with my sisters than I realize, and that I’ve really never liked Constance at all. Constance, who threw an aggressive baseball into my unsuspecting stomach that first summer, soon after I knew for certain I was pregnant, and who apologized too profusely afterward. I should have known better, she said, shaking her head, and what could I do but accept her apology and tell her it was nothing? The first miscarriage began soon after, but of course I couldn’t blame Constance for that. It was an accident, after all.
I should have kept my eyes on the ball.
The Hardcastle men, on the other hand. Well, well. They interpret Pepper exactly the way they want to, don’t they? Men always do. Pepper’s happy with this arrangement. She’s never had much use for women. Even when we were kids, her friends were mostly boys. Our sister Vivian’s the only glittering double X wiggling her shapely fins in the sea of Y chromosomes surrounding Pepper, and maybe that’s only because they’re sisters, united in their disdain for me, the uptight and obedient Tiny, no fun at all.
“Honestly, Constance—it’s Constance, isn’t it? There’s so many of you, and you all look alike!”
Constance’s mouth screws into an anus.
I have to bite my lip to hold back a hysterical giggle, because Pepper’s exactly right. They do look alike, the Hardcastles. There’s just this look, a distinctive shape of the eyes, the wild thickness of the hair, the relation of nose to mouth to cheekbones. (Caspian, perhaps, is the only exception—in him, the Harrison genes seem to have triumphed.) On the men of the family, the Look is dashing and gloriously photogenic, redolent of football games and windswept sailboats, apple pie and loving your mother. On the women, the proportion is wrong somehow. Coarse, a bit goggle-eyed. Handsome is the best you can say of any of them.
Or is that ungenerous of me?
Pepper doesn’t care whether she’s ungenerous or not. She doesn’t care that Constance’s poor mouth is about to grow a hemorrhoid.
What would that be like, not to give a damn what the other women think?
I observe Pepper, whose head is tossed back in laughter, exposing the peachy column of her throat to the dying afternoon light. (We’re all out on the terrace now; the house is really too hot.) Pepper, in the very throes of not giving a damn.
It would be fucking wonderful, wouldn’t it?
Yes. It would be wonderful. For a short hour or two, a long time ago, it was wonderful. It was freedom.
I swallow the last of my drink and head into the kitchen to give the orders for dinner.
Dinner, I’ll have you know, is a smashing success, right up until the point when the fight breaks out.
Emboldened by two expert martinis—I usually drink only one—and smothered by the persistent stuffiness indoors, I order the dining room table to be brought out through the French doors onto the terrace, overlooking the ocean. The last-minute change rattles Mrs. Crane, but with a few soothing words and the assistance of the doughty Hardcastle men in dragging around the furniture, the table and chairs are soon set, every fork and wineglass in place, candles lit, bowls of priceless purple-blue hyacinths arranged at even intervals down the center of the tablecloth.
“It’s brilliant!” says Pepper. She floats to her seat. The breeze is picking up, rustling her hair.
“Oh, I’m sure the bugs are delighted.” Granny Hardcastle drops into the chair at Frank’s left and casts me a look.
I turn to Mrs. Crane. “See if Fred can dig out the tiki torches from the pool house, please.” Fred’s the groundskeeper. “I think they’re on the right-hand side, near the spare umbrellas.”
Mrs. Crane is always happy to score a point against Granny. “Right away, Mrs. Hardcastle. Shall I tell the girls to start serving?”
“Yes, please. Thank you, Mrs. Crane.”
The maids start serving, and Frank pours the wine. I take my seat at the opposite end, and Cap, waiting for this signal with the other men, lowers himself into the chair at Frank’s right with only the slightest stiffness. Pepper has somehow negotiated the seat to Caspian’s right, directly across from Frank’s father, and before long the torches are lit, the bugs have scattered, the empty wine bottles are piling up at the corner of the terrace, and Pepper and Caspian have struck up the kind of rapport of which dinner party legends are made.
Well, why shouldn’t they? They’re both unattached. Both attractive and red-blooded. Bachelor and fashionable Single Girl.
“How long is your sister planning to stay?” asks Constance, from two seats down on my left.
I plunge my spoon into the vichyssoise. “Why, I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be lovely if she stayed all summer?”
Constance turns a little pale.
“Sadly, however, she works as an assistant to a certain senator in Washington, and I’m afraid he can’t do without her for long.” I lean forward, as if in conspiracy. “Though I suppose that possibly qualifies as aiding and comforting the enemy, doesn’t it?”
From the other side of the house comes the sound of raucous laughter. The younger Hardcastles are eating dinner by the pool, under the supervision of a pair of gossiping nannies, and the teenagers have quite possibly found the stash of beers and liquors in the pool house bar. I motion to Mrs. Crane. “Could you ask Fred to keep watch over the young ones at the pool? Perhaps lock up the pool house?”
She nods and disappears.
Through the soup course and the appetizer, the scene is one of convivial amity, ripe with wholesome feeling, perfumed with hyacinth, lubricated by a crisp white wine and the warm undercurrents of a family welcoming home its prodigal son. The breeze surges in from the Atlantic, soft with humidity. The tomato aspic is a perfect balance of sweetness and acidity, the shrimp firm and white pink. To my right, Frank’s handsome younger brother Louis keeps up a stream of earthy conversation. To my left, Pepper’s laughter rises to the pale evening sky. Nearby, Constance’s diamonds glitter atop her leathery collarbone, having caught the light from a nearby torch.
I look at her and think, pagina.
The shrimp and aspic are cleared away. The bottles of red wine are placed, already open, on the table. I signal to Louis at my right, and Louis signals to Frank’s cousin Monty, across the table, and together they pour out the wine, one by one, filling every glass.
When they’re done, Frank rises to his feet, clinks his glass with his fork, and smiles at me down the long reach of the Hardcastle table.
“Ladies. Gentleman. In-laws.” He grins at Pepper. “Outlaws.”
“Hear, hear,” says Louis.
“First of all, I’d like to thank my lovely wife, Tiny, for arranging this wonderful dinner here tonight, this dinner that brings us all together, decently clothed for once. Tiny?” He picks up his glass and gestures in my direction.
I pick up my glass and gesture back.
“Hear, hear,” says Pepper. “To the miraculous Tiny!”
The chorus of agreement. The crystalline clinking. The works.
“And now, for the real business of the evening. Not quite two years ago, the man seated next to me, whom we all know, though he wasn’t around as much when we were all kids, army brat that he was …”
Caspian turns his shorn head and says something to Frank, something in a low voice that I can’t quite pick up at this distance, though Pepper tilts back her head and laughs throatily.
“All right, all right,” says Frank. “Anyway, this kid grew up into a soldier while we were all going to law school, to medical school, and it turns out he’s got a lot of Hardcastle underneath that unfortunate Harrison exterior. …”
Another muttered comment from Caspian, and this time all the men around him laugh, though Pepper—yes, Pepper—actually looks a little mystified.
“Anyway, as I said, and seriously now, while we were home, stateside, safe and sound, our cousin Cap here was fighting for his life, for our lives and freedom and way of life, way off in the jungles of Vietnam. Fighting against the enemies of freedom, fighting against those who would see America and all it stands for wiped from the face of the earth. While we gentlemen were safe abed, to paraphrase, he put himself in danger every day, under fire every day, and one day last year all hell broke loose, and—well, we all know what happened that day. As of yesterday, the whole country knows what happened that day.”
The last traces of jocularity dissolve into the evening air, which has just begun to take on the bluish tinge of twilight.
I look down at my empty plate. My shadow is outlined on the gossamer porcelain.
“Cap,” says Frank gravely, from the other side of the table, and I close my eyes and see an unscarred Caspian, a pair of trustworthy shoulders in a shaft of May sunshine, drinking coffee from a plain white cup. “Cap, there’s no way to thank you for what you did that day. What you sacrificed. Medals are great, but they’re just a piece of metal, a piece of paper, a few speeches, and then everyone goes home and moves on to the next thing. We just want you to know—we, Cap, your family—we love you. We’re proud of you. We’re here tonight because of you, and whenever you need us, we’ll band up for you. The whole gang of us. Because that’s what we do, in this family. Cap? Come on, stand up here, buddy.”
I force myself to look up, because you can’t have Franklin Hardcastle’s wife and hostess staring down at her plate while Franklin Hardcastle polishes off the toast to the guest of honor.
Frank stands at the head of the table, and his arm climbs up and over the trustworthy shoulders of his cousin, who stares unsmiling and unfocused at a point somewhere behind me. “Cap. To you.” Frank clinks Caspian’s glass.
The chorus starts up again, hear hear and clink clink, and then Louis stands up and claps, and we all stand up and clap, until Caspian raises his wide brown hand and hushes us with a single palm.
“Thank you for coming here tonight,” he says, all gravel and syrup, vibrating my toes in their square-tipped aquamarine shoes. “Thank you, Tiny, for the superb dinner. Thanks for the speech, Frank, though I really don’t deserve it. We’re all just doing what we have to do out there. Nothing heroic about it. The real heroes are the men I left behind.”
He breaks away from Frank’s encircling arm and sits back down in his chair.
For some reason, I cannot breathe.
There are twenty-two people seated around the baronial dining room table of the Big House, and all of them are quiet: so quiet you can hear the teenagers squealing secrets by the pool, you can hear the bugs singing in the dune grass.
Until Constance’s husband, Tom, throws his napkin into his plate.
“Goddamn it,” he says. “I can’t take it anymore.”
“Tom!” snaps Constance.
“No. Not this time.” He turns and tilts his head, so he can see down the row of Hardcastle cousins and in-laws to where Caspian sits, staring at a bowl of hyacinths, as if he hasn’t heard a thing. “I’m sorry, I know you lost a leg and everything, and you probably believe in what you’re doing, God help you, but it’s fucking wrong to award a medal in my name—because I’m a citizen of this country, too, man. I’m an American, too—award a fucking medal for invading another country, a third world country, and killing its women and children just because they happen to want a different way of life than fucking capitalism.”
The silence, frozen and horrible, locks us in place.
