Read an Excerpt
The Summer Garden
A Love Story
By Paullina Simons
William Morrow Paperbacks
Copyright © 2011 Paullina Simons
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061988226
Chapter One
Deer Isle, 1946
The Carapace
Carapace n. a thick hard case or shell made of bone or chitin that covers
part of the body of an animal such as a lobster.
Once upon a time, in Stonington, Maine, before sunset, at the end
of a hot war and the beginning of a cold one, a young woman
dressed in white, outwardly calm but with trembling hands, sat on a
bench by the harbor, eating ice cream.
By her side was a small boy, also eating ice cream, his chocolate.
They were casually chatting; the ice cream was melting faster than the
mother could eat it. The boy was listening as she sang "Shine Shine
My Star" to him, a Russian song, trying to teach him the words, and
he, teasing her, mangled the verses. They were watching for the lobster
boats coming back. She usually heard the seagulls squabbling before she
saw the boats themselves.
There was the smallest breeze, and her summer hair moved slightly
about her face. Wisps of it had gotten out of her long thick braid, swept
over her shoulder. She was blonde and fair, translucent skinned, translucent
eyed, freckled. The tanned boy had black hair and dark eyes
and chubby toddler legs.
They seemed to sit without purpose, but it was a false ease. The
woman was watching the boats in the blue horizon single mindedly. She
would glance at the boy, at the ice cream, but she gawped at the bay
as if she were sick with it.
Tatiana wants a drink of herself in the present tense, because she
wants to believe there is no yesterday, that there is only the moment
here on Deer Isle—one of the long sloping overhanging islands off the
coast of central Maine, connected to the continent by a ferry or a
thousand foot suspension bridge, over which they came in their RV
camper, their used Schult Nomad Deluxe. They drove across Penobscot
Bay, over the Atlantic and south, to the very edge of the world, into
Stonington, a small white town nested in the cove of the oak hills at
the foot of Deer Isle. Tatiana—trying desperately to live only in the
present—thinks there is nothing more beautiful or peaceful than these
white wood houses built into the slopes on narrow dirt roads overlooking
the expanse of the rippling bay water that she watches day in and day
out. That is peace. That is the present. Almost as if there is nothing
else.
But every once in a heartbeat while, as the seagulls sweep and weep,
something intrudes, even on Deer Isle.
That afternoon, after Tatiana and Anthony had left the house where
they were staying to come to the bay, they heard loud voices next door.
Two women lived there, a mother and a daughter. One was forty,
the other twenty.
"They're fighting again," said Anthony. "You and Dad don't fight."
Fight!
Would that they fought.
Alexander didn't raise a semitone of his voice to her. If he spoke to
her at all, it was never above a moderated deep-well timbre, as if he
were imitating amiable, genial Dr. Edward Ludlow, who had been in
love with her back in New York—dependable, steady, doctorly Edward.
Alexander, too, was attempting to acquire a bedside manner.
To fight would have required an active participation in another human
being. In the house next door, a mother and daughter raged at each
other, especially at this time in the afternoon for some reason, screaming
through their open windows. The good news: their husband and father,
a colonel, had just come back from the war. The bad news: their husband
and father, a colonel, had just come back from the war. They had waited
for him since he left for England in 1942, and now he was back.
He wasn't participating in the fighting either. As Anthony and
Tatiana came out to the road, they saw him parked in his wheelchair
in the overgrown front yard, sitting in the Maine sun like a bush while
his wife and daughter hollered inside. Tatiana and Anthony slowed
down as they neared his yard.
"Mama, what's wrong with him?" whispered Anthony.
"He was hurt in the war." He had no legs, no arms, he was just a
torso with stumps and a head.
"Can he speak?" They were in front of his gate.
Suddenly the man said in a loud clear voice, a voice accustomed to
giving orders, "He can speak but he chooses not to."
Anthony and Tatiana stopped at the gate, watching him for a few
moments. She unlatched the gate and they came into the yard. He was
tilted to the left like a sack too heavy on one side. His rounded stumps
hung halfway down to the non-existent elbow. The legs were gone in
toto.
"Here, let me help." Tatiana straightened him out, propping the
pillows that supported him under his ribs. "Is that better?"
"Eh," the man said. "One way, another." His small blue eyes stared
into her face. "You know what I would like, though?"
"What?"
"A cigarette. I never have one anymore; can't bring it to my mouth,
as you can see. And they"—he flipped his head to the back—"they'd
sooner croak than give me one."
Tatiana nodded. "I've got just the thing for you. I'll be right back."
The man turned his head from her to the bay. "You won't be back."
"I will. Anthony," she said, "come sit on this nice man's lap until
Mama comes back—in just one minute."
Anthony was glad to do it. Picking him up, Tatiana placed him on
the man's lap. "You can hold on to his neck."
After she ran to get the cigarettes, Anthony said, "What's your name?"
"Colonel Nicholas Moore," the man replied. "But you can call me
Nick."
"You were in the war?"
"Yes. I was in the war."
"My dad, too," said Anthony.
"Oh." The man sighed. "Is he back?"
"He's back."
Tatiana returned and, lighting the cigarette, held it to Nick's mouth
while he smoked with intense deep breaths, as if he were inhaling the
smoke not just into his lungs but into his very core. Anthony sat on
his lap, watching his face inhale with relief and exhale with displeasure
as if he didn't want to let the nicotine go. The colonel smoked two in
a row, with Tatiana bent over him, holding the cigarettes one by one
to his mouth.
Anthony said, "My dad was a major but now he's a lobsterman."
"A captain, son," corrected Tatiana. "A captain."
"My dad was a major and a captain," said Anthony. "We're gonna
get ice cream while we wait for him to come back to us from the sea.
You want us to bring you an ice cream?"
"No," said Nick, leaning his head slightly into Anthony's black hair.
"But this is the happiest fifteen minutes I've had in eighteen months."
At that moment, his wife ran out of the house. "What are you doing
to my husband?" she shrieked.
Tatiana scooped Anthony off the man's lap. "I'll come back tomorrow,"
she said quickly.
"You won't be back," said Nick, gaping after her.
Now they were sitting on the bench eating ice cream.
Soon there was the distant squawk of gulls.
"There's Daddy," Tatiana said breathlessly.
The boat was a twenty-foot lobster sloop with a headsail, though
most fishing boats were propelled by gas motors. It belonged to Jimmy
Schuster, whose father, upon passing on, passed it on to him. Jimmy
liked the boat because he could go out in it and trawl for lobsters on
his own—a one-man job, he called it. Then his arm got caught in
the pot hauler, the rope that pulls the heavy lobster traps out of the
water. To free himself, he had to cut off his hand at the wrist, which
saved his life—and him from going to war—but now, with no small
irony, he needed deckhands to do the grunt work. Trouble was all
the deckhands had been in Hürtgen Forest and Iwo Jima the last four
years.
Ten days ago Jimmy had got himself a deckhand. Today, Jimmy was
in the cockpit aft, and the tall silent one was standing pin straight, at
attention, in orange overalls and high black rubber boots, staring intently
at the shore.
Tatiana stood from the bench in her white cotton dress, and when
the boat was close enough, still a bay away, she flung her arm in a
generous wave, swaying from side to side. Alexander, I'm here, I'm here,
the wave said.
When he was close enough to see her, he waved back.
They moored the boat at the buyers' dock and opened the catches
on the live tanks. Jumping off the boat, the tall man said he would be
right back to off-load and clean up and, rinsing his hands quickly in
the spout on the dock, walked up from the quay, up the slope to the
bench where the woman and the boy were sitting.
The boy ran down to him. "Hey," he said and then stood shyly.
"Hey, bud." The man couldn't ruffle Anthony's hair: his hands were
mucky.
Under his orange rubber overalls, he was wearing dark green army
fatigues and a green long-sleeved army jersey, covered with sweat and
fish and salt water. His black hair was in a military buzz cut, his gaunt
perspiring face had black afternoon stubble over the etched bones.
He came up to the woman in pristine white who was sitting on the
bench. She raised her eyes to greet him—and raised them and raised
them, for he was tall.
"Hey," she said. It was a breathing out. She had stopped eating her
ice cream.
"Hey," he said. He didn't touch her. "Your ice cream is melting."
"Oh, I know." She licked all around the wafer cone, trying to stem
the tide but it was no use, the vanilla had turned to condensed milk
and was dripping. He watched her. "I can never seem to finish it before
it melts," she muttered, getting up. "You want the rest?"
"No, thank you." She took a few more mouthfuls before she threw
the cone in the trash. He motioned to her mouth.
She licked her lips to clean away the remaining vanilla milk. "Better?"
He didn't answer. "We'll have lobsters again tonight?"
"Of course," she said. "Whatever you want."
"I still have to go back and finish."
"Yes, of course. Should we, um, come down to the dock? Wait with
you?"
"I want to help," said Anthony.
Tatiana vigorously shook her head. She would not be able to get the
fish smell off the boy.
"You're so clean," said Alexander. "Why don't you stay here with
your mother? I'll be done soon."
"But I want to help you."
"Well, come down then, maybe we'll find something for you to do."
"Yes, nothing that involves touching fish," muttered Tatiana.
She didn't care much for Alexander's job as a lobsterman. He reeked
of fish when he returned. Everything he touched smelled of it. A few
days ago, when she had been very slightly grumbling, almost teasing,
he said, "You never complained in Lazarevo when I fished," not teasing.
Her face must have looked pretty crestfallen because he said, "There's
no other work for a man in Stonington. You want me to smell like
something else, we'll have to go somewhere else."
Tatiana didn't want to go somewhere else. They just got here.
"About the other thing . . ." he said. "I won't bring it up again."
That's right, don't bring up Lazarevo, their other moment by the sea
near eternity. But that was then—in the old blood soaked country. After
all, Stonington—with warm days and cool nights and expanses of still
and salty water everywhere they looked, the mackerel sky and the purple
lupines reflecting off the glass bay with the white boats—it was more
than they ever asked for. It was more than they ever thought they would
have.
With his one good arm, Jimmy was motioning for Alexander.
"So how did you do today?" Tatiana asked him, trying to make conversation
as they headed down to the dock. Alexander was in his big heavy
rubber boots. She felt impossibly small walking by his side, being in his
overwhelming presence. "Did you have a good catch?"
"Okay today," he replied. "Most of the lobsters were shorts, too small;
we had to release them. A lot of berried females, they had to go."
"You don't like berried females?" She moved closer, looking up at
him.
Blinking lightly, he moved away. "They're good, but they have to be
thrown back in the water, so their eggs can hatch. Don't come too close,
I'm messy. Anthony, we haven't counted the lobsters. Want to help me
count them?"
Jimmy liked Anthony. "Buddy! Come here, you want to see how
many lobsters your dad caught today? We probably have a hundred
lobsters, his best day yet."
Tatiana leveled her eyes at Alexander. He shrugged. "When we get
twelve lobsters in one trap and have to release ten of them, I don't
consider that a good day."
"Two legals in one trap is great, Alexander," said Jimmy. "Don't worry,
you'll get the hang of this. Come here, Anthony, look into the live
well."
Keeping a respectful distance, Anthony peered into the tank where
the lobsters, already banded and measured, were crawling on top of one
another. He told his mother he didn't care much for their claws, even
bound. Especially after what his father told him about lobsters: "They're
cannibals, Ant. Their claws have to be tied up or they would eat each
other right in the tank."
Anthony said to Jimmy, his voice trying not to crack, "You already
counted them?"
Alexander shook his head at Jimmy. "Oh, no, no," Jimmy quickly
said. "I was busy hosing down the boat. I just said approximately. Want
to count?"
"I can't count past twenty-seven."
"I'll help you," said Alexander. Taking out the lobsters one by one,
he let Anthony count them until he got to ten, and then carefully, so
as not to break their claws, placed them in large blue transfer totes.
At last Alexander said to Anthony, "One hundred and two."
"You see?" said Jimmy. "Four for you, Anthony. That leaves ninety-
eight for me. And they're all perfect, as big as can be, right around a
five-inch carapace—which means shell, bud. We'll get 75 cents a piece
for them. Your dad is going to make me almost seventy-five dollars
today. Yes," he said, "because of your dad, I can finally make a living."
He glanced at Tatiana, standing a necessary distance away from the
spillage of the boat. She smiled politely; Jimmy nodded curtly and didn't
smile back.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Summer Garden by Paullina Simons Copyright © 2011 by Paullina Simons. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow Paperbacks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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