On the way downstairs to our kitchen, I heard my mother on the phone.
“Yes, the Head of the Summer party. Yes, head—like Head Of The Charles, I think. I suppose it’s their idea of humor. No, I didn’t get details. She came in very late.”
My mother would want to hear about the party but would probably feign only mild interest. She hadn’t hidden her surprise that I’d been invited—in fact, she’d made it clear that she thought Henry had extended the invitation without the expectation I would go. Her reaction was in keeping with her odd fascination—she was both enamored and scornful—with Henry and Tillie’s crowd.
When I’d begun working at Hodder, Strike, she’d seemed impressed by my connection to Henry. But she never failed to tell me when she’d read something about The New Yorker having passed its prime. She sent me articles about the recent ousting of legendary editor William Shawn, circling with a red pen where Henry was cited as an example of how stale and indulgent much of the magazine’s writing had become. Just recently, she’d told me with barely disguised glee that Henry’s three-part series on the interstate highway system had been brutally ridiculed in Spy magazine.
“They said that he’s never met a fact he didn’t fall in love with, that he’s infactuated,” she’d said.
“Since when do suburban interior decorators read Spy?” I’d asked.
She’d frowned at my jab. “I like to stay current.” And then, “A client of mine gave it to me. Her son-in-law sells ad space in Spy.”
When I walked into the kitchen, my mother was off the phone. On the table was a basket of blueberry muffins.
“Nice time last night?” she asked, putting plates in the dishwasher.
“Very.” I poured a cup of coffee and went outside onto the deck to avoid her questions. I would give her some details later, but for now I wanted to savor the sense of being at the party. It was a rare experience for me to want to stay at a party rather than leave early to go home and read.
The fog was lifting slowly, revealing the hills of wild grass and bearberry that rolled down to the marsh, where soon enough I could see grayish pools of water and feathery islands of grass. As I sipped my coffee, the houses on the other side of the marsh came into view, emerging from the mist like images sharpening on a Polaroid. I loved how kindly the weather changed on mornings like this, as if sparing you the shock of awakening into a bright, clear day and instead taking your hand and gently guiding you from the cloud of sleep.
A car pulled into the gravel driveway; my mother’s ride had arrived, and she’d be leaving for her aerobics class in Wellfleet, which meant I could go inside for breakfast without being interrogated. When I heard the front door close, I went into the kitchen.
As I peeled the paper from a muffin, my mother poked her head back inside. She looked as orderly as ever, a pink terry headband keeping her dark hair in place. “Dad’s out fishing. Be a love and pick up some skim milk and a bottle of olive oil. You can check out Jams; it’s quite nice.”
I was surprised to hear a good word about Jams, which had been disparaged by several people at the party for its high prices and unfortunate catering to the growing contingent of “yuppie” families summering in Truro. There was a lot of nostalgia in town for Schoonejongen’s, the dusty old general store that Jams had replaced, and widespread disappointment, which I shared, that the battered old post office on the hill, with its FBI Most Wanted posters by the door, had been closed and relocated to a bland box of a building next to Jams. These changes were not seen as improvements, at least by summer people, though complaining about Schooney’s, as the old store was known, had been a Truro ritual for decades.
It had been impossible to shop at Schooney’s without being barked at by Ellie Schoonejongen, a doughy woman with thinning, white-blond hair who spent her days slumped by the cash register complaining that customers bought either too much or too little. Once, when my mother and I stopped by to get fruit for the beach, Ellie shrieked, “Only three peaches? Take four!” When my mother took another peach to appease her, Ellie sneered and said under her breath that there was no price too high for summer people to pay. Truro’s seasonal crowd embraced the unpretentiousness of Schooney’s, as they did the irony of the TRURO CENTER sign on Route 6, which marked the tiny settlement of a handful of buildings—the slightly rundown shingled building that was now home to Jams, the institutional-looking post office, a small Realtor’s office that handled summer rentals, and an unassuming news shop called Dorothy’s, whose most important purpose was ensuring that every summer visitor who so desired could get a copy of the Sunday New York Times.
What drew people to Truro was its unspoiled and open beauty. Just south of Provincetown, with its gay bars, restaurants, and art galleries, Truro was Cape Cod’s most rural town, with well over half of it containing the vast protected forests, sand dunes, and empty ocean beaches of the Cape Cod National Seashore. The rest of the town, which stretched only a few miles from the ocean to the calmer waters of the Cape Cod Bay, was marsh and rolling hills and winding roads, some paved and some little more than rutted dirt paths, along which were simple saltbox houses and newer summer homes.
When I opened the screen door to Jams, I caught a whiff of the sweet smell of fresh-baked pastries. The store was bright and clean, with buttery, wide-plank wooden floors. Along with staple groceries, the shelves now held luxuries like Camembert and Brie, marinated artichokes, and imported olives. A deli had been added in back, which offered rotisserie chickens, baguettes, and a menu of sandwiches named for Truro beaches: the Corn Hill, for the spot where, as every Truro resident knew, Myles Standish and his band of Pilgrims landed before heading to Plymouth, was turkey with coleslaw. Watching fit women with bright rattan beach bags order cold Chicken Marbella and pasta salad with pesto, I understood why my mother liked Jams and why the night before Henry had pronounced that he would never step foot in the place.
After locating milk and olive oil, I circled the store again, hoping I might run into Franny, which I knew was as unlikely as my standing a chance with him. He was clearly something of a ladies’ man, but I couldn’t help wanting to see him again. It wasn’t just his beautiful eyes and smile or the casual way he had grabbed me to dance. It was also his warmth and instant acceptance of me into the fold that had made me feel aglow, as if I had not only belonged at the party, but might become the writer he’d thought I already was. I wanted to be back in that house, but with all the guests gone. Brimming with books and magazines, paintings and photographs, the house was filled with items chosen because they were beloved and had a cherished story to tell, not because they matched the rest of the décor.
Before heading back home, I pulled over at the Cobb Memorial Library, just up the road from Truro Center. Alva Snow, the town’s longtime librarian, was one of my favorite people in Truro. Alva, who looked much younger than her seventy-two years, had lived in Truro her whole life. She knew everything about everyone, not just the permanent residents but also the summer people, whom she called “wash ashores.” For most of my childhood, I had regarded Alva much as I had the one-room library’s old furniture, which was worn, comfortable, and not particularly memorable. But the summer before I left for college, after she noted that I was one of the few people who visited the library on sunny days as well as on rainy days, Alva and I began to have longer conversations, which were always rambling and fun. We talked about books, of course, which may be why I felt more comfortable with Alva than with most of the high school girls I knew, who were more interested in discussing television shows like Dallas. Alva loved the detective novels of Ngaio Marsh and P. D. James and nineteenth-century French poetry, while I liked getting lost in long novels of varying literary repute, everything from The Thorn Birds to My Ántonia. For a librarian, not to mention one getting on in years, Alva could be surprisingly girlish and silly. The summer after my freshman year, we talked about how much we wanted to believe the apocryphal story that the mayor of Providence, Buddy Cianci, planned to marry someone named Nancy Ann, so that she could be introduced in the Rhode Island Statehouse as “the esteemed Nancy Ann Cianci.” Every time we said this, we collapsed in laughter, with Alva once giggling so much she began to hiccup uncontrollably.