Off Season - Hardcover

Siddons, Anne Rivers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446527874 ISBN 13: 9780446527873

Publisher: Grand Central Pub, 2008

Synopsis

Acclaimed novelist Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel is a stunning tale of love and loss.


For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly--happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life. Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as every great love story does...in loss. After Cam's death, Lilly takes a lone road trip to her and Cam's favorite spot on the remote coast of Maine, the place where they fell in love over and over again, where their ghosts still dance. There, she looks hard to her past--to a first love that ended in tragedy; to falling in love with Cam; to a marriage filled with exuberance, sheer life, and safety-- to try to figure out her future.

It is a journey begun with tender memories and culminating in a revelation that will make Lilly re-evaluate everything she thought was true about her husband and her marriage.

About this title

About the Author

OFF SEASON is Anne Rivers Siddons's 17th novel. Her previous bestselling novels include Sweetwater Creek, Islands, Nora Nora, Low Country, Up Island, Fault Lines, Downtown, Hill Towns, Colony, Outer Banks, King's Oak, Peachtree Road, Homeplace, Fox's Earth, The House Next Door, and Heartbreak Hotel. She is also the author of a work of nonfiction, John Chancellor Makes Me Cry. She and her husband, Heyward, split their time between their home in Charleston, SC and Brooklin, ME.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Off Season

By Anne Rivers Siddons

Grand Central Publishing

Copyright © 2008 Anne Rivers Siddons
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-446-52787-3

Chapter One

There were seven of us at Edgewater that summer, if you count my brother Jeebs. None of us did, really. Jeebs was thirteen and gone into another orbit of his own; he entered ours only when he had nothing else to do, and then grudgingly.

That left Harriet Randall, aged eleven; Ben and Carolyn Forrest, who were twins, aged ten; Cecie Wentworth, aged eleven; Peter Cornish, aged twelve; and Joby Gardiner, eleven. And of course, me. Elizabeth Allen Constable but called, by my own creed, Lilly and nothing else. I was eleven that summer of 1962 and stonily determined not to be confused with my mother, who was Elizabeth, too.

My mother: Elizabeth Potter Constable; painter, activist (in her own words), great beauty. She was sporadic and only adequate at the first two, but at the third she was spectacularly successful. Turned heads followed Liz Constable wherever she went.

It was the apogee of the frenzied Jackie Kennedy mythology, and even up here in this rural saltmeadow world almost untouched by fashion for a century, women wore their hair in carefully tousled bouffants and put on crisp white sleeveless blouses and Bermuda shorts to go to the post office or general store (which were one and the same). The yacht club cocktail-and-chowder suppers looked like a Norman Rockwell magazine cover of an idyllic girls' camp. Into the middle of all the matched Lilly Pulitzer wrap skirts and T-shirts, the huge sunglasses pushed casually above foreheads to form chic headbands, my mother would drift barefoot like an idle racing sloop, her hair in its uncombed little Greek-boy tousle of curls, her white pants smeared with paint, the striped French matelot T-shirt she had affected since a trip to Cannes when she was sixteen daubed with it. There would not be a vestige of makeup on her pure medieval features, only a flush of sunburn on her high cheekbones and a slick of Chap Stick on her full, tender mouth-a Piero della Francesca mouth, according to Brooks Burns, two cottages down, who was a classical scholar and eighty years old, and had been in love with my mother, according to my father, since she came here as a bride.

"Eyes like summer rain on the ocean," he would say. "Eyes like clear pond ice."

"Eyes like a frozen February crust over Eggemoggin Reach," I might have added, "especially when those black brows come together over them."

But I doubted that anyone but my father and Jeebs and I had seen that. My mother's brows were two silky black slashes set straight over her eyes, which were clear, light-spilling gray and fringed with black lashes. With her sun-streaked copper curls they were striking; you expected slender sienna arches. I had those brows, I was often told, and the gray eyes, too, but even to me they often looked stormy and sulky instead of mythic. I had seen my mother, in her studio just before she came out to join us for an evening, slick her eyebrows with some sort of cream, and lightly redden her cheeks, and finger-tousle her hair before the old seashell mirror that hung beside the studio door. Once or twice I saw her daub a sunset smear on her cheek or forehead, or stain her shirt lightly with it. The result was a careless beauty seemingly preoccupied with things more important than her looks. It served her well.

I spied on my mother shamelessly during the summer. I'm still not quite sure why. I think I was looking for revelations, epiphanies, a map for knowing where the real woman and mother lay. It seemed that if I found it, I would have the map for myself, could chart a course by it. But I never did, and after that summer I did not spy on her again. Instead, I set about trying to become the direct antithesis of the woman in her mirror. It got me in endless trouble with her, though not so much with my father.

"Let her be," he would tell her from the rocking chair on the porch that was his regular summertime emplacement. "You wouldn't want a perfect little copy of you, would you? I would think one is enough."

"She could do worse," I heard my mother say once, tightly, in the days when I still eavesdropped. "Not much," I thought my father murmured from the rocker, but I was never sure of that.

And yet she was not all artifice. All the children from the cottages around us flocked to ours as naturally as thirsty birds to a birdbath. All the cottages down on this particular cove were members of the Middle Harbor Yacht Club, in the old Retreat Colony up the road, and had full privilege to join the brown, scabby-kneed colony children on the dock and in the tenders and small Beetle Cats in the harbor, or playing Ping-Pong in the raffish old clubhouse, or camping out on the islands in the bay across the harbor. And sometimes we did, but summer friendships are cemented early and tightly, and we came to be regarded as privileged outlanders, "too good for us," hanging around only with each other at Liz Constable's cottage. My mother really loved children, or, perhaps, I thought that summer, the children of others, and never seemed annoyed or bored with our endless and obscure yelping games, or the little flotilla of kayaks and Shellback dinghies that were tied up all summer beside my family's old Friendship sloop at the end of our dock. We were the only cottage in our settlement that had a deepwater dock. All the others kept their boats at the yacht club.

Mother vanished for long periods during the day, into her studio or at the desk in her bedroom, writing letters or phoning on behalf of her causes. They were good New England liberal causes, my father often said: birth-control information for young girls, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his incendiary young civil rights battle, meals for the infirm and disenfranchised of Hancock County, cleaning up the effluent-fouled streams and bays nearby.

I know she was serious about these causes. I had seen her in tears over some social injustice or other featured on the flickery old black-and-white television in the cottage living room. And I know that there were people in the colony, women mainly, who found her indiscreet and vaguely threatening and her causes as unseemly in our little nineteenth-century fiefdom as a fart at the Chowder Race. I know too that she honestly did not care a finger flick what people thought of her activism or her painting. But she did care, secretly and profoundly, about maintaining her role as a careless natural beauty, a warm, funny woman far above artifice and agendas. I could never fathom the why of that as a child; complexity is largely beyond children.

But I still can't today.

At noon Clara Anderson, who "did" for us mornings and who was the third generation of her family to do so for mine, would make a tray of bologna and cheese sandwiches and lemonade and put it on the big side screened porch, and we would rush in and wolf them down and be off again in a chattering swarm, out to the water or to the badminton and croquet courts my grandfather had carved out of the woods behind the cottage.

The other cottage mothers in our cove knew where to call if they had need of their children. So far as I knew, none of them ever worried that their offspring might be a bother to my mother, or that they might be in any way unsafe. Of course it was Clara who had the day-to-day burden of us, but she too liked children and had three of her own, and in our defense we had not yet absorbed any of the early-blooming horrors creeping into the cities then: drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, revolution. In Carter's Cove, as our little settlement was called, all that came much later. The only really malicious thing I can remember us doing was setting off cherry bombs in the shabby small bathroom of the yacht club's steward, a tight-faced fireplug-shaped young man from one of the original colony families who had not been accepted at Yale and was coldly mean-spirited to our crowd because we were not "his" kids. When our parents found out about it, we were forced to pick blueberries and wash windows and mow lawns to earn enough money for a new and vastly superior toilet. It struck us as only fair, and so we did not grouse too much about it, except that the steward got a far better toilet out of the deal and smirked at us all summer.

"Why were you so down on your mother that summer?" Cam asked me once. We had been together two months and were still in the stage where the necessity to know everything about each other, tell everything about ourselves, was paramount. On weekends, over coffee in one of the many small, dark cafs; at dinners of pizzas and cheeseburgers and an occasional salad; at night in the carapace of his old Porsche Carrera between kisses so profoundly consuming that they left us both sweating and gasping, we talked and we talked and we talked. Everything we said to each other was miraculous: the fact that he had been in the National Spelling Bee and lost by misspelling "mackerel" (I don't eat it to this day). The fact that I had once dyed my hair green with food coloring before the Cornwell Country Day production of Peter Pan. ("Were you Wendy?" "No, I was the dog, Nana. A green sheepdog. I was a great hit.")

So when he asked me about my mother and my feelings toward her that summer, I did not hesitate to spill out to him the thing I had never told anyone. Not my various best friends, certainly not Jeebs. Not my father, of course. No one.

"One day early that summer I went running up to her studio to ask her something," I said. "I forget what. Whether we could go somewhere or other, I think. The stairs and the third-floor hall were covered in sisal matting, and I was barefoot and was sure she couldn't hear me. It was lunchtime. We were never around her at lunchtime.

"Anyway, I got to the door of her studio and it was closed, but it always was, so in my adopted mode as supersleuth I eased the door open and looked in. She was ... she was standing in front of her easel, facing me, and she had her shirt unbuttoned to the waist and was holding it open, and old Brooks Burns was standing in front of her with his hands all over her breasts, crawling like old spiders. Every now and then he'd bend over and smack one of them, or suck at it. He was making a kind of whistling noise in his throat; I thought maybe he was dying. She was smiling at him. It was ... a sweet smile. Tender, like she'd give a child. After a while she said something to him and kissed him on the cheek, still smiling, and buttoned up her blouse and turned back to her easel and picked up her brush. He stood there awhile, gasping like a gaffed fish, and started to turn and leave. I was out of there and down the steps before I could get a deep breath. Then I went into the bathroom and threw up, and stayed in my bed under the covers all that day. I couldn't let anyone in, not Clara, not my father, not my summer best friend, Cecie Wentworth.

"After dinner, my mother came in with a tray of toast and milk and started to sit down beside me and-I don't know-feel my forehead or feed me or something. I said, 'No,' and turned over facing the wall. In a minute I heard her set the tray down and go out of my room and shut the door."

Cam was silent for a while, tracing the line of my jaw with his fingertip. Then he said, "You never cut her much slack, did you?"

"Slack? My God! That old ... satyr! You should have seen it."

"Did it ever occur to you that she might have been doing him an exceedingly kind thing?"

"Not once," I said, knowing the truth of what he said. Tears burned in my eyes. "Never once."

The memory of that day stuck like a burr in my brain. I tried to dislodge it; I was not prepared to give up my grand and secret anomie. But I could feel it begin to trickle away like sand out of a sieve.

"Well," Cam said, "I know if I was old and you showed me your beautiful boobs it would be an act of spectacular kindness."

"That's different."

"Why is it?"

I did not answer, and presently he said, "Was she like that? I mean when you were back home, in school and all that?"

I remember that I stared at him for a long moment. It was something that had never occurred to me. "No," I said slowly, thinking back to the winters in Washington that followed those summers. "No, she wasn't. She was different at Edgewater. Come to think of it, we all were."

"Why do you think that was?"

"It was just ... simpler there. Nothing changed. In our colony, in all those old colonies, not much had changed since the first people came there. Nothing much was new. If somebody painted a veranda or built a porch or bought a new piece of furniture, no matter how broken-down the old one was, people talked about it for weeks. New people hardly ever came in, except to visit. We ate the same things at the same time that our parents and grandparents had, or so my father said, and the grown-ups went to the same porches for cocktails and the club had the same regattas with the same boats every year, and it seemed to me that we even wore the same things every summer that I could remember, things we'd left at Edgewater. And we played the same games, children's games that we wouldn't have been caught dead playing at home. It was like all of us slipped back into some kind of idyllic summer time warp; it was like time stopped. I wonder why I never thought about that before. It was a whole other life and nobody seemed to know or question it."

"So what do you think was responsible for all that? It sounds like Brigadoon."

"The ocean," I said suddenly, as sure of that as I had ever been of anything in my life. "The bay. The water."

He laughed. "You sound like a sea nymph or a kelpie. Couldn't it have been that you were all the same people you were all year, and the place, and the water, and all the old associates just called out different parts of you? Parts that just weren't ... winter parts? People don't have two different selves, Lil. There are countless sides to all of us."

"No. We were different people there. I'm sure of that."

I was obscurely annoyed at him. He was undoubtedly right; Cam was always, among a thousand other things, my voice of pure reason. But I knew what I knew. I was different at Edgewater; I had always been different there. Back in Washington I was very much a child of my time; that sweet, smug, late fifties and early sixties world shaped me like potter's clay. I was touched by most of it. But in those Maine summers I was a creature of water and wind and tides and rock, a much simpler being, awkwardly pure and without artifice except for that last summer, when I became a spy, and there was something essentially artless even about that. Cam was wrong. The sea changed me.

I remember that I began to feel the sea recede as soon as we pulled out of the gravel driveway at Edgewater. By the time we crossed the Piscataqua River into New Hampshire, the breath of the bay was as faint as that of a dying child. By the time we reached Washington, D.C., it was gone, though its cadence whispered to me for months, a ghost without enough strength to do a proper haunting. In the first few humid, swaddling days before my classes at the National Cathedral School for Girls began, I was like a timid, newly caged wild thing: scarcely remembering but feeling in every cell the world I had lost, sniffing and tasting the somehow familiar cage into which I had been put, creature of neither, creature of both. My mother never failed to say that I was impossible in those few days; a changeling. My father simply touched my tangled curls and said, "It's not easy when you first come back, is it? But in a few days you'll be right at home at Cathedral, and then before you know it it'll be time to go back to Maine again."

I was nine or ten when I realized that it must be hard for him, too, newly returned to the most urban fortress of George Washington University, where he taught Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the Lake Poets to juniors and seniors who had not had the grades or the wherewithal to attend one of the Ivies. George Washington has a lustrous academic name now, but it was not always so. I am certain that my father never minded that. He was essentially a content man, perhaps a happy one. He was easy in his skin and confident in his calling, and a born family man. I have seen him angry, but never at us, though he must have been sometimes. His blue eyes often narrowed at injustice, unfairness, cruelty. But I have also seen them fill with tears as he looked at us around the dinner table or together in the sun at Edgewater. I think he was a very good man. I wish I had inherited more of that, instead of his wide mouth and light, straight stature. (Continues...)

Excerpted from Off Seasonby Anne Rivers Siddons Copyright © 2008 by Anne Rivers Siddons. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Pub
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0446527874
• ISBN 13: 9780446527873
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 358