Chapter Text
Two weeks before man landed on the moon, I landed at the Fiumicino airport, twenty miles south-west from Rome.
Once my taxi arrived within the city, the dirt and the chaotic traffic overwhelmed my senses as much as the historical monuments did, and when we drove up Janiculum Hill towards my new home of one month, I was glad I’d given myself time to get acquainted with the streets traveled by everyone from Caesar to Mario Lanza before I was to take the stage. My audiences wouldn’t have cared if I was jetlagged or feeling out of sorts. They had paid for their tickets and therefore expected an evening of musical pleasures from the latest American resident.
The extra time I’d set aside also served another purpose: I was on a mission to poke something that had been long dormant. Something that could go very well if I was lucky, but if it went badly, it could evaporate a treasured memory of a summer in the past.
Still, I’d made myself believe that I’d accept any outcome of the mission. I kept telling myself that all the way to the Sapienza campus, up until the moment I walked under the high marble arches and into the echoing lobby of Dipartimento di Storia dell’Arte. I reached into my back pocket for the phrase my mother had written down for me, hoping that it’d get my point across to the signora at the desk.
”Certamente. Mi segua, per favore.” She got up, and as instructed, I followed the loud clack of her heels as she showed me to the auditorium at the end of the hall. “Ecco.”
”Grazie, signora.”
The class was in session, so I sneaked in from the back, and there he was, back turned to the audience as he was pointing at the chalkboard, but it was him, the backs of his ears, the hairline at his nape the same as it had been when he had first arrived in Montauk fifteen years ago.
Oliver.
Fifteen years earlier
A table, a bed, a kerosene lamp. All that the room was missing was him.
I pursed my lips and wondered what he’d think of the bare surroundings. I’d heard he was from Chicago and our bungalow was one of the last in Montauk that didn’t even have electricity. Maybe he’d get bored and leave, and I could use this room as my private place to read.
The bed and the desk had been there when we’d arrived, but I’d brought the lamp there at my mother’s request. She’d made the bed with the yellow sheets that had flowers on them, last year they had been mine but now I had been given the plain blue ones. I hadn’t said anything, hadn’t wanted to seem petty.
The year was 1954 and it was our second summer in Montauk. My father was on his way on the train; The Sundowner from Manhattan was bringing in not only him, but our summer neighbors: the famed photographer Harry Goldman, his wife Liliana, and Harry’s new intern. My parents had had such a good time sharing the oceanfront compound of two bungalows with the Goldmans the year before that they had wanted to do it again.
I didn’t mind. Manhattan tried to suffocate you with heat and soot from June to August, whereas Liliana’s nieces, who summered with the Goldmans, were pretty and blithe as a bout of ocean air. Last year there had been an intern in our midst too, a quiet man of the name Maynard, who’d studied drama in Yale but had helped my father with the typing while his school was out. He’d stayed in the little room in the back of our bungalow and been of no disturbance: meek and polite.
“The house was quieter with him in it than without,” my father had exclaimed after we’d seen him off to the train back to New Haven at the end of the summer.
Now, I must say that my father didn’t usually value silence. In the city, he and my mother were out almost every night or, alternatively, threw dinners for throngs of guests at our house. Theater people or writers of all kinds would show up, sometimes my mother’s old friends from the dance company. However, the summers were my father’s time to come up with his next play, so on the days when he didn’t join us on the beach brooding and citing writer’s block, he required peace and quiet at the bungalow.
I got up and straightened the sheets to make it look like no one had sat on the bed intended for Harry’s intern. I didn’t know his name, but I hoped he would stay out of my way like Maynard had. He’d spent time in his room or typing away at the Smith-Corona in my father’s study. There had been no competition between Maynard and I for the attention of Liliana’s nieces; the girls hadn’t gone for his neatly combed hair nor his gangly demeanor.
Back in the kitchen, my mother was pouring water into the pot on the gas stove.
“There you are, darling. Do you remember if I packed the apron this morning? I cannot possibly find it in any of the bags but I don’t want to ruin my dress. It was the last in my size at Bergdorf and I managed to snatch it right before Tully Smithers laid her eyes on it.”
I crouched down to rummage in the suitcases my mother and I had brought with us in the car, all still in one pile by the doorway. I found the green-checkered apron from the third one.
Wearing an apron over her summer dress was the only thing that my mother had conceded to in her rebellion against becoming a traditional housewife.
“I’m not a cook,” she used to say, with a smoke in her elegant dancer’s hand, but she was an excellent hostess nevertheless. Anything she could order from the caterer at 22nd Street and Park Avenue was known to be plentiful at the Perlman dinners and the desserts never ran out. Nor did the wine, champagne, or the hard liquor that my father and his playwright friends favored.
Yet, what my mother lacked in her cooking skills she made up for with her charm. I loved her and so did everyone else. My father adored her and theirs was one of the good marriages in their circles. He was one of the few playwrights who’d bring the same woman to both premiere nights and private dinners. And then there were those like my father’s best friend Alvin Walters, who kept bringing men to my parents’ Thursday night cocktail hours, and some of them talking only in passing about the women whom the society pages called their wives.
I tied the apron strings for my mother and kissed her on the cheek. “I think I can hear a car.”
“Oh, that must be them!” Her pot was forgotten on the stove as we both rushed to the window.
My father climbed out of the taxicab and after him, a tall man who looked at everything curiously like a fox and, even though I couldn’t hear them through the window, seemed to be talking and laughing with my father. Two people were helping the driver unload the trunk: Harry and Liliana. They’d been on an assignment in Paris as usual, and we hadn’t seen them in a while.
I went outside.
“Welcome to the End of the World,” I announced from the porch steps. That’s what Montauk, the last hamlet at the easternmost tip of Long Island, was often called and I liked the foreboding sound of it. As averse as I was to the idea of being on stage myself, my mother kept saying that my father’s flair for drama had definitely not skipped a generation.
“Thank you, Elio, what a grand welcome,” Harry said. “And my, when will you stop growing? Samuel, you’ve got to do something about your son before he outgrows you.”
My father had walked up the boardwalk, wrapped one hand around my mother’s waist and ruffled my hair with the other. “I think it’s too late for that.”
“I’ll say.” Harry turned to inspect the heap of luggage at their feet and asked the stranger: “Oliver, which one of these suitcases was yours? Was there more than one?”
Oliver.
That must have been the name of the intern, the young man with the burnt flaxen hair that was neat at the nape but the top had been allowed to grow out, enough so that the ocean winds were able to get their fingers on it. He leaned over the pile of luggage, the gesture revealing the patches of sweat the weather had planted in the armpits of his buttermilk polo shirt, and picked up a leather suitcase.
“No, I only brought one,” he said.
“Very well. Now just remember what we told you about Samuel and his writer’s nerves on the train and you’ll be fine,” Harry said and winked at my father.
“Now, now, Harry, keep that up and we won’t invite you for dinner,” my father retorted.
“Oh, I would never want to risk that. Liliana and I will go to unpack and see how the house has fared, but we’ll come by later.”
“Please do,” exclaimed my mother. “I’m starting up with the chowder, it should be ready in an hour or two. Maybe. Who knows with these things. But I’ve opened the wine already!”
Liliana lifted her sunglasses and sighed with the relief of a woman tired from the trip. “Ah, that sounds divine, Annella. I could use a glass or three. The train was a circus. Everyone wanted to get out of the city this weekend, it seems.”
I watched the man named Oliver as the others talked.
He let his eyes inspect the roof of the house, the grassy marsh around it and as he was craning his neck in all directions, I hoped he wouldn’t fall off the boardwalk. Maybe he wasn’t used to boardwalks. Maybe they only had paved roads in Chicago. I had never been.
“Oliver, this is our son, Elio,” my father finally said after Liliana and Harry had left. “Elio, Oliver.”
“Nice to meet you.”
His hand wasn’t clammy at all despite the heat, but warm and dry. His eyes landed now upon me for the first time, kind and unreserved. Maynard’s had been evasive, he’d hardly ever looked me in the eye. Oliver, he held my gaze. I chickened out first and glanced away.
“Shall I take him to the East Wing?” I asked my father.
“Yes, that’s a good idea. You see,” he added to Oliver, “the bungalow is very modest so we’ve started calling the one spare room the East Wing. It’s a little joke we have.”
Oliver chuckled politely. “Thank you for letting me stay with you. I’ll try to keep out of your way as much as I can.”
“No, no, as soon as I heard from Harry that they were running out of guest rooms, I told him you’d be very welcome here. This is your home for the summer.”
“Thank you, Mr. Perlman.”
“Please, call me Samuel. Didn’t we discuss this on the train already?” my father chided him good-naturedly.
Oliver laughed again. He seemed to laugh a lot, but the sound of it was pleasant, not tinny like some of my father’s friends, so I didn’t mind.
“Okay. Thank you for this opportunity, Samuel and—"
“Annella, and don’t you even try calling me anything else,” my mother chimed in. “Mrs. Perlman was my mother-in-law and I’m not that old yet.”
I watched my parents. This stranger had quickly weaved them both under his spell, and my father didn’t even seem to mind when my mother petted the forearm of this Oliver to make her point.
“This is it,” I said, a hint of pre-emptive apology in my tone, when I led Oliver to his room. A single bed, the desk, the kerosene lamp. “I know it’s not much but—”
“It’s perfect.” He placed his scuffed suitcase by the bed and peeked out the window which gave to the water, before turning back to me. “Your mother mentioned something about dinner. I think I’m going to take a nap before that.”
He didn’t even have the courtesy of taking his shoes off, nor did he pay much further attention to me as he flopped down on the yellow-petaled sheets and I interpreted that as my signal to leave. The last thing I heard before I closed the door behind me was: “Thanks, Elio. Later!”
The sun was already gathering up its final rays when Liliana and Harry arrived at our doorstep for chowder and drinks. They’d changed from their Manhattan appropriate attire into simpler summer clothes and Liliana was in a much better mood.
“I don’t think I mentioned yet how good it is to see you, Elio.” Her hugs were warm but different from my mother’s. Where my mother was soft, Liliana was thin and twig-like.
“That’s what working in fashion does to you,” she always said.
She was an editor at the Bazaar; Harry was a fashion photographer. They sometimes worked as a team, but rarely, as Harry mostly shot menswear. They both shared an interest in the form rather than in the accuracy of details. I’d seen Harry’s works and even though his camera tended to reduce his models to abstract shapes, there was an essence of the person in Harry’s photos. I envied his eye.
I had no such eye, all I had was my ear.
I played piano, had done so for longer than I could remember out of my eighteen-year-old life, and while I knew that music didn’t need me, I needed music. During the performative show that our life in Manhattan sometimes resembled, the moments when it was just the keys and me were mine, all mine.
In an ideal world, I would’ve kept the melodies to myself, but in our family it wasn’t always an option. My mother being a former dancer and my father writing plays to be acted out in the theaters of Manhattan, some level of performing was expected. I did it when asked, but rarely offered.
“Where’s Oliver?” Harry asked as he pulled himself a chair at the dinner table. “He seems like a nice fellow, I chose him well if I may say so myself. Charmed everyone’s socks off in the train.”
“Don’t tell me you drove him away already, Samuel,” Liliana joked as my father opened the champagne that my mother pointed him to. By sheer luck, she had found her flutes in one of the bags and I had dusted them with a cloth before lining them up on the kitchen counter.
“Luckily there’s no midnight train on Fridays, so he’s stuck with us till tomorrow at least.”
“Who’s stuck?” came a voice from the kitchen doorway.
“Oliver!”
“We were just talking about you.”
“Sorry, I had to take a nap. All those trains must have tired me out.”
“Here,” my mother showed him a place at the table. “Take a seat and I’ll have the drinks ready in no time. Liliana, did you see where I put the lemons?”
The women fixed the cocktails, pouring the drinks with an easy routine, and we toasted to the summer ahead of us. Ever since the turn of the decade, the nation had started to believe in a brighter, easier future, and the start of a summer was always a promise of better things to come, or at least of winding down after a busy spring season.
“And what is this drink?” Oliver asked after his first sip.
“This is a French 75,” my mother supplied and topped the glass of my father who’d emptied half of his already. “Champagne and gin, with lemon.”
“What else does a man need,” my father hummed and reached for my mother’s hand and kissed it.
My mother rested her palm on his cheek. “We always start the summer with these,” she added to Oliver.
For the past year, my parents had started to let me drink a little at dinners, so I’d gotten my own glass, too. I found myself liking the lemon flavor more than the stiff whiskeys that my father had allowed me to taste.
“The chowder’s on the stove, if anyone cares for food,” my mother waved at the pot.
“And we brought bread,” Liliana remembered and produced from her bag a loaf that had been fresh that morning when she’d picked it up from their neighborhood bakery in Manhattan.
“I would love some of both,” Oliver picked up his plate and made a beeline to the stove. “I’m starving.”
The warm evening turned into night and the table discussion revolved around everyone’s plans for the summer and the themes that my father was mulling over for his play.
“I still haven’t decided whether we should be looking at the conflict from Bessie’s perspective or from Mr. Smith’s. Would be nice to be you, Harry, getting commissioned for an assignment after assignment and not having to wait for the inspiration to strike.”
“It keeps the food on the table,” Harry said flippantly, as one could only in company where everyone else was lucky enough to do equally well in their vocation. Despite my father’s woes, at the end of every summer he had a play for his agent and by the next spring, new review clippings to add to his chest of accolades.
“But I haven’t taken everything that they’ve offered, so there will be off-days, too,” Harry added to Oliver.
“I don’t mind,” Oliver said jovially, rubbing his mouth to hide a yawn. “I will use the time to take in the village.”
“That’s a great idea. There are bikes in the shed, Elio can show you.”
The others moved on to discuss the shoots Harry had done in Paris and as the night grew darker, I could see Oliver growing more and more tired, but he soldiered on. When the Goldmans and my parents delved into the rumors surrounding the unexpected demise of the latest musical at the St. James Theatre, Oliver turned to me.
“So. What does one do here all summer?”
“Aren’t you here to intern for Harry? To study his techniques, help with his photo shoots?” I asked, slurping the last spoonful of my chowder.
Again, that laugh. “Yes, but it doesn’t sound like that will take up all my time. What do you do?”
“I go clamming, read. Swim. Play music. Sometimes Marzia and Chiara and I bike up to the lighthouse.”
“Marzia and Chiara?”
“They’re Liliana’s nieces. You haven’t met them yet, I guess.” He seemed confident and charmed everyone, but this was one thing where I had the advantage. I knew the girls, knew what they liked, what they would snicker at. My upper hand made me feel generous towards him. “But I’m sure you will. They’ll be here all summer too, except sometimes they go back to the city with Harry when we run out of wine or things like that.”
Oliver watched as the others opened yet another bottle of claret, and I wondered if he was bored with the discussion at the table, with my parents and the Goldmans trading stories on Manhattan insiders that Oliver did not know.
I had an idea.
“Would you like to go down to the beach?”
His eyes widened and he glanced at the others but smiled. “Now?”
I shrugged like it was no big deal. I could be confident, too.
“Yes, now. We’ll take the lamp, of course. In case you’re afraid of the dark.”
“In case I’m—” he laughed, now incredulous. At the end of the summer, would I miss that laugh or be glad that it was gone? “Let’s go.”
I led the way out the back deck. I made sure to light up the steep stairs so that he knew where to step, and from there, it wasn’t a long way to the water.
The seagulls rarely flew at night, so the beach was quiet save for the waves that one couldn’t hear up at the bungalow but which broke in majestic, soothing repetition down here. Only a smattering of torn-up clouds draped around the edges of the moon, high up on the peaceful sky.
“Would you look at that!” Oliver marveled at the view.
On the western part of the island, the beaches would still have been full of life at that time of the night, but our stretch was a nest of tranquility. There were no parties, unless we threw one ourselves.
I said nothing.
I didn’t know why I’d brought him here, maybe I’d wanted to take him out of the house where everyone already adored him and I hadn’t known what to think. He wasn’t quiet like Maynard, quite the contrary. He didn’t know anyone here, and yet he didn’t seem that much a fish out of water. I didn’t know what to make of it. I could never be like that.
So maybe here on the beach, on our own, I’d see what I’d think of him. Maybe with me, he would be less confident because no one could be like that all the time, and I’d get to be on a more equal footing with him.
It didn’t occur to me that I’d wanted him all to myself. That realization came only later in the summer, when we’d danced around each other long enough for things to have only one explanation.
I stood back as he slipped off his shoes and went to wade in the murky water.
“There’s jellyfish,” I shouted after him to warn him, but he wasn’t deterred. “Oliver? They’re difficult to see in the dark.”
“Come on here with your lamp, then!”
I followed him, stood next to the waterline with the trembling light as he looked out to the water. The Atlantic Ocean watching over us; the bustle and life of Manhattan a world away and Chicago merely an idea.
“Do you think one could be happy here?”
He glanced back at me and I didn’t know where the question had come from, but it felt like a morsel of something I’d wanted when I’d brought him out here.
I nodded, then again. “Yes.”
He smiled and held my gaze again, like he’d done when he’d first arrived.
“Good.”