Bittersweet. Miranda Beverly-Whittemore
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Each relative I’ve met wants to discuss Cousin Jackson’s suicide, but discreetly (they adopt the same hushed tone as when they mention David’s Jew-ishness), leaning, with great concern, against their porch rails, asking Ev – even asking me, forgetting I’m no one – ‘Have you heard how CeCe’s doing?’ ‘Can’t medication help with that kind of thing?’ ‘Do you think there was a way to stop it?’ I wonder if Jackson knew they would talk this vividly about him, and if that’s part of why he did it.
Is it lost on me that a boy who blew his own brains out is the primary reason I find myself Genevra Winslow’s personal guest in the sun-dappled Eden where she’s spent every summer of her life? Not a bit. I have come to believe Jackson’s death was a necessary sacrifice to the gods of friendship (‘he died so that I may live’), and I tell myself it isn’t selfish to believe so. After all, he was born into this bounty. It’s his problem it wasn’t good enough.
Give my love to Dad if you dare.
Okay, I wrote it. But I didn’t send it.
Just one weekend spent amid the Winslow clan and I’d already learned a useful trick – if you didn’t speak, they forgot you were listening. That’s how I gathered that only a handful of Winslows had attended Jackson’s memorial service back in February, where CeCe, Jackson’s mother, had been inconsolable. Over the first lantern-lit dinners of the season, there volleyed a tingling, electric replay of the returning soldier’s every act the previous summer, the last time anyone had noticed him.
He had been too skinny.
Too quiet.
Always buried in a book.
Angry about the Kittering boys borrowing the canoe.
Or no, when Flip was hit by the dock repair truck, he’d been empty of emotion, remember, hadn’t so much as batted an eye, just carried the mangled dog into the grass and laid her down.
Wasn’t there a broken engagement to some girl from Boston?
Hadn’t he once yelled at Gammy Pippa in the Dining Hall?
As all of Winloch replayed the stammering timbre of Jackson’s voice, the slight shake in his hands – which hadn’t been there before Fallujah – our collective chatter crescendoed, filling Winslow Bay with the single, relieving point the Winslows could finally agree upon:
It was because of the war. A relief, someone uttered, to have a reason.
Beyond that, one couldn’t blame anyone in particular, but it didn’t escape me, as I listened invisibly, that those few Winslows who lived in Burlington and had four-wheel drive were doing their best to forget the unhinged pitch of CeCe’s keening, not to mention the attention-sucking way she’d fallen, dramatically, to her knees beside her son’s coffin (her histrionics, frankly, a bit much), as the snow fell outside the funeral home, blanketing the city in fresh, pure white.
It was times like these that one was thankful for tradition. At least that’s how Birch Winslow began his toast that first Monday evening of summer, raising a glass of local ale before the whole of Winloch. It was the twenty-first of June, the Midsummer Night’s Feast, held every year on the solstice upon the Dining Hall lawn, before the tennis courts, such a fundamental Winslow tradition that Ev seemed shocked when I needed it explained. A good hundred of us were spread before Birch on blankets and folding chairs in the soft, falling light, our collective contributions to the groaning board (the elite’s name for a potluck, I’d come to learn) already picked apart on the tables made haphazardly of sawhorses and plywood. Stockard’s russet potato salad, Annie’s fried chicken, and my homemade blueberry pie were all long gone.
‘We are missing one of our own,’ Birch went on, and a sad hush descended upon us – even wild little Ricky stopped squirming – ‘and the loss is a great hole in us that will remain unhealed.’ Missing was any mention of Jackson’s name; his family was absent as well. Rumor had it that Mr Booth had left CeCe for good back in April, and that she and her offspring would not be coming back. But Birch did not elaborate. We raised our glasses of artisanal beer as the Winslow coat of arms rippled above us.
Tradition held that the feast was dinner theater; the Rickys and Maddys of the family, too young to memorize lines, were dressed as sprites and fairies, outfitted in diaphanous wings, wielding Peter Pan swords and Tinker Bell wands, their faces swirled in glittery turquoise. It fell to the older boys (and the men who fancied themselves young) to perform the memorized parts of the rude mechanicals from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Star-crossed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe had courted each other through the reticent wall for nearly a century, and the Winslows still found it hilarious.
‘O Grim-Look’d Night! O night with hue so black! / O night, which ever art when day is not! O night, O night! alack, alack, alack.’ Pyramus was played by Banning in a pair of his wife’s culottes. The audience cheered at the sight. His timing was good, actually, as though his premature businessman middle age was just a diversion from his true, thespian calling. He was all bluster and arrogance, a donkey in the clothing of a man.
As the prologue finished introducing our Pyramus, messy Annie accosted me on my blanket, digging her ample hands into my forearm, begging for help in a frantic whisper. Ev glared at us until I snuck off the blanket and followed Annie to Maddy, sitting on the bottom step of the Dining Hall, stuffing her tiny pink mouth with the remnants of a pan of brownies. ‘She’s swallowed walnuts! Walnuts!’ Annie hiccuped like the Little Red Hen, and I spent a good ten minutes with the wiggling, sugar-high girl in the bathroom, helping her mother swab off the chocolate and watching her closely for anaphylaxis.
Crisis averted, I returned to our blanket. I had planned to spend the evening getting sloppy drunk with Ev, but where she’d been sitting, Abby now dozed. The Winslows were absorbed in the play. I put my hand on the dog’s hot head, laughed at Banning Winslow, and couldn’t believe my fortune that these people loved Shakespeare.
Then Thisbe entered.
Yes, it was a challenge to recognize ‘her’ – the red wig, the vintage dress. But the smattering of freckles over the cheeks, the pink, supple lips – every detail was sharpened by my shame.
His flounces were met with riotous laughter as he delivered his lines in falsetto. He was silly, yes, playing his own brother’s female lover. But he was also electrifying. Not an eye strayed.
To have stood would have been to draw attention. Or so I told myself, rapt at his every move, until he stabbed himself, landing atop his brother’s corpse, causing Banning to cry out, and the audience to give them a standing ovation.
After dinner, I escaped into the bustling herd of fairy children. They were free at last, from school, from the inhibitions necessarily placed upon city kids, finally able to run facefirst into that loose, early summer burst of wind and sun and sweat. It was better with children. They were either loyal or beastly, and it wasn’t hard to tell the difference. We threw sticks for the dogs, and gathered tennis balls from the hedges, as dusk fell and the mosquitoes partook of their own feast, until, one by one, the angels were gathered up and carried home.
The crowd dispersed, it seemed safe to stroll back to the Dining Hall. Abby dreamed loyally on Ev’s blanket, the only one left on the great lawn. I couldn’t bring myself to wake the sleeping creature, even though the sawhorses were gone, the plywood stacked against the hall.
I found myself alone before the barnlike building. The soft sound of guitar filtered out the screened double doors and down the broad steps. I wondered after Ev – should I go back to Bittersweet and check on her? Instead, I climbed the stairs toward the tempting glow and peeked in through the screen, taking in the large space.
Round tables were scattered across a well-polished hardwood floor, with boards so wide they must have been original. Opposite me, another set of double doors led back down to the main Winloch road. To the right lay the industrial kitchen, separated from the main hall by a cutout wall on which food could be set. To the left, a stairway led up to a second floor, buttressed by a set of long, drab couches on which a small