Book cover and blurb
Title: The Vineyard
Author: Michael Hurley
Genre: Literary Fiction
Title: The Vineyard
Author: Michael Hurley
Genre: Literary Fiction
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From Michael Hurley, winner of the Somerset Prize for his debut novel, THE PRODIGAL, comes a complex and ambitious, allegorical tale of old money, young passion and ancient mystery in a classic New England seaside village.
Ten years after their college days together, three wounded and very different women reunite for a summer on the island of Martha's Vineyard. As they come to grips with the challenges and crises in their lives, their encounter with a reclusive poacher known only as "the fisherman" threatens to change everything they believe about their world--and each other.
“Hurley writes beautifully,” says Kirkus Reviews, “especially when describing island and nautical life.” Publishers Weekly praises “his well-crafted prose.”
Author Bio
Michael Hurley and his wife Susan live near Charleston, South Carolina. Born and raised in Baltimore, Michael holds a degree in English from the University of Maryland and law from St. Louis University.
The Prodigal, Michael’s debut novel from Ragbagger Press, received the Somerset Prize for mainstream fiction and numerous accolades in the trade press, including Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, ForeWord Reviews, BookTrib, Chanticleer Reviews, and IndieReader. It is currently in development for a feature film by producer Diane Sillan Isaacs. Michael’s second novel, The Vineyard, is due to be released by Ragbagger Press on November 25, 2014.
Michael’s first book, Letters from the Woods, is a collection of wilderness-themed essays published by Ragbagger Press in 2005. It was shortlisted for Book of the Year by ForeWord magazine. In 2009, Michael embarked on a two-year, 2,200 mile solo sailing voyage that ended with the loss of his 32-foot sloop, the Gypsy Moon, in the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti in 2012. That voyage and the experiences that inspired him to set sail became the subject of his memoir, Once Upon A Gypsy Moon, published in 2013 by Hachette Book Group.
When he is not writing, Michael enjoys reading and relaxing with Susan on the porch of their rambling, one-hundred-year-old house. His fondest pastimes are ocean sailing, playing piano and classical guitar, cooking, and keeping up with an energetic Irish terrier, Frodo Baggins.
Links
YouTube Video Book Trailer: http://youtu.be/iXfSuF1t9ss
Website: www.mchurley.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/mchurleybooks
Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/author/show/5445584.Michael_C_Hurley
EXCERPTS FROM THE VINEYARD, by Michael Hurley
Ragbagger Press, Nov. 25, 2014
Trade paper: 5 x 8, 384 pp.
ISBN-10: 0976127563
ISBN-13: 978-0976127567
________________________________
CHAPTER ONE:
D
rowning seemed like the best option or, for that matter, the only option. Being an inveterate planner of all things, even the means and manner of her own death, Charlotte Harris had explored for a full year the various ways she might best do herself in. Every possibility always came back to the water and to this place. But now that she was finally here and making her final crossing to the island, the greenish-gray waves pushing ahead of the ferry across Vineyard Sound seemed too gentle—incapable, almost, of the kind of violence necessary to end a life.
. . . .
The pleated sundress she had chosen for “the occasion,” as she primly regarded her own death, was neatly pressed and folded in the valise stowed in the trunk of her car. It was her only luggage. On the ferry, the tiny Fiat was dwarfed by the enormous SUVs and minivans parked all around it. They needed to be big enough to land platoons of parents, children, dogs, and bicycles, and all the assorted materiel of summer for the annual assault on Martha’s Vineyard by the armies of New England. There was one couple, however, who looked out of place.
They were young—very young. The girl had a deep green tattoo across the small of her back that appeared and disappeared as her halter top rode up above her jeans. She was clinging like a wet dishtowel to the boy, who was better-looking than the girl, and as tall, lean, and hard as a light pole. Charlotte was thirty-two. She guessed the boy’s age and did the mental math. There was at least ten years’ difference between them, maybe more. A thread of imagination flashed briefly in her mind, then vanished. Five years ago, she might have . . .
. . . .
Dory was rich. Stunningly rich. Although she thought of herself as someone just like everyone else, there was no one quite like Dory. She lived her life as though everything were possible. No objective was beyond her ability to shape reality to her ends. So, when Charlotte had unburdened herself of the story of her failed marriage over martinis during one of Dory’s excursions to Boston, Eudora Delano’s Search and Rescue Service had snapped into action.
Dory decided that Charlotte must stay with her on the Vineyard until she got over losing her child to cancer, as if that were even possible, and got over losing her husband to the contagion of indifference that followed, as if that were even necessary.
. . . .
CHAPTER 2:
Charlotte plopped down on the patchwork quilt that covered the high, four-poster bed. Carefully embroidered ringlets of berries and flowers rambled across the fabric. Made by prim ladies at Edgartown tea parties, she imagined, wheedling away the long winter hours behind frosted windowpanes in serene comfort. The whole ethos of a bygone era was still present in the Delano house like the scent of perfume. It was all so exquisite. Quite so. It seemed to Charlotte as if nothing uncouth, no ill wind, could ever penetrate such a fortress of gentility.
Except she had penetrated it, . . .
. . . .
Dory was a free spirit, a granola girl, a bon vivant. Charlotte was not. Charlotte, even in the throes of a suicidal depression, remained a Pop-Tart kind of girl, a wear-jammies-to-bed girl, and a woman firmly tethered to the moral and social conventions of the middle class, which certainly did not include gallivanting about naked in one’s backyard.
. . . .
The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the path to purgatory was not paved at all. Ruts and potholes pushed and bullied Charlotte as she ran that gauntlet. What a fitting anticlimax it would be, she thought, to break an axle and become stranded along the way to one’s own suicide—a live woman and a dead car stuck together on a murderous road. It would be untoward to wash a dead body out to sea while leaving a dead car in the middle of the road. A minute passed while she concocted a story for the ensuing road assistance. I had an urge to go skinny-dipping, was all that came to her. Dory would accept this unquestioningly, though not likely without some petulance for not being asked to come along.
. . . .
The unexpected warmth of the water surprised her even before she realized she had begun to wade out into it. It covered her ankles, then her thighs, and made the raw night air seem more rude by comparison on the parts of her that were yet unimmersed. If her own baptism as an infant had been, by all reports, a freezing, wet shower endured with screaming and terror, this means of undoing the sacrament by immersion was markedly more pleasant. The warm water was far more welcoming than the cold air and earth she was leaving behind, and not at all the hypothermic ordeal for which she had braced herself, now, for months. O Death, where is thy sting?
. . . .
CHAPTER 3:
T
rafalgar Wallace the Third, referred to by friend and foe alike as “Tripp,” was not widely regarded as a good man or a bad man, as most people measure character. He was known as a practical man, which is a very different thing. He came from a long line of practical men who knew two things well enough that they didn’t need or care to know much else: the proper way to invest the family’s money and the proper way to spend it—or not spend it, preferably, while enjoying the things money could buy before grudgingly passing the remainder on to the next ungrateful generation. By this self-defeating credo, as the Wallace family tree spread and swelled in size across the centuries, the multiplying heirs were required to spend less of the family’s money than those who came before them. This demanded a temperament they all distinctly lacked. As the latest Wallace heir, Tripp was doing on the ocean that day what he did best: squandering what was left of his inheritance.
. . . .
CHAPTER 5:
Turner Graham was what men used to call “a dish.” She was old-school pretty, and that came with the usual privileges of membership. She had wavy, jet-black hair that she wore long, and she enjoyed flipping it back all at once, with a flourish. Everyone told her she looked like Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth, and though she was usually not crass or drunk enough to say so, as a matter of fact she thoroughly agreed with both comparisons. She liked the attention of men and had always gotten a lot of it, usually without much trying. That’s how she married an up-and-coming bank executive she had only just met in Las Vegas, and that’s also how she divorced him a year later after having an affair with his very married boss.
. . . .
Turner wasn’t into guilt and had no desire to lead what stuffier people considered a well-examined life. She wanted to live a good life, preferably without examining a damn thing. And for the most part, that’s exactly what she did.
. . . .
All expenses paid were the key words, here. Turner was a beautiful woman, there was no denying. Any number of men over the years had paid her expenses and then some for the favor of her attention. But she never saw the arrangement for the age-old bargain it was, or if she did, she never let on. She reeled them in gradually and sorted them all out on the blog until she decided to accept someone’s offer for a fabulous trip someplace where they could meet. They would have explosive, forbidden sex, after which they would “fall in love” and plot their escape together. This lasted until the money stopped flowing or the jilted wife’s lawyers showed up—whichever came first. Then, she would move on to the next man in line who thought she was strangely beautiful and witty and way too talented to be writing just a blog. Some were sincere, and some were using her, but to be certain, she was using every one of them. In the end, she really didn’t give a damn what it all said about her or them. The virtual blog world she invented for herself distracted her from the depressing reality of the world she actually lived in.
. . . .
CHAPTER 6:
Tommy Vecchio was one of the working-class kids who later became one the “fun” counselors. He could be counted on to look the other way when a bottle of booze appeared at the beach bonfires held each evening. He was also known for not looking the other way when those same bonfires devolved into games of strip poker and skinny-dipping among the kids whose parents were late picking them up. It was rumored that Ruth Palermo, who left the island abruptly in the middle of her junior year of high school to care for a sickly (and hitherto unheard of) aunt in Newport, had gotten pregnant by Tommy. A rather ugly, churchy sort of brouhaha had started to build from whispers about the matter. But no sooner had the rumors started to swell than it was announced that Tommy Vecchio had answered the call of Almighty God to study for the priesthood. And that was that. Everyone knew Tommy was a rounder before, but now he was God’s rounder.
CHAPTER 10:
D
espite the tumultuous beginning of the season and the clouds in Dory’s future, June in Edgartown was as bright as ever, and the three friends took advantage of every minute of it. There were walks down Main Street on sunny afternoons carrying giant, round mounds of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream, teetering three-high and dribbling down onto sticky fingers before it was licked gone. There were steamed little neck clams with butter sauce and fresh horseradish, served with gin and tonics on the porch of The Crew House, overlooking the harbor. And there was the good-looking, Italian waiter who worked there. It became Turner’s mission to see how many times she could get him to use the word “Tanqueray” in a sentence because she liked the way he said it. There were lazy hours lying on the beach by the lighthouse and meandering hunts for the perfect cockleshell, and double-dog dares to go skinny-dipping after dark that always descended into fully clothed refusals, recriminations, and false accusations of prudery—the truth, however, being that none of them was eager to expose great white bellies bursting with clams and Tanqueray and mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.
CHAPTER 12:
F
ood and people were everywhere. Every cupboard had been opened. Every bowl was summoned to duty. Rutla was restored to command. The tiny shop in town that sold outlandishly decorated cupcakes had been cleaned out of every dollop for the affair. By six o’clock, Dory’s wine cellar was so decimated that reinforcements were arriving steadily through the back door, carried from McIntyre’s store on Main Street by a breathless clerk. The rather severe, unnamed man on the phone, who was Tripp, told the owner that the president had arrived on the island for the weekend unexpectedly, and that several more cases of their best stock were needed at once. This was only vaguely plausible, even for the Delanos, yet it had been spoken with such urgency and authority that dusty bottles of Chateau Lafite Rothschild that hadn’t seen the sun since before Dory was born came rolling in like kegs of cheap beer.
CHAPTER 13:
He spoke mostly of himself and his own struggles with faith and celibacy, and she kept her hand on the same spot on his knee, occasionally rubbing it as he drank—his fifth vodka to her one, by the time the first hour passed. By the end of the second hour, they had covered all the worldly troubles of the Church and moved on to their respective childhoods and families. Turner’s hand then travelled nonchalantly higher, from his knee to his thigh. She occasionally patted and rubbed him there in slow, circular motions. When he came back with his sixth vodka and her third, she decided it was time to move the conversation into new territory.
CHAPTER 15:
He had known her as a child making sandcastles on long, sunny afternoons. He had known her as a skulking, bored teenager, wandering through late mornings in smelly tee shirts with bedhead hairdos, bad breath, no makeup, and hairy legs. He had known her as a ridiculously self-important debutante. But despite more than a few opportunities, he had never known her, in the Biblical sense, and for that she had always regarded him as both a gentleman and an oddity. Their whole relationship over the two decades since puberty had seemed like one long and thoughtful game of chess. But time and events had now moved her pieces into a corner.
. . . .
He was right—damn right—and his words burned in her ears even as she laughed them off. There was no protest. There was no grand plan. There were the usual boards and fashionable directorships and fundraisers and “working groups” for this or that charitable foundation, and endless auxiliaries and so on and so forth, all of which streamed out before her like a magic carpet that promised to carry her into a well-regarded, blue-haired old age in New England. But there was almost nothing about Eudora Delano that was new or special or different from all the other well-heeled girls she had known in her life—almost, that is, except for one thing. Being still single at thirty-two made her odder by the hour and was the closest thing to a conscientious objection she could muster. But apart from that dubious triumph, she had been spinning her wheels since college—just like Turner, just like Charlotte, and just like the three of them had done all summer and would probably do the next summer and the summer after that.
. . . .
It is a habit of those society women who imitate whenever possible the affectations of the French, to be blasé about their bodies, but it was not a habit that Dory had ever warmed to. She did not often enjoy the pool, but when she did, she was as well buttoned as a parson’s daughter. Charlotte was mostly of the same mind, and, although she sometimes wished she were not, she saw no benefit in changing. Turner, however, who throughout her life had been drawn to every mannerism of wealth like a moth to the flame, wasted no time in enjoying the pool au naturel. This passed utterly unnoticed by Rutla, the German, and was suffered decorously by the grounds-keeping staff, who knew to suffer everything decorously. Dory and Charlotte endured the display in their swimsuits, smirking and eye rolling at this, one of Turner’s many and inevitable foibles, while mentally cataloging her every feature and flaw.
CHAPTER 18:
I
t was now almost August. The summer seemed to be picking up speed to slingshot into fall. The July holiday from cooking, cleaning, and the general banality of daily life that Dory, Turner, and Charlotte had enjoyed while staying at the Delano estate was coming to an end. Constance Delano’s grand gesture of the season was over. Her party had been a stunning success. She had nobly honored, albeit in absentia, the fisherman who she and others on the island believed had saved her daughter’s life. She had served the dish that everyone on the island was dying to try. And she had capped the whole affair with the surprise engagement of the Delano heir to the scion of one of the island’s oldest families. That the Wallaces were no longer a wealthy family was well known only to Constance and a few insiders, and by them generally ignored. On the Vineyard, the glow of a family’s good name lingered much longer than the shine of its gold.
CHAPTER 20:
He met all the necessary criteria. He was from a well-respected family. He had gone to the right schools, as had his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him. He had the right friends who had gone to the same schools and traveled in the same small circles. He was accomplished at the right sports—sailing in summer and skiing in winter—and he knew how to say and do the right things at the right moment in a way that bore testament, along with his good looks, to an obvious breeding. He was tall and well formed and not overly bright or bookish or moody or sensitive. He would love Dory with fraternal affection and a benign indifference that would immunize him from the terrible angst that afflicts the lovelorn. There would be affairs, perhaps, but he could be relied upon to keep them discreet and meaningless, and there would be no brooding or melancholy or naval gazing in the wake of their discovery. New love would falter and stumble as it invariably does, but the business of marriage would march on. There would be no midlife forays into the wild unknown because he was not a curious man. His life had followed a well-worn path thus far, and he would stick to that path without the danger of navigational error that comes from needless reflection. He would lead a good life, not a well-examined life, and thereby make it possible for Dory to do the same. He and Dory would produce tall, lithe, gorgeous, towheaded children and grandchildren who, on their way to fulfilling their central role as heirs to the family’s fortune and curators of its legacy, would by their laughter and playfulness banish the awful silence that would otherwise creep into their marriage, like a pestilence.
© 2014 by M. C. Hurley. To be used only with permission for review purposes.
Michael Hurley and his wife Susan live near Charleston, South Carolina. Born and raised in Baltimore, Michael holds a degree in English from the University of Maryland and law from St. Louis University.
The Prodigal, Michael’s debut novel from Ragbagger Press, received the Somerset Prize for mainstream fiction and numerous accolades in the trade press, including Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, ForeWord Reviews, BookTrib, Chanticleer Reviews, and IndieReader. It is currently in development for a feature film by producer Diane Sillan Isaacs. Michael’s second novel, The Vineyard, is due to be released by Ragbagger Press on November 25, 2014.
Michael’s first book, Letters from the Woods, is a collection of wilderness-themed essays published by Ragbagger Press in 2005. It was shortlisted for Book of the Year by ForeWord magazine. In 2009, Michael embarked on a two-year, 2,200 mile solo sailing voyage that ended with the loss of his 32-foot sloop, the Gypsy Moon, in the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti in 2012. That voyage and the experiences that inspired him to set sail became the subject of his memoir, Once Upon A Gypsy Moon, published in 2013 by Hachette Book Group.
When he is not writing, Michael enjoys reading and relaxing with Susan on the porch of their rambling, one-hundred-year-old house. His fondest pastimes are ocean sailing, playing piano and classical guitar, cooking, and keeping up with an energetic Irish terrier, Frodo Baggins.
Links
YouTube Video Book Trailer: http://youtu.be/iXfSuF1t9ss
Website: www.mchurley.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/mchurleybooks
Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/author/show/5445584.Michael_C_Hurley
EXCERPTS FROM THE VINEYARD, by Michael Hurley
Ragbagger Press, Nov. 25, 2014
Trade paper: 5 x 8, 384 pp.
ISBN-10: 0976127563
ISBN-13: 978-0976127567
________________________________
CHAPTER ONE:
D
rowning seemed like the best option or, for that matter, the only option. Being an inveterate planner of all things, even the means and manner of her own death, Charlotte Harris had explored for a full year the various ways she might best do herself in. Every possibility always came back to the water and to this place. But now that she was finally here and making her final crossing to the island, the greenish-gray waves pushing ahead of the ferry across Vineyard Sound seemed too gentle—incapable, almost, of the kind of violence necessary to end a life.
. . . .
The pleated sundress she had chosen for “the occasion,” as she primly regarded her own death, was neatly pressed and folded in the valise stowed in the trunk of her car. It was her only luggage. On the ferry, the tiny Fiat was dwarfed by the enormous SUVs and minivans parked all around it. They needed to be big enough to land platoons of parents, children, dogs, and bicycles, and all the assorted materiel of summer for the annual assault on Martha’s Vineyard by the armies of New England. There was one couple, however, who looked out of place.
They were young—very young. The girl had a deep green tattoo across the small of her back that appeared and disappeared as her halter top rode up above her jeans. She was clinging like a wet dishtowel to the boy, who was better-looking than the girl, and as tall, lean, and hard as a light pole. Charlotte was thirty-two. She guessed the boy’s age and did the mental math. There was at least ten years’ difference between them, maybe more. A thread of imagination flashed briefly in her mind, then vanished. Five years ago, she might have . . .
. . . .
Dory was rich. Stunningly rich. Although she thought of herself as someone just like everyone else, there was no one quite like Dory. She lived her life as though everything were possible. No objective was beyond her ability to shape reality to her ends. So, when Charlotte had unburdened herself of the story of her failed marriage over martinis during one of Dory’s excursions to Boston, Eudora Delano’s Search and Rescue Service had snapped into action.
Dory decided that Charlotte must stay with her on the Vineyard until she got over losing her child to cancer, as if that were even possible, and got over losing her husband to the contagion of indifference that followed, as if that were even necessary.
. . . .
CHAPTER 2:
Charlotte plopped down on the patchwork quilt that covered the high, four-poster bed. Carefully embroidered ringlets of berries and flowers rambled across the fabric. Made by prim ladies at Edgartown tea parties, she imagined, wheedling away the long winter hours behind frosted windowpanes in serene comfort. The whole ethos of a bygone era was still present in the Delano house like the scent of perfume. It was all so exquisite. Quite so. It seemed to Charlotte as if nothing uncouth, no ill wind, could ever penetrate such a fortress of gentility.
Except she had penetrated it, . . .
. . . .
Dory was a free spirit, a granola girl, a bon vivant. Charlotte was not. Charlotte, even in the throes of a suicidal depression, remained a Pop-Tart kind of girl, a wear-jammies-to-bed girl, and a woman firmly tethered to the moral and social conventions of the middle class, which certainly did not include gallivanting about naked in one’s backyard.
. . . .
The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the path to purgatory was not paved at all. Ruts and potholes pushed and bullied Charlotte as she ran that gauntlet. What a fitting anticlimax it would be, she thought, to break an axle and become stranded along the way to one’s own suicide—a live woman and a dead car stuck together on a murderous road. It would be untoward to wash a dead body out to sea while leaving a dead car in the middle of the road. A minute passed while she concocted a story for the ensuing road assistance. I had an urge to go skinny-dipping, was all that came to her. Dory would accept this unquestioningly, though not likely without some petulance for not being asked to come along.
. . . .
The unexpected warmth of the water surprised her even before she realized she had begun to wade out into it. It covered her ankles, then her thighs, and made the raw night air seem more rude by comparison on the parts of her that were yet unimmersed. If her own baptism as an infant had been, by all reports, a freezing, wet shower endured with screaming and terror, this means of undoing the sacrament by immersion was markedly more pleasant. The warm water was far more welcoming than the cold air and earth she was leaving behind, and not at all the hypothermic ordeal for which she had braced herself, now, for months. O Death, where is thy sting?
. . . .
CHAPTER 3:
T
rafalgar Wallace the Third, referred to by friend and foe alike as “Tripp,” was not widely regarded as a good man or a bad man, as most people measure character. He was known as a practical man, which is a very different thing. He came from a long line of practical men who knew two things well enough that they didn’t need or care to know much else: the proper way to invest the family’s money and the proper way to spend it—or not spend it, preferably, while enjoying the things money could buy before grudgingly passing the remainder on to the next ungrateful generation. By this self-defeating credo, as the Wallace family tree spread and swelled in size across the centuries, the multiplying heirs were required to spend less of the family’s money than those who came before them. This demanded a temperament they all distinctly lacked. As the latest Wallace heir, Tripp was doing on the ocean that day what he did best: squandering what was left of his inheritance.
. . . .
CHAPTER 5:
Turner Graham was what men used to call “a dish.” She was old-school pretty, and that came with the usual privileges of membership. She had wavy, jet-black hair that she wore long, and she enjoyed flipping it back all at once, with a flourish. Everyone told her she looked like Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth, and though she was usually not crass or drunk enough to say so, as a matter of fact she thoroughly agreed with both comparisons. She liked the attention of men and had always gotten a lot of it, usually without much trying. That’s how she married an up-and-coming bank executive she had only just met in Las Vegas, and that’s also how she divorced him a year later after having an affair with his very married boss.
. . . .
Turner wasn’t into guilt and had no desire to lead what stuffier people considered a well-examined life. She wanted to live a good life, preferably without examining a damn thing. And for the most part, that’s exactly what she did.
. . . .
All expenses paid were the key words, here. Turner was a beautiful woman, there was no denying. Any number of men over the years had paid her expenses and then some for the favor of her attention. But she never saw the arrangement for the age-old bargain it was, or if she did, she never let on. She reeled them in gradually and sorted them all out on the blog until she decided to accept someone’s offer for a fabulous trip someplace where they could meet. They would have explosive, forbidden sex, after which they would “fall in love” and plot their escape together. This lasted until the money stopped flowing or the jilted wife’s lawyers showed up—whichever came first. Then, she would move on to the next man in line who thought she was strangely beautiful and witty and way too talented to be writing just a blog. Some were sincere, and some were using her, but to be certain, she was using every one of them. In the end, she really didn’t give a damn what it all said about her or them. The virtual blog world she invented for herself distracted her from the depressing reality of the world she actually lived in.
. . . .
CHAPTER 6:
Tommy Vecchio was one of the working-class kids who later became one the “fun” counselors. He could be counted on to look the other way when a bottle of booze appeared at the beach bonfires held each evening. He was also known for not looking the other way when those same bonfires devolved into games of strip poker and skinny-dipping among the kids whose parents were late picking them up. It was rumored that Ruth Palermo, who left the island abruptly in the middle of her junior year of high school to care for a sickly (and hitherto unheard of) aunt in Newport, had gotten pregnant by Tommy. A rather ugly, churchy sort of brouhaha had started to build from whispers about the matter. But no sooner had the rumors started to swell than it was announced that Tommy Vecchio had answered the call of Almighty God to study for the priesthood. And that was that. Everyone knew Tommy was a rounder before, but now he was God’s rounder.
CHAPTER 10:
D
espite the tumultuous beginning of the season and the clouds in Dory’s future, June in Edgartown was as bright as ever, and the three friends took advantage of every minute of it. There were walks down Main Street on sunny afternoons carrying giant, round mounds of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream, teetering three-high and dribbling down onto sticky fingers before it was licked gone. There were steamed little neck clams with butter sauce and fresh horseradish, served with gin and tonics on the porch of The Crew House, overlooking the harbor. And there was the good-looking, Italian waiter who worked there. It became Turner’s mission to see how many times she could get him to use the word “Tanqueray” in a sentence because she liked the way he said it. There were lazy hours lying on the beach by the lighthouse and meandering hunts for the perfect cockleshell, and double-dog dares to go skinny-dipping after dark that always descended into fully clothed refusals, recriminations, and false accusations of prudery—the truth, however, being that none of them was eager to expose great white bellies bursting with clams and Tanqueray and mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.
CHAPTER 12:
F
ood and people were everywhere. Every cupboard had been opened. Every bowl was summoned to duty. Rutla was restored to command. The tiny shop in town that sold outlandishly decorated cupcakes had been cleaned out of every dollop for the affair. By six o’clock, Dory’s wine cellar was so decimated that reinforcements were arriving steadily through the back door, carried from McIntyre’s store on Main Street by a breathless clerk. The rather severe, unnamed man on the phone, who was Tripp, told the owner that the president had arrived on the island for the weekend unexpectedly, and that several more cases of their best stock were needed at once. This was only vaguely plausible, even for the Delanos, yet it had been spoken with such urgency and authority that dusty bottles of Chateau Lafite Rothschild that hadn’t seen the sun since before Dory was born came rolling in like kegs of cheap beer.
CHAPTER 13:
He spoke mostly of himself and his own struggles with faith and celibacy, and she kept her hand on the same spot on his knee, occasionally rubbing it as he drank—his fifth vodka to her one, by the time the first hour passed. By the end of the second hour, they had covered all the worldly troubles of the Church and moved on to their respective childhoods and families. Turner’s hand then travelled nonchalantly higher, from his knee to his thigh. She occasionally patted and rubbed him there in slow, circular motions. When he came back with his sixth vodka and her third, she decided it was time to move the conversation into new territory.
CHAPTER 15:
He had known her as a child making sandcastles on long, sunny afternoons. He had known her as a skulking, bored teenager, wandering through late mornings in smelly tee shirts with bedhead hairdos, bad breath, no makeup, and hairy legs. He had known her as a ridiculously self-important debutante. But despite more than a few opportunities, he had never known her, in the Biblical sense, and for that she had always regarded him as both a gentleman and an oddity. Their whole relationship over the two decades since puberty had seemed like one long and thoughtful game of chess. But time and events had now moved her pieces into a corner.
. . . .
He was right—damn right—and his words burned in her ears even as she laughed them off. There was no protest. There was no grand plan. There were the usual boards and fashionable directorships and fundraisers and “working groups” for this or that charitable foundation, and endless auxiliaries and so on and so forth, all of which streamed out before her like a magic carpet that promised to carry her into a well-regarded, blue-haired old age in New England. But there was almost nothing about Eudora Delano that was new or special or different from all the other well-heeled girls she had known in her life—almost, that is, except for one thing. Being still single at thirty-two made her odder by the hour and was the closest thing to a conscientious objection she could muster. But apart from that dubious triumph, she had been spinning her wheels since college—just like Turner, just like Charlotte, and just like the three of them had done all summer and would probably do the next summer and the summer after that.
. . . .
It is a habit of those society women who imitate whenever possible the affectations of the French, to be blasé about their bodies, but it was not a habit that Dory had ever warmed to. She did not often enjoy the pool, but when she did, she was as well buttoned as a parson’s daughter. Charlotte was mostly of the same mind, and, although she sometimes wished she were not, she saw no benefit in changing. Turner, however, who throughout her life had been drawn to every mannerism of wealth like a moth to the flame, wasted no time in enjoying the pool au naturel. This passed utterly unnoticed by Rutla, the German, and was suffered decorously by the grounds-keeping staff, who knew to suffer everything decorously. Dory and Charlotte endured the display in their swimsuits, smirking and eye rolling at this, one of Turner’s many and inevitable foibles, while mentally cataloging her every feature and flaw.
CHAPTER 18:
I
t was now almost August. The summer seemed to be picking up speed to slingshot into fall. The July holiday from cooking, cleaning, and the general banality of daily life that Dory, Turner, and Charlotte had enjoyed while staying at the Delano estate was coming to an end. Constance Delano’s grand gesture of the season was over. Her party had been a stunning success. She had nobly honored, albeit in absentia, the fisherman who she and others on the island believed had saved her daughter’s life. She had served the dish that everyone on the island was dying to try. And she had capped the whole affair with the surprise engagement of the Delano heir to the scion of one of the island’s oldest families. That the Wallaces were no longer a wealthy family was well known only to Constance and a few insiders, and by them generally ignored. On the Vineyard, the glow of a family’s good name lingered much longer than the shine of its gold.
CHAPTER 20:
He met all the necessary criteria. He was from a well-respected family. He had gone to the right schools, as had his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him. He had the right friends who had gone to the same schools and traveled in the same small circles. He was accomplished at the right sports—sailing in summer and skiing in winter—and he knew how to say and do the right things at the right moment in a way that bore testament, along with his good looks, to an obvious breeding. He was tall and well formed and not overly bright or bookish or moody or sensitive. He would love Dory with fraternal affection and a benign indifference that would immunize him from the terrible angst that afflicts the lovelorn. There would be affairs, perhaps, but he could be relied upon to keep them discreet and meaningless, and there would be no brooding or melancholy or naval gazing in the wake of their discovery. New love would falter and stumble as it invariably does, but the business of marriage would march on. There would be no midlife forays into the wild unknown because he was not a curious man. His life had followed a well-worn path thus far, and he would stick to that path without the danger of navigational error that comes from needless reflection. He would lead a good life, not a well-examined life, and thereby make it possible for Dory to do the same. He and Dory would produce tall, lithe, gorgeous, towheaded children and grandchildren who, on their way to fulfilling their central role as heirs to the family’s fortune and curators of its legacy, would by their laughter and playfulness banish the awful silence that would otherwise creep into their marriage, like a pestilence.
© 2014 by M. C. Hurley. To be used only with permission for review purposes.
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