Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [44]
The light is never the same, she thinks. Funny how she’s lived most of her life within a mile or two of the ocean in Boston and never paid a minute’s attention to the sea. Of course it’s there, and of course ships come and go — and sometimes even friends come and go on those same ships — but the water has held no interest for her. Now, it seems, she can’t get enough of it. As if she needed to make up for years of neglect.
When the telephone rings, Vivian braces herself, the image of Dickie in his Packard, his face white and his hands trembling, flitting across her vision. She leans against the wall by the telephone table and takes the phone off its cradle.
“Vivian,” he says.
“Dickie,” she says. “Darling, are you in Boston?”
“Vivian,” Dickie repeats, his voice oddly calm. Frighteningly calm, really.
“Oh, Dickie, what is it? Is it very bad?”
“It’s very, very bad,” he says. “Worse than I ever thought possible.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
“Have you talked to your broker?” Dickie asks.
“I did,” she says. “There’s some damage,” she lies. “But not too bad.”
“The reason I ask is that I need you to do something for me,” Dickie says.
“Anything,” Vivian says. “Anything,” she repeats with the guilt of the survivor. “I’ll come right now. I’ll get on the train. I can be there by noon tomorrow.”
“No, don’t come,” he says. “I need you to stay there.”
There’s a silence over the wire.
“Dickie?” she asks after a time.
“I need you to buy the house,” he says.
Vivian makes it onto the beach just before the sun is about to set. Sandy runs on ahead as if he too had been bursting to get outside. Vivian takes off her town welts and unrolls her stockings. She still has on the chartreuse-and-black-checked dress she put on in anticipation of some kind of bereavement. On the telephone, she was flustered and, for once in her life, speechless.
Think about it, Dickie said.
She turns to look back at the house, comfortably settled in its nest of dunes. Behind it, the sun is low on the horizon. The house has three gables, a screened porch in the central one. Behind the screen, there’s a bedroom. On fair days, Vivian takes her tea on the porch instead of in bed.
She doesn’t want to leave the house, and she can afford to buy it. There, she thinks. That’s settled.
She drifts north toward the lifesaving station, noticing that the storm has left more detritus on the beach than usual. She steps around the seaweed and the razor clams, the scallop shells and a piece of netting from a fishing boat, and she thinks of Dickie in Boston.
She will call him as soon as she gets back to the house. She will tell him that she will buy the house immediately, and then Dickie will come back up and they’ll live together again just as if this horrible stock market thing had never occurred. Though even as she imagines this scenario, she knows that it will never happen like that. Dickie’s pride would never allow him to live in the house if she owned it.
She tries to imagine what it would feel like to know that one had lost everything, that one had to sell all the dresses and the jewelry and the cars and the houses. That one could never go to Havana or throw a party at the Plaza Hotel. That one would have to get a job. She tries to picture what possible work she herself could find if it happened to her, and that thought frightens her. She had one year of finishing school at Mount Ida, near Boston, a year she used primarily to prepare for her coming out. She can’t think of a single practical skill she learned. She isn’t at all sure she could survive the sort of ruin Dickie is facing.
Vivian doesn’t have to walk very far before she finds what she is looking for. It lies pressed upon the beach, its slightly curved edges digging into the sand. When she picks it up, the glass has a satisfying heft. It’s a good-sized banana-colored chunk, not too unlike the shade of her Maggy Rouff. She runs her thumb around the edges, which are smooth. She puts the bit of sea glass into the pocket of her dress.
McDermott