An Unkind Summer The letter arrived on a Monday in September, which was the kind of timing that Clara Bates would have found ironic if she were the ironic type. She was not ironic. She was desperate, which is different. Desperation has no humor in it; it is the most honest emotion a person can feel. The letter was on heavy cream paper, the kind that costs more than a week's rent in Manhattan. The handwriting was neat and precise and unmistakably not hers. Miss Bates: Mr. Harrington has read your published work and finds it promising. He requires a personal memoir edited and structured for publication. The position involves a three-month residency at his estate on Long Island. Compensation is substantial. Should you be interested, please contact me at the address below. Mr. Edward Shaw, Intermediary Clara set the letter down on her desk and looked out the window of her apartment on West Eighty-Seventh Street. The street was full of people going somewhere—men in dark coats walking fast, women in light dresses carrying shopping bags, a child pulling a toy that made a sound like a squeaking hinge. She had not been interested in anything substantial for seven years. She picked up the letter again and read the address below. It was an estate on the North Shore of Long Island. The name of the estate was "Willowmere." The name of the estate meant nothing to her. The name of the man who had written the letter meant everything. She did not write back that day. She did not write back the next day either. She sat in her apartment and drank tea and looked at the letter on her desk and tried to remember what it felt like to make a decision that was not driven by hunger or rent or the need to exist in a body that required both. She wrote back on the third day. The train from Grand Central to Glen Cove took forty-seven minutes. Clara sat by the window and watched Manhattan disappear behind her—the buildings getting shorter, the streets getting wider, the people getting fewer. She watched the Hudson River appear and disappear, the trees get thicker, the lawns get greener. By the time the train reached Glen Cove, she was in a country she had not visited since she was twenty and had not known was a country until she left it. The man who met her at the station introduced himself as Mr. Shaw. He was older than she had expected—sixty, perhaps—and wore a suit that was not quite fashionable but was certainly expensive. He carried a leather suitcase that looked like it had been used to carry books. "Miss Bates," he said. "Mr. Harrington is expecting you. The carriage is outside." There was a carriage. It was not a carriage so much as a motorcar painted black, with a driver who wore a cap and did not smile. They loaded Clara's single suitcase into the trunk, and the motorcar took them down a road that was lined with trees and fences and houses that were large enough to be estates and small enough to be pretend. Willowmere appeared at the end of the road like a set from a play—white columns, a wide veranda, a garden that was too perfect to be natural and too natural to be fake. It was the kind of house that had been built by someone who had money but not taste, which is the most American combination there is. Mr. Shaw led Clara inside. The foyer was high and cold and furnished with things that had belonged to someone else's grandfather. A staircase curved upward. A portrait of a man in military uniform hung above the fireplace. "Mr. Harrington is in the library," Mr. Shaw said. "I'll show you to your room after lunch." Lunch was served in a dining room that could have seated twenty but had clearly not seated more than four in years. The food was good but impersonal—roast chicken, mashed potatoes, a salad that had been arranged like a painting and would have been better left that way. "Where is Mr. Harrington?" Clara asked after twenty minutes of eating in silence with Mr. Shaw, who ate with the efficiency of a man who considered eating a task rather than a pleasure. "In the library. He asked that you join him after you have rested." "I've rested." "Then by all means." He led her to the library. It was the warmest room in the house—a fireplace, bookshelves from floor to ceiling, a rug that had been woven somewhere in Asia and was now threadbare in the places where someone had stood and thought. A man was standing at the window, looking out at the garden. He was tall and thin and wore a sweater that had been fashionable in another decade. He turned when Clara entered. "Clara Bates," he said. She stopped in the doorway. She did not know what she had expected—anger, perhaps, or relief, or the blank stare of a man who had erased her from his life the way a painter erases a line he does not need. She had not expected this: James Thorne, standing in a library on a Long Island estate, looking at her the way a man looks at a door he has been standing in front of for seven years. "James." "Clara." He did not move toward her. She did not move toward him. They stood in the library of a house that belonged to a man neither of them knew, and the space between them was seven years long and one step wide. "Mr. Harrington asked me to edit his memoir," she said. "I know." "You're his medical consultant." "I am." "You didn't tell me." "I didn't think—seven years is a long time, Clara." She looked at him. He was thinner than he had been. There were lines around his eyes that had not been there before. His hair was darker at the temples, or perhaps the light from the window made it seem so. "Why are you here?" she asked. "I could ask you the same thing." She opened her mouth to say something clever and closed it. The truth was simple and humiliating: she needed the money. She had published one novel that had received polite reviews and modest sales. Her second novel had received no reviews and no sales. She was twenty-seven years old, and she was running out of time to find out whether writing was something she could do for a living or something she had fooled herself into believing she could do. "I needed work," she said. "So did I." That was not what he had meant, and they both knew it. But in the library of Willowmere, on a September afternoon in 1925, with the wind moving through the garden outside and the fire crackling in the hearth, it was enough. The work was harder than she had expected. Mr. Harrington was not a natural writer. He was a natural businessman—a self-made man who had built a fortune in shipping and real estate and had never learned that a life is not a ledger and cannot be balanced. His memories were fragmentary, contradictory, and punctuated by long periods of silence when he would look out the window and say nothing for several minutes. Clara sat across from him with a notebook and a pen and the patient professionalism of a woman who understood that her job was not to judge the material but to shape it. She asked questions. He answered. Sometimes his answers were useful. Sometimes they were not. She wove them together into something that resembled a narrative. James visited the house twice a week. He came in the afternoons, usually after his rounds at the nearby hospital. He would sit in the library with Clara while she worked, reading a medical journal or writing in a notebook of his own. He never spoke about Mr. Harrington's memoir. He never spoke about anything, really. He was a man who had learned to fill time with quiet. On the second week, Clara found the poems. She had gone to the library to retrieve a file she had left there. James was not present. The room was empty, and the fire was low, and the light from the window was the particular golden light that only exists in October in the northern hemisphere, when the sun is lower in the sky and the air is crisp enough to make everything look slightly more beautiful than it is. On the desk, beside a stack of medical journals and a cup that had held coffee and had not been washed, was a notebook. It was small and leather-bound and unmarked. Clara opened it. The first page was dated seven years ago—the month she had left for Paris. The second page was dated the month after. The third, the month after that. Each page contained a poem—short, precise, devastating in its restraint. You left in July When the jasmine was dying I counted the days By the length of the shadow She turned the page. Paris in winter is not like Paris in summer. The light Is different. The people Are different. You would not Recognize it. I have Tried to make it familiar By thinking of you In a room I imagined With your furniture And your books And your silence She turned another page. And another. The poems went on for years—seven years of poetry, written in a notebook that no one had ever read, in a language that was too precise for sentiment and too honest for fiction. She closed the notebook and set it back on the desk and stood in the library for a long time, listening to the wind outside and the fire inside and the sound of her own breathing, which had become something she was not sure she controlled. When James came in, she was sitting at the desk, the notebook in front of her, her hands folded on top of it. "You found them," he said. It was not a question. "They're beautiful." "I know." "That's not arrogance. That's—" "Facts. I write to remember. Not to be read." She looked up at him. He was standing in the doorway, his coat still on, his hands in his pockets. He looked tired. He looked the same. "Why didn't you publish them?" she asked. "I didn't think anyone would care." "Someone would have." "Would they?" She did not have an answer to that. She picked up the notebook and set it beside her. It felt warm from being in the sun. It felt like something alive. "I'm sorry," she said. "For what?" "For leaving. For not writing. For—" She stopped. The words were too large for the room. "For everything." He stood in the doorway for a moment. Then he took off his coat and hung it on the back of a chair and sat down in the armchair across from her and said: "Paris is cold in the winter." "I know." "You said you didn't mind the cold." "I said I didn't mind it. I didn't say I was fine with it." He looked at her. In the golden light of the October afternoon, his face was softer than she remembered. Not younger. Not older. Just—present. A man sitting in a library on a Long Island estate, looking at a woman who had left him seven years ago and had come back for reasons he did not fully understand and did not fully want to understand. "I learned to be cold," he said. "That's not the same thing." "No. It's not." The storm came on the last night of July. It hit Long Island with the force of a weather system that had been building since spring and had finally decided to finish what it had started. The power went out at nine o'clock. The house went dark. The servants retreated to the lower floors. Mr. Harrington retired to his room with a candle and a book he would not read. Clara was in the library, working by candlelight, when the power failed. She was editing the ninth chapter of Mr. Harrington's memoir—a section about the war, about loss, about the year 1918 when the world ended and nobody noticed because they were too busy dying. She heard a sound from the corridor—a door opening, footsteps, a voice saying something she could not hear over the wind. James appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a coat and holding a candle. The flame made his face look like it was made of wax and shadow. "The power's out," he said. "I can see that." "I brought this." He held up the candle. She took it and set it on the desk beside hers. The two flames flickered toward each other, then apart, then toward again, as if two people standing in a dark room who want to get closer but do not know how to ask. "Sitting room's too drafty," he said. "Figured you'd be down here." "How did you know?" "You always work late. Even in Paris." She had forgotten that he knew about her habits. Of course he knew. He was the kind of man who pays attention. They sat in the library through the storm. The wind rattled the windows. The rain hit the glass like small stones. The candles burned down to their middle and then their bottom, and the room grew darker, and the darkness made things simpler. "You know," he said after a long silence, "Paris in the winter is very cold." "I know." "You said you didn't mind." "I said I didn't mind." "That's not the same thing." She looked at him across the space between their candles. His face was half in light and half in shadow, and in the shadow, he looked younger. In the light, he looked older. The truth was somewhere in between, in the gray area where most things live. "What do you want me to say?" she asked. "I don't know." "That's not an answer." "I know. I'm still learning the answers." She reached across the space between them and put her hand on the arm of his chair. He did not move away. She did not move closer. They sat in the dark library of a Long Island estate on the last night of July in the year 1925, with a storm outside and two candles between them, and neither of them said anything for a very long time. The memoir was finished on a Tuesday in August. Clara bound it with a string and wrote the title on the cover in neat handwriting: An Unkind Summer. She did not call it that because of the summer she and James had shared. She called it that because of the summer of 1925—the summer of the jazz age and the stock market boom and the flapper dresses and the prohibition and the feeling that everything was going to be fine forever, which is the feeling that always comes right before everything stops being fine. She packed her suitcase on a Thursday morning. James was not at the house. Mr. Shaw told her he had gone to the hospital and would not be back until evening. Clara nodded and continued packing. She folded her dresses, her sweaters, her notebooks, the poems he had never meant for anyone to read. At the station, Mr. Shaw met her with the motorcar. They loaded her suitcase. The driver started the engine. Clara sat in the back of the car and looked out the window at the trees and the fences and the houses getting smaller and farther away. At Grand Central, Mr. Shaw helped her with her suitcase. "Thank you," she said. "For what?" "For the job. For the money. For—" She stopped. For the poems. For the storm. For the candlelight and the silence and the way he had looked at her in the library, in the dark, saying her name like a question he was not ready to answer. "It was honest work," Mr. Shaw said. "That's more than most people can say." She got on the train. She found her seat. She sat by the window and watched the platform through the glass, looking for a figure in a coat who might or might not appear. The train started moving. The platform got shorter. The people on it got smaller. And then there was nothing but the track and the sky and the sound of the wheels on the rails, which sounded like a heartbeat—steady, inevitable, indifferent. She opened her notebook. On the last page, in handwriting that was not hers, were four lines: You left in July You return in July The sea does not remember What the land forgets She closed the notebook. She put it in her bag. She looked out the window at the world passing by, and she did not cry. She did not smile. She sat in the train on a Wednesday afternoon in August 1925, holding a notebook that contained the words of a man who had loved her in silence for seven years, and she understood, with a clarity that was neither happy nor sad, that some things cannot be undone and some things cannot be remade and the space between is the only thing that is truly yours. The train moved west. The sun was lower. The sky was the color of old gold. And Clara Bates, sitting in a compartment on the New York Central Railroad, held onto something she could not name and called it by no name at all.

Author Note & Copyright: