AT THIS POINT in the story, Joan and Mrs. Nudd laughed until they wept. They all laughed happily except Pamela, who was waiting impatiently for her part in the narrative. It came immediately after the fall downstairs. Randy had stayed at the Blaisdells’ for supper and had returned to the camp with Pamela while Hartley and Russell were trying to get Nora into bed. They had news for everybody, they said; they had decided to get married. Mrs. Nudd had never wanted Randy to marry Pamela, and their news made her sad, but she kissed Pamela tenderly and went upstairs to get a diamond ring. “Oh, it’s beautiful!” Pamela said when she was given the ring. “But don’t you need it? Won’t you miss it? Are you sure you want me to have it? Tell me the truth…” Miss Coolidge, who had been very quiet until then and who must have felt very much a stranger, asked if she could sing.
ALL THE LONG DISCUSSIONS that Russell had had with Esther about the impermanence of their relationship did not help him that autumn when the Nudds went away. He missed the girl and the summer nights in her room painfully. He began to write long letters to Esther when he got back to Albany. He was troubled and lonely as he had never been before. Esther did not answer his letters, but this did not change the way he felt. He decided that they should become engaged. He would stay on at college and get a Master’s degree, and with a teaching job they could live in some place like Albany. Esther did not even answer his proposal of marriage, and in desperation Russell telephoned her at college. She was out. He left a message to call him back. When she had not called him by the next evening, he telephoned her again, and when he got her this time, he asked her to marry him. “I can’t marry you, Russell,” she said impatiently. “I don’t want to marry you.” He hung up miserably and was lovesick for a week. Then he decided that Esther’s refusal was not her decision, that her parents had forbidden her to marry him?a conjecture that was strengthened when none of the Nudds returned to Macabit the next summer. But Russell was mistaken. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd took Joan and Esther to California that summer, not to keep Esther away from Russell but because Mrs. Nudd had received a legacy and had decided to spend it on the trip. Hartley took a job in Maine at a summer camp. Randy and Pamela?Randy had lost his job in Boston and had taken one in Worcester?were having a baby in July, and so Whitebeach Camp was not opened at all.
THEN THEY ALL came back. A year later, on a June day when a horse van was bringing the bays up to the Macabit Riding Stable and there were a lot of motorboats on trailers along the road, the Nudds returned. Hartley had a teaching job, so he was there all summer. Randy took two weeks without pay so that he and Pamela and their baby could be there for a month. Joan had not planned to come back; she had gone into partnership with a woman who owned a tearoom at Lake George, but she quarreled with her partner early in this venture, and in June Mr. Nudd drove to the lake and brought her home. Joan had been to a doctor that winter because she had begun to suffer from depressions, and she talked freely about her unhappiness. “You know, I think the trouble with me,” she would say at breakfast, “is that I was so jealous of Hartley when he first went to boarding school. I could have killed him when he came home that year for Christmas, but I repressed all of my animosity…”
“Remember that nursemaid, O’Brien?” she would ask at lunch. “Well, I think O’Brien warped my whole outlook on sex. She used to get undressed in the closet, and she beat me once for looking at myself in a mirror when I didn’t have any clothes on. I think she warped my whole outlook…”
“I think the trouble with me is that Grandmother was always so strict,” she would say at dinner. “I never had the feeling that I gratified her. I mean, I got such bad marks at school, and she always made me feel so guilty. I think it’s colored my attitude toward other women.”
“You know,” she would say on the porch after supper, “I think the whole turning point in my life was that awful Trenchard boy who showed me those pictures when I was only ten…” These recollections brought her a momentary happiness, but half an hour later she would be biting her fingernails. Surrounded all her life by just and kindly people, she was having a hard time finding the causes of her irresolution, and, one by one, she blamed the members of her family, and their friends, and the servants.
Esther had married Tom Dennison the previous fall, when she returned from California. This match pleased everyone in the family. Tom was pleasant, industrious, and intelligent. He had a freshman job with a firm that manufactured cash registers. His salary was small, and he and Esther began their marriage in a cold-water tenement in the East Sixties. Speaking of this arrangement, people sometimes added, “That Esther Nudd is so courageous!” When the summer came around, Tom had only a short vacation, and he and Esther went to Cape God in June. Mr. and Mrs. Nudd hoped that Esther would then come to Whitebeach Camp, but Esther said no, she would stick it out in the city with Tom. She changed her mind in August, and Mr. Nudd drove to the junction and met her train. She would only stay for ten days, she said, and this would be her last summer at Whitebeach Camp. Tom and she were going to buy a summer place of their own on Cape God. When it was time for her to go, she telephoned Tom, and he told her to stay in the country; the heat was awful. She telephoned him once a week and stayed at Whitebeach Camp until the middle of September.
Mr. Nudd spent two or three days of every week that summer in New York, flying down from Albany. For a change, he was pleased with the way his business was going. He had been made chairman of the board. Pamela had her baby with her, and she complained about the room they were given. Once, Mrs. Nudd overheard her in the kitchen, saying to the cook, “Things will be very different around here when Randy and I run this place, let me tell you…” Mrs. Nudd spoke to her husband about this, and they agreed to leave Whitebeach Camp to Hartley. “That ham only came to the table once,” Pamela would say, “and I saw her dumping a dish of good shell beans into the garbage last night. I’m not in a position to correct her, but I hate to see waste. Don’t you?”
Randy worshipped his thin wife, and she took full advantage of his protection. She came out onto the porch one evening when they were drinking before dinner, and sat down beside Mrs. Nudd. She had the baby in her arms.
“Do you always have supper at seven, Granny?” she asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t get to the table at seven,” Pamela said. “I hate to be late for meals, but I have to think of the baby first, don’t I?”
“I’m afraid I can’t ask them to hold dinner,” Mrs. Nudd said.
