Summerlings Read online

  ALSO BY LISA HOWORTH

  Flying Shoes

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Lisa Howorth

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Hal Leonard LLC: Lyric excerpt from “Three Cool Cats,” words and music by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, copyright © 1959 by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, copyright renewed. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Lyric excerpt from “The Twelfth of Never,” words by Paul Francis Webster and music by Jerry Livingston, copyright © 1956 and renewed by Webster Music Co. and Hallmark Music Company. All rights for Hallmark Music Company controlled and administered by Spirit Two Music, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC. New Directions Publishing Corp.: Excerpt from “Canto LXXXI” from The Pisan Cantos, copyright © 1948 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  A portion of this work first appeared as “Ode to Chesapeake Bay” in the August/September 2017 issue of Garden & Gun.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Howorth, Lisa, author.

  Title: Summerlings : a novel / Lisa Howorth.

  Description: New York : Doubleday, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018053370 (print) | LCCN 2019002780 (ebook) | ISBN 978038554658 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385544641 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.O95729 (ebook) | LCC PS3608.O95729 S86 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018053370

  Ebook ISBN 9780385544658

  Cover photographs: boy © The Advertising Archives/Alamy Stock Photo; spider © Domiciano Pablo Romero Franco/Alamy Stock Photo

  Cover design John A. Fontana

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Lisa Howorth

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Washington, my four Washingtonian grandparents,

  and all the grandparents who save the day

  “Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood!”

  —Anton Chekhov,

  “The Bishop”

  1

  For us boys, the summer of 1959 was as cataclysmic as a meteor. Washington’s historic plague, our wild neighborhood party, and my first acquaintance with death—these are the things I remember so vividly from that bright season, along with the accompanying feelings of fear, revelation, and wonder.

  I was eight, the time in life when everything is still new, and some things are perceived clearly but others are murky and not understood—that is to say, those things in the realm of adults. What my friends and I knew was a grab bag of information overheard, along with information we made up and told one another and accepted as fact. Not really so different from the grown-up world, I suppose. We existed in a smaller world of our own daunting challenges, peopled with gods and monsters. Sometimes they were the same.

  * * *

  —

  It was a scorchingly hot summer. Maybe the record-high temperatures had something to do with our plague. But Washington summers are always fairly hot; the city is built on a swamp, after all. What were L’Enfant and Banneker thinking? Paris, I suppose. Wide diagonal boulevards, circles, obelisks, bronze and granite heroes—but built on marshy land where cattle once grazed.

  The city grew like a swamp, too. Our neighborhood, just over the District line near Chevy Chase Circle on Connecticut Avenue, was lushly green in summer, even deep into August. Connors Lane, originally just a farm road, was jungly and mossy—Virginia creeper and ivy grew on houses, grass grew from cracks in the sidewalk and street. Few people had perfectly tended yards, or exotic nursery specimens from Johnson’s Flowers or American Plant Food. What grew was what was used to growing: boxwoods, dogwoods, oaks, holly and yew, maples and mulberries, and, of course, the iconic cherry trees, although they weren’t indigenous and had been given to the city of Washington by the Japanese government in 1912. My mother told us that when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, an angry mob set the cherry trees at the Japanese embassy on fire. But cherries thrived all over the city—their delicate pink blossoms so very lovely in spring, giving our stolid, stony city a lighter feel, like a frill of petticoat peeking from under a nun’s habit. In our old neighborhood, steps and walks crumbled and mold grew on walls. We didn’t worry about things like mold back then; we worried about polio and radioactivity. The big oaks created a dense canopy on our lane—a tunnel where we boys foraged and loitered and ran amok like the little beasts that we were. The light under the canopy gave everything a dark, watery green cast in summer, a green not like any of the greens in my new box of sixty-four Crayolas.

  * * *

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  Connors Lane had been part of a large farm established in 1848 by two Irish immigrant brothers of that name. The farm had been sold, although a remnant of the family still lived down the lane, toward Western Avenue, where most of the newer houses were. Some of those new houses belonged to second-generation Jewish couples whose parents or grandparents had escaped Europe before the Holocaust. My grandfather said our neighborhood, because it wasn’t part of the more “hoity-toity enclave” closer to Connecticut Avenue, was one of the few places in Chevy Chase where Jews were allowed to live, which I didn’t understand but was told not to talk about. Our end of the lane, close to Brookville Road, consisted of mostly older houses of assorted vintages. My grandmother called us the “Whitman’s Sampler” because our neighbors were all so different, and from “somewhere else.” Other countries, but also from other places in the U.S. Not unusual for the Washington area, but, looking back, it was unusual for most of America. We certainly didn’t think it was different then; as far as we knew, it was just like everywhere else. Everywhere else must have diplomats, government people, and refugees from one bad thing or another, is what we thought, if we thought about it at all.

  In fact, our family were the oddballs—Washington natives, although, of course, originally we were from “somewhere else,” too. My grandfather Brickie’s grandfather, a Schultze, had come from Germany (Brickie wasn’t especially proud of this) and made harnesses for President Taft’s horses. Po
or horses! Brickie’s mother came from Limerick, and my grandmother Dimma’s people were from Philadelphia, going way back. I didn’t know as much about my dad’s family because he and my mother divorced when I was five or so, and things were not cordial between them. My sister, Liz, and I didn’t see our father often: the occasional dinner at O’Donnell’s Sea Grill, or the Touchdown Club, and we’d go with him to Rehoboth Beach for a few days every summer. Daddy’s family, Mannixes, were Irish, too, and Catholic—“mackerel snappers,” as the lapsed-Catholic Brickie said, and I did know that Daddy had worked with his father in real estate, but they’d had a falling-out over some slum properties my father didn’t want to deal with. He still hadn’t found a job. Brickie said my dad was allergic to work.

  We called my grandfather “Brickie,” a nickname from his sandlot baseball days on the Ellipse, and because of his bright-red hair. His real name was John, same as mine. He worked down in Foggy Bottom for the United States Information Agency, writing broadcasts for Voice of America. He also helped create the Jazz Ambassadors program, sending famous jazz musicians around the world to make people like America. My grandmother Dimma’s name was a child’s corruption of “Dear Ma,” what her grandmother had been called. Dimma did lady things: played bridge, shopped for beautiful clothes, did a little charity work, and enjoyed the crossword puzzle in the morning Washington Post with her Chesterfields and Cutty Sark. She was still pretty, her hair a subtle gold, and she wore stylish cat-eye glasses to match. Brickie and Dimma came to live with us when my parents separated.

  Our house was fairly modest, a three-story brick colonial built on the site of an old firehouse, with what my grandmother called a “porte cochere,” and extensive gardens, where Brickie tended his peace roses, peonies, and annuals. The old stable where the fire engine and horses had been kept still stood in the backyard. When they moved in, my grandparents had taken the master bedroom, and my mother had moved into the attic room—at least until she left. Liz and I had our own small bedrooms, but now Liz, who, at almost thirteen, was a “problem adolescent,” was off at Camp Furman for the summer and would soon start boarding at Holton-Arms downtown, so I was practically an only child.

  I was not exactly sure why my parents divorced. Looking back, I can see that Daddy was feckless and spoiled, and had trouble holding a job, and my mother was often depressed, and needed a lot of attention. They were both good-looking and wild, and they loved to drink and traipse off to Ocean City or Virginia Beach or New York. After their marriage ended, my mother contracted tuberculosis and had to go to St. Elizabeths, a hospital where there was a TB sanatorium—or at least that’s what Liz and I were told. Nearly two years later, she was still there, although she came to visit us every month or so. I missed both of my parents, particularly my mother, but I didn’t miss their fights. Divorce was lonely for children—there wasn’t a lot of it in the 1950s, and I sometimes felt like we were frowned upon by some people, but I followed Brickie’s advice and tried not to think too much about it, and waited impatiently for my mother to come back to us.

  Our end of Connors Lane was populated by an intriguing array of mostly international families. The De Haans lived next door in a big new house shoehorned onto a lot too close to ours, according to my grandparents. The De Haans were Dutch and had two boys, Kees and Piet. I didn’t play with them much because they didn’t go to Rosemary School with me but to Beauvoir—a school where Europeans sent their children who were in danger of becoming too American. Kees and Piet dressed nicely and were opposed to getting dirty, which didn’t sit too well with me and my two best friends, Max and Ivan. Max had heard his dad say that General de Haan had been a Nazi sympathizer during World War II. I couldn’t understand why, if he was the enemy, he hadn’t been hanged or shot by a firing squad and was living freely in America, but apparently it was the fault of “lily-livered, bleeding-heart eggheads” like Adlai Stevenson, according to the father of the Shreve boys down the street. The General was tall, with an imposing gut, and dressed impeccably in wool vests and velvety moleskin pants, even in summer. Like Kees and Piet, he slicked back his hair, which in his case only accentuated his baldness. I never saw him smile. They’d built a small, ridiculously blue swimming pool—very unusual for Chevy Chase back then—and it was wunderbar, but Max was never invited to swim because he was Jewish, and then we were all banished for something atrocious we’d done to Kees and Piet to get back at them for excluding Max. We deeply regretted what we did, or so I said in an apology note Dimma had made me hand-deliver, but mainly our regret had to do with not being allowed in their pool. My grandmother occasionally had tea with Madame de Haan, who had crammed their house with lovely old European antiques “No doubt acquired from their Jewish neighbors,” Brickie said. But Dimma enjoyed their Old World culture and felt sorry for Madame. “She must be twenty years younger than he is,” she told my grandfather. “He doesn’t even let her drive.”

  “Of course he doesn’t,” Brickie said. “Because she would drive the hell away. Just like, I might add, those one hundred thousand Dutch Jews who would’ve liked to.”

  * * *

  —

  The Friedmanns, Max’s family, on the other side of the De Haans, didn’t want Max playing with Piet and Kees, even though the Dutch boys were polite and much better behaved than Max and Ivan and I were. The Friedmanns had escaped Austria before the war, after the Anschluss. They lived in a brownish, decrepit farmhouse that was cool and dim inside and smelled like pineapple. I thought this was because Mrs. Friedmann baked a lot, maybe with special Jewish ingredients, but Dimma said that the aroma was due to “lax housekeeping.” I’d pointed out that at least it didn’t reek of Clorox and ammonia, like our house after our maid, Estelle, cleaned. Things were just old and worn out. The Friedmanns were kind of poor by our neighborhood’s standards because they’d had to leave everything behind when they fled Austria. The nicest things in the house were the handsome bookshelves Mr. Friedmann had built to hold their many books, some of which were in Hebrew. Mr. Friedmann had been an electrical engineer in Austria, but now tuned pianos and fixed clocks and radios and tended a huge vegetable garden in their backyard. Mrs. Friedmann wore peasant skirts and kept her salt-and-pepper hair in a long braid down her back. She went to a lot of meetings at their synagogue, Adas Israel in Cleveland Park, and read newspapers in other languages, like Esperanto. Brickie called them “beatniks, but without the jazz and poetry.” But he occasionally helped Mr. Friedmann with his garden, and loaned him records. In return we got delicious tomatoes, and sometimes his prized watermatoes; a successful experiment in crossing cherry tomatoes with watermelons. Their tabby cat was named Wiesie, for Simon Wiesenthal, because, as Max said, “She stalks and executes mice like Wiesenthal with the Nazis.” Since Max was going on ten, a year older than Ivan and I, he liked to be the authority on things, and his much older sister was a rich repository of teenage wisdom. Max informed us about things like how babies were made, and born, which was so disturbing it couldn’t possibly be true. He also knew what queers did—mate with guys—doubly unimaginable.

  * * *

  —

  In the house beyond the Friedmanns lived an ancient spinster, Miss Prudence Braddock, neighborhood doyenne by virtue of being one of the original inhabitants on Connors Lane before the farm had been divided up and sold off. We never saw her and we were told to leave her alone and stay out of her yard—she didn’t like children, possibly because our baseballs often threatened her spectacular lavender azaleas, which were as ancient as she was and as big as rooms. She owned a magnificent dollhouse full of tiny, precious furnishings she’d collected over her long lifetime. Dimma and my mother had been invited to see it, but not Liz, still deemed a kid, nor our Brazilian friend, Beatriz—Miss Braddock didn’t like foreigners, either. Beatriz didn’t really care, but my sister was sorely disappointed and she vowed to break into Miss Braddock’s to get a look. “She’s mean, and she’s going to die any minute,
anyway,” Liz said. And eventually die she did, and the dollhouse went to the Smithsonian, without any of us children ever getting a look.

  * * *

  —

  The Andersens lived on the other side of us. Mr. Andersen was an artist; I don’t know why they lived in Washington, or where they’d come from. They were very “modern,” Dimma said, not admiringly; their immaculate Craftsman home featured a carefully tended yard, new Danish furniture, and a ferocious charcoal-colored Giant Schnauzer named Foggy, who we believed was mainly there to keep us off their property. Even though he was behind a fence, we were terrified of him—he hated all living things but especially us, possibly because we often threw magnolia-pod hand grenades at him. Once we’d seen him eat a box turtle whole, like it was a chocolate-chip cookie, and a regrettable thing had happened not too long before involving the Shreves’ cat and Estelle, our maid. Dimma believed the Andersens looked down on us as déclassé, and she declared that they “put on airs,” and were “dour,” which I took to mean boring, but they had spectacular arguments that were anything but. There was an angry daughter a little younger than Liz—Maari—who was even scarier than my sister. Max and Ivan and I had once seen Maari break a baseball bat when she was emphasizing where she thought home plate should be, and this was so impressive we steered clear of her. And there was a three-year-old we called Punchy Jane because she held her hands in fists and worked her elbows fiercely when she walked.

  * * *

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