All Summer Long: A Novel Part 1

All Summer Long.

A Novel.

Dorothea Benton Frank.

Dedication.

In memory of our friend Pat with great love.

Epigraph.

All that glitters is not gold; Often you have heard it told: Many a man his life has sold.

But my outside to behold:.

Gilded tombs do worms enfold.

Had you been as wise as bold, Young in limbs, in judgment old, Your answer had not been in'scroll'd.

Fare you well: your suit is cold. Cold, indeed, and labour lost: Then, farewell, heat and welcome, frost!.

-The Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene VII.

William Shakespeare.

Prologue.

Easter Monday, April 6, 2015.

Manhattan.

Whether the subject of change was partners, possessions, or places, some people had an easy time letting go. A fixture in the crown of Manhattan's cla.s.sic interior designers, Olivia Ritchie was not such a person.

Over the years she had enjoyed the privilege of observing the private and personal habits of the one percent through her work. She was surprised to discover that there were people-many of them, in fact-whose closets weren't jammed to capacity with twenty-year-old garments they thought would come back into vogue. Hers bulged with a kind of weird ferocity, as though the closets were populated by tiny, possessive museum demon docents that guarded the history of her style. These same people with the organized closets, whose clothing and accessories were usually spread over their other residences, which helped to explain why they were so neat, actually replaced the contents of their spice cabinets and pantries annually, and over-the-counter medicines were tossed out by their expiration dates, just because it seemed like a good idea. Actually, someone on their payroll did it for them. Olivia didn't do any of those things. To begin with, she had only one home. And only a part-time housekeeper.

Olivia Ritchie wasn't technically a h.o.a.rder, but she loved her collections and the precious possessions she had ama.s.sed over decades. She saved garments and linens simply because she loved the fabric or the workmanship. You could find them wrapped in acid-free paper and packed in acid-free cardboard boxes under the bed and stacked in the very top of the linen closet and armoires. There were scores of handbags and scarves and mountains of costume jewelry that had been out of style for a very long time. Sometimes she would use a detail from one of them to represent a motif in a custom wallpaper or fabric. Sometimes she used the object for color. She squirreled away all sorts of things because they could be an honest catalyst for inspiration. And if she truly tired of something, she managed to sell it to a client.

Olivia had dozens of objets d'art and curiosities from all over the world, ranging from a sixteenth-century Italian saltcellar sometimes attributed to the school of Benvenuto Cellini to dozens of ivory j.a.panese netsukes. She had miniature cloisonne boxes that played sweet music, tiny French clocks that chimed a.s.sertively on the quarter hour, and dozens of hand-carved Chinese puzzle b.a.l.l.s. The intricacies of the puzzle b.a.l.l.s never ceased to amaze her. They seemed impossible to her-impossible to envision as an artist and impossible to render. All of these belongings, down to the most humble b.u.t.tons in her b.u.t.ton box, were poised to ignite her creative spark. These tools inspired Olivia's magic. She made the dreams of other people come true. At least that was the pleasant rationale to keep them all.

But she couldn't keep her first husband, the philandering, financially irresponsible medical student she had married in her mid-twenties against the pleading of everyone she knew. Two years into it she came home one night to an empty apartment. All he left her was a note on the kitchen counter along with ten milligrams of Valium. The note read: Sorry. I can't do this anymore. You're too demanding and controlling. You really ought to get some help.

He took every stick of furniture, the contents of the kitchen and linen closet, and needless to say, all the music. Oh, he left the wedding alb.u.m on a windowsill in the living room, a choice that stung. She ripped the pictures into shreds and threw them off the balcony, watching as pieces of her dream floated down to 73rd Street. It took her a while to get over it.

Olivia buried herself in work and built her business, one gnarly client at a time. After being single and, she would admit, very lonely, Olivia achieved extreme success and married again, this time with the blessing of everyone she knew. But she vowed never to answer to anyone again. There would be no mingling of resources this time around. She was in charge of it all and the happiest she had ever been. People said she had dreamed Nick into her life-Olivia was a lucid dreamer, something that drove her crazy because her dreams were so vivid it was hard to tell the difference between a dream and reality. Nick teased her without mercy about them, comparing her to a New Zealand tribe of indigenous people who confused them also.

Her safe and jovial (much older than her) second husband-darling, poetic, professorial, and ever the perfect gentleman-Nicholas Seymour, was a lifelong student and teacher, and he didn't particularly care about power. Well, he was happy to cede control of their money as long as things went well. For fourteen years of bliss they had been flush and pretty much able to do as they pleased because her business thrived.

Nick was like Olivia in that he also collected things. Nick had shelves upon shelves of gorgeous handmade leather-bound books whose spines were hand tooled in gold leaf. His small study that held these treasures had a tiny woodburning fireplace, a luxury in their type of building. The combination of the lingering ghosts of wood fires over the years and old leather laced with the occasional Montecristo smelled better than any perfume on this entire earth. And Nick had an army of tiny cast lead Confederate soldiers placed in battlefield dioramas on a few shelves, lit and protected by gla.s.s walls that looked like small aquariums. To his everlasting delight, the Union troops of General William Tec.u.mseh Sherman did not and would never reflect actual history in his depictions.

"It's a mighty powerful feeling for a modest man like me to be able to change the outcome of a war," he would say with a wink to a guest. "May I offer you a measure of my oldest bourbon?"

Who could refuse? He and his visitor, usually a colleague or a graduate student, would sink into Nick's well-worn and cracked leather armchairs and sip away into the evening telling stories about the South or European wars or just about the great beauty to be found in a line of Seamus Heaney's poetry.

Nick, who could have been the prototype for Oscar Madison, was a man of many interests. The walls and file drawers of his study were filled with ancient rare maps used by explorers in ages long gone. His favorites were cla.s.sified as cartographic curiosa, a term that referred to maps with geographical inaccuracies such as misshapen continents or ones that showed places like California as an island.

"Look at this," he said to Olivia one night, carefully lifting the brown paper away from a new acquisition-a seventeenth-century map detailing North America. "This fellow de Lahontan was a French military officer stationed in Quebec. After he fought the Iroquois, he made this map."

"Amazing!" Olivia said. "Gosh, honey, didn't you wear that shirt yesterday?"

"Yes. Is it a capital offense to wear a shirt a second day?"

"No, but it's wearing yesterday's lunch." Olivia said and touched the rather large stain left by the drips and splatters of the red sauce from spaghetti Bolognese they had shared the prior day at a charming neighborhood restaurant.

"Oh. I'll change it in a moment."

"No, you won't. I know you. It would take an act of Congress."

"I will! But listen to this." He shuddered and thought, Women! "What's truly amazing is that the literature he published along with it described a mythical place, one inhabited by a large and lavish tribe of Native Americans."

"Mythical? You mean it's a lie?"

"Yes! Yes! Yes! In those days, who could call you out?"

"Well, they didn't exactly have Google Earth in the 1600s," Olivia said, and smiled.

"No, they surely didn't." Nick shook his head and looked at Olivia. "G.o.d, I just love this stuff."

Although she didn't quite understand his fascination with old maps, Olivia and Nick shared an appreciation for fine craft in any discipline. Their treasures were an extension of who they were professionally and spiritually. They were an ideal couple, except that he was truly a bit of a slob and she wasn't exactly forthcoming about their finances.

They forgave each other their indulgences and almost anything really, but unfortunately for Olivia, the dreaded moment of truth had arrived. It was time for her to downsize with Nick, which meant selling their apartment and moving. Downsizing. It was a terrible term, one that woke her up in the middle of the night with visions of misery along with her serious financial problems and gave her cold sweats. Downsizing. Even the sound of it was depressing. It implied all sorts of terrible things. Failure to maintain their lifestyle as it was. Getting out of the game. Yesterday's news. Done. Finished. Old. Down. What was down? h.e.l.l was down. She was going to h.e.l.l.

This terrified her, and for good reason. Nick thought they could both afford to retire, but Olivia knew they could not. And if the concept of downsizing didn't fill her with enough dread, they were moving to Charleston, South Carolina. She, a fourth-generation New Yorker, was walking away from the bright lights of the center of the universe. Her fingernails would be found embedded in the cement in front of the Decoration & Design Building. This could easily prove to be the worst decision of her life. It was professional suicide.

In the minds of her clients she would be washed up. Moving away from New York would surely be a death knell! It tolls for thee, Olivia. Why in the world would a client in Manhattan hire an interior designer from anywhere else? New York still had all the edge, didn't it?

But this was the agreement she had made with Nick, a confirmed bachelor, when they married fourteen years ago. They sold his studio apartment and he moved in with her. When the time came, they would retire to Charleston, the land of his ancestors and his boyhood. He was beside himself, giddy with joy.

"I'd go anywhere with you," she'd said fourteen years ago, and meant it.

Then.

"By G.o.d, you're wonderful. You'll love a simpler life!" Nick bellowed with thunderous affection on so many occasions, and he always meant it too. "You're an angel! And I am a lucky man."

But Nick, with his salt-and-pepper closely clipped beard and blue eyes filled with mirth, lived in the world of poetry and history and didn't have an inkling about how money or the world worked. He depended on Olivia's business ac.u.men to manage their money, and she had done a splendid job of it. She said all their success was due to being lucky. And she was. Until recently.

It didn't take too many mistakes to throw her business into a downward spiral. And even though the mistakes weren't always hers, she ultimately took the fall. First, there was the thirty-thousand-dollar sofa that came in two inches short that the manufacturer wouldn't take back and the client wouldn't accept. That sofa was now in a storage unit in Secaucus along with other problematic items, and they all irritated the living h.e.l.l out of her every time she saw them.

"Some people are just dreadful," she'd think to herself every time she made a delivery.

Truculent behavior was one of the ugliest characteristics of the ent.i.tled and vastly wealthy. Sometimes her clients were completely unreasonable just because they could be.

Next, there was a contract for a total renovation of an eleven-room apartment on upper Park Avenue. The profits from that job would have covered their living expenses for two years. But then the sudden stunning news of that client's explosive, tabloid-doc.u.mented, acrimonious divorce hit the news as though a gigantic rogue meteor had crashed in Time Square. From every corner of Manhattan tongues were wagging like those of dogs galloping toward an overturned street vendor's pushcart. All of that antic.i.p.ated income and all those deposits for fabrics, furniture, lighting, and rugs slipped right through her fingers and dissolved into a nasty puddle of her growing anxiety and despair. The identical thing happened when a major client was transferred to London and another to Sydney. Plans had been drawn by an award-winning architect to reconfigure the footprint of their apartments, in addition to plumbing and electrical plans. Fixtures had been ordered, exotic wood floors and paneled walls had been bought at auction, and then wham! The rug was unceremoniously pulled from under her feet, like Lucy with Charlie Brown's football. No one cared how this would impact Olivia professionally or personally. She gave the impression, because it did not pay whatsoever to ever lose your cool, that her business was so successful their cancellations wouldn't change a thing. It wasn't true. And she never told Nick.

Bad things come in threes, she said to herself.

No, they didn't. They came as frequently as the fiendish G.o.ds of trouble could hurl the disastrous lightning bolts to earth.

To round out her worries, their apartment on East 86th Street sold for much less than she antic.i.p.ated. While the apartment, as you would expect, was a metaphoric jewelry box, the building itself was an unrenovated postWorld War II ugly white brick monstrosity with low ceilings, clanging pipes, and no parking garage. These days, people wanted a view, a media room, and a health club in addition to every other amenity you could name. Dog walkers and concierge services? Yes. These days, people flocked not only to the West Side but to areas downtown and in Brooklyn where you would not have touched your Manolo Blahnik/Warren Edwardsshod foot to the pavement a mere ten years ago.

Things just weren't going her way. At all. So while Nick might have been getting used to the idea of retirement, she was anything but. She had to work and somehow make up her losses. If Nick knew how close they were to bankruptcy, he would die. Her insides quaked at the thought of the truth being discovered. Thankfully she had a loyal client who didn't care if she lived on the moon. Hopefully that client would not abandon her when Olivia gave up physical proximity to her.

So as it got closer to Nick's retirement, she took a deep breath and they put her co-op on the market. They got a buyer who was happy to pay full market value, but they couldn't get board approval. It finally sold but not well. After ten months and no offers, she signed a contract for a pittance. All cash. They would close in ninety days. She began to panic. Moving was no longer a promise but a reality. One last worry? She had made the final decision about which house they bought in South Carolina on her own. She knew the house she chose was far too grand for Nick's taste. But that particular house was what she needed for herself and for the image of her business she hoped to build there.

"This is a disaster," she said, referring to the sale of their co-op. "It's like being robbed. Not to mention, how am I going to unravel years of pack-rat habits in three months?"

"Better days are coming!" said her a.s.sistant, Roni Larini. "Besides, I'll help you."

They were sharing a large Greek salad and a liter of sparkling water delivered from Viand Cafe around the corner, at the tiny but beautiful office she rented in a discreet residential townhouse on East 58th Street.

"Thanks. I know you will. You always do. And I've got the lease on this place until October."

"Maybe you should keep it," Roni said.

"Maybe," Olivia said, but she knew she could not afford to sign another lease. Not without new projects on the books.

Roni could almost read Olivia's mind. She knew Olivia was completely overwhelmed. And it took something as cataclysmic as the nose dive she was experiencing to unravel Olivia.

"I'll check the fine print. Maybe you can sublet."

"There's a thought."

"What's the rent?"

"Four, including maintenance."

"We could get six on a sublet. Easy. Or! How's this? We fix up the back rooms into bedrooms and you'll stay right here when you come to town."

"We'll see."

"You'll be fine, Olivia. We've been to the edge before. Are you getting any sleep?"

"Not much. Nightmares like mad."

"You should start doing yoga again. It makes you put everything into perspective."

Roni often referred to herself as Olivia's office wife. She may have only been thirty, but she had made herself indispensable. In truth, Olivia wondered how she would live without her when she moved. But they had sort of a loose but optimistic plan to hold their relationship together by employing the services of frequent emails, FedEx, FaceTime, and Skype. And she would fly to New York twice a month and stay at the Cosmopolitan Club. Lord knows, she'd paid membership dues for years but was always too busy to enjoy the benefits. Or maybe she should give up the Coz Club, put a bed in the storage room as Roni suggested, and save some money. It had been decades since she'd had to reconsider her overhead.

It was true that her expenses would be much lower in South Carolina, which would help their financial constraints. But could she generate enough business from there to get her out of debt? Could she generate any business at all? Would she really be as efficient without Roni by her side in flesh and blood? She had asked Roni to consider moving south with them, but Roni could not. The timing was all wrong. Roni was firmly tied to New York. Her eighty-five-year-old mother was in a.s.sisted living, dealing with all the horrors of Alzheimer's. Her two useless siblings and their useless spouses lived in the Midwest in oblivion, pretending no responsibility.

"I know you're right. I should go back to yoga," Olivia said and fished out a large black olive from among the lettuce and tomatoes, popping it into her mouth. "I wish they'd pit these things."

"I wish a lot of things," Roni said.

"Me too."

CHAPTER 1.

Rats.

Their small commercial plane was about twenty minutes north of Charleston, descending through a thick blanket of c.u.mulus clouds to an alt.i.tude of ten thousand feet. Once they cleared the clouds, the landscape of the Lowcountry burst into view. Waves of bright-green spartina covered former rice fields and marshlands, their blades standing in sharp contrast against the sparkling blue majestic waters of the Waccamaw River. Olivia was mesmerized. Nick's delight at the scene, and most especially at her reaction, was very nearly a tangible thing.

"Behold paradise!" Nick said dramatically, exhaling a gush of relief. "The sluices of water cutting through the marsh gra.s.s in tendrils . . ."

"Just like the ringlets on the back of Miss Scarlett's pretty little head," she said in a terrible southern accent. Then she cut her eye at him and smiled. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be so cynical."

"You're going to love living here. I swear you will," Nick said, saying a silent prayer that the Lowcountry would work its magic on her. "And your pretty cynicism will roll away on the turn of the next tide."

"I've always enjoyed the time we've spent here," she said.

But it was one thing to stay at the gorgeous Charleston Place Hotel and have room service and quite another to live on the tip of an island in a funky old beach house.

Her eyes were focused on the landscape as it rose to meet them. His eyes were focused on her. (Cue up the theme song from Out of Africa.) Her thick blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail that drifted down her back. She was wearing a straw fedora and all white linen, even though it was before Memorial Day. A bona fide New Yorker, Olivia didn't give one tiny d.a.m.n about when she wore white. She had her own rules.

He loved her in hats. And in white-it reminded him of her tangled in their sheets. Nick was all too aware of her shaky feelings about the move. That's why he went along with the house she chose. To be honest, he was uncertain about which house she actually did choose! They had looked at so many he couldn't remember. To be more honest, he didn't care one whit. He was one step closer to coming home, and that was all that mattered to him.

He knew the renovation of any of the old houses would be a huge project, and Olivia loved nothing better than a huge project. Nick thought, if he was right, that the house she did choose was hideous, but she said she saw potential everywhere. Where? He thought. He couldn't see potential in any of them.

The good news was that all the houses were in such disrepair that his relatives, distant as they were, and old friends wouldn't be offended by a vulgar display of wealth. At the heart of it all, he was an island boy, a Geechee boy, a Lowcountry boy. Low-key discretion was the name of the game for his tribe.