Tigers in Red Weather Read online

  Copyright © 2012 Liza Klaussmann

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  The Bond Street Books colophon is a registered trademark of Random House of Canada Limited

  Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67749-3

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

  “Depression Before Spring” and “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Cover image: (front) Models in Red Swimwear at Beach © Condé Nast Archive/Corbis,

  Jacket design: Terri Nimmo

  Published in Canada by Bond Street Books,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To my grandmother, for the bravery.

  And to the rest of my family, for everything else.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Nick

  1945: September

  1945: December

  1947: February

  Daisy

  1959: June

  1959: July

  1959: July

  1959: August

  1959: August

  Helena

  1967: August

  1962: November

  1967: August

  Hughes

  1959: July

  1944: December

  1959: July

  1959: July

  1959: July

  1959: August

  Ed

  1964: June

  1967: August

  1969: October

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  NICK

  1945: SEPTEMBER

  I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse,” Helena said.

  “At least it’s something different,” Nick said. “No more goddamn ration books. No more taking the bus everywhere. Hughes said he’s bought a Buick. Hallelujah.”

  “Lord knows where he got it,” Helena said. “Probably from some cheat fixer.”

  “Who cares,” said Nick, stretching her arms lazily toward the New England night sky.

  They were sitting in the backyard of their house on Elm Street wearing their slips and drinking gin neat out of old jelly jars. It was the hottest Indian summer anyone in Cambridge could remember.

  Nick eyed the record player sitting precariously in the window. The needle was skipping.

  “It’s too hot to do anything but drink,” she said, laying her head back against the rusting garden chair. Louis Armstrong was stuck repeating that he had a right to sing the blues. “The first thing I’m going to do when I get to Florida is get Hughes to buy me a whole bushel of good needles.”

  “That man,” Helena said, sighing.

  “I know,” Nick said. “He really is too beautiful. And a Buick and fine record needles. What more could a girl ask for?”

  Helena giggled into her glass. She sat up. “I think I’m drunk.”

  Nick slammed her glass down on the arm of the chair, causing the metal to tremble. “We should dance.”

  The oak tree in the backyard cut pieces from the moon, and the sky was already a deep midnight color despite the warmth of the air. The fragrance of summer lingered, as if no one had told the grass that the middle of September had rung in. Nick could hear the nocturnal musings of the woman in the triple-decker next door. Tasting the flavor of the week.

  She looked at Helena as she waltzed her across the grass. Helena could have turned into that kind of woman, Nick thought, with her body like a polished cello and wartime beaux. But her cousin had managed to retain a freshness, all sandy curls and smooth skin. She hadn’t gone ashen like the women who had gone to bed with one too many strangers blown up by mines or riddled by Schmeissers. Nick had seen those women wilting on the ration lines, or creeping out of the post office, threatening to fade away into nothingness.

  But Helena was getting married again.

  “You’re getting married again,” Nick exclaimed, a bit drunkenly, as if the thought had just crossed her mind.

  “I know. Can you believe it?” Helena sighed, her hand warm against Nick’s back. “Mrs. Avery Lewis. Do you think it sounds as good as Mrs. Charles Fenner?”

  “It’s lovely,” Nick lied, spinning Helena out and away.

  To her ear, the name Avery Lewis sounded exactly like what he was: some Hollywood poseur selling insurance and pretending he had dated Lana Turner, or whoever it was he was always going on about. “Fen would probably have liked him, you know.”

  “Oh no. Fen would have hated him. Fen was a boy. A sweet boy.”

  “Dear Fen.”

  “Dear Fen.” Helena stopped dancing and walked back to the gin glass waiting for her on the chair. “But now I have Avery.” She sipped from it. “And I get to move to Hollywood, and maybe have a baby. At least this way I won’t turn into an old maid, mad as a hatter and warts on my nose. A third wheel at the fireside beside you and Hughes. Heaven forbid.”

  “No third wheel, no warts and one Avery Lewis, to boot.”

  “Yes, now we’ll both really have someone of our own. That’s important,” Helena said thoughtfully. “I just wonder …”

  “Wonder what?”

  “Well, if … if it’ll be the same with Avery. You know, the way it was with Fen.”

  “You mean in bed?” Nick turned quickly to face her cousin. “Well, I’ll be goddamned. Has the virginal Helena actually mentioned the act?”

  “You’re mean,” Helena said.

  “I know,” Nick said.

  “I am drunk,” Helena said. “But I do wonder. Fen is the only boy I really loved, before Avery, I mean. But Avery is a man.”

  “Well, if you love him I’m sure it will be just grand.”

  “Of course, you’re right.” Helena finished off her gin. “Oh, Nick. I can’t believe it’s all changing. We’ve been so happy here, despite everything.”

  “Don’t get weepy. We’ll see each other, every summer. Unless your new husband is allergic to the East Coast.”

  “We’ll go to the Island. Just like our mothers. Houses right next door.”

  Nick smiled, thinking about Tiger House, its airy rooms, the expanse of green lawn that disappeared into the blue of the harbor. And the small, sweet cottage next door, which her father had built for Helena’s mother as a gift.

  “Houses, husbands and midnight gin parties,” Nick said. “Nothing’s going to change. Not in any way that really matters. It will be like always.”

  Nick’s train from Boston was delayed and she had to fight her way through the crowds at Penn Station, all rushing off to be somewhere in a muddle of luggage and hats and kisses and lost tickets. Helena must be halfway across the country by now, she thought. Nick had closed up the apartment herself and given the final instructions to the landlady as to where everything was to be sent: boxes of novels and poetry to Florida, suitcases full of corsets to Hollywood.

>   The train, when she finally got on it, smelled like bleach and excitement. The Havana Special, which ran all the way from New York to Miami, would be the first overnight journey she had ever taken alone. She kept pressing her nose to the inside of her wrist, inhaling her lily-of-the-valley perfume like a smelling salt. In the dizziness of it all, she almost forgot to tip the porter.

  Inside her roomette, Nick set her leather case on the rack and clicked it open, checking the contents again to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. One nightgown for the train (white), and one for Hughes (green, with matching dressing gown). Two ivory silk slips, three matching pairs of ivory silk underpants and brassieres (she could wash them every other day until the rest of her things arrived in St. Augustine), her ditty kit (travel vial of perfume; one lipstick, red; the precious Floris hand cream Hughes had brought her from London; one toothbrush and paste; one washcloth; and one cake of Ivory soap), two cotton dresses, two cotton blouses, one pair of gabardine trousers (her Katharine Hepburn trousers), two cotton skirts and one good summer-weight wool suit (cream). She also counted out three pairs of cotton gloves (two white, one cream) and her mother’s pink and green silk scarf.

  Her mother had loved that scarf; she always wore it when she was traveling to Europe. Now it belonged to Nick. And although she wasn’t going as far as Paris just yet, going to meet Hughes after so long seemed more like going to China.

  “Beyond here be dragons,” she said to the suitcase.

  Nick heard the whistle blow and quickly snapped the lid shut and sat down. Now that the war was over, the scene outside the window, women waving handkerchiefs and red-eyed children, was less affecting. No one was going off to die, they were just going to an old aunt’s house, or some boring work appointment. For her, though, it felt exciting; the world was new. She was going to see Hughes. Hughes. She whispered his name like a talisman. Now that she was only a day away from him, she thought she might go crazy with the waiting. Funny how that was. Six months, but the last few hours were unbearable.

  The last time they had seen each other was spring, when his escort ship had docked in New York for repairs and Hughes had gotten liberty. They had stayed on board the U.S.S. Jacob Jones, in one of the rooms for married officers. There were fleas, and just when Hughes had his hand down her skirt, her ankles began to burn. She had tried to concentrate on the tip of his fingers searching her out. His lips on the pulse in her neck. But she couldn’t help crying out.

  “Hughes, there’s something in the bed.”

  “I know, Jesus.”

  They had both rushed to the shower to find their legs covered in red bites and the water in the drain a pool of pepper. Hughes cursed the ship, cursed the war. Nick wondered if he’d notice her naked body. Instead, he turned his back and began soaping himself.

  But he had taken her to the 21 Club. And it had been one of those moments when it seemed that the whole world was conspiring for their happiness. Hughes, who would never take money from his parents and wouldn’t let Nick spend her own, didn’t earn enough on his lieutenant junior’s salary for a meal there. But he knew how much she loved the stories of the sharkskin-suited gangsters and their glamorous molls who had kicked up their heels there during Prohibition.

  “We can only have two martinis and a bowl of olives and celery,” he said.

  “We don’t have to go there at all, if we can’t afford it,” Nick said, looking at her husband’s face. It was sad; sad and something else she couldn’t put her finger on.

  “No,” he said. “We can afford just this. But then we have to leave.” They arrived in the dark-paneled Bar Room, with its crush of toys and sporting artifacts hanging from the ceiling, and Nick instantly felt the impact of her own youth and beauty. She could feel the eyes of the men and women at small tables pass over her red shantung dress and glance off her short, thick black hair. One of the things she loved about Hughes was that he had never wanted her to resemble the celluloid blondes tacked up in every boy’s room across the country. And she didn’t. She was a little too severe-looking, her lines a little too crisp, to be considered pretty. Sometimes it felt like a never-ending battle to prove to the world that, in her difference, she was special, discrete. But there, at the urbane 21 Club, she felt her own rightness. It was a place full of streamlined women, with intelligent eyes, like bullet trains. And there was Hughes, so honey-blond, with his elegant hands and long legs and service dress blues.

  The waiter seated them at table 29. There was a couple to their right. The woman was smoking and pointing out lines from a slender book.

  “In that line, I really see the whole film,” the woman said.

  “Yes,” the man said, with just a touch of uncertainty.

  “And in some ways, it is so Bogart.”

  “It does seem like he was the only logical choice.”

  Nick looked at Hughes. She wanted to communicate to him how much she loved him for bringing her here, for spending too much money just to have a cocktail, for letting her be herself. She tried to radiate all these things in her smile. She didn’t want to talk just yet.

  “Do you know what?” the woman said, her pitch rising suddenly. “We’re at their table. Do you realize we’re at their table and we’re talking about them?”

  “Are we really?” The man took another sip from his scotch.

  “Oh, that is so Twenty-one,” the woman said, laughing.

  Nick leaned in. “Whose table, do you think?” she whispered to Hughes behind her gloved hand.

  “I’m sorry?” Hughes said distractedly.

  “They said they’re at someone’s table. Whose table?”

  Nick realized that the woman was now eyeing them. She had heard her, seen her try to hide her curiosity behind her hand. Nick flushed and looked down at the red-and-white-checked tablecloth.

  “Why, it’s Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s table, dear,” the woman said. She said it kindly. “They went on their first date at this table. It’s one of the things they brag about here.”

  “Oh, really?” Nick tried to hit a note somewhere between polite and nonchalant. She smoothed her styled hair with her palms, feeling the softness of the suede loosening the hair spray.

  “Oh, Dick, let’s give them the table.” The woman was laughing again. “Are you two lovers?”

  “Yes,” said Nick, feeling bold, sophisticated. “But we’re also married.”

  “That’s a rarity.” The man chuckled.

  “Yes, indeed, it is,” the woman said. “And that deserves Bogart and Bacall’s table.”

  “Oh, please don’t let us disturb you,” Nick said.

  “Nonsense,” the man said, picking up his scotch and the woman’s champagne cocktail.

  “Oh, really, you’ve been bedeviled by my wife,” Hughes said. “Nick …”

  “Oh, we’d love it,” the woman said. “And she is especially bedeviling.”

  Nick looked at Hughes, who smiled at her.

  “Yes, she is,” he said. “Come on, then, darling. We’re all on the move for you.”

  The martini that arrived reminded Nick of the sea and their house on the Island: clean, briny and utterly familiar.

  “Hughes. This may be the best supper I’ve ever had. From now on, I only want martinis, olives and celery.”

  Hughes put his hand to her face. “I’m sorry about all of this.”

  “How can you say that? Look where we are.”

  “We should get the bill,” he said, motioning to the waiter.

  “Is everything all right, sir?”

  “It’s fine. May we have the bill, please?” Hughes was looking at the door. Not at Nick, not at her red dress, or her shiny black hair that she’d had to keep in a net on the train all the way from Cambridge to Penn Station.

  The waiter glided away.

  Nick fiddled with her handbag because she didn’t want to look at Hughes. The couple who had switched seats with them had left, although the woman had squeezed her shoulder and winked at Nick when s
he’d risen. She tried to stop herself wondering what Hughes might be thinking about. There was so much that she didn’t know about him, not really, and although she always wanted to confront, to slice him open in one deft movement and peer inside, something animal in her told her it was the wrong way to proceed with him.

  “Sir, madam.” Nick looked up. A man with the air of a walrus had appeared at their table. “I’m the manager. Is anything wrong?”

  “No,” Hughes said, glancing around, presumably for the waiter. “I’d only asked for the bill …”

  “I see,” the Walrus said. “Well, it’s entirely possible that you weren’t aware, sir, but dinner”—and here he paused, letting his handlebar mustache take full effect—“dinner is on the house for the Navy tonight.”

  “I’m sorry?” Hughes said.

  “Son.” The Walrus smiled. “What can I bring you?”

  Nick laughed. “A steak, oh please, a steak,” she said, and everything else vanished.

  “A steak for the lady,” the Walrus said, still looking at Hughes.

  Hughes grinned, and suddenly Nick saw the boy she’d married revealed in the untouchable man who’d come back to her. A boy in a stiff cardboard collar and a rigorously pressed blue uniform. And their predicament, which was just like everyone else’s.

  “A steak, if you can find one in this city. Or this country, for that matter,” Hughes said. “I wasn’t sure they still existed.”

  “They still exist at the Twenty-one Club, sir, such as they are.” The Walrus snapped his fingers at the waiter. “Two more martinis for the Navy man.”

  Later, it was the fleas, again. And Hughes was tired, he said, from the steak. Nick folded her red dress and put on the black nightgown, which he wouldn’t see in the dark. She lay on the bed listening to the noise of the repairmen, working on the ship in the dock. The empty hammering of the steel.

  Just outside of Newark, Nick decided to go to the lounge. She had packed three hard-boiled eggs and a ham sandwich for dinner so she wouldn’t have to spend the three dollars in the dining car. But she couldn’t resist the lure of the bar. It had been advertised as serving all the “new” drinks, and she had put aside fifty cents for extras.