We arrived on-island this morning: Mother Young, Ruby, me, and Mrs. Grimsbury. Mother Young and Ruby took immediately to opening Cliff House for the season. This involves removing drop cloths, dressing the beds, turning on the plumbing, restocking the kitchen, and, as I’ve learned, a litany of complaints from Ruby. Tugging plywood off the windows is apparently the universe’s most laborious task.
As a newly pregnant Madonna-to-be, I’m unable to assist with the preparations. We’ve not yet had the pregnancy medically confirmed but I am certain there’s a baby growing inside. I look forward to the importance, the meaning this small person will bring to our lives. As the wife of the family’s eldest son, I can’t take any chances, lest I cause harm to the heir of the Young fortune.
“The heir?” Ruby quacked when I refused to drag patio furniture to and fro. “Lady, you’ve got the wrong family.”
Then she tee-heed for ninety seconds straight. I don’t understand her at all.
And that’s Cliff House as I know it so far this summer. What else do folks write in here? Let’s see. Today the weather was fair, around sixty-two degrees, with a pleasant breeze. Tonight there’s a dance at the Yacht Club. I’ve switched from Parliaments to Chesterfields. The weather tomorrow is supposed to start out a bit foggy, clearing by lunch.
Best regards,
Mrs. Philip E. Young, Jr. (Mary)
16
RUBY
May 1941
What was Daddy thinking? Ruby could kill the man! Just kill him!
Not literally, of course. But, still. Of all the crummy notions, he picked this one.
“Gas masks!” Ruby said to no one in particular as she yanked a drop cloth off a settee. “Horrific!”
From golf balls to gas masks, in a snap.
As if Sam (and Topper) weren’t keyed up enough about the blessed skirmish, that warmonger FDR announced mandatory conscription approximately three minutes after Sam and Ruby returned from Acapulco. A peacetime draft. Didn’t that just beat it all? Sam’s number had not yet been called, much to his never-ending dismay.
“Perhaps I’ll sign up,” he said—nay, threatened—thrice weekly. “They need good men.”
“Darling,” Ruby responded, her face flat while her heart thwacked. “This will be a long battle yet. If you’re meant to go, you’ll go.”
Then she’d excuse herself and spend the next hour kneeling in the closet, begging God to spare her sweet husband. It’s as though he wanted to be some sort of hero. Baloney. A good man, that was the hero Ruby admired.
To make matters worse, a few weeks before they were to open Cliff House, Daddy announced a change to his business. Young Golf Products would cease the manufacture of golf balls and focus its facilities on gas masks. With one fell swoop, Daddy ruined the summer before it began. Swear to peaches, if a single gas mask found its way to Sconset, Ruby would hurl it right off the bluff.
Cliff House was peace. It was calm, a retreat from the real world. In Sconset, life glittered like the Atlantic beneath the sun. But now the men would toil away in the city during the week and bring to Sconset if not the masks themselves, visions of defense equipment coming off the line.
Ruby tried everything: reason, threats, and good old-fashioned crying. But Daddy remained unswayed.
“It’s only temporary, petal,” he said, just last night during their family’s final meal in Boston before decamping for the summer. “We must do our part.”
“Must we?!”
“Hear, hear,” P.J. cheered.
“That’s the way, Pops,” Topper said. “You shred it, wheat.”
Ruby gave him a swift kick to the shin.
“It’s a man’s duty to support his family,” Mary reminded them all. “And a woman’s duty to support her husband’s occupation, whatever that might be.”
As everyone nodded in agreement, Ruby rolled her eyes and then promptly received a sharp glare from her father. Her impertinence amused and charmed him—to a degree.
“If you ask me,” Ruby’s mother said about the change, “this is a jolly good arrangement. Better a contract with Uncle Sam than with a sporting-goods store that could be broke by next Tuesday.”
They’d gone through plenty of that a decade ago, if you please. Mother was right. The economic decline was certainly no costume ball. So Ruby shut her trap for the rest of the meal, even as she simmered inside.
Now they were at Cliff House, the women anyway, opening the home for the summer. Ruby experienced none of her usual thrill, the giddy anticipation for the next one hundred days. The cloud was thick, the doom too real. She tried not to imagine next summer, or the summer after that.
“We must do our part,” Ruby groused as she polished a floor radio. “I’ve got it! Let’s get ourselves killed for someone else’s problems!”
“Oh Ruby!” Sarah Young said from somewhere upstairs. “Are you still down there? How’s it all coming?”
“Yes, Mother! I’m down here. It’s going splendidly. Working myself to the bone!”
Ruby looked toward a box on the floor and the twenty or so porcelain figurines left to unwrap.
“Have you started on the dining room?” Sarah asked.
“Not quite yet.”
Ruby sighed. Nothing was ever fast enough.
“Soon, though!” she added, already beat.
“Thank you, dear! Couldn’t do this without you!”
With a smirk, Ruby pulled back the floral drapes, whipping up torrents of dust along the way. Mother couldn’t do it without her indeed. As she had so many times before, Ruby wondered why the boys (or, rather, the men) weren’t there to assist, why the opening of Cliff House fell to the women.
In fact, everything at Cliff House fell to the women. Not just the unpacking but every day, all day, all summer long. Through it all, the men came and went like important guests of a finely run, excessively accommodating hotel. But, really, Cliff House was their home, Ruby thought. The women’s, more than the men’s. It was their work. Their fingerprints. Their soul.
“Aw, Ruby Red,” she could almost hear Topper tsk. “Sorry you have to labor a single smidge in your otherwise gilded lifestyle. Must be a real grind! You poor lass!”
Then again, Topper considered golfing in light drizzle a monumental achievement, so he was in no position to pass judgment on residents of Easy Street. He was the doggone mayor of Snazzy Town.
“How’s the view for ya, gents?” Ruby asked aloud, rubbing the salt and grime from the windowpanes. “And the veranda? Has it been properly swept? Yes, please do! Continue to drop your cigarette ashes about! No need to hassle with a receptacle. There’s always someone to sweep it up!”
“Ruby?” said a voice, a pinch to the side.
“God bless it!” Ruby jumped, and then turned to the doorway. “Applesauce! Mary Young, you scared the dickens out of me.”
Her sister-in-law looked wan and mildly depressed, as was customary. Ruby was a touch wan and depressed herself.
“How does Sam stand such rough language?” Mary said.
“He taught me all the best curse words, dontcha know?” Ruby joked.
“Life’s such an endless gas for you, isn’t it? When will you ever get serious?”