The Last Summer of the Camperdowns Read Online Free PDF Page A

did have was debt. Of course, it’s clear to me now as an adult that a bigger problem than not having any money was behaving as if we did. You might as well have told my mother to join a bowling league as suggest that she live within her means.
    Money was the thing we never talked about publicly but never stopped discussing privately. Money was the crazy aunt we kept locked in the attic, our lives measured in food trays and inelegant deceptions. “Aunt Loretta? Oh, she’s decided to stay on in Palm Beach. Sometimes we wonder if she will ever make her way back here.” In a way, it was part of the shared delusion of our household, this idea that we were broke. We didn’t have the kind of money needed to maintain a position of tribal significance, which was an ongoing source of frustration, especially to my mother. She had a generous annuity and could still have commanded a big salary if she decided to perform again.
    Camp wasn’t interested in money, maybe because he’d grown up with it and took its advantages for granted, or maybe because he viewed money and its pursuit with a combination of artist’s disdain and Teamster’s suspicion. He was a cultural schizophrenic who responded to any number of competing voices in his head. He wrote a prizewinning biography of James Riddle Hoffa—yes, that’s how I got my name, Riddle James, and my nickname, Jimmy—along with several respected volumes about industrial relations, trade union formation, strikes and the working class, but his true love was songwriting and composing. A failed songwriter and composer, as my mother never tired of reminding him. A warrior with a melody in his heart and a hole in his pocket, she mocked.
    No one spoke.
    “Oh, look at Vera,” I said in a vain attempt at distraction as the puppy clamped her teeth onto Dorothy’s ear and tried to drag her across the floor. Anything to disperse the unaccustomed silence.
    My father stood up, chair tumbling to the floor, mercury rising, totally eclipsing me as he confronted my mother. Hopelessly intimidated, I receded back into my chair.
    “Greer Foley,” he thundered, “whose side are you on anyway?”
    Caught up in the whirlwind of his anger, I looked on simultaneously riveted and detached, as if I were watching a tornado touch down, caught up in his swirling colors as they engulfed me, so much like the natural world, sea-green eyes, chestnut hair, ruddy skin. I was being swept away by forces over which I had no control.
    I’ M THIRTY-THREE YEARS OLD and the memory of that long-ago summer remains as alive to me as something I can reach out and touch, a secular rosary upon which I frequently meditate. I run the tips of my fingers over their firm smooth surfaces, feeling each individual sphere, cool and detached, fiddling with ideas and scenarios and endless possibilities in the hope that things could somehow have been different. If only. If only I could somehow poke a hole through time and space and reach into that old house and shake that girl, slap her silly, tell her to shout out from the rooftops what she knew.
    There was time. I had the time. It only takes a moment to do the right thing. But maybe that was part of the problem. I took my time. All those hours devoted to thinking about what to do were just a prelude to letting myself off the hook.
    Something I’ve learned: once you postpone doing what’s right, you become a big part of what’s wrong.

Chapter Three

    W HISTLING FOR THE DOGS, I DARTED OUT THE FRONT DOOR , the crashing of the waves and the wind obliterating the last remnants of staccato bickering emanating from the dining room. I rubbed the back of my neck, joints sore from swiveling from one point of view to the other. To spend time with Greer and Camp was to experience firsthand the effects of a ping-pong marathon between two warring countries.
    Breathing deeply of the ocean air, my sighs of blessed release mingling with the sweet music of songbirds, I chased Vera to the far