She decided that the children should have three weeks at Lake Quichiquois. There are myriad small lakes all through the Berkshires. This was nearest to Clarksvale, about twenty miles. No resort. Just summer cottages. Friends of Aunt George offered theirs as they were going north to visit family for several weeks. The cottages were in the woods above the lake. Each was surrounded by woods, land was not costly, everyone had privacy. Just comfortably set far enough apart.
Aunt Priscilla acquiesced. My mother, being company, had no yea or nay. My mother preferred the busiest city street to the beauties of the woods. Not to the beauty but to the creatures that came with it, flies and spiders and bees and creepy crawlers. But my mother was company. Polite. Company was expected to acquiesce.
Of course, Aunt Georgie wasn’t going. Shut up for three weeks surrounded by children? Like my father, she had business excuses.
After her decision, Aunt Georgie said, “I have a hired girl to go along. No sense of you and Elizabeth [my mother] turning your holiday into a wash and iron and cook for six children.”
Aunt Priscilla was wary. “Who is the hired girl?”
“I hired Elektra.” Aunt Georgie slid the name off her tongue as if she just recalled it.
A look. From one to another of the aunts. And returned the other to the one. Aunt Pris decided, half-reluctantly, “Well, she’s as good as we could hope for this late in the summer.”
Imperceptible. Aunt George had been apprehensive. Priscilla could have said no. She hadn’t. Now Aunt Georgie could resume her position as head of the family. In name. She paid the bills.
“She’s strong,” Aunt George said. “Remember how she took up all your rugs last spring-beat them like a man would, the air was grimy.”
“And laid them all again,” Aunt Priscilla mentioned. “And she would carry the whole laundry in one load up the stairs.”
There were twenty-three steps up from the living room to the second floor. I had counted them. I always count steps. Another eighteen up to the attic bedrooms where the boys slept, and live-in help when Aunt Priscilla tolerated it.
I don’t know how many steps to the basement. I didn’t go to the basement. The furnace was there and the storage. Years of the Saturday Evening Post and the Geographic, and old trunks filled with old clothes.
Elektra was strong. Elektra didn’t natter. She was scrub clean. The aunts ticked off her good points. Nothing said of the bad. Of the cause for apprehension one to the other. Somehow I didn’t want to ask Katty. Katty had a way of embroidering words to make a bland story an exciting one. If not exactly a true one.
I’d seen Elektra, of course. Someone must have said, “There’s Elektra.” Wriking on Main Street. Or going into the post office. Or sitting at a soda table at the soda fountain. “There’s Elektra.” I could describe her as if I’d seen a snapshot of her. Tall. Man tall. Lean. Man lean. Straight black hair, held back by a barrette. Hanging to her waist. Not when she was working. Then piled in braids or in loops. High ruddy cheekbones. Straight nose. Like on an Iroquois.
I’d seen her. She delivered the ironing that Aunt Priscilla sent to Gammer Goodwife. Gammer lived in that big square yellow rooming house on the terrace you passed walking to town. The townsfolk called it the “Poor House.” Elektra lived there too. She was kin to Gammer.
I’d seen Elektra. Dancing with Voss.
I couldn’t but wonder if Katty had put the idea of Lake Quichiquois into Aunt Georgie’s head. Linda, her best friend, was going up there for the rest of the summer. Her family owned a summer cottage there. There was a boys’ camp across the lake. For little boys, but the counselors were privileged!
And so we went to Lake Quichiquois. Aunt George’s chauffeur, Fred in the chauffeur’s cap, drove us up there in the seven-seater. The ladies in the backseat. My younger sister squeezed in by my mother. Katty and I on the jump seats. The three little boys in front with Fred.
Elektra would be up the next day. Fred was borrowing a pickup truck from the garage to carry our trunks. The aunts always took trunks, even for a short stay. Elektra would ride with Fred in the cab of the pickup.
Time goes quickly by the water. Too quickly. We are water people. Quichiquois was a dream happening. Elektra would have the breakfast cooked and served before eight o’clock every morning. She’d red up the kitchen while we waited out the dictum: “Do not go in the water until one hour after eating.” We wouldn’t. But we would go down to our dock before the hour was up and the children would splash through the shore water. Elektra would get our rowboat turned over, ready to row out for anyone in trouble. Elektra was a strong swimmer. She cleaved the water as beautifully as a dolphin.
Dover Camp, a long established one, was just across the lake. The little boys and our boys could and did exchange taunts across the water.
And of the three counselors, two were already in college, lordly sophomores the coming year. The other was a senior in prep school. Katty and Linda were in rhapsodies. New boys-or as they called them, men-and these girls were practiced at making boyfriends. The boys were at Brown, and the girls’ college was just across the Massachusetts line. The talk became all about football games and weekend soirees. And house parties in the spring.
Across the lake was also Mr. Gruen’s general store and soda fountain. The meeting place for all lakers. He had a year ago built on a room for the soda fountain. He had old-fashioned tables and chairs in there during the week, but they were moved out on Saturday and there was dancing to a juke box. No Paul Jones.
The Dover Camp boys only had to walk downhill a short way to the soda fountain. On our side it was a quarter-mile walk, after we reached the lane from the cottage, down to the bend that led to the store. It was much shorter to get into the rowboat and row right across to the store dock. If you knew how to row. We didn’t. Elektra did. She tried to teach us. It isn’t easy to learn to row. The boat goes around and around in circles. Unless you have a very strong arm. Muscles. Like Elektra. The children, Katty, and I were allowed to go with Elektra in the boat on Saturdays. My mother and Aunt Pris would walk over later to fetch the little children home early. Katty and I were allowed to stay until the eleven-fifteen closing. With Elektra.
Until our first Saturday evening, I had not known Voss was also working at the camp. Three afternoons a week. Instructing the young campers on the fine points of sailing.
And I couldn’t help but wonder which one of them had decided to find a job up at the lake, when the other had been already hired.
The cottagers danced. Katty and Linda and the counselors danced. The little boys and girls tried to dance. Voss and Elektra danced together. I watched from the sidelines. So did Whey-face.
I never did find out why he was called Whey-face. The girls would simply explode into “curds and whey” when I asked. He was sort of doughlike, not fat but a bit puffy; he would always be a little off side. No matter how fine an education he would have. No matter that when he grew up he would take over the president’s chair at the bank and his father would retire to chairman of the board.
Both Claude and I just sat on the bench in the corner and watched the dancers. Sometimes I’d get him up on his feet and would try to show him how to move to the music. But he never understood rhythm or timing or movement. Two left feet. He always came out to the lake on dance nights to drive Voss back to town, On weeknights Voss hopped a ride to Clarksvale with workers at the camp.
Once-just once at Quichiquois-I danced again with Voss. He walked over to where Claude and I were sitting to ask Claude something or other. I think he recognized how my feet were in rhythm even while sitting down there on the bench. He would understand because he was a dancer. Not a professional, but bred in the bone, roiling in the blood. Without warning, he took my hand and pulled me up from the bench, said, “Come on,” and we danced out onto the floor. Entirely different from the Paul Jones. A jazz jazzy. Exhilarating.