“What do I tell them?” Love asked.
“Explain that it’s not our policy to give rides but that you’d be more than happy to call them a cab.”
“Common sense,” Love said.
“There will be guests who say they don’t like the fruit at breakfast. They’ll want peaches instead of bananas. If someone asks for peaches, write it down. I buy the breakfast and I’ve been known to honor requests for peaches. We don’t offer room service so we try to do the best we can on the breakfast.”
“No room service,” Love repeated. She wrote it down.
“You’ll be working every day from eight to five, except Tuesday, your day off. That’s a lot of time on the desk. In July and August it can get pretty hectic. You’ll be bombarded with requests, questions, people checking out, people checking in. If it gets to be too much, let me know. Let Therese know, let Bill know. Don’t try to tackle everyone’s problems at once. It won’t work.”
“I took a magazine to deadline each month,” Love said. “I can handle the pressure of twenty hotel rooms.”
“Mid-June, of course, the Beach Club starts,” Mack said. “We have a hundred members who pay dues to use the beach. They each have a locker. They each have a key. They all need chairs and towels. The kids want buckets and shovels. On a hot day in August when you have thirteen check-outs and twelve check-ins and twenty-five kids running through the lobby with sandy feet and a guest in room twelve telling you his toilet is overflowing and old Mrs. Stanford has lost the key to her Beach Club locker, then you will know the meaning of pressure.”
Clearly he was trying to scare her. “I guess so,” Love said.
Mack lowered his voice. “I did want to say a little more about the guests. What I’ve learned in twelve years is that it’s common to experience feelings of…resentment.” He looked around the lobby as though there might be a guest or two hiding behind the wicker sofas. “The people who stay here, the people who use the beach, all have a lot of money. And they look to you not as an equal but as someone who works for them. Listen, a guy comes from New York, he has two weeks off a year and he’s spending that precious time and a boatload of money here at the hotel. He wants things perfect. You see what I mean? It gets tricky, dealing with egos. There’s a lot of financial muscle flexing going on here.”
Love smiled. Didn’t he know she had come from Aspen? “I get your point.”
“But what I’ve learned is that wealthy people are frequently sad people,” Mack said.
“I’ve found that to be true as well,” Love said. “Money can only get you so much. It can’t cure your cancer or get you love. It can’t make you fertile.”
Mack smiled. “Fertile?”
Love blushed. Her personal life was slipping already, showing like a bra strap. “Yeah, you know, money can’t get you a child. Your own child.”
“Exactly,” he said. “You’re going to do a fantastic job. I can tell.”
After Love finished her lesson about the phones and the fax and the credit card machine, and after she impressed Mack with her knowledge of the island, he left to take care of a lock in one of the rooms. Love drummed her fingers on the polished wood of the desk, stared down at the phone console, gazed out at the lobby, and thought, This is where I’m going to meet the father of my child.
She heard a voice in the back office. She tiptoed through Mack’s messy office and listened at Bill’s door, which was still ajar.
Love held her breath and knocked. Bill cleared his throat, then said, “Come in!”
He was the only one in the office. “I heard you talking,” she said. She smiled at him. “Do you always talk to yourself? I do.”
“I was reciting Robert Frost,” he said. “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches’ and all that. I didn’t realize anyone was still here.”
“Sorry I startled you,” Love said. “The poem you were reciting, is that a favorite of yours?”
“They’re all favorites,” Bill said, thumping the cover of his book. “This one is called ‘Devotion.’ I just stumbled across it.”
Love moved farther into the office. There were two wicker chairs by the windows. Love sat down. “Read it to me,” she said. “I don’t read nearly enough poetry.”
Bill closed his eyes and leaned back in his creamy leather chair. He was so thin his wrist bones protruded like knobs. “’The heart can think of no devotion, greater than being shore to the ocean, holding the curve of one position, counting endless repetition.’” He opened his eyes. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
My first day of work, a man reads poetry aloud to me. “What does it mean?” she asked.
“He’s talking about love,” Bill said. “He’s saying the greatest demonstration of love is devotion, being there with your beloved day in and day out. Have you ever been married?”
“No,” Love said.
“I’ve been married thirty years, and I love my wife more now than ever. It’s like all those days, even the really boring, awful days, have added up. Each day I love her yet more.” He closed the book. “So I guess I’m what Frost would call devoted.”
“Sounds like it,” Love said. Her feelings a bit crushed.
“How about you? Are you devoted to anything?” Bill asked. “Anyone?”
“I’m devoted to having a baby,” Love said. “I’m devoted to finding someone to father my baby.”
Bill’s eyebrows arched, his mouth formed a silent O. Love’s personal life was a woman popping out of a cake, Surprise!
“A baby is certainly a noble devotion,” he said.
Love put her hands on her thighs and stood up. “Too bad you can’t help me,” she said.
Bill laughed nervously. “Endless devotion.” As Love walked by his desk to leave, he held out his hand. It was a frail hand, but warm and sincere. “Someone is going to be very lucky,” he said.
Mack had been running the Beach Club for twelve years, Bill had owned it outright for twenty, but it was Lacey Gardner, the Grande Dame of Beacon Hill and Nantucket, who had true bragging rights. She had joined the Beach Club in the summer of 1945-fifty-three years ago-did she need to say it? Seven years before Bill’s father, Big Bill Elliott, even bought the place. Lacey had been around longer than anybody.
At eighty-eight, she was the oldest living graduate of Radcliffe College and that earned her a permanent seat in the front row at Harvard’s commencement. Every year on the day following commencement she drove from her apartment in Boston to Hyannis and put her car on the 9:45 ferry to Nantucket.
Lacey’s tenure on Nantucket seemed to her like many different lifetimes. Her parents had brought her over to the island in 1920, when she was ten years old. She remembered the ferry docking and the hoteliers standing on the wharf calling out the names of their establishments: Sea Cliff Inn, Beach House, Point Breeze. Years later, she came to Nantucket for weekends with her chums from Radcliffe. On summer evenings they danced on the open porch at the Moby Dick in ’Sconset. Back then, ’Sconset was a refuge for actors and actresses when Broadway closed for the summer; Lacey still remembered productions of Our Town, Candida, and The Bride the Sun Shines On out at the ’Sconset Casino. Dancing on the porch, lobster and chicken dinners for a dollar fifty a plate, cabaret fashion shows-this was the lively, carefree summertime Nantucket of Lacey’s youth. And she was the only one left to remember it.
In 1941, her gentleman friend Maximilian Gardner proposed to her on the beach in Madaket. Lacey was thirty-one years old and still not married. She worked for the Massachusetts Board of Health. Men called her feisty and independent, and women called her a career girl and a snob. But she loved Maximilian Gardner. At first he was just one of the young men in her fun-loving crowd, but then she noticed the way he looked at her. It was when Maximilian Gardner looked at her that Lacey felt most like a woman.