The Gypsy Moth Summer

He had eaten five lobster tails, using the same technique that had worked so well at the progressive dinner party. Keeping his mouth full so he only had to nod and lift his eyebrows in agreement when one after another old biddy greeted him, asked how he was enjoying his first clambake. He nodded and smiled and stuffed his face with shellfish, sausage, and corn baked in a potato sack deep in the sand under layers of seaweed and hot stones, so it was salty, like he was eating the sea itself. But he couldn’t enjoy anything really, not when he was worried about Brooks. Waiting for the right moment to pull his son aside and ask what the hell was going on.

And now the old woman, Veronica, had taken him hostage. He had no idea what she was talking about. Messages for Leslie. Something about the factory. Her creepy predictions, like she was a witch crystal-gazing. Things are about to change.

It was her warning that had unnerved him most. Be careful, Julius. Nothing is as it seems on the island. Especially when at war. Now he understood—the woman was demented. The country had been at peace since the end of the Gulf War. But as she pulled him around the dining room, like a new pet she wanted to show off, her congested breath rattling, the atmosphere in the room changed. The women spooning globs of chocolate mousse and creamy tiramisu, the men dropping shots of whiskey into mugs of beer with a foamy splash, suddenly, they seemed to Jules, desperate and famished and scared.

He and Leslie had fought back at the Castle. Why should he go to the Fourth of July party, he’d asked, when she’d only ignore him, sashay from guest to guest, leaving him to trail after little Eva and make sure she didn’t pull down a tablecloth covered in Bellini-filled flutes. Another Leslie Day Marshall schmooze-fest, he’d said, and Brooks had snorted, which, Jules knew, could’ve meant allegiance or insult. Or both.

In the end, he’d ironed the seersucker suit he’d worn the night of the progressive dinner party, even sprinkled baby powder over a wine stain, a trick his mom had shown him.

Ta-da! He’d announced himself with open arms, the back of the suit jacket still toasty from the iron, just as Leslie, Brooks, and Eva were climbing into the car headed to the club. His wife’s smile warmed him inside out. A peace offering, he hoped, since they’d been fighting like cats and dogs for weeks.

The car was running, Eva strapped into her car seat, Brooks fiddling with the radio dials until he found what he wanted—a station blasting “Baby Got Back”—and then Leslie was laughing, dancing, wiggling her hips in the seat, even Eva waving her plump arms above her head. Jules popped the trunk. He’d left his new dress shoes back there. The price tag had made his mouth go dry but Leslie had insisted. Brooks’s backpack was tucked next to the shoes and when Jules lifted the shoebox, the backpack rattled. Like it was full of metal.

He unzipped the bag—not that he needed proof. He’d grown up a city boy. He knew the jangling of spray-paint cans when he heard it.

When they had pulled up to the clubhouse, Jules busy handing the keys over to the valet, Brooks had disappeared. He must talk to his son. Then he, Brooks, and Leslie would sit down and have a long talk about what came next. Leslie would refuse, but Jules didn’t see a way around going to the police. Maybe, if Brooks turned himself in … he stopped himself. Brooks could be holding on to the cans for someone else? Those ratty metal-head kids who had ruined the ballroom walls with their foul tags. SAVE ME. FUCK ME. He’d stopped there, not wanting to read any more. Who, he wondered, did they think was listening? He’d told Leslie about the sprayed walls and she’d responded with the same apathetic shrug she’d used again and again those past few months.

He managed to lose Veronica and downed his third drink, something fizzy with lime, the rim coated in red, white, and blue sugar granules. The American flag swizzler poked him in the nose. Then he heard his father’s voice so loud and clear, he searched the room, turning in a slow circle. He was losing his mind, he thought, then spotted Brooks with Eva by the lemonade fountain. Brooks hand in hand with a pretty young girl who, Jules guessed, was the Maddie. His son was nervous, his fingers lifting to pick at his hair, his eyes moving from one corner of the room to the next like he was waiting, but for what? Each time the girl leaned close to him, to whisper in his ear, to tug on his shirtsleeve, Jules saw Brooks pull away. Something he guessed Maddie noticed too, because her smile looked put on. A mask.

You better keep watch over that boy, his father’s voice grumbled. Jules finished the drink and made his way back to the bar for another. Something to silence his pops.

But after the fourth drink, and even the fifth, his tongue fuzzy from the lime, the voice remained.

Leslie waved to him—a wiggle of fingers from her spot at the great window overlooking the rolling hills of the golf course.

His stomach convulsed, and he was heading for the bathroom that smelled like aftershave and pipe tobacco, where Muzak slipped out from invisible speakers, and a Hispanic man not much younger than Jules handed out towels and received a measly quarter in a porcelain dish.

Veronica reappeared. She tugged him forward and spent the next twenty minutes introducing him—thrusting him into the middle of conversations was more like it—to one confused old lady after another. At first, he smiled meekly, shook the offered hands, every one bedecked with jeweled rings stuffed over swollen knuckles. He assumed Veronica was trying to get him gardening work, but when her sassy side took over, he saw it was a game. She was mocking the island elite, and the dumb lugs didn’t even know.

“No, Dolores,” Veronica said with a sweet smile, “He can’t trim your rosebushes. He’s not a day laborer, he’s a landscape architect. He went to Harvard, for chrissakes!”

Veronica grabbed Jules’s arm and pulled him away and he did his best to stifle a laugh as he glanced back at poor Dolores, her mouth hanging open over her doubled chin.

“Forget that dingbat,” Veronica mumbled. “And be careful no one hands you their empty glasses. Half these people think you’re a busboy.”

Coming from anyone else on the island, Jules would have been offended. But Veronica had felt, ever since that night at the Castle after the mad Colonel tolled the bell, like a friend. Or a comrade, at least. Neither of them belonged on this island.

“Shucks.” She slapped his arm playfully. Like a teenage girl flirting in the school hallway, he thought. “An old hippie like you should be able to appreciate my elevated state of being. Come with me, Julius. Let us transcend together. Ooh, lookie there!”

He followed Veronica’s crooked finger. Orchid Lady from the fair stood by the buffet in a shimmery blue dress that made Jules think of porpoises. A jumbo shrimp tail stuck out of her mouth and when she spotted Veronica pulling him toward her, she nearly dropped her plate.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” he whispered into Veronica’s poufy silver hair, tasting hairspray.

She stopped him. “Don’t think, just smile. She’ll be less scared if you smile.”

He heard his father’s voice. They’re all scared of you. They’ll always be scared of you. Jules knew he was right. No matter how hard Veronica, in her sweet but manic Good Samaritan crusade, tried to change their minds.

She’s just another Lady Van der Meer, his father’s voice said. And you’re her pet project. One that has to be leashed in the garden each night. God forbid you go rabid.

As Veronica rattled off directions to a slack-jawed Orchid Lady, who, it turned out, was named Lorna Hennessey, and the chair of the East Avalon Flower Festival that year, Jules thought of his mother’s lady, which is what she’d always called Mrs. Van der Meer, her employer of more than four decades and, no matter how much his father had wanted to deny it, their family’s benefactor.

It was, he thought, as Orchid Lady nodded—why certainly Jules could participate in the flower festival that year—thanks to Mrs. Van der Meer that he was standing there listening to these two ancient white ladies discuss him like he was stock to be traded. It was still a mystery to him how his sweet-natured mama had won the argument with his father, convincing him to let Jules attend the private high school paid for by Mrs. Van der Meer. Must have taken Mama all her patience, and courage, to stand up to the man who was as hard as dried cement. His pops had ranted that taking white people’s money was like … how had his father put it?

But his mother had insisted, waved Jules’s test scores in his pops’s face, parroted her lady, even using the woman’s hoity-toity inflection, The boy is clearly gifted! Destined for great things.

His mother’s shining eyes had unlocked something—a kindness?—in his father, and Jules had worn those chains, rode the Van der Meer scholarship from Dalton to Columbia to Harvard, all the way to the Oyster Cove Country Club.

He wished Mama were with him now. She, like Leslie (the Leslie before the island), had seen the promise in people. He knew just what she’d say. Julius, look at all these fine people! He and his pops were always teasing her about what she called “her appreciation for finer things.” His pops called it “rich-white-people shit,” but who could blame her, Jules thought. She’d grown up the light-skinned daughter of a maid in the Van der Meer home on Central Park East, becoming a maid herself at sixteen. She’d come of age surrounded by beautiful things. Like a girl lost in a museum.

But his mother was dead, and wealthy whites no longer fascinated him the way they had when he’d first met Leslie almost eighteen years ago, the Twiggy look-alike who wore coveralls when they’d volunteered at an urban garden in Roxbury, far from Harvard’s landscaped campus. That first year with Leslie had been filled with dizzying excitement—all the attention he’d been paid by her friends, who, like Leslie, didn’t live in the dorms, but in palatial townhouses on posh Beacon Hill. They called themselves artists and activists, although it was hard to figure what medium they worked in, or what cause they were dedicated to. To Jules, it seemed they bounced from cause to cause with the same ambivalence they showed him—when he was new, they lavished him with attention, but after a few months, he was old hat.

Not his Leslie. She was a believer. In change. In good. In the power of one person to make a difference. Even after the idealism of the ’60s burned out, Leslie’s friends, one by one, doing an about-face, following in their mothers’ and fathers’ footsteps—bored housewives and paunchy investment bankers—his Leslie stayed gold.

His father’s voice was just a whisper now, but, still, it buzzed at his ear like the mosquitos that swarmed the island on humid nights.

He studied the corsage pinned to Orchid Lady’s ample bosom, even more exotic than the bloom she’d worn the night of the fair. A trio of green-white Brassavola novola orchids. He had to stop himself from leaning forward and sniffing the strong, citrusy tang, and then remembered he’d read somewhere that they were only fragrant at night, in order to attract the right moth. An image of her covered in gypsy moths gave him a moment of confidence and he smiled and nodded. “So lovely to see you again.”

Veronica and Orchid Lady moved on to a new topic, something about the factory, and he was relieved, ready to make his exit. He glanced out the window, past the rows of golf carts, and saw Brooks walking away from the clubhouse toward the green course. He was with that girl. They were holding hands. People were looking out the window. Did Jules see them shaking their heads?

“Excuse me, ladies.” He bowed his head. “I’m headed to the little boys’ room.”

“Make sure you come back, Julius dear,” Veronica called after him. “I’m not finished with you just yet!”

He was out of breath when he caught up with Brooks and the girl. His new pointy-toed dress shoes squished across the damp turf.

She blushed and looked up at Brooks, who stared into the hazy dusk settling over the silent green.

She reached out and Jules shook her hand. He could fold it inside his palm if he wanted to. Make it disappear. She was pretty. Maybe even beautiful. There was something about her face—her round cheeks and petite mouth—that reminded him of a painting. Raphael or da Vinci. A Mona Lisa smile. What was Brooks thinking, Jules wondered, knowing his boy, if he could read his mind, would’ve called Jules a hypocrite.

“Hold your horses, kiddo,” Jules said, surprising himself by sounding all Ward Cleaver. “I just need to talk to you for a sec. That cool, Maddie?”

He wondered if she had any idea what kind of trouble she might be getting his boy in. Sure, it was only a might at this point, but hadn’t she heard stories about what happened to black boys who fell for white girls? Once those white girls got sick of them.

Jesus, he thought, he sounded just like his father who had called him all manner of names when he’d come home from Harvard and told them about Leslie. Fool. Dumbass. Fluffernutter for brains. That last one had made Jules and his mom laugh but, still, it had stung and there’d been a moment, time slowing, Jules’s breath loud and thick like he had cotton stuffed in his ears, where he’d been sure his father would disown him. Would declare him no son of mine.

He walked toward the metal shed turned blue in the twilight. When Brooks didn’t follow, he seized the boy’s arm, pulling him around so their backs were to Maddie. To the mob at the clubhouse.

It was near dark, the golf green stretched out before them. Like they were shipwrecked on a distant planet, Jules thought, where the sun shone an unearthly blue.

His son looked at Jules’s hand gripping his arm. “What are you doing, Dad?”

People were streaming out of the clubhouse, taking seats in the white folding chairs set up for the fireworks show. The strings of round bulbs hanging from the outdoor tent reminded Jules of the fairway lights, and although it was only a little over a month ago, it felt like years, and he knew that everything that had and would happen, this surging unease, had begun that night at the fair.

“Come on,” he said, and bent to whisper in his son’s ear, catching that sweet scent that belonged to Brooks and Brooks only.

Had he smelled like that as a baby? Jules tried to remember. All those nights he’d spent holding him, the tip of his finger planted in the baby’s mouth, Jules’s head jerking forward each time he dozed off, and none of it—the exhaustion, the aching back, the pins and needles in his arms—had mattered because it was his son he was holding. His son. A survivor.

“I opened your backpack,” he whispered. It came out like a hiss and he knew he’d made a mistake.

He went to put an arm around Brooks’s shoulder, to show him he wasn’t mad. God forbid he ran from Jules, from his protection—they’d figure it out together, like a family—but the boy pivoted out of reach so fast Jules stumbled. Almost fell. Brooks was walking away. Like Jules was a stranger.

“Get back here!” he shouted, and checked himself. The tent was full of people. He didn’t want to make a scene or call attention to the very reason he was shouting. His boy was the vandal. The villain everyone—from the cross-eyed postmaster to the mad Colonel and even his one ally, Veronica—was looking to string up.

The girl’s pale face looked back as she and Brooks walked away from Jules, vanishing into the inky darkness. Behind him, at the clubhouse, “God Bless America” blared from stereo speakers. The first firework launched into the sky with a hiss of air, and Jules counted one, two, three, before it burst red, white, and blue.

When black-and-white egg-laden females emerge, they emit a pheromone that attracts the males. The female has a small gland near the tip of the abdomen which releases the pheromone, with a pumping motion, termed “calling.” It can attract males from long distances, tracking the scent through its erratic flight pattern.

—The Gypsy Moth: Research Toward Integrated Pest Management, United States Department of Agriculture, 1981