It was the summer that wouldn’t end. Through July and August at the lake cottage the heat was noticed but truly only as August came on and the usual cooling nights didn’t occur and the dripping sleeplessness of July continued. Henry or Dick Pyle made daily trips up the hill to Lakemont for blocks of ice for the iceboxes but even that was novelty—both men that same spring had purchased their first automobiles, Dick a Maxwell Runabout and Henry a Dodge Touring Car, and so each excursion was loaded down with children and more than a few of the adults. There were frequent late afternoon thunderstorms so drought was no worry. It was only when September came and they returned to Elmira that the fierce lock of heat was deeply felt. Back in classrooms, all of them, Robert in grade school, both girls at Elmira Free Academy and Henry sweating in his office and the classrooms of Tripp Hall. And just then, when they could’ve served some cooling purpose the afternoon thunderstorms abated and instead sluggish humid air seemed to rise steaming from the cobbles each morning. The Lyceum Theatre was handing out free paper fans to customers. Olivia and the housegirl of the time did all their baking and roasting in the mornings and many evenings they took picnic suppers to Eldridge Park, hoping for a breeze off the river—a practice Olivia disliked, considering the park a place for summer gatherings and uncomfortable with Henry in shirtsleeves in public for dinner, however informal the setting and regardless of how those around them were dressed.
But on the first Saturday of fall, the day dawned as steamy, still and hot as ever and at the breakfast table Henry surveyed his already wilted and short-tempered females and announced, “I’ve got it! We’ll take the trolley out to Reeds Landing and rent a pair of canoes, take along sandwiches or we can even stop at that place, you know, the one past Clinton Island along the river—I’ve heard they have wonderful chicken—and just make a day of it. Get out of all this.”
Robbie beamed and said, “Can we take Bobo?” The year-old collie who even then sat alert beside the boy for either crumbs or unwanted food to be slipped down to him.
“Well, Robbie. I don’t know. How do you think he’d take to a canoe?”
“He likes the rowboat just fine.”
“Henry—” Olivia began, less than keen, uncertain.
Polly interrupted, “Father. Have you lost your mind? We’d roast like ducks out there on the river.”
“Why don’t we drive up to the lake?” Alice. “So the cottage is shut for the winter, but the drive wouldn’t be so bad and at least when we got there we could cool off in the water.”
“All the damned dust,” said Polly, who was trying such things out.
“You will not—” Henry began.
“Oh leave her be,” Olivia said. “I can’t bear the thought of it myself.”
Alice snapped, “It was just an idea. I’ll end up at the sanitarium if I have to spend another day—”
“Mother, please,” Henry said. “Polly, I won’t have you talking like that in this house or any other. And if I hear about you and your friends being rude again at the Red Jacket Ice Cream Parlor—”
“I’ve got it,” Robbie cried. “The water toboggan past Fritch’s Bridge! That’s what we need to do.”
“Oh God,” Polly said under her breath, rolling her eyes.
Henry and Olivia were looking at each other. At the same moment they lifted their eyebrows. A suppressed smile fled over Olivia, gone before any of the children might catch it. Robbie’s enthusiasm was too great to argue with. Alice was holding the tip of her tongue between her lips, an unconscious habit that, Henry had learned long since meant the idea, however novel, held attraction for her. So he rose from the table and smacked his hands together and said, “Robert, my boy, you’re a genius. Now, before all the rest of Elmira gets the same idea. Bathing suits, towels, a change of clothes—” he glanced at Olivia, “And unless I’m wrong they also serve a variety of foods that should satisfy all of us.” He pulled out his pocket watch and finished. “In ten minutes I want everyone back down in the front hall with whatever you think you might need. Let’s get cracking.”
They rode the electric trolley west along the bank of the Chemung River, early enough so the trolley cars weren’t yet full but clearly plenty of other people had dawned with the same idea. There was a small clot of girls Alice and Polly knew and when they shifted seats to be closer to their friends Olivia glanced at Henry and he let it go. Robbie sat between his parents and between his legs on a short leather leash Bobo sat quietly, watching the surroundings. A boy’s dog—he’d been introduced and subjected to pretty much anything a boy could think of.
PROPER SWIMMING ATTIRE REQUIRED—CLEAN BOILED SUITS TO LET IN ALL SIZES read the sign above the ticket counter. The steps up to the water toboggan rose seventy feet in broad easy stairways with high handrails and at the top was a railed platform. The toboggan itself was a smoothed wooden shoot that dropped down and out swiftly before extending in a gradual decrease over the river, plopping the usually screaming descender into the depths midriver, where a number of fellows in rowboats hung lazy in the current for those unwilling or unable to swim back to shore. Under a grove of riverside sycamores were strings of picnic tables as well as concession stands serving up everything from spun cotton candy and ice cream to wieners and fried chicken and all manner of cold drinks. Back away from the river was a low damp spot in a meadow that had been turned into a pond and stocked with bullheads and cane poles could be rented and angle worms purchased as well.
Quickly Bobo figured out how things worked and so every time one of his children climbed toward the platform the dog would wade into the shallows and stand with muzzle upturned, barking as the child came flying down, barking until the child reached the riverbank. Midmorning as the heat truly came on, as well as in the spirit of things, Henry took a few trips down the slide but what he enjoyed most was slowly floating on his back down the lazy current, his body encased in the cool but not cold river, before finally rolling over to breaststroke roughly for shore. The Island boy hadn’t learned to swim until he met Olivia and began to spend time at the lake and it had been Mary who’d figured out his reluctance to enter the water was nothing more than fear and so quietly had taken it upon herself to teach him the rudiments of swimming—the young deeply embarrassed man out for early morning sessions with his mother-in-law became proficient more quickly than he might’ve with any other tutor.
Henry briefly tried to tease Olivia into riding the slide herself but she hushed him by looking with those bold dark eyes and saying, “I’m so enjoying watching the children, dear. And perfectly capable of deciding if I wish to make an ass of myself or not.” Smiling. Although she unrolled her stockings in the late morning and hitched up her skirts to wade in the shallows in the shade of the sycamores as Henry went off with Robbie to spend an hour baking by the pond, fruitlessly trying to catch bullheads. Henry guessed the pond water was so warm after the summer that if any of the fish survived they were half-buried in the muddy bottom—something that seemed to him a natural fit for such an ugly inedible fish. Robbie caught nothing but a snagged branch caked with muddy leaves but just as happy for the effort. They walked back to drop off the cane pole side by side, Henry’s hand resting easily on his son’s knobby shoulder.
They ate a grand lunch of wieners with mustard and sauerkraut, potato salad, late season sweet corn roasted over a bed of coals in charred husks, root beer floats and banana splits for desert. In the afternoon Alice and Polly were finally released to wander within sight with their girlfriends, boys their ages and slightly older swinging close but then away, as much from the swarm of girls and their own shyness as by the presence of parents. It had been the year when Polly, although a year younger and shorter had rounded breasts and despite the woolen stockings beneath the swimming skirt and its heavy though sleeveless top, was a mild torture to Alice with her near invisible bosom and long gangly legs and arms. For a time Henry rented one of the rowboats and with Robbie and Bobo aboard worked along the shaded bank, Henry easy but putting his back and arms into the work. Here or anywhere, he’d never lost his love of boats and could find something good about even the roughest of craft. Then it was too hot and he released Robbie back to the pleasures of the toboggan and the river, trusting now not only the watchers but the boy. He lay up in the shade with Olivia on a soft quilted blanket, cool there in the shade, Olivia in a folding camp chair brought from home, reading; Henry on his side, head propped up on one elbow. Then down on his back with his hands behind his head, dozing in the heat but anchored to the place by the sounds of voices, the screams from the toboggan, the otherwise low buzz of voices all around and beneath that, deep and low as a pulse, the murmur of the river. Just three years before in late spring this river had flooded, washing away not only the toboggan and all the other riverside parks and amusements but flooding the lower streets of Elmira to a depth sufficient that men used canoes and rowboats to navigate among their businesses. A fully loaded train of freight cars had been nudged into place over the railroad bridge that spanned the river, the weight enough to hold the bridge even as the water rose and ruined much of the coal within the cars. The coal from the sheds that served the city, owned by Doyle Franks. As well as a primary stake in the Erie Railroad itself. It was not only a civic gesture, but the bridge held.
Late afternoon, all in the pleasant state of water-and-heat-exhaustion, they rode the trolley back to town and hauled themselves up to the house, where shortly after everyone changed they realized that once again all were famished. Being the weekend the housekeeping girl was off and there was nothing that appealed and so as the early fall revealed itself by the dropping angle of light even as the heat held, they all loaded into the big Dodge for the seven block proud drive downtown where they had dinner in the swank Rathbun House, which rumor claimed was an exact replica, even down to the menu of the Murray Hill Hotel in New York City. True or not, it was a fine meal and they ended the evening once again with ice cream from the Red Jacket. Back at the house, all three children took their turns bathing and were in bed before nine o’clock.
Somewhat later Henry was seated in the parlor with his feet up, a glass of rye over ice mostly idle in his hand when Olivia came through from the bathroom herself, wearing her robe open over a deep blue silk nightgown. She came beside him and leaned down and he lifted his head to kiss her, the soft silk neckline opening to her breasts.
“That,” she said, “was an exquisitely perfect day.” Patting herself back into place.
“It was pleasant, wasn’t it?”
“No. It was more than that. Thank you.”
He was silent, took a small sip of his drink, a shaving of ice sliding against his lower lip.
She said, “Be up soon?”
He smiled. “Just moments.”