# Read the first page of The Beach at Summerly by Beatriz Williams Read the opening of The Beach at Summerly by Beatriz Williams free, no signup. A caretaker's daughter is drawn into Cold War intrigue on a summer island. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-beach-at-summerly-beatriz-williams - Genre: Historical fiction - Year: 2023 - ISBN: 9780063020863 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780063020863&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780063020863 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780063020863 ## The opening Aunt Benedita telephones long-distance just as I’m rushing out the door. She’s one of those people who has a knack for it. “I can’t talk right now,” I tell her. “I’m late for class.” “You’ll want to hear this. Your father told me that Tom Donnelly and his boys started to work on a new job.” “Gee, that’s terrific. You know how I love hearing all the little tidbits from back home.” “Don’t you want to know whose house they’re working on?” “Look, Auntie, I know you don’t believe it, but a mile away from where I stand at this telephone, there’s a lecture hall filled with undergraduates desperate to hear me speak about the Salem witch trials. Could you put them out of their misery?” Aunt Benedita disregards my pique. That’s how we’ve remained on speaking terms, all these years. “They’re fixing up Summerly,” she says. Lucky for me, an armchair sits next to the table where we keep the telephone. I land on it hard and notice that the telephone cord has somehow gotten twisted around the table leg. I unwind the cord while Aunt Benedita’s voice leaks out of the earpiece, repeating my name. When I put the receiver back to my ear, the darn thing shakes in my hand, all by itself. “Good for them,” I tell her. Outside, the air smells green. The temperature is positively balmy. The blossoms are popping out at last in their pinks and whites. Even after all these years on the mainland, I can’t look on a blossoming tree without my throat feeling sore. You simply don’t get blossoming trees on Winthrop Island. It seems so extravagant. The sky has turned an ultramarine shade of blue and the blossoms nod and waft against this exemplary field. I hurry across the quadrangle toward Founders Hall and try not to mind all the beauty, but it hits my gut all the same. I wasn’t exactly lying to Aunt Benedita about the lecture hall, but you might say I was stretching the truth. I still have time to hurry up the steps, deposit my belongings in the fourth-floor telephone booth known as my office, and drink a cup of muddy coffee before presenting myself in the classroom two minutes before the lecture’s due to begin. It’s the end of April and the air is green and balmy, as I said, and most of my students have given up trying to arrive early, if at all. “Women in Early Colonial America” is a brand-new course in the history department curriculum—a course I designed myself, if you must know—but I’m afraid nobody seems to care much about colonial history in these days of hydrogen bombs and Jackson Pollock, even though I try to present the subject with a certain amount of panache. Still, a few young ladies have managed to drag themselves through the dreaming blossoms and into the classroom, and that’s all that matters, really. To reach a few fresh minds, to plant some germ of inspiration. That girl in the second row, for example. The light, curling brown hair and the sharp chin; the dark, narrow eyes like a young fox. She sets that inquisitive chin into her palm and loses herself in the parable and I say to myself, in a thought that floats in parallel to my words and my theatrical gestures, That’s it, honey, just sink yourself into the past, so you don’t have to spend so much time in the awful present. Later, when I retire to my telephone booth office in the fourth-floor attic, there is the newspaper to distract me. Sure, maybe it describes the awful present, but at least it isn’t my awful present. I light a cigarette, pour myself another cup of muddy coffee, and add a splash of cognac from the flask in my desk drawer. If you’re going to drink in your office, I always say, make sure it’s worth the trouble. The news is even more rotten than usual—same old mess in Indochina, the Red Sox lose another one, that chump McCarthy’s starting in on the Army now—but I read on regardless. If nothing else, I know the trick of mental discipline. Close your mind to the unwanted thought. Throw yourself a nice, noisy party of the head so you don’t hear it knocking. Still, now that I’m sitting down to read the newspaper instead of lecturing, drinking this miraculous coffee instead of standing cold sober in front of a room full of dewy coeds, that damned word keeps streaking across my mind from wherever it is you hold your memories. Summerly. Why in God’s name did Aunt Benedita have to go and telephone me about a thing like that? Long-distance, no less. She might have put it in a letter—she writes plenty of those, too. Always trying to smooth things over, Aunt Benedita, always having the exact opposite effect. I bicycled to Summerly the other day, she might write, and it’s an awful shame how they’ve let it go to seed. The roof shingles are falling out by the dozen and the grass is up to the front window. Do you remember that old rhododendron bush? It’s taking over the hedge. Does she not understand how these details hurt? Does she think they’ll make me feel better? Now she wants to tell me that Tom Donnelly’s crew is fixing up the place again so the Peabodys can return for the summer season like old times. What am I supposed to think about that? Am I supposed to want to join them? Well, now I’ve done it. You see what I mean? You open your mind a crack, just a crack to allow a single dumb word like Summerly into the party, and the rest of that thought shoves through uninvited and eats up all the canapés. I lay down the newspaper and open the desk drawer, and this time when I uncork my bottle of cognac, I really let the coffee have it. I do like cognac. It’s like brandy, only . . . more. A professor of mine made the introduction, junior year, and we’ve been friends ever since. The cognac, I mean, not the professor. No, Professor Pete and I had the briefest possible affair before his wife found out and reported him to the department head. He accepted a research position at some progressive-minded college in the Midwest somewhere and I haven’t heard from him since. The cognac was the best part of our friendship, to be perfectly honest. I prop my feet on the corner of the desk and slide the newspaper into my lap. The aqua vitae gives off its perfume inside my skull. I turn the page. @@BLOCK@@ “RED BRAHMIN” PAROLE HEARING @@BR@@ CANCELED, SOURCES SAY And I guess it speaks to the old adage about trouble coming in threes that my phone rings the exact instant I’ve absorbed that headline. The coffee spills in my lap. I swear savagely and reach for the receiver. Emilia Winthrop, I growl. The voice on the other end is a courtly Southern baritone. “Miss Winthrop. I hope I haven’t called at a bad time.” When I arrive home at a quarter past five, Susana’s making dinner. Lizbit sits nearby on the kitchen counter, stirring something inside a large metal mixing bowl. “Emmie,” she says sternly, “have you been hitting the bottle at work again?” Lizbit calls us both by our first names, to the delight of visitors. They think it’s so amusing and precocious in a seven-year-old. “Hell, no.” I swoop her into my arms and deliver a boozy kiss to her cheek. “I’ve been a saint. What’s for dinner?” “Pork chops,” says Susana. “What’s the matter with you?” “You’ll never guess.” “Not Cato again.” “No, not Cato. Believe it or not.” My kid sister’s a terrific cook. I’m going to miss her terribly when she gets married in June. When I try to picture the aftermath—Susana and Harvey on their honeymoon in Key West, me and Lizbit sitting around the living room in our underwear—I get this sinister feeling of bleakness and hunger. I can only hope Lizbit takes over the cooking. Susana flips the pork chops in the skillet. “So what gives? Poor Lizbit’s going to get sauced just standing downwind of you.” “I can hold my breath,” says Lizbit. I snap my fingers. “Witches. That’s it.” “Witches?” “Witches, not Women. ‘Witches of Early Colonial America.’ That’ll turn out the kids next semester.” “For God’s sake,” says Susana, “just go set the table, will you?” Now, I don’t mean to impugn the good Harvey. He’s a real prince and I’m grateful he’s taking my sister off my hands. It’s a sad story, really. He’s only twenty-six and a widower. Graduated Harvard Law and married his sweetheart, a girl from Brookline, nice girl by all accounts, then six months later she’s dead of cancer. They didn’t catch the tumor until it was too late. Terrible story. ## Books with a similar feel - [The Serpent and the Pearl by Kate Quinn](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-serpent-and-the-pearl-kate-quinn.md) - [When We Had Wings by Ariel Lawhon](https://uncovered.ink/read/when-we-had-wings-ariel-lawhon.md) - [The Spies of Shilling Lane by Jennifer Ryan](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-spies-of-shilling-lane-jennifer-ryan.md) - [The Orphan's Tale by Pam Jenoff](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-orphans-tale-pam-jenoff.md) - [Once in Every Life by Kristin Hannah](https://uncovered.ink/read/once-in-every-life-kristin-hannah.md) - [The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-tea-girl-of-hummingbird-lane-lisa-see.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.