The Beach at Summerly by Beatriz Williams EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Authors: Beatriz Williams
- Language: English
- Genre: Espionage Thrillers
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
April 1954
Wellesley, Massachusetts
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.
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