It was a spring party like any other held in Southampton, with the usual games. Croquet. Badminton. Mild social cruelty. It took place at Mother’s house on Gin Lane, a sprawling white clapboard place surrounded by a swoop of tawny lawn, which eased down to meet the ocean. The Queen Anne cottage, known to most as Mitchell Cottage after Father’s people, stood with her sisters lined up along the treeless South Fork of Long Island, New York, like passengers on a ship deck facing out to sea.
If I paid more attention that day, maybe I could have predicted which of the boys who laughed over croquet wickets would soon die in the forests of Argonne or which women would exchange their ivory silk dresses for black crape. I wouldn’t have pointed to myself.
It was late May and too unseasonably cool near the ocean for a fete of any kind, but Mother insisted on sending our Russian friends, the Streshnayvas, off in style. I stood in the cool, wide living room at the back of the house. Like a steamship wheelhouse it provided the perfect view of the backyard through the picture window, the glass hazed with salt from the sea. It gave the scene a blurry look as guests drifted down the lawn to the dunes.
I felt two arms wrap around my waist and turned to find my eleven-year-old daughter, Caroline, already almost to my shoulder in height, her hair the color of summer hay and pulled back in a white ribbon. Her friend Betty Stockwell stood at her side, a complete opposite of Caroline, five inches shorter and already blossoming into a dark-haired beauty. Though dressed in matching white dresses, they were as different as chalk and cheese.
Caroline held her arms fast around my waist. “We’re going to walk the beach. And Father says he’s sorry he dressed without your help this morning, but don’t deprive him of his Dubonnet.”
I smoothed one hand down her back. “Tell your father color-blind men who insist on sneaking yellow socks into their wardrobes cannot be forgiven.”
Caroline smiled up at me. “You’re my favorite mother.”
She ran off across the lawn and down to the beach, past men who held on to their straw hats, their white flannel trousers flapping in the breeze. Ladies in canvas shoes and suits of cream linen over dainty lingerie shirtwaists turned their faces to the sun, back from places like Palm Beach, happy to feel northern breezes again. Mother’s suffragette friends, most outfitted in black taffeta and silk, lent dark contrast to the otherwise pale lawn, like strutting crows in golden flax.
Mother came and linked arms with me. “A bit chilly for a beach walk.” My seventy-year-old mother, Caroline Carson Woolsey Mitchell, referred to as “Carry” by her sisters, stood as tall as I did, six feet, a staunch New Englander sprung from ancient Yankee stock that had weathered as many heartaches as hurricanes.
“They’ll be fine, Mother.”
I squinted to see my Henry, Caroline, and Betty already walking down the beach, the skirt of Caroline’s white dress wind-puffed, as if ready to fly her skyward.
“They have their shoes off?” Mother asked. “I do hope they come in soon.”
The wind stirred whitecaps on the ocean as the three walked, heads bowed.
Mother wrapped her arms warm about me. “What do they even talk about, Caroline and Henry?”
“Everything. Lost in their own world.”
The breeze grabbed Henry’s straw boater, leaving his auburn hair shining in the sun, and Caroline darted to pluck it from the surf.
“How lucky she is to have a father who dotes on her,” Mother said.
She was entirely right, as always. But would Caroline be up coughing again half the night from the sea air?
Henry waved from the beach, like a castaway stranded on a desert island.
I waved back. “Henry will burn with his fair skin.”
Mother waved to Henry. “The Irish are so delicate.”
“Half Irish, Mother.”
Mother patted my hand. “They’ll miss you.”
“I won’t be gone long.” Sofya and her family had been visiting from St. Petersburg for a month and I was due to travel back with them to St. Petersburg the next day.
“I do worry. Russia is so far. Saratoga is nice this time of year.”
“This may be my only chance to see Russia. The churches. The ballet—”
“The starving peasants.”
“Keep your voice down, Mother.”
“They eliminated serfdom but the tsar’s poor are still enslaved.”
“I’ll go mad if I stay cooped up here. Caroline will be fine with Henry.”