Free The Summer We Read Gatsby by Danielle Ganek Page B

lavishly styled shingled house next to Lydia’s. He was a decorator—or an interior designer, as I’d been corrected—and his place was an advertisement for a Hamptons lifestyle that seemed otherwise to exist only in magazine spreads, all plump white cushions and pale green throw blankets tossed over fat chaises, books left spread-eagled on round tables set with glistening glasses of lemonade a shade or two paler than the casually draped cashmere.
    Hamilton had organized Lydia’s funeral in Paris, which Peck and I had both attended, and a memorial service a few weeks later in Southampton for her many friends, but he’d been doing an installation at a client’s house in Nantucket and I hadn’t seen him since I arrived in Southampton. We gave each other a big hug and I thanked him for coming to the party.
    “Darling, I go to everything . I’d go to the opening of an envelope,” he said. He had an awful lot of white hair combed into an elaborate sweep on either side of his face, and eyebrows so extravagant they looked like pets. He wore his customary uniform of an unsummery tweed blazer, as though he were out in the chilly English countryside after a foxhunt and not at a casual summer party on Long Island. He also carried a fan that he waved at his face all evening, despite refusing to take off the jacket, even after I suggested it twice.
    “How’s your writing ?” he asked, sounding exactly like Lydia. Hamilton was amiably ill-tempered and could be hilariously bitchy, but he always seemed to have a soft spot for Peck and me. “Your aunt always encouraged you to write.”
    “She encouraged everyone to write,” I pointed out. This made him laugh.
    “Of course she did,” he said. “But I hope you’re not letting that dissuade you. She’d be ever so disappointed.”
    “You know what she used to love to say to me?” I asked him. “ ‘There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.’ That was one of her favorite bits of writing advice. But she was actually a pretty good teacher. She used to make her students read a passage from a great work and then write their own piece, using a similar technique, with a similar tone and mood, whether it was a third-person omniscient narrator, or first person. She did the same to me.”
    “She told me you had talent, for whatever that’s worth,” he said. “Talent is one of those elusive concepts that is so maddening to understand. Anyway, it’s what you do with talent that counts.”
    I fixed Hamilton a drink from the bar cart we had wheeled out onto the porch. We had picked four bottles of expensive aged scotch, he was pleased to see. “I’m a terrible snob about the stuff,” he said.
    When we’d gone out to stock up on provisions for the evening, Peck had smacked my wallet out of my hand when I attempted to pay. “Your mussels are no good here,” Peck had said to me, as though she were the duchess of Fool’s House buying out the entire liquor store. “Mussels” was one of her oft-used euphemisms for money, a word she went out of her way not to use. “I know you’re concerned ,” she said, implying that I was being tiresome about money again, the way I was when I tried to talk about selling Fool’s House because we couldn’t afford to keep it.
    Actually, I wasn’t concerned. It was more that I was curious. Peck, who had no steady source of income, had always spent like she had stores of wealth at her disposal. She wouldn’t talk about the stuff—she carried herself as though she were embarrassed at having inherited a trust fund and thus could afford to find it rude to even discuss the topic—but she was the type who would pay more for things if she could, priding herself on her taste for the expensive.
    She never actually said the word money if she could help it, although once, the last summer we’d spent together, I heard her saying to someone on the phone, in a weary tone, as if she were exhausted by the