Page 37 of The Book of Summer

“Aw, hell,” Topper said with a forlorn sort of head tilt. “Ruby, you’re a doll. Bundles for Britain sounds swell but don’t listen to your baby brother. I’m full of bunk ninety percent of the time.”

“That is definitely true.”

“Forget serious, Red. You keep your sunshine. You stay in that cocoon. Everybody loves the la-la girls. In New England you’re the rarest kind of bird.”

17

Island ACKtion

CLIFF HOUSE UPDATE: CISSY C CALLS REINFORCEMENTS

May 20, 2013

As I informed my ACK squad a scant five days ago (click here for the full article), though the building still stands, for all intents and purposes, the legendary Cliff House isfinit.

The Baxter Road behemoth has been the site of some of the island’s most festive and famous shindigs. According to hospital records dug up by my intrepid intern, a total of seven Kennedy-related injuries have been reported on the property over the years. Many more have not been reported. And one can only imagine the sexual misdeeds committed on-site. There’s no telling whose DNA would be found if the dressing rooms that once surrounded the pool remained.

But the pool is gone, along with the dressing rooms, the lawn, the tennis courts (one clay, one hard), and most of the back veranda. The only thing left, really, is the home itself, one-quarter of a privet hedge, and a cantankerous owner still inside.

Don’t misunderstand. Cissy Codman and her seldom-seen husband Dudley are not entirely out of options. Tuesday will mark an important day in the fight to save their home. That night, the Board of Selectmen will vote on whether to move ahead with Cissy & Co.’s controversial hard armor schemes. She’s worked wicked hard on her quest and has even kicked millions of her own. Calls to Dudley Codman have gone unreturned, as per usual.

“It’s not happening,” says lifelong Sconseter and commercial fisherman Chappy Mayhew. “Her gimmick would cause havoc on a very fragile ecosystem. True locals won’t stand for it.”

To aid her cause, Cissy’s shipped in one of her kids. It’s the middle of her three children, Elisabeth Codman. Bess is an ER doctor in San Francisco and a graduate of Nantucket High School. She is the only one of Cissy’s kids to have attended school on-island.

“I’m only trying to get her out of the house,” Bess tells theACKtion. “Seriously, Corkie, it’s nothing more.”

Way to play it cool, Bess. Way to lay low.

Stay tuned for news coming out of the Selectmen’s Office on Tuesday.Island ACKtionwill be live-tweeting the event.

ABOUT ME:

Corkie Tarbox, lifelong Nantucketer, steadfast flibbertigibbet. Married with one ankle-biter. Views expressed on theIsland ACKtionblog (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al.) are hers alone. Usually.

18

Tuesday Morning

“Well, well, well, the Bradlee girls are back on A-C-K,” Bess sings, joke-style, as she glides through the side door of Tea Time, her cousins’ house in town. “Alert the authorities.”

Some might call Tea Time a compound—the Bradlees certainly wouldn’t—but it has a front house and three guesthouses (aptly named “For Felicia,” “For Palmer,” and “For Everyone Else”), plus a pool, so it qualifies to Bess. Also, a former presidential candidate slash secretary of state has a place down the road and his is irrefutably smaller.

However.

“You can’t have a compound in town!” Aunt Polly insists.

You can’t have one in Sconset either, apparently. Or you can, but it won’t last forever.

“Frick and Frack.” Bess smiles, sauntering into the kitchen of the main house. “Together again.”

Frick and Frack, or Flick and Palmer. Two sisters, two vastly different women, though close all the same.

Flick is tall, broad-shouldered, husky-voiced, and assured. She makes piles of money on Wall Street and has her own weekend home in Amagansett, in addition to “For Felicia” in Nantucket Town. Palmer is the little sister and Bess’s closest friend. Delicate and blond, she is a former “mid-tier ballerina” who danced for some time with the Little Rock Ballet Company before chucking it all to get married to a guy with great hair and a country club membership.

“I never had to get a real job,” she’d tell you in a delighted hush, never pretending she wanted it any other way.

Now Palmer teaches ballet to little girls in an Atlanta suburb, tots like her own cherub Amory, who is always either napping or sitting with her ankles crossed, mouthing the words to a picture book with her perfect pink lips.