The Beach At Summerly, Beatriz Williams, 2023
A poised and literary historical fiction romance. It’s been a while since I’ve had the peace and pleasure of giving my time with something so artly and intentional. Williams’ language is coolly poetic and she writes with such practiced discipline (I can bet you’ll have some emotional response to at least one quote listed below—it is poetry). Her unreliable narrator and protagonist has a very distinguished voice.
The Beach At Summerly follows Emilia Winthrop, a woman in her late 20s, 8 years after she left Winthrop Island (a fictional place in MA) because of some untold catastrophic event. It’s alluded to that she’s to blame for landing Olive Rainsford (aunt of the boy whose estate she and her family work at) in prison for helping the Soviet Union receive classified US information. The “before” storyline is in 1946, and the “after” is 1954.
In novels which follow this popular style of the past slowly leading to reveal one crazy climax, a lot of times the climax itself is done with not enough care, or with not enough umph. But the only way I can describe Beatriz’s two-storyline cryptic plot revelation is…elegant. It was elegantly done, and when we do reach the climax, it feels that there’s enough layer of emotion and plot that we are eased into it with the time and thought that it deserves.
Emilia and her sister Susana live a quiet life raising 7 year old Lizbit when she receives a call from the CIA asking that she report to DC to help Olive Rainsford—this is odd, considering Emilia was asked by this same CIA agent to incriminate her 8 years prior. The CIA is hoping to engage in a prisoner exchange—give Olive to a Soviet prison in exchange for an American trapped there—and Olive has said she will participate in the exchange only if Emilia agrees to some unknown request.
Emilia has her doubts about opening up the old wounds she’s long ago let go of. The bulk of the novel is her narration of her time on Winthrop Island in 1946, the summer leading to the catastrophic event.
Emilia, Susana, their neglectful father, and their stroke-immobilized mother live at the Caretaker’s Lodge at the Peabody Estate, and Olive Rainsford, sister of Edwina Peabody, is staying for the summer at the Peabody guest cottage with her three young children.
Emilia recounts her great summer memories; she, her older brother Eli (the news of whose war death caused her mother’s stroke), and the Peabody boys, Arthur (also passed at war), Amory, and Shep, spent every childhood summer together. Through these memories, we get the characterization of Shep and Emilia’s wholesome friendship which in 1946 (Shep, 22 and Emilia, 20) begins feeling complicated and dire, and ultimately, we follow them as they fall in love.
Beatriz Williams has felt love the way I have. Reading the Shep and Emilia love story somehow felt like my own heartbreak (though I’m sure someone with a wholly different experience would say the same thing).
Amidst their burgeoning romance (written with the same gentle poignancy which we all remember our first love), Emilia accepts a babysitting position for Olive Rainsford’s kids. Olive takes a strange investment in Emilia, whom she claims to see much of herself. She encourages Emilia to go to college (offering to pay), despite Emilia’s commitment to her very sick mother, and deliberately against the wishes of Emilia’s father, who thinks college will fill her with all the same silly ideas as Olive (who is known as eccentric and for her reputation of having many [communist] husbands).
The tension with her father becomes unbearable at the optimal moment that her and Shep’s love is realized, as well as the opportune tragedy of her mother’s passing; she is free to flee. Emilia is ready to elope with Shep, following him to a job opportunity in California. She’s on her way when Sumner Fox, agent of the CIA, approaches her on the ferry out of Winthrop Island and gives her a shocking ultimatum: she return to the Peabody estate, hooked to a video camera, to snoop through Olive’s attic and find evidence to indict her as the Soviet loyalist releasing information of Atomic Bomb to Soviet contacts, or he’ll turn her father into the police on the means of suspicion for the murder of her mother, whom he found evidence for having died of a Nembutal overdose unrelated to her stroke.
With no choice but to make what she thinks is the right choice, Emilia takes the next ferry back to Winthrop Island and shows up to her babysitting shift with a camera hooked to her. Her fear and paranoia on this quest leaks through the page like poison.
Here is where I’ll mention the incredible way this scene is done, and the admirable way Williams’ suspense is naturally built. Emilia reflects, in a short few pages, on the novelty of riding the ferry as a child. She says she saw it as “a gateway to the world beyond,” in which you could both “escape and return.” And then it’s in the next passage that Emilia docks the return ferry back home, after almost—almost—getting out.
(BIGGEST SPOILER) On this night’s babysitting shift, Emilia follows Olive to the beach where she reports to her Soviet contacts. We can see this scene like we’ve been there before. The darkness and the breeze and the sand and the waves only a short distance ahead. Emilia runs into Amory Peabody (Shep’s older brother), who is rejoicing at the unexpected news of impregnating (and marrying) her younger sister Susana.
At this moment, Emilia is seen by the Soviet contacts, and Amory takes a bullet heading her way. Olive is caught by the CIA, but with the win comes the loss of Amory Peabody. Emilia falls into a dissociative state, and my, my, the way this scene is shown with such sensory detail as to remove oneself from their personal mind and become a mere piece of the landscape! If you’ve ever experienced dissociation, this scene will bring you to a personal realization of it.
This scene also changes from an active POV to a passive one, further demonstrating her eerie break from self. She had earlier emphasized a throbbing pain after hastily stubbing her toe in Olive’s attic, and then after Amory’s death, she says she “stood calmly and walked toward the Summerly lawn, without the slightest limp.” This simple statement gave me chills.
After the death of Amory, and her inadvertent betrayal to the Peabody family, she leaves everything behind—even her marriage to Shep—until her 1954 meeting with Olive Rainsford in DC. Back in the present, Olive tells her the stipulation for the Prisoner Exchange is that Emilia must agree to take into custody Olive’s children.
Emilia says no, and, confused at why Olive is requesting she raise her children all these years later, she spends the night at a paid-for hotel. She gets a drink at the bar where Shep, who she hasn’t spoken to since Amory’s death, greets her with an earnest plea to allow him to continue seeing the kids. It was Shep, it turns out, who had been raising them the past 8 years.
Emilia and Shep share a hotel-bed night together in which she lets him know that she will not be taking the kids. The love that lingers is indubitably present. She reveals to him the existence of Lizbit, Amory and Susana’s womb child of 7 years earlier, ultimately breaking Shep’s heart at his lost opportunity to raise his deceased brother’s child.
She returns to see Olive, who admits would have agreed to the Prisoner exchange either way. Olive would prefer to be in the Soviet Union, where her loyalty lies. She made this proposal because of some warped intent on playing a part in the Shep and Emilia reunion. She claims that what they have is a raj yotaka, a rare thing. It seems Olive has been obsessed with Emilia all along, and Olive, who is prototypically determined and impossibly obstinate in her beliefs, fostered the idea that Emilia would become her minion Soviet loyalist. For this, Emilia deserved love.
Olive tells Emilia with pride that it was she, in fact, who murdered Emilia’s mother with Nembutal, and not Emilia’s father all along. This is something a smarter reader may have guessed (though not easily), as the day before Emilia’s mother’s death, Olive insists they bring her with them to a beautiful day at the beach, where she enjoys her final day.
Simply enough, I have never been so impressed with a character. We too are riveted by the thrall of Olive Rainsford, and torn at the moral dilemma and confusion the 20 year old Emilia is faced with. The aspect I’m most notably impressed with is the way Emilia’s character voice is changed in the 1954 storyline—she becomes strong, sarcastic, and obstinate (like Olive). This goes for her dialogue, as well as her narration. Her character change, though we don’t see it happen gradually, creates a heavy extra magnitude to the events in 1946, as we see the way they truly altered her. She has become someone with conviction.
Absolute 5/5. Trigger Warnings: Implied SA, death, war
Quotes:
(I was the one who discovered her, you know, on the immaculate white tiles of the new bathroom. She had fallen on her face and I’d had to roll her over to see if she was dead.)
I nestled back in the cool sand and tried to think of something funny. Truth to tell, there was no humor to explain the difference—how the clumsy, rawboned, mumbling boy had disappeared under the serious skin of a man I didn’t know. Or no, maybe the man had burst through the awkward skin of the boy, that’s how to describe it. Well, that was life. That’s what war did.
I stood there and realized Amory was mortal. An attractive, charming, inebriated man I had kissed once, a long time ago.
“My arms just hang here useless when they ought to be holding you up.”
What was it like, Shep. Were you scared. When you heard the artillery and the gunfire and the thud of bullets, when you saw the blood. Did you ever see a sniper shoot a man through the stomach. What did he look like when he lay there bleeding and dying in the cold mud. Did you pull your first-aid kit from your pack and try to stop the blood. Was he your friend, your buddy, did you love him. What was I doing when this terrible thing happened. Was I sitting in the keeping room mending Pop’s socks.
I stood there helpless in the stuffy wood room that smelled of centuries while my father crooned to my mother, cradled her like a baby.
The second door had been left a few inches ajar. Through this narrow aperture I glimpsed some color, a slash of movement. I set my palms against the wall. I could hear my own breath whistle through my lungs, the sweat palpable from my armpits. I took a step, another step. My right hand dragged along the plaster. I was certain the floor would creak under the weight of me, but it didn’t. I felt the edge of the doorframe under my fingertips. I realized I had closed my eyes. I opened them.
There was nothing in the world but the thump of Shep’s heart. It was like being in a womb—no light, no air, just warm human flesh and heartbeat. I had to turn my head to the side so I could speak.
Get some sleep, he said to me as we clung together next to the kitchen door, but he didn’t let me go. It was too awful to contemplate, letting go of each other. What if we never found our way back?
She stands there blazing. Her eyes flare open. Her fingers spread like claws on the wooden table. It’s a vivid thing, her passion. For her children, of all things—the children she had with her dead lovers—all she has left of the men she adored. It almost makes her beautiful again.
I don’t remember being able to say anything at all. I just slid my hands around him and held on for dear life.
The sorrow of years has compressed to nothing…now the stupefied aftermath settles over us like a fog.
Shep shrugs his jacket over his shoulders and sticks his necktie in his pocket. He stares at me on the bed, just sitting there naked as a worm with my hands in my lap. Though I may be a coward in some things, I won’t flinch under his gaze…it seems to be his face softens, looking at me, but maybe that’s because I want it to so badly.
