The Time Traveler's Almanac

At night in Old Cottage years later, Julia looked out the windows into the dark. And saw Mount Airey by daylight. The cabin and the grove were gone. The bare ground they had stood on was cracked and eroded. She told Mrs. Eder that she was going to visit Stoneham Cabin next morning. Falling asleep, Julia remembered the resort as it had been. As a child, she had learned to swim at Bachelor’s Point and heard the story of Mount Airey being spun. Men tamed and in trunks, women liberated in one piece suits, swam together now and talked of the useful Mr. Coolidge and, later, the traitorous Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

When she was fifteen, her father died in an accident. Nothing but the kindest condolences were offered. But Julia, outside an open door, heard someone say, “Ironic, Flash Garde’s being cut down by a speeding taxi.”

“In front of the Stork Club, though, accompanied by a young lady described as a ‘hostess’. He would have wanted it that way.” She heard them all laugh.

By then, cocktail hour had replaced afternoon tea at Baxter’s. In tennis whites, men sat with their legs crossed, women with their feet planted firmly on the ground. Scandal was no longer whispered. Julia knew that her mother’s remarriage less than two months after her father’s death would have been fully discussed. As would the decision of this mother she hardly ever saw to stay in Europe.

Julia’s grandmother attended her son’s funeral and shed not a tear. Her attitude was called stoic by some. Unfeeling by others. No one at Baxter’s or Bachelor’s Point had the slightest idea that the greatest love of Helen Garde’s life had, over their twenty years together, given her hints of these events yet to come.

After her father’s death and her mother’s remarriage, Julia visited the Rex. From behind the silver mask, Alcier spoke. “The gods find you well. You will wed happily with their blessings,” he said. “The divine ones will shield your children.”

Much as she adored Alcier, Julia thought of this as fortune-teller stuff. She began, in the way of the young, to consider the Rex and the Shrine of the Twelve Portals as being among the toys of childhood.

That Fall, she went to Radcliffe as her grandmother wished. There, the thousand and one things of a wealthy young woman’s life drove thoughts of the gods to the back of her mind. They didn’t even re-emerge on a sunny day on Brattle Street in her senior year.

Julia and her friend Grace Shipton were headed for tennis lessons. At the curb, a young man helped a co-ed from Vassar into the seat of an MG Midget. He looked up and smiled what would become a well-known smile. And looked again, surprised. It was the first time he had laid eyes on the woman he would marry.

Before this moment, Julia had experienced a girl’s tender thoughts and serious flirtations. Then her eyes met those of the young man in the camel-hair jacket. She didn’t notice the boy who watched them, so she didn’t see his mischievous smile or feel the arrow. But in a moment of radiance her heart was riven.

When Julia asked Grace who the young man was, something in her voice made the Shipton heiress look at her, “That’s Robert Macauley,” came the answer. “The son of that lace curtain thug who’s governor of New York.”

Julia Garde and young Robert Macauley were locked in each other’s hearts. All that afternoon she could think of nothing else. Then came the telegram that read, “Sorry to intrude. But I can’t live without you.”

“Until this happened, I never believed in this,” she told him the next afternoon when they were alone and wrapped in each others’ arms.

Robert proposed a few days later. “The neighbors will burn shamrocks on your front lawn,” he said when Julia accepted.

She laughed, but knew that might be true. And didn’t care. Polite society studied Helen Stoneham Garde’s face for the anger and outrage she must feel. The heiress to her fortune had met and proposed to marry an Irishman, A CATHOLIC, A DEMOCRAT! But when Julia approached her grandmother in the study at Joyous Garde and broke the news, Helen betrayed nothing. Her eyes were as blue as the wide Atlantic that lay beyond the French doors. And as unknowable.

“You will make a fine-looking couple,” she said. “And you will be very happy.”

“You knew.”

“Indirectly. You will come to understand. The wedding should be small and private. Making it more public would serve no immediate purpose.”

“Best political instincts I’ve encountered in a Republican,” the governor of the Empire State remarked on hearing this. “Be seen at mass,” he told his son. “Raise the children in the Church. With the Garde money behind you, there’ll be no need to muck about with concrete contracts.”

“There will be a war and he will be a fighter pilot,” Helen told Julia after she had met Robert. Before her granddaughter could ask how she knew, she said impatiently, “All but the fools know a war is coming. And young men who drive sports cars always become pilots.”