Summer Storm Read Free Page A

and went bicycling and swimming with the children. There was no television in the cottage and the only paper Mary saw for two weeks was the local News. It should have been a thoroughly relaxing time for her. She was with people she loved and who loved her, and she was doing all the recreational things she liked best to do. It was therefore disconcerting to find herself so restless and dissatisfied.
    She knew what was bothering her—more precisely, she knew who was bothering her. She had thought she was over him. She had put him out of her life and her work and that, she had thought, was that. She had convinced herself that her happiness lay with things of the mind, not with a dark, slim man who had once torn her life apart and almost destroyed her in the process.
    The day before she was due to leave Nantucket for Yarborough it rained. After lunch Mary took an old brown raincoat of Mike’s and went for a walk. She went down to the beach and there, with the rain falling on her face and the waves crashing on the sand, she thought back to those innocent undergraduate days of five years ago when she had first met Christopher Douglas.
     

Chapter Two
     
    She had heard of him long before they met. He was in the graduate drama school at her university in New Haven and had been something of a celebrity on campus for over a year. For one reason or another, Mary had never been to any of the drama productions in which he had starred. She herself was very busy, and in the English department something of a celebrity in her own right. She was, for example, the only undergraduate ever allowed to take the famous graduate seminar of the university’s leading professor of Renaissance literature. Mary O’Connor, ran the talk in the English department, had all the marks of a real scholar.
    Her commitment to her work scared off a number of boys who would otherwise have wanted to take her out, but she didn’t lack for dates. At twenty-one, tall and slender, with long black hair, dazzling pale skin and absolutely blue eyes, she was stunning enough to be forgiven for her brains. She was the youngest of five children and, her brothers and sisters all said affectionately, the smartest. That was why her mother had relented and allowed her to attend a secular, coeducational university. Both her older sisters had gone to a Catholic college for women and upon graduation both had taught school for two years and then married.
    “Mary Kate is different,” her sister Maureen had told her mother. “For one thing, she’s ten years younger than I am and seven years younger than Pat. That’s two generations in today’s age, Mom. She shouldn’t be bound by the same rules we were.” And her conservative, apprehensive, but deeply caring mother had relented. Mary had gone to school in New Haven, only a few miles away from her native Connecticut town but worlds away in outlook and philosophy.
    She had loved it. And she had not, as her mother had feared, been “corrupted” by bad influences. At the beginning of her senior year she still did not smoke pot or get drunk every weekend; and she was still a virgin.
    It was shortly before the Christmas break that a boy she had been dating invited her to see the drama-school production of Twelfth Night. “Christopher Douglas is playing Orsino.” he told her, “and he’s supposed to be terrific.”
    “Okay,” said Mary casually, “I’d like that.”
    She went, and her whole life changed.
    * * * *
    She would never forget the first, time she laid eyes on Kit. The lights in the theater had dimmed, the curtain had slowly risen, and there he was, alone in the center of the stage, reclining carelessly against some brightly colored cushions. The first thing she had noticed was his voice. It came across the footlights, effortlessly audible, deep and velvety with just the suspicion of a drawl.
     
    If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,  The appetite may sicken, and so