The Summerhouse Read online

  “So you went, and they fell in love with Jordan Neale,” Leslie said, smiling as though she’d heard the happy ending of a fairy tale.

  Ellie laughed. “Not quite like that. Did I mention that I didn’t learn to type until after I was published?”

  “So you hire someone to type the books for you,” Leslie said, puzzled.

  “And how was I going to pay for that?” Ellie said. “If Martin had found out . . .”

  “He would have cut you down until you burned everything you’d written,” Madison said softly. “But in a ‘loving’ way, of course. ‘Are you sure you want to have someone else read what you’ve written, sweetheart?’ he’d say.”

  “Yes,” Ellie answered. “Exactly. Verbal abuse. Of course at the time, I didn’t think that consciously. Jeanne said that women in my situation must make themselves believe that the man they’re with is good. If they begin to see the truth about him, then . . .”

  “Then they have to do something and they’re too terrified to try anything. After all, the man has spent all his energy on making her feel incompetent and inadequate,” Madison finished for her.

  “Yes,” Ellie answered, saying everything in that one word.

  “So how did you get published?” Leslie asked in exasperation.

  Ellie laughed as she looked down at her empty cup. “Innocence, for one thing. If I’d known anything at all, I wouldn’t have tried. I wouldn’t even have made that appointment with the editor. Later, people told me that I couldn’t do what I did, that I had to have an agent, that my manuscript had to be this and that. I was told that there were rules and that I had broken all of them.”

  Ellie looked up, smiling. “But you know what? The publishing world is just as hungry as we readers are for good stories. My editor would kill me for saying this, but if your story is fabulous, you can turn it in written in charcoal on bark and the publishing house will take care of the rest.”

  “Yeah, but how did you get anyone to read those manuscripts in the first place?” Madison said. “I hate handwritten insurance forms, so I can’t imagine a whole book done in pen and ink.”

  “You’re exactly right. If my editor had known what she was asking for, she wouldn’t have asked me to send my books to her. You see, Daria was late. She’s usually late, but not through any reason except that she has a thousand things to do and ten minutes to do them in.” Ellie smiled. “I’ve often told her that my career started because she was late. In fact, I once gave her a pocket watch for a gift.”

  When Leslie and Madison looked blank, Ellie explained. “You know, like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. ‘I’m late. I’m late,’ the White Rabbit says.”

  The women smiled, but Ellie could see that they wanted her to tell them about her book.

  “Okay, but I only know what happened because later Daria and I became friends and she told me the story.”

  For a moment Ellie was silent; then she smiled and started to speak. There was a faraway look in her eyes, a look of happiness the women hadn’t seen before.

  “I’m late,” Daria said to her assistant, Cheryl, who had traveled to the writers’ conference with her. “I have to go now!”

  “But there’s just one more and she looked so hopeful. She has this big box clutched to her chest and she looks scared to death, as though if she’s caught she’ll be punished.”

  For a moment Daria closed her eyes in exasperation. Cheryl was new, fresh out of a prestigious university with a degree in English lit, a minor in creative writing.

  “They all look like that,” Daria said in exasperation to her assistant, then thought, Until they get some money; then they—No, she wasn’t going to complete that thought. This was the third day that she’d been at the conference, and she’d heard at least fifty authors pitch their work, but she’d heard nothing that was of any interest to her. One by one, she’d sent the authors to Cheryl to pick up standardized sheets with pointers on how to get a science fiction novel published, how to get a romance published, and so on.

  Daria looked at her watch again. It wasn’t as though she were late for a hairdresser’s appointment. She was late for a speech. At the end of the hall was an auditorium, and there were about three hundred paying would-be writers sitting in there right now waiting to hear Daria tell them how to get their books published and on the best-seller lists.

  Of course, what Daria wanted to do was get up there and say, “Write a good book and it’ll sell,” then sit down. But, no, that wouldn’t do. No, she had to stand up there and talk for thirty minutes about margins and how much her publishing house was willing to pay for a book they hadn’t seen to an author they’d never heard of.

  Daria looked at her eager young assistant. Was she actually a nice person or was this some passive-aggressive action meant to make her boss do what she wanted her to do?

  Whatever, Daria thought with a sigh. “Five minutes,” she said to Cheryl, then tried to look stern and like a “real” boss.

  With a radiant smile, Cheryl put her head around the door and said, “You can come in now,” and in walked a short, thin young woman who did indeed look frightened.

  “I don’t mean to take up your time,” the woman said hesitantly.

  “That’s all right,” Daria said as patiently as she could manage. “You’ve written a book?”

  “I . . . well, I guess so. I mean, I’m not really a writer, but I did have a few ideas, so I wrote them down. I’m sure they’re not worth anything, but then, maybe, someone might like them. Or maybe one of them, I don’t know.”

  Daria had to work hard to keep the smile on her face. One of those, she thought. Some writers hyped themselves up and came at you like a tsunami released on your face, telling you that they were going to put your publishing house on the map with this magnificent opus they had wrought.

  Then there were people like this woman, this . . . Daria looked at the woman’s name tag, but all she could see was the last name of Gilmore. The first name was hidden behind the blue typing-paper box that she was holding so tightly to her chest that her fingers were white.

  “Ms. Gilmore,” Daria said, “may I be honest with you? I’m late for giving a speech, and—”

  Instantly, as though she were obeying orders, the woman stepped back and started apologizing. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. They didn’t tell me. I thought I had an appointment for one o’clock, and—”

  Daria very well knew that it was now two-thirty, so that meant the woman had been sitting outside in the hall waiting for this moment for . . . Well, based on Daria’s experience, the woman had probably been waiting all her life to hand her manuscript over to a New York editor.

  Daria couldn’t take the guilt anymore. As she gathered her things, she handed the woman her card. “Here, send what you have to New York. Mark it to my personal attention and I’ll take care of it myself. How does that sound?”

  “Very generous,” the woman said, looking at the card as though it were the key to heaven.

  As Daria left, to ease her guilt a bit, she gave the woman a little squeeze on the shoulder; then she practically ran from the room.

  Cheryl walked into Daria’s office, laughing. “You’ll never guess what I just received in the mail.”

  “I can’t imagine,” Daria said absently as she searched through the pile on her desk to find the fifty pages of manuscript that she’d just edited. She had to get everything into her bag to take home. Unfortunately, she had to go to a dinner tonight with some of the bigwigs of the company, which meant that she’d be up until midnight trying to catch up on her workload. She had three—count ’em three—books that she was crashing, books that had been put in the schedule, then the authors, for one reason or another, hadn’t turned their manuscripts in on time, so it was up to Daria to do a year’s work in just weeks.

  “You remember that writers’ conference last week when you had that late author appointment? You told her that she should send what she’d written to you here, to your personal