The House on Oyster Creek Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - A LETTER FROM FATE

  Chapter 2 - THE BOAT MEADOW

  Chapter 3 - CHARLOTTE’S HOUSE

  Chapter 4 - WASHED ASHORE

  Chapter 5 - RICH

  Chapter 6 - THE SEAWALL

  Chapter 7 - TUNA SEASON

  Chapter 8 - TELL ME

  Chapter 9 - FLOATING

  Chapter 10 - MOTHER NATURE

  Chapter 11 - SALT

  Chapter 12 - CAPE COD GIRLS

  Chapter 13 - THE KING’S LAW

  Chapter 14 - SQUID

  Chapter 15 - THEY

  Chapter 16 - FOG

  Chapter 17 - PERFECT CLARITY

  Chapter 18 - QUAINT

  Chapter 19 - AT SEA

  Chapter 20 - LONG NIGHT MOON

  Chapter 21 - WISTERIA

  Chapter 22 - AN UNEXPLODED BOMB

  Chapter 23 - SEPTEMBER TWELFTH

  Chapter 24 - THE GHOST NET

  Chapter 25 - A TOURIST

  Chapter 26 - A CRIME

  Chapter 27 - TRY AGAIN

  Chapter 28 - THE SHORT HISTORY OF A WATERY PLACE

  Chapter 29 - ALL THAT REMAINS

  Chapter 30 - CLASS

  Chapter 31 - OVER THE BRIDGE

  Chapter 32 - CHICKEN SOUP

  Chapter 33 - DREAD AND THE COMMON MAN

  Chapter 34 - BY THE WATERS

  Chapter 35 - DEATH OF A VIKING

  Chapter 36 - A PERFECT BEACH DAY

  Chapter 37 - THE SOUND OF SNOW

  Acknowledgements

  Teaser chapter

  Praise for the Novels of

  HEIDI JON SCHMIDT

  The House on Oyster Creek

  “This novel shimmers with the light of a summer day in New England. Schmidt expertly explores the complexities of domestic life and the tug of forbidden love, and plays them out against the subtly drawn accuracies and realities of class in a small Cape Cod town.”

  —Elizabeth Strout, New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge

  The Bride of Catastrophe

  “Comically beautiful. In polished, nearly Austenian prose, Schmidt blurs the line between inanity and tragedy.”

  —Village Voice

  “There is line after line of hilarious and desperate truth here—what a a joy to read.”

  —Elizabeth Strout

  “Energetic, garrulous, and funny, with characteristic affectionate yet biting wit. Our heroine may be a long way from mastering her life, but she has an enviable command of the book of love.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Will comfortably share the shelf with works such as John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire and Paul Theroux’s Mosquito Coast.”

  —Library Journal

  “Schmidt has a keen eye for detail and a sharp sense of humor.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Offers a number of pleasures, including . . . the exuberant attitude toward experimentation that was the hallmark of the 1970s.”

  —Booklist

  Darling?

  “Brilliant, very, very funny. . . . It is impossible to disentangle the comic from the tragic in Schmidt’s writing. . . . [She] is incapable of cliché.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Generous, poignant, an unsparing eye and a keen wit: Alice Munro throwing her arm around the shoulder of J. D. Salinger. One doesn’t often raise the banners that say profound and enormous fun over the same book, but here we can and do.”

  —Elinor Lipman

  “Sharp, yet lusciously written . . . full of shocks, beautiful images, and new ways of seeing things.”

  —The Guardian/Observer (London)

  “Here is that rare and welcome book about love that’s less concerned with how we find love than what we do with it, a book that deals not in moments of passion, but in moments of grace, a book about the frustrating, hilarious, embarrassing, transcendental business of living with love. Heidi Jon Schmidt’s stories are filled with delightful wit, spellbinding feeling, and an emotional intelligence that rises to the level of essential wisdom.”

  —Peter Ho Davies

  “This collection has so many shining moments of humor, of heart-break, of grace that readers might find themselves asking: Why aren’t more stories this good?”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Schmidt creates a mood not unlike the tenor of modern life, lurching from giddy enthusiasm to embarrassment to frustration. Schmidt’s take on contemporary phenomena is bracing.”

  —Booklist

  “[Schmidt’s] precise and elegant prose is smart and artful, indeed.”

  —The New York Times

  The Rose Thieves

  “A graceful journey into the individual life of a young woman and the collective life of a family—and a fine debut.”

  —The New York Times

  “Laugh-out-loud comic and really tragic at the same time. Beautifully, evocatively written.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “The stories are standouts.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Captures the rueful humor in family ambiguities.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Delightful . . . precise and elegant.”

  —Library Journal

  OTHER NOVELS BY HEIDI JON SCHMIDT

  The Rose Thieves

  Darling?

  The Bride of Catastophe

  NAL ACCENT

  Published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  First published by NAL Accent, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, June 2010

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Heidi Jon Schmidt, 2010

  Conversation Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2010

  All rights reserved

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint lyrics from “Waiting on Gramma,”

  copyright © Jerry Beckham, 2009.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-Publication Data:

  Schmidt, Heidi Jon.

  The house on Oyster Creek/Heidi Jon Schmidt.

  P. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-42970-9

  1. Self-actualization (Psychology) in women—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters—F iction. 3. Wellfleet (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.C51554H68 2010

  813’.54—dc22 2010003857

  Set in Albertina • Designed by Elke Sigal

 
Printed in the United States of America

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or or third-p arty Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my sister Laura Ann, whose struggles as a shellfish farmer inspired this book, and whose success as a mother daily inspires me.

  And for Marisa, who combs her hair with codfish bones.

  1

  A LETTER FROM FATE

  Charlotte had known when she married Henry that he would inherit Tradescome Point. It helped weave the little veil of romance over him: He was the only child of only children, from a long line of Maine Puritans whose names he knew only from the stones in the family plot. They’d been shipbuilders, ship captains, and his grandfather, having sailed around the tip of Cape Cod to avoid a gale, had found this crooked finger of land in Wellfleet and decided to retire there. Tradescome Point, called Mackerel Point back then, looked south over the serpentine estuary known as Oyster Creek, which opened into Mackerel Bay and then into Cape Cod Bay. The island at the bay’s mouth had been named Billingsgate because fish seemed as plentiful there as in Billingsgate Fish Market in London. Lobsters washed up in heaps after a storm, and a man could rake in bushels of scallops at low tide, like leaves. And of course there were the famous oysters, reefs of them in the shallow water, and cod, and mackerel drying in sheaves on every one of the wharves that bristled out all along the shoreline—every fisherman was proud as a king.

  By 1902, when Isaiah Tradescome arrived, almost every last mackerel had been caught. The big wharf at the end of the point had been swept off its pilings in the Portland Gale, and there was no reason to replace it—there were no mackerel left in Mackerel Bay, and the point, accessible only by water or by the narrow cart way alongside the creek, which lay under two feet of water at high tide, was of no use to anyone. Isaiah bought it, all eleven acres, for a hundred and eighty-seven dollars, built his house, and lived there the rest of his days.

  Henry spoke of the place slightingly, as the last relic of a tradition he’d managed to escape. He was the last Tradescome except for his father, who lived in a nursing home outside Boston: a staring old man who crimped the edges of his blanket with nervous fingers all day and all night, waiting for death.

  “Hold his hand,” Charlotte prompted Henry the last time they visited him. It was four hours by train from Grand Central; they’d sit with his father and spend the night in a hotel, reassuring each other about what a good place they’d found, how clean and bright it was, how the nurses seemed genuinely concerned. Charlotte had put up pictures of Henry Senior, looking up from his desk at his insurance office, showing off a wire basket of littlenecks he’d dug out of the tide flats off the point. She wanted everyone to remember that he had once been a whole, living man.

  “Or just rest your hand on his head, so he can tell you’re here.”

  “He doesn’t know me,” Henry said with profound irritation. One of his hands had been weakened by polio years ago; the other was tensed along with his jaw at his wife’s notions. She believed in the healing power of a touch, and other banalities.

  “He’ll feel it; he’ll sense something, some deep memory. It’ll comfort him even if he doesn’t know it’s you.”

  “Conventional wisdom,” he said, seething. Conventional was his worst insult—he pronounced it with such contempt that Charlotte feared it as she would a red- hot poker. Emaciated, translucent, his father looked up at them with watery, frightened eyes.

  “It can’t hurt him,” Charlotte insisted.

  Henry gave in and took the crooked fingers in his. A little frown troubled his father’s long, pale face and the old man pulled his hand away. One corner of Henry’s mouth turned up—now did she get it? Tradescomes came from cold granite; they did not want comfort against life’s blows.

  “You’re young, that’s all,” Henry said to Charlotte, with a chuckle. “Your view will darken; give it time.”

  Before she’d had Fiona, Charlotte had believed this, and most of the rest of what Henry told her. He was twenty years older than she was, an author, a staunch and learned man, and she’d been grateful to have him as a guide. Charlotte was made of empathy; she would accidentally glimpse the hopes and fears of the stranger behind her in a supermarket line. Her heart went out to people and she could never get it back. Henry’s heart seemed to have hardened until it cracked; she’d been sure she could restore it, bring it back to life again. It hadn’t occurred to her that Henry might not want that.

  The phone call woke them all. The light on the Empire State Building was out; it must be after midnight. Charlotte took Fiona up from her crib and settled back in bed to nurse her.

  “Thank God,” Henry said. “Yes. No, there won’t be a service. There’s no one left to mourn him.” He gave his characteristic bleak laugh and hung up, breathing a long sigh.

  She reached her free hand out to him, and he allowed it to sit on his shoulder for a moment before picking it up and returning it to her.

  “It’s hardly bad news,” he said.

  “Still it’s sad.” Fiona was drifting off again and Charlotte’s nipple popped comically out of her mouth, though she kept trying to suck, making fish lips in her sleep. To think that Henry’s father had been someone’s baby; someone had gazed down at his face with this wondering love that amounted nearly to prayer. . . .

  “An old, stale sadness,” Henry said.

  “So, sadness has, like, a shelf life?”

  He did smile at that. “No,” he said. “Which means it will still be there in the morning, so you might as well get some rest.” He got up and went to the bathroom for the hot water bottle, pulling a T-shirt of Charlotte’s out of the laundry to wrap it. The warmth and smell would trick Fiona back to sleep in the crib.

  “Is this too hot?”

  Charlotte pressed her wrist against it. “Just right,” she said. Henry was nothing if not helpful. Getting the rice cereal to the perfect consistency, or the water bottle to the exact temperature, these duties he undertook in earnest. And he would hold Fiona whenever Charlotte needed a free hand, though always with a slightly rebellious look, as if just because there was a baby here in the crook of his arm didn’t mean he had to feel anything for it. Certainly not.

  He leaned down to make up the crib—his naked backside was poignant, two stick legs supporting his thick torso and the head of gray hair he raked with his good hand all day, racking his brain for exact phrases. His back hurt him, the doctor said he needed a new knee, and the bad hand hung strangely as always, an unclenchable fist, proof of the cruelty of life. He settled the water bottle in, smoothed the wrinkles out of the sheet, and Charlotte tiptoed behind him, leaning into the crib, careful to keep the baby tight against her until the last second. Fiona didn’t wake up, just snuggled closer to the hot water bottle, and they stood over her, watching her sleep. It felt like they were a real, whole family, the kind where each brings his own spark so there’s always a soft light burning, even
in the darkest time.

  “I’ll read awhile,” Henry said, going into the living room and turning on his lamp. It had been a bare bulb when Charlotte met him, shining harshly on the jammed bookshelves, the piles of books on the floor beside the armchair, the table where he pushed the books aside to make a bit of room for his dinner plate every night—usually scrambled eggs. He’d read until his eyes felt “like boiled owls,” then go down the six flights of stairs and around the corner to McClellan’s Tap. “He lives like an Athenian,” one of his acolytes at the newspaper had explained. “His life is in the marketplace. Home is just a place to sleep.”

  Charlotte had been another of those admirers, in awe of his devotion to work and thought, his stark austerity. She’d been so young, embarrassingly young, with no idea what mundane materials lives are made of. Wanting to distinguish herself, do something brave and important, she had gone to work for a pittance at the East Village Mirror , which Henry had started printing on a mimeograph when he first saw the danger looming in Vietnam. Now he was the visionary-in-residence, whose purity of journalistic heart made all the rules and tricks Charlotte had learned in grad school seem tainted. The Mirror’s tiny circulation did not trouble him—better to address a small group of serious readers than be a cog in some big, shining wheel. Did you see more deeply into the subject? Did you find the details that would etch the story absolutely into the reader’s mind? Then you could hold your head high; never mind the byline, the prestige. His chin was always stubbly, his sweaters worn through at the elbows: He didn’t waste a thought on such things. The trace of a Maine accent left in his speech added to the sense that he belonged to an earlier and much better time, and his left hand, flaccid at his side, gave a certain glamour, giving the easy explanation for his ferocity, his steely refusal to take part in the ordinary round of life. Everyone was curious—the men drank with him; the women slept with him. They made a myth of him and loved him for it. Only Charlotte, whose brand of hubris was emotional, had tried to get to know him.