The House on Oyster Creek Read online

  And she’d succeeded; she’d made her way into his heart. And been so smug about it too, being favored by the great man. Henry was almost the age her father would be now. Her father had remarried soon after her mother’s death (he was one of those men whose wife was his soul; he couldn’t live long without one), and been absorbed into the new family, leaving Charlotte as a sort of fifth wheel. She’d call him on holidays, and they’d have a bit of conversation, but she wouldn’t have thought to confide in him, and when he died one morning as he was setting off on his postal route, she’d felt only a dull, distant grief, an echo of something so old it had become ordinary. By then she had made this strange marriage and didn’t know what to do.

  She had only herself to blame. She and Henry had taken a trip to France together, in those early years. Provincial creature that she was, she was attracted to everything that glittered: Henry pulled her down alleyways into restaurants that seemed like caves, full of students smoking Gauloises. Paris had been Disneyfied beyond recognition, he said; only the beauty of the women was worthy of note anymore. Away from his desk, he was unmoored; nothing pleased him and he barely spoke, though his face would knot suddenly with fury and he’d address some bitter expostulation to the editor of the International Herald Tribune. Holed up in the garret hotel room with him, Charlotte had suffered a loneliness so bleak it seemed almost physical. On the train to Marseilles he went to the men’s room and never came back; after an hour she went to look and found him in a different car, reading a history of the Dreyfus affair and looking fit to kill. She tiptoed back to her own seat, thinking she’d get off at some stop midway and go on alone. Except that Henry, having never owned a credit card, was carrying only a hundred dollars in traveler’s checks. She couldn’t abandon him, any more than she could have left a child alone. They alighted in Marseilles as married as ever. Charlotte saw a young couple striding past, deep in conversation, and Henry, watching her watch them, said with perfect tenderness: “Poor girl, that’s what you ought to have had.”

  Now, with Fiona safely asleep, he tucked an old wool blanket (his father’s) over himself and tried a few pairs of glasses from the side table before he found the right ones. The cat jumped into his lap. Bunbury was the ugliest cat Charlotte had ever seen—a square head, a mean face, and fur stiff as a bottlebrush—but he and Henry had some kind of understanding, and as Henry started to scratch behind the cat’s ears, Charlotte saw grief overtake him. His shoulders went rigid, he clenched his fist, that was all. Charlotte tried to sleep—Fiona would need her again in a few hours—but it was impossible. She lay there trying to piece the dead man together, from the bits she knew. The man in those pictures, his linen suit and trim mustache, a certain energy and pride in his face . . . had he gotten some of what he hoped for, before he died? Face to the pillow so Henry couldn’t hear, she cried for him. Somebody had to.

  He had structured it all so smoothly, before he lost himself to dementia—probate went without a hitch. The nursing home had absorbed most of his savings, and after the taxes there was barely a dollar left. But Henry was the only heir, and they received by registered mail the key to a safe-deposit box that contained such jewelry as Charlotte could not have imagined—blue diamond teardrop earrings, a gift to Henry’s grandmother on the occasion of his father’s birth, and a cameo depicting a barefoot woman on horseback, thrusting a spear into the breast of a lion.

  “Ship’s captains,” Henry said, barely glancing, as Charlotte held the brooch under the light. It was translucent pink, carved from a shell. “They brought things back. . . .”

  They were shut up in the anteroom off the safe-deposit vault. It was paneled in gleaming mahogany, and about the size of an elevator. “Dross . . .” Henry said under his breath, pushing aside a packet of old letters. Underneath, there was a set of brass knuckles, well used.

  “Mutineers,” he said with a gleam, trying them on his good hand. “You had to be ready for them. You have to be hard as a ball bearing, Grandfather used to say.” He made a quick, tight jab in the air, with real hatred on his face, as if his enemy were right in front of him.

  “Is this the deed?” Charlotte asked, to turn the subject. Clearly it was—a fold of thick, brittle paper, covered in tendriled script, tied with a stained satin ribbon. It looked like a letter from fate.

  “ ‘Know all men by these presents . . .’ ” she read out. “ ‘In consideration of one hundred and eighty-seven dollars, I, Luther Travis, do hereby grant unto the said Isaiah Tradescome, his heirs and assigns forever, a parcel of upland and meadow in South Wellfleet, being about ten and three-quarter acres more or less, bounded northerly by the Oyster Creek cartway, seventy-three lengths of fence as the fence now stands, and southerly by the waters of Mackerel Bay, extending eastward to the bridge beside the boat meadow, and westward to Sedgewick’s Gutter. . . .’ ”

  “Point Road was still the cartway when my grandfather bought the place,” Henry said, rigid in the shoulders. “The road came later, after the automobile.” He was the only person Charlotte had ever heard speak the word automobile, and he said it with some suspicion, as if it was still a newfangled idea as far as he was concerned. “Sedgewick’s Gutter, I don’t know.”

  “The Boat Meadow?”

  “Oyster Creek is only full at high tide. It runs through the marshland—you can take a canoe through the channels but there’s high grass on all sides, so it’s as if you’re paddling through a wheat field. I used to spend whole days in there. In some places the cordgrass is ten feet high. It’s mysterious; you don’t know what’s around the next bend.”

  His voice was soft and distant, and he slid the brass knuckles off and took the deed out of her hand as if he might see himself there, a boy kneeling at the edge of the marsh, keeping still enough that the life of the place would continue, the hognose snake slithering off the bank and across the water, the fiddler crabs popping out of their holes.

  “So, you do remember something from before you were twelve,” Charlotte said. He’d always insisted that his first memories were the things he could see in the mirror over the iron lung, the year his parents took him out to Wellfleet to try to escape the polio outbreak. Nothing from before that mattered, anyway—it might as well have been someone else’s two-handed life.

  “I don’t,” he said, looking up from the deed. “A few flashes maybe—being out in the canoe, or all the women like black statues at my grandfather’s funeral.”

  “And the game,” Charlotte prompted. He’d lived for baseball back then, had begged until he was allowed to stay in Boston to pitch the first Little League game of the year. If they’d left when they wanted to, he might not have gotten sick; everything might have been different. “The one that was nearly a no-hitter.”

  “I do remember the game,” he said. “I felt like I could fly.”

  This was a jeer at the naive boy he’d been. The one who emerged from the iron lung a month later had only scorn for such innocence. He’d kept hearing how lucky he was—how he should be grateful to God for sparing not only his life, but his right arm as well. That the left one hung there helpless was a very small thing when you thought of what might have happened. Of what happened every day. He’d had nothing to do but read while he was in the machine; he’d discovered all kinds of things. Things like Auschwitz

  “Lucky to be alive,” he said now, treasuring the foolish phrase. “I’d believed in God up till then . . . But there was the minister saying God had been watching over me. He sounded like a salesman. . . . I thought: ‘This man must never have seen a newspaper.’ ”

  Charlotte laughed. It was funny how people who had just been kicked in the teeth by life would go on profusely thanking God. It was not funny that Henry had lost hope when he was twelve and never seemed able to catch a glimpse of it again.

  “A boat meadow,” she said, hoping to change the subject before a rant could get started. “Fiona would love that, floating through a boat meadow.”

  Henry looked over the top of his gl
asses, amused. Fiona had just taken her first steps. He had no experience of children, no inkling how fast she would grow.

  She went on reading the deed:

  “ ‘All of these boundaries, except the waterlines, are determined by the court to be shown on the plan, as listed in the Barnstable County Registry of Deeds, book seven, page two seventeen. . . .’ Well, we’re landowners.”

  She spoke with the light drama Henry used to love, fifteen years back when she was the eager girl in the corner of the Mirror’s tiny newsroom. She could bring the sparkle and mystery out of things; she’d seemed at first to be the cure for him, but she mostly irritated him now. She had no gravitas; had never fully accepted his authority, though he was vastly more experienced, better read than she was. When he refused to let her write the bigger pieces at the Mirror (nothing personal, it was just that she didn’t come up to their editorial standards) she had, inconceivably, left the paper altogether to take a job at Celeb magazine, a fashion/gossip weekly Henry had never even looked at except once when he was waiting for a root canal.

  “Landowners,” he echoed, contemptuous, his dark gray eyes darkening further, his mouth pursed. He did not traffic in landownership, but in ideas. Well, she had wanted to please him, had tried for years, but having never been able to measure up, she’d turned it around and learned to enjoy flicking the red flag, watching him charge off in a rage. If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em. She’d made real money at Celeb while he was holding the fort for serious journalism in his dark little office. She bought an orange patent- leather handbag, red stiletto heels with shark’s teeth painted on the side, like hot rods for your feet. All very irritating, but calling him a landowner was the worst thing yet.

  “By the waters of Mackerel Bay,” she went on. “It’s poetry! A ‘boat meadow’? The idea of it . . .” Wellfleet was just a word to her, a word from that seminal text, the Oyster Bar menu—Wellfleet, Chincoteague, Blue Point, gusts from the seaside, where the lowing of fog-horns, the fresh cold wind off the water, could make loneliness seem like a beautiful thing.

  “We’re rich! I can’t believe it.”

  She knew this would drive him crazy. His glance was poison and he put a finger to his lips. Was that what she cared about, money? If they had to be rich, she could at least keep from mentioning it, and most certainly from trumpeting it while fanning herself with the deeds to their seaside properties, et cetera.

  “It’s only the truth, Henry.” She laughed. “We . . . well, you . . . have inherited the place. What are you going to do with it?”

  He sighed. He’d walked up the endless stairs to his rent-controlled apartment every day for thirty years, from the time he started the Mirror through the era of his little renown as a political reporter and critic, to today, when there would occasionally come a volume in the mail, a first edition of his collected essays, discovered at a garage sale, which some supplicant was begging him to autograph so as to fill out his (always his) collection of the representative works of the Vietnam era. These little packages made him shudder, reminding him of what he’d meant to become. And the shudder itself infuriated him—his ambitions had not borne out, so what? He could hardly call himself disappointed—he had expected little from life. At the Mirror he was the wise man, unfailingly thoughtful, open to all points of view. Charlotte was too young for him, lighthearted, light minded too. He’d had more serious, sophisticated women who would have made much better companions, but some idiot instinct had compelled him in this direction, caught him in this subliterary life. Fiona’s crib stood where his desk used to be.

  Back in the city, Charlotte looked down over Houston Street, where flocks of black-garbed young people were picking along through the icy puddles. It was the winter of 2003; she still couldn’t help stopping at the corner of Sullivan to stare south, toward the empty sky where the Trade Center used to loom. The billboard across the way showed a woman whose stony face made a strange contrast to the breasts welling softly from her lace brassiere. If you bought the brassiere, maybe your face would get that hard and nothing would hurt you; maybe that was the point. Whatever, Fiona needed a wider view. She was a squiggle in a yellow sleep suit, who must sip up sweetness and strength until she blossomed into the whole, capacious creature Charlotte willed her to become. Yes, willed. Charlotte’s own natural disquiet, that sense that any minute she’d put a foot wrong and fall off the edge of the earth, which she had prayed to transcend by becoming an adult, a journalist, a wife, had finally been stilled with her first look at Fiona’s face (as she was lifted, bloody, from between Charlotte’s thighs by the obstetrician). Of course. You walk toward the light, keeping the little hand tight in your own. That’s all.

  “So, what are we going to do with it . . . Tradescome Point?” she asked Henry.

  “I am not going to do anything with it,” he said, pressing his temples. “I have work to do. It’s been closed up for years, and as long as it doesn’t ask anything from me, I’ll let it stay that way.”

  “It’s land, Henry; they’re not making it anymore. . . .”

  “What would we ‘do with it’?” he asked, his patience stretched to breaking.

  “Float through the boat meadow, on the tide!”

  If he’d laughed, or made any response, she’d have gone along. It was one of her gifts, the ability to go along. But instead he shuddered, a little spasm of disgust that touched the sorest spot in their marriage.

  “We could live there . . .” she said lightly.

  “I live here,” he said, with icy finality.

  Then he gave a small, spectral laugh: “I sounded just like him then—my father.”

  2

  THE BOAT MEADOW

  Charlotte had, accidentally, been a good student. She aimed to please, and she would divine her professors’ peculiarities, what fascinated them, where they hesitated, and find her own interests flowing naturally in with theirs. Everything she wrote was in some way a personal appeal. She had graduated from journalism school with honors before she realized that newspaper reporters were charged with knocking on strange doors and asking impertinent questions, exposing weaknesses, deflating egos, laying blame, and generally making people miserable. It was too late to change course; her loans were coming due.

  Her first assignment at the Mirror had been a feature on fall day trips—who could screw that up? But standing in a pick-your-own jack-o’-lantern patch, she had noticed that the pumpkins were already cut and lay evenly spaced alongside vines that looked to have shriveled sometime before.

  “You can’t really pick them by hand,” the proprietor explained. “The vines are too thick.” Charlotte had knelt down to see this closer, trying to match a pumpkin to its stem, when the woman cried out suddenly: “It’s been a drought year! So we bring a few in from New Jersey, so what? My God, all that’s wrong in the world, and you’re out here muckraking in a pumpkin patch? . . . Get out; get off my property. . . .”

  Charlotte stumbled away, calling back over her shoulder to say she could see the woman was both honest and enterprising, that the vines looked wonderfully strong, that had there been enough rain everything would have been entirely different, and it was extremely thoughtful and generous of her to preserve the joy of the pick-your-own-pumpkin experience by importing out-of-state squash. That was her real gift—guessing what people needed to hear, and saying it. She could darn them up like socks, using a bit of her own wool to strengthen the weak spot.

  Journalism did not need her. Henry did. She moved in with him a few months after they met, convinced him to get a telephone, cleaned ten years of dust off his venetian blinds. At first it had all been so sweet—to be with this man who’d been so cloistered among his books he’d missed half of life’s substance and could be introduced to things like . . . bread pudding, or an Etch A Sketch . . . by a woman who could have been his daughter. She grew basil in a window box; she knit him a sweater.

  “If you’d told me you were going to take two sticks and a ball of wool and make . . .
this . . . out of it . . . I wouldn’t have believed you,” he said.

  “That’s the thing, Henry!” He was lacking some instinct, some sense as pervasive as taste or smell, and this was just the thing she had to give. And sex, of course—what a cheerful glutton he’d been, as if the secret of happiness were right there in her body. She knew this was the way with men who couldn’t speak out their feelings. She was glad of it; it was her best evidence of love.

  He gave her the collected Yeats, Stendhal in his preferred translation, and she read and was amazed: He was spreading his world at her feet.

  “Just trying to educate you,” he corrected her. “To plug up a few of the larger gaps. I barely remember any of it. One gives up fiction after a certain age.” She sang while she was cooking or doing the laundry, but it grated on Henry’s nerves. “It would be one thing if you had any kind of a voice,” he said, “but I’m trying to read.” Sometimes he was trying to read her newspaper pieces, and they repulsed him: He’d slash his big fountain pen across a paragraph or a page as if he were bringing down a whip.

  And she, agreeable creature, would be stricken to the center of herself with shame at her deficiency. She became quiet, then almost silent, kept her poor attempts at journalism to herself as much as possible.

  “You’re being brainwashed, idiot,” her friend Natalie said. “You’re like some kind of supplicant nun. You hang on every word that guy says, even when he’s insulting you!”