The House on Oyster Creek Read online

  “A rising tide lifts all boats!” Betsy said. “There’s going to be plenty for everyone.”

  “I used to work for Blair Settenbee,” Charlotte said.

  Betsy blinked and looked at her as if for the first time. “You did?” Charlotte could almost see her wondering if she’d been a governess.

  “I wrote for Celeb.”

  “Get out!” Betsy said. “You did not! I love Celeb.”

  “I was on the style beat.”

  “Gee, I never miss that section,” Betsy said, scrutinizing her again. What had she missed? What clue was there to show that Charlotte had once been chic? “I probably bought some of the things you recommended,” she said, looking disillusioned.

  “I’m so glad we got to know each other a little,” Betsy said, pushing a ten-dollar bill into Della’s tip jar and heading down the front steps. “It’s lonely out here in the winter. People like us have to stick together. Sorry about the near-death experience, though . . .”

  “All’s well that ends well,” Charlotte said, watching Betsy hop into the BMW and pull blithely back onto the road, causing a gravel truck to downshift loudly behind her. She was probably right: The oystermen were fighting a losing battle—it was a romantic notion that you could farm the edge of the sea, live by the tides, and really make a living at it. Farmers never made a decent living. . . . Certainly the dairy farmers she’d grown up among had suffered one hard time after another, and without government milk subsidies, she’d hate to think. But to be able to say, “I raise oysters,” was a little like being able to say you were a mom, or that you wrote a column for the East Village Mirror—there was not much outward glory in it, but at the end of the day you could be proud of what you’d done.

  And it was the same for the town as for a person—the Wellfleet where oysters grew just beneath the surface of the bay was an infinitely more vital place than the Wellfleet where grandiose houses muscled into one another’s views on the hillsides. To live by the waters, according to the tides and the seasons and the phases of the moon, to see by the light of the long narrative of the town’s history and the complicated story of these neighbors’ interlocking lives, was to see more, feel more, be more alive. That was why she had torn her family up by the roots and set them down here. That was why Darryl could get well here—strong enough to look life in the eye.

  Home, finally, she pushed the dresser and the washstand away from the walls and draped them with sheets, ran masking tape along the window frames and the molding, stirred the paint and poured it into the roller tray. It was one of those smells, like the first cut grass of the year, or the bay during a plankton bloom on a cold spring day—so fresh and hopeful that it changed everything the minute it was set loose in the room. Charlotte sat down on the bed: Darryl had been waiting for a letter she’d never thought of writing. Searching for it, disappointed again and again. She could see him standing there on the tide flats, one arm stretched out toward her. He had nothing, not even a halfway decent truck, and he knew he had no one but himself to blame. To be in such a humble position was to be in company with everyone on earth.

  21

  WISTERIA

  Dear Darryl,

  I can’t stand thinking that you were waiting for a letter and I didn’t send one. When I think of the chance anyone takes, falling in love—I hardly know how anyone manages. When you’re twenty you’ve got hormones, and maybe bourbon . . . and that sense of immortality that causes so many motorcycle crashes and marriages. I suppose I ought to be tough as an old rhinoceros by now, but really I seem more fragile, since I know how much it can hurt. I took the upstairs wallpaper down without wrecking the walls; you’d be proud! You and I are so different that to find this green thing growing between us is a kind of miracle. I can’t take my eyes off it; I want to see what kind of flowers it will have . . . and . . . I want it to become strong as a wisteria. Nothing kills a wisteria; you probably know that. Darryl, we have everything good between us—we have to find a way to let it grow.

  Love,

  Charlotte

  This half page took two hours to write. In the first draft, the white horses and swans from her old poems came into it—steeds to carry a schoolgirl away. That girl had to be kept hidden from Henry, but she’d crept out to meet Darryl. Charlotte would have liked to write pages—volumes—to explain herself, to justify herself, saying that she, like Darryl, was past forty and still a raw newcomer to life, just hatched out of a protective madness, determined now to build something solid and real. But half a page was risk enough. She put the letter in an East Village Mirror envelope so it would look like business correspondence, and pushed it into the post office mail slot so it would go into his P.O. box without ever leaving the building.

  It came out of the box along with a notice from the Department of Motor Vehicles saying that as six weeks had passed since Darryl’s truck had failed to pass inspection, the registration had been revoked. And his health insurance bill—higher than his rent. And the March issue of Playboy—his mother, who had given him a subscription the year he turned thirteen (It’s perfectly normal, honey—Love, Mom), had repeated the gesture this Christmas . . . to signify a fresh start? In hopes that he would never see a naked woman without thinking of her? He let it slip out of its wrapper into the garbage, and folded the brown paper into his pocket to burn at home. Then he saw the address on the envelope—the East Village Mirror—and a scalding sensation shriveled his guts. He tore it open right there, though it was indiscreet. Keep your hands off my wife, was what he expected to see.

  By the time he realized it wasn’t a threat, he felt too ill to read it. What had he gotten himself into? The rich are different from you and me. Where had he heard that, and why was it echoing in his mind now? It made him ache to watch her with Fiona, to see her blush at his flirtations. Thrilling to push a little farther, and farther, to see how far he could go with her. She laughed so easily; life was a sparkling fascination to her.

  For most of the women he knew, life was a force they only just managed to bear. They laughed when they guessed he meant to be funny, because they needed help and he looked so strong. He needed a wife, and his time of illusions had passed—the choices were few: Dawn, with her twelve-year-old son who wouldn’t be allowed to play sports again until he finished anger-management classes; Nikki, who could work harder than any woman he’d ever met, whose green eyes were as distant as if she were looking up at him from the bottom of the sea; Kim, the dental assistant; possibly Lisa Gonsalves from the bait shop. He had to pick one of them and settle down, make a life. And one of them had to pick him—to say, Yes, he used to be a drug addict but he seems to have it beat, and he hasn’t even got a decent truck, but he works so steadily I think he’ll come out ahead, and I’d rather him than Bud Rivette. Charlotte, by the luck of her marriage, had been lifted above such calculations. When he was working on the flats in the evening he’d see her at the kitchen window—it was a vision of happiness, goodness, hope. The house itself, the books on the shelves, the Persian rug passed down through the generations, Fiona’s strewn toys—any man who lived there would be a whole man, unafraid of life, with no need of the supplemental courage and energy you could get through a needle.

  It had been like being young again, telling her his secrets, taking these stealthy steps into her heart. With every glance he’d forced another door, and she was always there, laughing, glad to see him. He’d been bold as a lion. Why? Because she was married to Henry Tradescome and there was no earthly chance . . . though he’d dreamed there might be, had imagined . . . He laughed to himself. Playboy wouldn’t touch what he’d imagined, couldn’t, because there would be that look in her eyes. Yes, he’d looked for her letter . . . he’d pulled up the floor mats in the truck, hoping she might have hidden it there. What he’d found was that the floor was rusted through. And he’d felt relief as much as disappointment. She wasn’t in love with him, she wouldn’t pull him closer so she wouldn’t hurt him, he wouldn’t hurt her. How his heart h
ad turned over, out on the tide flats when he saw it was true, that she was going to let him kiss her, going to let something wild loose.

  He spread the letter across the steering wheel but he could hardly dare read it, for fear it would show something he didn’t want to see—her sticky womanly need, an intelligence that could overwhelm his, something false that he’d find himself hating . . . or all three. Her handwriting was spiky, messy, difficult to decipher; not, thank God, Dawn’s round, regular script. He read it through once, then again. She was, by some miracle or calamity, in love with him, and for a second he felt only contempt—could she be such a fool? Then he felt again how the ground had gone out from under him that day in the fog. She’d seen the best things in him and it made her the most seductive and dangerous woman on earth. That picture she carried around in her head was something he had to have.

  A familiar feeling. He distrusted it absolutely. He folded the letter and stuck it inside the flap of his checkbook, which he kept in the breast pocket of his winter jacket. After this he would find himself reaching to touch it absently, when he was worried about the future or guilty about the past. But to unfold it, to read it again—that seemed a sin, for which he would be punished by finding that he had only imagined the letter, had kept a fold of blank paper next to his heart all that time.

  22

  AN UNEXPLODED BOMB

  It seemed to Charlotte that she had been watching Henry through a telescope all the years in New York, focused so closely she could see him only piece by piece. Here in Wellfleet she looked through the other way and saw him distant but whole, set in his own landscape—cold, staunch New England—and, it seemed, his own time. His father had been born in 1910, his grandfather in 1885. Even his mother, born Priscilla Standish, the only child of a Presbyterian minister and his wife, had been raised with a steely ideal.

  Cross-legged on the living room rug, drinking tea from a porcelain cup that Priscilla had tagged as Seventeen hundreds, estate of Auntie Experience, Charlotte was reading her mother- in-law’s letters. Expecting a letter herself, and with it, the real beginning of love, she was blind and dizzy with hope. She could barely think; she lost track of conversations, laughed at the wrong moments, stood at the kitchen window for half an hour at a time until she shook herself back to reality and washed another dish. The rote work of going through the old trunks was a comfort; the stacks of little envelopes, each promising a glimpse into another life, another time. Bunbury stretched out, on his back, in the swath of sunlight that fell across the couch. Charlotte opened another letter.

  Dear Henry,

  We are having the finest weather of the summer, I do believe. Young Henry has been up the marsh in the canoe all day. Viola and Ted Hawkins won the duplicate competition last night. Viola’s cousin will be here for the first two weeks in August and would like to play. I thought Ada Town might make a fourth. It must be hot there. I hope you have some of the light shirts back from Mr. Chun.

  Yours fondly,

  Priscilla

  There were hundreds of these monstrously appropriate little missives, dutiful and empty—emptied, it seemed—of hope or disappointment, judgment or observation, any human detail. Most were sent from Wellfleet to her husband, at work in the city, but there was a boxful addressed to Henry at college, and beneath those, letters to her parents in Maine. Then, at the bottom of the trunk, there was a letter addressed to Priscilla—a very young Priscilla, who needed to have a tooth pulled. Her father, whose handwriting, like Henry’s, was full of slashing downward strokes, exhorted her to stoicism: We must expect suffering in this world. We must face it down.

  The sunlight that Bunbury had been sleeping in had shifted and was reflecting off the gong now, so brightly Charlotte turned it sideways to avoid the glare. The gong disk swayed, the reflection veering crazily; Charlotte saw that Priscilla had taped one of her notes to the underside of the sandalwood frame: Gong from Simeulue, Indonesia. Kingfisher held in quarantine there; plague. Also clove oil. She could have made lists, an inventory of these things that would explain their provenance for posterity, or she could have typed up a little history of each object, as if this were a museum. But she hadn’t valued the story she was trying to tell, not enough to really set it down and take care that it was passed along. Instead she’d scrawled it on torn scraps, hoping someone—Henry—would see and understand.

  Henry didn’t want to see. There was a photograph at the very bottom of the trunk, one Charlotte hadn’t seen before, of Priscilla holding a young Henry on her lap. She looked fashionable and unhappy; he looked irritated but obedient. Maybe Henry had been one of those babies who didn’t want to be soothed; Charlotte had read about them. Maybe his mother had been waiting for affection all her life, and when her own child didn’t seem to warm naturally, it had broken her. Or worse: She’d been waiting to feel affection in her own heart, and had found that her child didn’t move her as she’d expected he would. Whatever, it had ended with Priscilla taping her little messages to the furniture.

  Or maybe every guess Charlotte made was wrong. Henry had almost never spoken of his mother, except to say something like, “Mother loved a good lamb chop,” or “Mother was very partial to cats, in her own peculiar way.” He did not recall seeing his parents kiss, nor had he ever heard them argue. Charlotte’s interest in them made him queasy. When she said she was just trying to get to know him, he maintained that this was a bad idea. This was the great thing about the Mermaid, and McClellan’s, his corner bar back in the city. Thanks to whiskey, he could skip the squeamish-making process of friendship and go straight to the meat of a conversation—politics, literature, the weather. He always left feeling the deepest bond with the man on the next stool, something that would hardly have been true if he’d “gotten to know” the fellow.

  Still, Charlotte had gotten to know Henry, thus becoming dangerous to him. There she was reading his mother’s letters, making her assumptions, thinking she understood something! Yesterday it was the bottle of lilac water, which she was determined must have meaning to him; but she was wrong, and worse than that, she was trespassing, prying in places he didn’t even allow himself to go.

  “Here, smell it again, Henry. . . . It must remind you of something.” It had seemed to change him, that day he took the bath—at least for a minute. As if he’d awoken, looked around, noticed his daughter . . . It seemed there was some genie in that bottle that might change their lives.

  He sighed. He knew what she wanted; it wasn’t an unreasonable desire. It just happened to be something he didn’t have. The perfume bottle was made of frosted glass, with lilacs hand-painted on the side and a green glass stopper in the shape of two leaves. He sniffed. “It reminds me of old ladies,” he said.

  “It has to have belonged to your mother . . . or your grandmother?”

  “I suppose,” he said. He was trying to get downstairs to his desk, to safety, but she stood in the door.

  “Did she like lilacs? Your mother?”

  “Mother? Mother liked . . . What did Mother like?” He stepped back, leaning against the kitchen sink with a furrowed brow and a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.

  “Mother was a very reserved person,” he said finally. “She took a great interest in antique furniture, but beyond that . . . I don’t know, and I’m not sure I ever did.” Bunbury rubbed up against his legs and he saw an easy escape. “Do you want to go out?” he asked, looking down at the cat as if he expected an answer. “Oh, yes, do you want to go out? It’s cold out there, but you’d probably like to go out.” He opened the door. “Here you go; is that what you want, to go out?”

  Bunbury put his nose out and sniffed the air, turning to gaze mildly up at Henry. Bunbury was not given to hinting: When he wanted to go out he sat with his nose to the doorjamb; if he wanted to come in, he jumped onto the porch railing to tap the window with his paw. But Henry kept up the one-sided conversation, in hopes Charlotte would desist.

  If he had asked her what her mother had liked�
��well, she knew every single thing: little bouquets of wildflowers, handmade quilts. . . . Her mother would always, always stop at a child’s lemonade stand. . . . There was a sadness in her that was quieted by simple, homey things. When she died the worst part was that Charlotte couldn’t protect her from that sadness anymore. Thinking of her made Charlotte feel as if she were standing at the edge of a dizzying precipice, so she tried not to. Maybe the same was true for Henry, who was entirely absorbed in the cat now, petting him, scratching behind his ears, while Bunbury purred and stretched his neck, angling his head to take fuller advantage of the attention.

  “You said once that she liked cats . . .” Charlotte said.

  “Yes, old mister,” Henry continued, to Bunbury. “Yes, you like a nice scratch.”

  “Henry?”

  “What?” He shook his head; he seemed surprised she was still there.

  “I was saying that you’d told me your mother liked cats.”

  “I suppose I might have.”

  “Did you have a cat when you were little?”

  “Oh, we had a number of cats. Mother liked a kitten. She got one every spring. Then in the fall she’d have it put away.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  He had that look of suppressed delight he got when he’d been able to shock her. “Ye-es, he’s such a good kitty,” he said to Bunbury. “She liked what she liked, Mother did,” he added.

  “She killed your pet once a year?”

  “She only liked kittens.”

  “She killed your pet kitten the minute it wasn’t a cute baby anymore, year in and year out?”