The House on Oyster Creek Read online

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Astor Place—Henry’s office. I had the idea it would be safe there . . . or we’d all be together. . . .”

  He smiled sadly: She’d confirmed his suspicions.

  “But . . .” she said, wanting to explain the other side, how by the next day, caught in the apartment with the poison smell everywhere and Henry out searching for an open bookstore so he could buy a Koran, she had felt something bottomless open beneath her. She was going to die one day, maybe tomorrow, and Henry’s bleak love would be the only one she’d known.

  “We were working out by Mill Creek . . . you know it out there? Big house, looks over the harbor, and it was that perfect day, and we had the radio. . . . We just stopped still and listened, and after a while I realized we were all right in the positions we’d been in half an hour before. And I thought if I died right then, like all those people, my life would have been worth nothing to anyone at all.”

  He had his restless look, his hands in front of him as if he needed to use them as much as he needed to breathe. The bottles behind the bar shone in rich colors like stained glass.

  “Quarters,” Charlotte said, motherhood having taught her the value of distraction. “We need to play the jukebox.”

  “It takes dollars,” the bartender said. He’d been so still there, she hadn’t noticed him—a pale young man with spiky hair and a long nose, reading behind the bar—Kierkegaard probably, Charlotte thought with a sinking heart.

  “Could we get two ginger ales?” she asked. “Mr. McConnell said he’d stand us a round.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone actually say ‘stand us a round’ before,” the bartender said. She’d been wrong; he was reading Borges.

  “Me neither,” Darryl said. “She just blew in from the last century; she talks in iambic pentameter.”

  “Oh, I’ve had my shots for that,” the barman said. “So, you guys have an oyster farm?”

  “Yeah, yeah, we do,” Darryl said, with a conspiratorial glance that made Charlotte feel as if the sun had just risen in the corner of the room. She was proud of herself, proud he loved her. “Not a huge operation, just, you know, a family farm.”

  She’d fed a five-dollar bill into the machine and started picking songs: “Refugee,” “Runaway Train,” “Crash into Me.”

  “About love they were never wrong, the old rockers,” she said, as Tom Petty started wailing. “ ‘How it arises in violence, out of desperation . . .’ ” This meant nothing to Darryl; he hadn’t read Auden. She’d have to repeat it for Henry, who had never heard Tom Petty.

  “You see what I told you,” Darryl said to the bartender, but he’d gone back to his book. Charlotte found “Sugar Magnolia” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”

  “May I have this dance?” she asked him.

  “What?”

  “We can,” she said. “I think we can. It’s settled between us . . . we’re not going to run off the rails with each other.”

  He stood there as if he were afraid to touch her, as he’d been afraid to walk into the bar, but she slipped an arm around his waist, took his other hand in hers.

  “Lead,” she said, and he smiled at her impertinence and did as she told him, his hand sharp at the small of her back, directing her in a waltz.

  “Where did you learn to dance?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’ve just seen a lot of movies.” The truth was, he was a natural, instinctively responsive to the music, to life, to her. Box step by box step they held each other closer until they were like kids in a high school gymnasium, young again and so new to life they’d feel high on the spring air, and to be this close to each other was just sacred. Innocence—they’d lost it, both of them in different ways. Now here it was back again. And maybe the music would never stop. Darryl held her so tight, suddenly, it was like being clenched in his fist, and everything went raw and a prayer rose in the back of her throat. . . .

  “Brian, maybe turn the jukebox down a little?” McConnell was standing in the doorway, and she and Darryl stepped apart, still holding hands for a second, like children. The music receded: Charlotte almost reached out as if she could catch the last notes in her hand. Then they remembered where they were and what they were doing.

  “I’m George, by the way,” McConnell said. “George McConnell. The oysters are amazing; that’s the purest taste I’ve had in I don’t know when. . . .”

  “Darryl, Darryl Stead,” Darryl said, shaking his hand. Charlotte stepped back; her job was done.

  “I’ll take them.”

  “The cooler full? Or a whole bushel?”

  “Oh, no—all of them. How many did you say? Eight bushels? I’ll make them the special this weekend. I’m not going to cook ’em—it would be a waste. It’s just the thing—fresh, simple, memorable, right from the source. What’s the name of your farm, by the way? I’ll put it on the menu.”

  “Don’t really have one. . . .”

  “Red Canoe Sea Farm,” Charlotte said. She hadn’t worked on Madison Avenue for nothing. And she could still see the canoe full of oysters, floating behind them in the fog.

  “Sounds great. Then, say, four bushels a week, until we figure out the demand?”

  They walked back to the truck with a careful distance between them; good fortune was dangerous, and if they had brushed one hand against the other it might change everything so they’d drive away from home instead of toward it, into some future where they had each other and nothing else at all. Belted in, they breathed easier.

  “Wild-goose chase, eh?” Charlotte said. “I knew it would work!”

  “You were right,” he said, too trusting.

  “No,” she admitted. “By the time we got the ticket I was sure it was hopeless. I just had to pray I might be wrong.”

  “A thousand dollars today . . . five hundred a week from now on . . . do you realize . . . ?”

  “I see a solid truck in your future.”

  “I’m going to try to pay my mother back first,” he said. Route 93 branched to the right, but they stayed on Route 3, heading south toward Cape Cod. “And maybe I can do something about Tim.”

  “Darryl, he doesn’t really mean to blackmail me?”

  “It’s complicated,” Darryl said. “He was holding the fort all that time I was away, and I’m supposed to have my tail between my legs now, and instead he went to prison and I got you, or that’s the way it seems to him. So he likes seeing me squirm. I wish Carrie could get rid of him, find someone who showed her some love.”

  They drove for a long time, each in his own thoughts. Charlotte was singing the last song they’d danced to—“Runaway train, never going back, wrong way on a one-way track.” But they were going back; here they were at the bridge. There was a new bouquet since the morning: crab-apple branches with a long blue ribbon fluttering. Someone—some woman—honored a terrible grief here, week after week after week.

  “It was the plainest little dream,” Charlotte said after a long time, looking straight ahead down the highway. “Of just being two honest, searching people, doing the best we could together.”

  “And screwing up royally,” Darryl said.

  “Well, okay . . . so that could have been our motto. ‘Red Canoe Sea Farm, raising oysters and living life together, one dumb mistake at a time.’ ” Laughing made it sadder, though.

  “So,” she said, “it was a dream of a working love.”

  “Yeah. It’s just . . . it feels . . . it felt like a runaway train.”

  32

  CHICKEN SOUP

  “Henry? Fiona? I’m home!” Charlotte sank onto the couch. After the long day away her own living room looked like a perfect little chapel, the books stuffed into the dusty shelves, the painting of Billingsgate Light looking proudly over the sea, the vase of white daffodils on the table, from bulbs she’d planted last year. Henry had already set the table for dinner, and all the elephants were off the mantelpiece, grouped into families on the rug; he must have taken them down for
Fiona. The clouds were low and ragged, but the sun was breaking through as it set—it was clearing from the west; it would be nice tomorrow. She loved this place, her family, her little spot on earth. She loved the damned gong from Indonesia, where the crew had been quarantined with plague, though she had put the beater out of Fiona’s reach. A tear was stuck in her eyelashes; she blinked and it ran down her cheek.

  Slowly she became aware of a rhythmic sound, a leisurely thwack, thwack coming from around the side of the house. It went on, absolutely regular, and Charlotte went to the kitchen window to see that Fiona was skipping rope—Henry had tied the rope to the banister and was turning it, evenly, with his good hand, while staring off across the bay.

  “Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred!” Fiona said.

  “That’s very impressive,” he said, gravely, and she said, “I can do more; just watch me. I bet I can do five hundred!”

  “What’s this? Do I have a star rope-jumper for a daughter?” Charlotte said.

  They looked up and Fiona came running at her with such energy Charlotte was afraid she would bowl her over.

  “Mama! I jumped a hundred times!”

  “She did,” Henry said. “You wouldn’t have expected it, but being alone with a dry old soul all afternoon drove her to it.”

  He came up the steps and kissed her, quick, but urgent and tender, and he pushed her hair back from her forehead with his good hand as if she were an apparition he had to touch to believe.

  “What? Is something wrong? Did . . . ?”

  “Nothing. I missed you.” He tossed this off with a certain defiance, as if to say: Didn’t think I could do it, did you? The answer was no, she didn’t think he could admit to missing her, or any such conventional fragility. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost—the ghost of his marriage, maybe.

  “Did—did anyone call up?”

  “Betsy, to say the Narvilles are arriving today.”

  “I guess that was unavoidable.”

  “So, how was Boston?” He sounded vague, and she realized he had very little idea what she had been doing—his book took up most of his mind and he hated to waste space on other things. All he knew was that some source of warmth had been missing, and now it was back.

  “We did it,” she said. “We sold ’em, every one.” The tellable parts of the story began to perk in her mind—the dark kitchen with flames leaping, the barkeep and Borges, the way she’d guessed from the chalkboard menu that they’d found the right place. Henry always loved to hear her stories.

  “Bad news here, I’m afraid.”

  So she’d been right. “What do you mean?”

  “Did you see the Times?”

  Charlotte shook her head, and Henry’s shoulders dropped in disappointment. It was incomprehensible to him that a person could get through a day without reading the Times. He produced it, opened to page two, where the headline concerned Spain and socialism. The byline was Moishe Nakamura’s.

  “I don’t suppose there could be two Moishe Nakamuras?” Charlotte asked, and burst into tears.

  “Well, he’s a man of the world,” Henry said, to console her. “He speaks six languages, has a native understanding of two cultures—I suppose it was foolish to imagine we could keep him.”

  He thought she was crying over Moishe Nakamura. Of course he did. Charlotte gave a fresh sob.

  “I’m afraid it’s a bad move, though, for him. He’s too young yet; he needs to develop a stronger spine. . . .”

  They heard the flag whisk up the Narvilles’ flagpole, then the whir and clank as the electric storm shutters were rolled back. Charlotte got her breath and went back to crying. “They think they own that land. We went down there to the registry and went through everything, and found out the truth and it didn’t matter a bit. The oystermen are still in limbo and the Narvilles still don’t even know anything has changed.”

  She had worked so hard; she had found the answer to every one of Darryl’s problems—the lawsuit, the business. . . . Now he could get married—to Nikki. Charlotte sat down on the step. Fiona ran to get her teddy bear and thrust it into her hands for comfort.

  “I poached some salmon,” Henry said helplessly.

  “How did you do that?”

  “In a pan of water, like an egg. Isn’t that what you do?”

  “Yes,” she sobbed. Great, her husband loved her. She cried harder, pulling Fiona into her lap with the bear. Henry patted the top of her head, with the hopeless look of a man bailing with a thimble.

  “And toasted sesame seeds, on the salad?”

  She nodded. The salmon was delicious, and by the time they finished she was calmer. For days, though, tears leaked down her face, welling and spilling, slipping silently down beside her nose. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, laughing, because they seemed to stream from such an abundant, inexhaustible source. She called Orson, who said they had done what they could. He had filed the results of the title search with the court, but for now Ada owned the tide flats and she would have to take the initiative to change things.

  The Narvilles had to use Charlotte’s driveway to put their boat in, for fear of scraping its bottom on the seawall. She watched from the kitchen yard, where she was digging in a gelatinous mix of watered peat and manure so as to transplant her lettuce seedlings. There was a long smear of dirt down her face where she wiped off the tears.

  Henry stole quick, puzzled glances, but he’d have felt wrong bringing . . . anything . . . up. He himself had worked so carefully to keep sorrow at arm’s length, he barely recognized it now. Whatever was wrong, it was, like most of life, a private matter. He offered to do the shopping, make the dinner, whatever would allow her a little peace. Tomorrow would bring a change. But tomorrow didn’t, nor the day after, and on the third day, Charlotte was rinsing off a chicken to start a soup when she suddenly gave a sort of hissing sound, as if she might be deflating, and leaned against the sink in some kind of pain.

  “Are you ill?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said, grabbing a paper towel to blow her nose. “Allergies. The pollen. Look at Fiona.” Fiona was on the beach, carrying armloads of seaweed and spreading them to dry on the lawn. She looked so earnestly absorbed, so purposeful and confident, as if she were quite sure that what she was doing was necessary and important . . . that Charlotte gave up and wept into her hands.

  Henry stood behind her, his head bowed in a posture of apology. He didn’t know what was wrong, but he was pretty sure it was all his fault.

  “I know this . . . this whole land court problem is very upsetting for you,” he said.

  “That’s kind of you, Henry. Don’t worry; I’m fine.”

  “Should I peel the carrots?” She nodded and went out on the porch to sit in the wicker chair and cry. It was such a relief that for a minute it seemed she’d fallen in love solely for the purpose of weeping. Henry came out after a minute and patted her head, with a kind of modified dribbling motion.

  “How many carrots?”

  “Two is good.”

  “And celery?”

  “Two stalks of celery, yes.”

  He kept standing there, looking uncertain.

  “An onion?” he asked finally.

  “Yes, an onion.”

  He took a step and then turned back.

  “Do you want peppercorns?”

  “I want love, Henry, and I have endeavored to get it in the most idiotic way, and now I’m apparently about to be blackmailed by a man who’s been in jail for biting off a policeman’s ear.”

  “Oh!” Henry sat down beside her, with a dry laugh. “I suppose the soup can wait, eh?”

  She nodded.

  “So, blackmail?”

  “It’s Tim Cloutier.”

  Henry looked absolutely appalled.

  “Not that I was . . . involved, with . . . not that I’ve been really involved with anyone, or I have been, but not in such a way that . . . Oh, I wrote a letter, and Tim got hold of it, and he’s said I have to buy
it back at some awful cost or he’s going to give it to you.”

  Henry nodded, stoic. Of course, she’d found a man with two arms. He pulled his bad one a little closer to his chest, to protect it.

  “It’s no surprise,” he said, “. . . given the situation.”

  “What situation?”

  “Me,” he said, with disgust. He knew so much; it just didn’t occur to him that things could change.

  “It’s not you,” she said. “It’s . . . oh, who ever knows.”

  He smiled, nodded. “Aphrodite is perverse,” he said, apparently to comfort her. She waited for him to ask whom she had written to; how the letter had fallen into Tim’s hands; anything at all. But he was a child of this house, these people. . . . Such questions didn’t even form themselves in his mind.

  “I will call Tim Cloutier,” he said.

  “Oh, no, don’t. Wait. Maybe he’ll back down, or . . . I don’t know. Let’s see what happens; maybe it will just blow over.”

  “He’s been making threats against my wife,” Henry said. His anger swung away from her, toward the easier target. A blow against Charlotte would damage his own life. “I’m not going to wait to see what he does next.”

  He was dialing. Charlotte worked mechanically, peeling the carrots, braced for a blow.

  “I believe you’ve accidentally come into possession of something that belongs to my wife? A letter she wrote? Would you be so kind as to return it to her?”

  He paused, listened. “The circumstances aren’t of interest to me,” he said. His voice was majestically cold; it allowed no argument.

  Fiona came flying in the door just then, with her arms full of seaweed. “It’s fish,” she said. “I’m going to sell it at the market.” She’d given up playing in the dollhouse—moving the dolls through life wasn’t enough; she wanted to be the doll, to feel the experience, whatever it was. She was always wrapped in a shawl now, pretending to be an orphan scullery maid, or a Bengali spice merchant.

  “Can the market be on the porch?” Charlotte asked.

  Fiona considered, and deciding it could, hung the seaweed over the railings carefully and went upstairs to dress for her new job. Tim pulled into the driveway and came up the steps like a schoolboy on the principal’s threshold, every muscle tense with defiance even as he did exactly what Henry had asked. Passing Fiona’s market, he squinted for a second—did the Tradescomes know some way to get money out of seaweed? Henry opened the door before he could knock. Tim said nothing, just held the letter—folded in a tight triangle like a note passed in school—out to him.