The House on Oyster Creek Read online

  Natalie had been her roommate the first year of J school, but she’d dropped out midway through. She was a shameless snoop and found work immediately as a police reporter. Charlotte finished her degree, started at the Mirror, and found Henry, worrying every minute about whether she was good enough, whether Henry loved her, whether she should stay with him, whether she should stay at the Mirror. . . Meanwhile Natalie was scooping everyone in sight. By the time Charlotte screwed up her courage to break up with Henry, Natalie was writing for the Daily News, living down near City Hall, where she could keep an eye on the police department. She took Charlotte in, but Henry kept turning up on the doorstep, asking Charlotte for a recipe or whether she still had his Leaves of Grass. He was losing weight and his usual intriguing dishevelment had progressed toward actual filth. While Charlotte scribbled down a list of lentil soup ingredients, he did Natalie’s dishes and peered into her bookshelves, shaking his head sorrowfully over her reading habits before pocketing the recipe with the penitent gratitude of a man who deserves his exile. It was difficult for Charlotte to stay entirely angry at him, and Natalie, who hated doing dishes, was won over entirely. On Valentine’s Day she made a card for Charlotte, with cutout pictures of William F. Buckley, Nick Nolte’s mug shot, Dick Cheney, Bin Laden. Charlotte, don’t go back to Henry! it read. Be OUR valentine!

  She had put the problem succinctly. Her own boyfriend was a detective whose schedule was the opposite of hers, a perfect situation. If Charlotte could get a little distance from Henry, Natalie was sure things would change. She helped Charlotte apply for the job at Celeb (“Is this a cover letter, or an apology for your existence?”she’d had to ask).

  Meanwhile Henry himself had an idea—they heard his knock one evening and instead of coming in he asked if Charlotte would come take a walk with him. Halfway down the block he took a pork chop out of his shirt pocket and offered her a bite.

  “No, thanks, I ate already. But . . . go ahead.”

  “I was trying to make dinner, and I realized we ought to get married,” he said, gesturing with the chop.

  “Why would you want to marry me? You don’t like anything about me!”

  “I should be shot,” he said.

  “Nothing so glamorous,” she said, so wearily she could have cried for the loss of her old self, the self that had nearly skipped up the eighty stairs to their apartment in the days when she was setting off on a brave new life with the brilliant and eccentric Henry Tradescome.

  “The truth is, I can’t bear to lose you,” he said. He seemed stiff and gray, frozen with grief.

  “And we can have a baby?”

  “I guess we’ll have to,” he said, with a sort of giggle, such as a man might make when buckling himself into his space shuttle seat. Then, he—or not he, but some small, feeling being locked up inside the towering critic—whispered: “Please come back. Please.”

  “I love you, Henry,” she admitted. It seemed like her very worst flaw. She held him tight on the street corner, feeling the chop bone press into her chest. No one would ever need her the way Henry did.

  And she had loved him so, that miserable October day when they were married at City Hall, he in the usual balding corduroys and his father’s suit jacket, which he kept on hand in case of a funeral, she in a white dress that trailed in a mud puddle on the way back to the subway, where people had smiled to see this happy, bedraggled bride. She gave her bouquet to a wide-eyed little girl just before they got off at Prince Street. In the stairwell there, they found a stray cat, yowling, and it followed them home, where Henry opened a can of tuna for it and tucked an old sweater over it as it curled up to sleep in the bottom bookshelf. They were a family; the rain streamed over the window.

  His problem resolved, Henry went back to his desk. He was a single-minded, not a wholehearted man. By the time the baby was born, their troubles were part of the habit of married life. Henry’s gloom abated during Fiona’s infancy, but returned in force as she grew into a creature of wants and needs, running afoul of him at every turn. Why couldn’t she sit still in her chair? What was the absurd aversion to peas? There they were just out the door when she was in tears suddenly—because they had left some filthy stuffed animal behind? He clenched his fists—that he, Henry Tradescome, was fumbling through his pockets for the keys to go back into the apartment and retrieve this thing, he who had been called “the incandescent conscience of his generation,” before his generation forgot him . . .

  He thrust the bear at Fiona, making a furious face that frightened her right back to weeping.

  “Now, Henry,” Charlotte said, “it’s not polite to make faces. Can you use your words?”

  He could not, especially not to apologize, and he’d live in a silent fury for hours, only to spend the next day in penitence, undertaking an immense grocery shopping, and cleaning the bathroom tile with a toothbrush.

  Living in that apartment with him had begun to feel something like living in his mind, which was like that fabled Venetian cell where the prisoner could neither sit, stand, nor lie. (Henry knew about many such places—he was writing a study of cruelty throughout history: The Torturer’s Horse. It would justify his long silence, when it appeared.) That morning they’d been making love—or Charlotte tried to see it as making love, not as some sort of exertion Henry performed for his health—and when she had smiled up at him, the gaze she got back wasn’t tender or even lascivious—it was more like contempt.

  “I think I’ll go up to Wellfleet,” she said. “Just to get the lay of the land.”

  They—she and Fiona, asleep in her car seat, one sweaty curl stuck to her forehead—arrived at Tradescome Point in the late afternoon of a golden September day, after driving for what seemed like forever. She had the directions written out—entering Wellfleet you’d see the big screen for the drive-in movie looming, and the next left, across from the SixMart, took you down Point Road. The woods along the highway opened suddenly to show a creek winding through a field of tall grass toward the sea. Oyster Creek—the boat meadow—of course. Waves were breaking way out, and the trees at the edge moved in the wind, but the creek itself was still as a mirror, and so high it spilled into the grasses on either side.

  And the light—Charlotte had forgotten how much light the sun could give when you didn’t have to wait for it to strike just the right angle between two high buildings. It felt like home, New Hampshire, when the fields were going over to goldenrod and the new school year would begin. School, September, had always held such magical promise for her. She’d felt alone as a tree in the desert, standing at the bus stop on the crest of the hill, the sun yet to rise, the milkweed pods twisted like claws, fluff wafting east on the wind. . . . “The meanest flower that blows,” echoes of English class, where hope lived. Her dog had died of ear mites—ear mites!—he had clawed through his skin trying to get at them, while she had stumbled along changing her mother’s dressings and trying not to think about . . . anything. She needed to keep going to school. A miracle would come to compensate for all of this, to make it worth something. Maybe a love miracle, or someone who would recognize her true heart, her original vision . . . Poor, idiot creature, she had really expected something like this! But without those dreams she might have lost heart entirely; settled in, keeping house for her father, she’d still be there now. Looking over the salt marsh, the creek winding its strange way through, she felt a breath of that old expectation stir in her forty- two-year-old heart.

  Around the next bend was the SixMart, a gas station/convenience store with a lighted sign that read simply, GAS. A man in canvas work pants was filling his pickup truck at the pump.

  A hand-lettered sandwich board set out in front added: STRONG COFFEE; COLD BEER; NIGHTCRAWLERS AND SEA WORMS.

  Point Road turned left there, between a roadhouse on one side and another low building—a Masonic lodge—on the other. Behind the buildings on both sides was a wretched forest cluttered with fallen trees, then a few small houses, with boat trailers in the driveways
, lobster traps in piles, maybe a dog behind a chain-link fence. Henry had talked about the summer people, authors and sculptors and psychiatrists. She had not expected to find hard, New Hampshire-style poverty. The road went over a one-lane bridge, whose sign cautioned drivers it would be underwater at extreme high tide. At the moment the water was just lapping up beneath—driving over, Charlotte could see the wide expanse of the salt marsh again. On the inland side was a colony of little cottages set among scrub oaks and chokecherries. A sign that read, DRIFTWOOD CABINS, HOUSEKEEPING, BY THE WEEK, hung crooked at the entrance, grown over with vines. The cottages looked tired and run-down, with laundry hanging from lines strung between them and plastic toys upended in the yards. Two teenage girls in tight jeans and sweaters were standing there at the roadside, talking, tossing their hair, waiting for someone to drive by and notice them, maybe rescue them.

  And then the macadam ended, and seeing the house rear up ahead Charlotte laughed out loud. Of course this was Henry’s place, of course! It stood starkly alone on the grassy expanse of the point, a plain, spare building with a high peaked gable and a side porch whose bits of gingerbread trim were sorely in need of paint. The windows were boarded, one of the front steps had rotted through, and the lawn was grown up with clumps of thorny roses. There was an oak tree grown low and wide like an apple at the front, and a thick stand of lilacs to the east, along the oyster shell driveway that ran straight down the beach.

  Fiona woke up as the car crunched to a stop on the shells. “Ma . . . Ma . . .” she fussed, waving her little hands around as if to bat consciousness away. She was a funny-looking child: her little face had Henry’s huge nose in the middle, and her hair stuck straight out of her head like a just-hatched chick’s. “Mama, what?”

  Charlotte lifted her out of the car and settled her on her hip—she was the perfect weight, just the ballast to keep her mother sailing smoothly. As long as Charlotte was holding her, everything seemed right with the world.

  “We’re here!” Fiona cried, waking up enough to look around. “We got here! What is this place?” She squirmed down and was running toward the beach as fast as her bowed little legs would carry her, and Charlotte just barely managed to catch up with her before she threw herself in.

  “Hey, silly, do you want to go swimming?”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “Actually, that was a rhetorical question.”

  But Fiona saw no impediment, and Charlotte held her just long enough to unsnap the corduroy overalls and pull off the sopping diaper. Then she waded in behind, jeans pulled up to the knee.

  “It’s cold!” they said at once. Charlotte meant they should get out, but Fiona was only announcing a fact. The water was intensely, brilliantly blue and cold, and she jumped and splashed wildly, thrilled by it, though Charlotte’s feet were numb.

  “Okay, okay, that’s enough; we don’t want to freeze,” she was saying when a truck pulled into the driveway, an old white pickup that had been patched with a blue fender and door.

  “Excuse me? Ma’am?” The driver had gotten out and was coming toward them—a burly workman in canvas pants who seemed to think he owned the place.

  “Hello?” Charlotte said.

  “Um . . . can I help you?” He was standing at the wrack line, so she could see who he was, more or less—a guy like her high school class-mates, the ones who’d stayed in New Hampshire as if they were rooted there, who became carpenters or housepainters, while she went off to school. Rough- hewn, strong, with a broad face and a head of unruly hair going gray. A “galoot,” Henry would have called him. Fiona, who had picked up Charlotte’s discomfort, came up from the water and took her hand.

  “Can I help you?” Charlotte asked. Neither of them sounded very helpful.

  “Ma’am, this is private property. There’s a public beach in town, if that’s what you’re looking for.” His eyes were avid: searching, questioning, figuring; the eyes of a predator, or a baby, and he looked her up and down, taking everything in, the rental car, the half-naked child, the blue leather satchel, gift of a Celeb advertiser, lolling open so her wallet and her little flowered makeup case, gift of another Celeb advertiser, were showing. She saw that once he took these things in, he would despise her.

  “No, thank you, I’m not looking for a public beach,” she said, prim, offended, because he seemed to see her as the woman she was dressed to resemble. “In fact, this is my place,” she said, in a tone appropriate to the woman he had mistaken her for, some Upper East Side type whose face-lift had left her stuck on haughty.

  “Henry Tradescome owns this place,” he said.

  “Yes, and I’m his wife.”

  He did a real double take, and peered into her face with a frank, unnerving perplexity. “Henry Tradescome is, like, old,” he said. “And I don’t think he’s married.”

  “Yes, that’s a common doubt,” she snipped. Henry was a hermit, a sage, a hobo—anything but a husband. If by some chance he did have a wife, she’d be locked in some literary attic, with gray hair down to her waist, bad teeth, wild eyes.

  They’d reached an impasse; neither spoke. Both were still bristling, but suspicion was going over toward curiosity.

  “I’d think Henry would have mentioned me,” he said. “Since I’ve been taking care of the house all this time.”

  “Yes, I suppose you would think that. I’m sorry, he hasn’t.”

  “I’m Darryl Stead. I live up the road. My father knew him . . . um. . . . your husband.”

  “I’m Charlotte . . . Tradescome.” She still felt uncomfortable calling herself Tradescome. She was Charlotte Pelletier, the mailman’s daughter, the too-intense girl whom no one quite knew what to do with, the one whose mother had died.

  Fiona, who had been peeking out from behind Charlotte’s leg, emerged, half-naked and entirely wet. Charlotte pulled her up on her hip. “And this is Fiona, my—our—daughter.” So there. “In fact, I was just about to go inside,” she said. “I’ve got the key in my purse.”

  “The doors are boarded over.”

  She turned back—it was so.

  “Well, then, would you kindly . . . unboard them? I’ll pay time and a half.” This was an insult, revenge on him for calling her ma’am.

  “I don’t get paid,” he said. “I use the driveway to get down to my oyster claim. We all do.” He gestured toward the bay like a farmer toward a field, though she could see nothing but water, shaded pale green to deep blue to something darker, almost purple. For all his heft he was still gangly, his arms hanging too long from his shoulders as if heavy work had stretched everything out. “So we watch over the place. And I will take the boards off the door for you.”

  This he did, moving faster than Charlotte would have thought possible, undoing the screws and pulling down the plywood to set it aside. He took the key out of her hand and worked it into the lock, lifting the door so it would turn. When he pushed the door open, a wave of stale air rushed out at them, smelling of mildew and mouse.

  “I’ve got a flashlight in the truck,” he said.

  She wanted to refuse it, but the electricity was off, of course, and she couldn’t see a thing inside. “Thank you.”

  “I’ll get out of your way,” he said, handing it to her. “You can just leave the flashlight on the porch. I’ll pick it up at the next low tide.”

  “People are so damn rude,” she said to Fiona as he drove off. At least she’d stood up for herself. But she felt as if she were going to cry. People were so damn rude, the way they saw how she’d grown away from herself, become someone she’d never wanted to be. She leaned in the doorway, trying to collect herself, not to upset Fiona. She had a piece to write when she got back . . . the secret signals women send out with their handbags. She let out a little sob, turning it into a laugh. “Fiona, isn’t it pretty here? Wouldn’t it be fun to live right beside the water?”

  “Dark in there!” Fiona said, cowering.

  “Yes, because the windows are covered, see?” Charlotte whispered
this, an old maternal trick to make things seem mysterious instead of frightening. “Let’s see what it’s like inside. Are you ready?”

  Fiona’s eyes were wide now, and she nodded, clinging tight around her mother’s neck. They walked in the path of light from the door, through the kitchen to the parlor beyond. The flashlight beam lit on a corner china cabinet, a sextant beside the mantel, and as Charlotte’s eyes adjusted she could begin to make out shapes, a sense of the place. She laughed—of course Henry had lived here. Ahab could have lived here in his few days on land. The horsehair sofa, the big nubbly lamps, the pipe rest beside the chair—she half expected to see Henry’s father still sitting there, reading the Times’s V-E Day special edition. The kitchen had a real old icebox built into the corner under the staircase, which was steep and narrow and had, instead of a banister, a heavy rope strung along the side. She started up but it was pitch-black, and thick with cobwebs. “Never mind,” she said to Fiona, mostly to break the silence. “We’ll look upstairs after we move in.”

  Because that’s what they were going to do, she and Fiona anyway. Henry could come if he liked, but he wouldn’t want to. At first they’d call it a “long-distance relationship.” He’d mean to visit, maybe he would one time, but gradually he’d find he was alone with his work again and be glad.

  Back on the porch, they were dazzled by the sun. The delicate fretwork around the roof (some woman’s attempt to soften the lines of the place) was all broken, and a corner of the floor had rotted through.

  “We’ve got some work to do here,” Charlotte said. It was a beautiful idea, working to make this place solid instead of writing for Celeb , coming up with ways to convince women to buy things. If only she had any skill at all . . . She looked down through the hole in the floor and saw something move there—a skunk’s tail.

  “Okay, so now we will tippy-toe down the steps,” she said. Fiona was reaching toward the water with both arms, as if she could swim through the air. Where would Charlotte work; how would she manage it? Well, she would; she’d just have to. A boat was passing the channel marker at the mouth of the bay—a fishing boat, she supposed, with a cloud of gulls hovering. Generations of women had scanned the horizon from this spot, hoping to catch sight of a familiar sail. Charlotte and Fiona were going to join them.