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The House on Oyster Creek Page 30


  “It belongs to my wife,” Henry said. Charlotte took it, Tim glaring as if he’d like to spit on her. And on Henry—they were beneath his contempt, a pretty low spot to be in. Fiona came running down the stairs, wearing a makeshift burka, carrying a wicker basket over her arm. Tim looked as if he had never seen such depravity, and went away down the steps, shoulders straight and proud.

  Charlotte put the chicken liver in Bunbury’s bowl; then she pushed the letter in with the gizzard. It started to pinken with chicken seepage; she threw it away under the sink.

  “I do love you, Henry,” she said, just stating an old, obvious truth.

  He nodded, and smiled at her . . . she’d have said he was shy.

  “Either that,” he said, “or you are the greatest actress the world has ever known.”

  33

  DREAD AND THE COMMON MAN

  On June 23, the second day in a row that Ada Town hadn’t crossed the highway to buy her paper at the SixMart, Carrie called Rob Welch and asked him to check on her. He found Ada in bed, her book open on her chest, her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead; she seemed to have simply folded her hands and died. She was buried in the churchyard, beside Pastor Stewart, but she had not wanted a service, and only Alfred Nittle, her attorney, was there to see. She had called him just a week before to revise her will, leaving everything to the Wellfleet Ecological Life League, except for the house and the surrounding land. That was to pass to Carrie Cloutier.

  “She’s set for life. Ada saved her. She can get away from Tim; she can help Desiree with the baby when it comes. . . . But of all people, why Carrie? Did Ada even know Carrie, besides buying the paper from her every day?” Charlotte and Henry were sitting on the front porch steps with their coffee while Fiona gathered dandelions for the stew she was making. The air smelled of honey from the locust blossoms. Everything was shaggy with new foliage and flowers, and the early sunlight angled through the green shallows as the tide went out.

  “Probably my suggestion,” Henry said, as if he were admitting a fault. “I went to see her.”

  “What? When?”

  “Oh, a few weeks ago. I took my walk early and stopped in there.”

  “You never told me.”

  “I don’t suppose I did.” Ada was part of a secret world, the world of his childhood. She was too close to his heart. He’d never let anyone see.

  “I took her a copy of Dread and the Common Man. Obscene, really, that I hadn’t done it before.” He grimaced with a self-loathing he felt was entirely right and proper. Vestina would have approved. “We talked for half an hour, just the most conventional conversation. She’s an admirable woman, you know, never marrying, making her own way. She agreed that Carrie’s had a tough row. Ada was not about to sell any land to Tim, but she has something in common with Carrie. We talked about how the town takes care of its own, that kind of thing.”

  “You went over there and solved the whole problem and never said a word?”

  “I’m a WASP!” he said, with mock horror. “Anyway, I didn’t solve the problem; I just made a quiet suggestion. A suggestion you gave me. I didn’t imagine it would have any effect.”

  “Was she glad to see you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Were you glad to see her?”

  “Would have been wrong not to go.” That was what Henry had to say about his visit to the woman who had cared for him in place of his mother, whose lilac perfume could change his whole sense of life. Well, he was a WASP, skilled in the lost art of rectitude. He’d worked, after the polio, to become “hard as a ball bearing,” so life couldn’t take another bite out of him. And lost so much of himself in the process . . . Charlotte scooched over and put her arm around him.

  “Was Ada around when you were sick?”

  “She read to me,” he said. “Hardy Boys. Book after book after book. Does it seem to you that the bay is much warmer this June than last?”

  “It’s warm when the high tide’s in the afternoon, that’s all. The sun heats the sand all morning and then the water comes in over it—it’s heavenly.”

  “I don’t remember it that way at all,” he said, with some ghastly apprehension.

  “Well, you never liked to swim. . . .”

  “It’s nothing like it used to be,” Henry said, definitively, as if he’d just summed up someone’s life in an obituary and there was nothing more to be said. “The hole in the ozone is much larger now even than they expected. . . .” Oh, he shook his head; he saw nothing but grief in the future. He’d been right all along.

  “Was that what Ada was reading when she died?” Charlotte asked. “Dread and the Common Man?”

  Henry gave a horrified giggle. “I hope not!” he said.

  34

  BY THE WATERS

  “You have a tomato in your hair.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got a tomato tangled in your hair, right . . . back . . . here,” Darryl said, reaching behind her. High summer, late July: Charlotte had promised Fiona a Popsicle as soon as she was finished tying up the tomato plants, but the box in the freezer was empty, so here they were—where else?—at the SixMart. A minute later Darryl drove in, in a new truck, a little refrigerator truck that still had the Bayside Ice Company logo painted on the side.

  “Gas,” he explained. “It’s on empty.” It was important that she know this, so she wouldn’t think he’d stopped because he saw the Volvo. He hadn’t done that, or anything remotely like that, since the day they went over the bridge. She’d seen him across the room at the VFW fund-raiser for Nikki Miles’s brother. He’d caught her eye during a speech about courage and the price of freedom, shot her a quick fond glance that seemed to encompass just about everything—regret, love, amazement at the ineffable complications of life, and a certain peacefulness, as if he knew he’d done the right thing. Then Nikki’s brother had reached for his beer bottle and missed, knocking it into his lap, so Darryl had to attend to him. And Charlotte had to attend to Henry, who, at the sight of a man wounded into clumsiness, had been seized by a fury and started muttering so loudly about impeaching George Bush that she’d been afraid he’d incite a riot.

  The tomato was caught in the back, at the nape of her neck.

  “Wow, it’s really stuck.”

  “I was all tangled up in them,” she said. “It’s getting pretty jungly in there.”

  He worked carefully at the tangle, freeing one strand and then another until the tomato came loose in his hand. They looked down at the little unborn thing—milky green, veined like a gooseberry, tiny in his thick palm—and she almost bent to kiss it. Instead she smiled, feeling as always that he would understand the whole complicated story behind the smile, maybe better than if she’d tried to put it into words.

  Fiona, absorbed in her Creamsicle, leaned back against her mother’s legs and looked up at them, watching, taking it all in. There was the smell of fried fish in the air, and an unbroken procession of cars on the highway, with surfboards and bicycles and immense inflated beach toys bound on their roofs. Families sated with sun and salt water, returning to their rented cottages to grill hot dogs and watch the sunset—years later some of the children in those cars would remember this one day as an emblem of freedom and happiness.

  Tim came out of the market, with sunglasses over his eye patch and a big shark’s smile.

  “Where’s your truck?” Darryl asked.

  Neither he nor Charlotte would have stopped at the SixMart if Tim’s truck had been there.

  “Carrie took it to the car wash,” Tim said, wrinkling his nose.

  “That’s right; I heard you did pretty well,” Darryl said.

  “Four bluefin. They weren’t biting at first; there was so much chum in the water they didn’t care about the bait. But I waited ’em out. . . .” He lifted his sunglasses to shoot a glance at Charlotte, as if she would find his fisherman’s prowess irresistible. “One was so fat, I got fifteen bucks a pound, for four hundred and seventy-three
pounds.”

  “What a year you’re having,” Darryl said.

  “Yeah, and I got somethin’ to show ya.”

  An envelope, from the superior court. Everything else was forgotten; they gathered around to read it. Narville’s claims had been summarily rejected.

  “There is no issue as to material fact. This land is shown to be in possession of a third party, and cannot be claimed either by Mr. Narville or the town of Wellfleet,” Tim read aloud.

  “So, Ada was the owner; now it’s Carrie, and the case is closed,” Darryl said.

  “Carrie and me; community property,” Tim said. “I was out there at dawn; I’ve got half my oysters back in already. I can’t wait to see the look on that bastard’s face.”

  “Of course.”

  “So, you’re my neighbor,” Charlotte said, with a light irony that made Darryl smile and Tim bristle, a quick frown crossing his face. He’d heard the threat in it, and threat was his native language—but Charlotte’s weapon—a hatpin—was unfamiliar.

  “Damn right I am,” he said. Charlotte could hear how he hated her.

  None of them would speak of her letter to Darryl again. Tim would avoid even thinking of it, though he would suffer certain twinges, a vague shame gone to rage that left him contemptuous of Henry, and New Yorkers, and newspaper people, and, of course, washashores. Charlotte would remember Henry’s stoic face, the way he had borne her betrayal as he bore everything, in silence. Darryl thought of it every day: Charlotte had loved him, and he’d given her up, and with that sacrifice he hoped to have earned his way back into fate’s good graces. If they’d been lovers, he’d have ended up ashamed. Now, every time he saw her, he felt proud.

  “How’s that Creamsicle?” he asked Fiona. He loved to see her—he had saved her from great harm.

  “Good, Dar-r-ryl,” she said, happy and shy, smiling at him while ice cream melted onto her shoes.

  “Telegram!” Reggie the glass eater called, popping his head in through the door.

  “Rhode Island Red,” Fiona shot back, ready with the answer like the good schoolgirl she was.

  “You’re a regular ’fleetian!” Darryl told her, and she beamed.

  “What does that mean?” Charlotte asked him. “Telegram, Rhode Island Red? Why does everyone say it? What’s the joke?”

  “Well, I have no idea,” Darryl said. “All my life it’s just been . . . he says telegram, you say Rhode Island Red. I have no idea what it means.”

  “You never asked?”

  Darryl laughed. “It’s just one of those things . . .” he said, looking quizzically at Tim. “Does anyone know?”

  “I never paid any attention,” Tim said. The three forty-five bus had pulled up outside and Orson appeared at the top of its steps, blinking in daylight, gathering his cape in as he came down the steps, with the aura of a dignitary descending from his private jet.

  “A meeting of the St. Botolph Club,” he said, holding his head. “Oh, Rémy Martin!”

  “Do you have any idea about ‘telegram . . . Rhode Island Red’?” Charlotte asked him. “What does everybody mean by that?”

  Orson squinted at her. “Could you please direct me to the ibuprofen?” Then, with two fingers at his throat, “Good catch, I gather, Tim.”

  Tim gave a crisp nod.

  “And congratulations on Carrie’s inheritance.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Of course.” Orson tried in vain to twist the childproof cap off the ibuprofen.

  “I’ll do it for you!” Fiona said, and quickly did.

  Orson tossed four of them to the back of his throat and swallowed. “Of course, the really delicious thing is the seawall,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Charlotte asked.

  “The high tide hits the seawall, does it not?”

  “It does,” Charlotte answered.

  “And the Narvilles’ property line is ‘by the waters,’ in this case meaning to the mean high-tide line?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “So Carrie and Tim . . . own all the beach there, right up to the seawall. The Narvilles can stand on the seawall and look, but without your permission, sir, they can’t swim there, nor moor their boat, nor take a little stroll. . . . Oh, my head. Skip was on his way over to explain that to them when I left yesterday. I didn’t envy him.”

  Tim gave a low whistle. “Well, how d’ya like that?”

  The silence that fell after this might have been unbreakable if Orson hadn’t been there.

  “What went around does seem to have come around,” he said, and they all—Orson, Tim Cloutier, Darryl Stead, and Charlotte Tradescome—laughed together. They were not much alike, but they were alone with one another out here, and that bond was familial, unbreakable. As every drop that fell into the sea had its effect on the oysters, everything anyone did here affected the town. Ada’s birth and the story that was made from it, Darryl’s flight and his prodigal return, Charlotte’s arrival, Tim’s bite out of Rob Welch’s ear . . . even such a pale, delicate thing as an embryonic love affair would change the climate here. They needed one another, knew one another; they would become closer to one another whether they wanted to or not.

  “Jeb Narville’s got his boat moored right in the middle of my property,” Tim said. “I guess I’m going to have to take him to court.”

  They heard an ambulance wailing toward them.

  “Car crash? Can’t be too bad,” Darryl said. “No one’s going more than ten miles an hour.”

  They went to the doorway to watch it come, bumbling slow and clangorous between the two lanes of traffic, as cars grudgingly made way. Fiona clutched at Charlotte, burying her head in her mother’s neck, and Charlotte felt the last of the Creamsicle spill down the front of her shirt.

  “It’s not going to hurt us, sweetie,” she said. “Except maybe our eardrums.”

  It turned down Point Road.

  “Shit,” they all said, in perfect unison.

  35

  DEATH OF A VIKING

  Jeb Narville’s brick-red cheeks, which had made him look so greedy and angry to Charlotte, might have told a different story to a neurologist, but Jeb did not submit himself to doctors. He did not care to be regarded as a bundle of delicate interconnected membranes, each one vulnerable to its own sort of misery. He saw—had seen—himself as a solid entity, a steel-hulled ship slicing through the waves.

  “The paramedic said his pupils had blown out,” Andrea told Charlotte the next day. “Blown out, like a candle. It means they don’t respond to light anymore. That even though he was breathing, he was pretty much gone. An aneurysm, it could have happened anytime.”

  She jumped up suddenly, as if she could escape this idea, sat instantly back down as if she’d hit her head on some other hard truth. Charlotte had wedged herself into a corner of the immense sofa, pressed as far back into the leather as she could get. She’d brought over a coffee cake, which she held on her lap as a kind of shield. Andrea’s grief was so enormous and awful—compounded of shock and guilt and fury and fear—that it seemed almost physically dangerous, a giant, filthy wave that was about to crash down over them.

  “He was here . . . right here,” she kept saying angrily, as if demanding that Charlotte put him back. Her face was blotchy; there were dark circles under her eyes; she made a terrible sobbing sound but no tears came, and she clenched her fists. “Money was no object!” she said. “We could have appealed it right up to the Supreme Court!”

  “Of course you could,” Charlotte said, soothing, holding the coffee cake tight. “Of course.”

  “ ‘No genuine issue as to material fact,’ that’s what they said in the judgment,” Andrea said, twisting a Kleenex around her finger. “Because of . . . oh, some tiny little loophole. But Jeb says the court doesn’t have jurisdiction; he would fight it on those grounds. Skip said he’d do it, but for now they . . . those men . . . have the rights to the land, and next morning there that guy was, putting all his junk out in front of our house.


  Charlotte nodded, honestly sympathetic. She couldn’t help it; it was virtually impossible for her to keep from sympathizing with any person who was in the same room with her.

  “In the South, we have the welcome wagon,” Andrea burst out. “When someone moves into town everyone goes over to meet them, brings them a little gift, just to make them feel at home. Here they seemed to hate us before we even moved in! They tricked us into thinking this was real waterfront. That woman at the SixMart, she acted like she couldn’t see us! Over the winter they stole all the fish out of our koi pond! And Jeb had dreamed of this, he . . .”

  Now the tears came, dammed up behind the mascara for a moment before they spilled down through Andrea’s makeup so her whole face seemed to be coming apart, like the painting of Vestina when Charlotte dropped it. Andrea had made such a neat little package of herself—the frosted ponytail, the perfectly yoga-fied body—she had tried so hard, and still everything had come to ruin.

  On the coffee table she had arranged a kind of shrine: a fat bronze Buddha and a group of votive candles around a photograph of a confident-looking young boy at the helm of a sailboat, facing into the wind.

  “Is this Jeb?” Charlotte asked.

  “His whole life he dreamed of having a summer place on Cape Cod,” Andrea said, weeping. “He grew up in Eastlake Meadows—the projects, in Atlanta . . . you wouldn’t guess, would you? He came up here for a week once, in the summer—it was a social services thing, a free camp program. He swore that once he made his fortune, he’d come back. So he did, and . . . ohhh.”