The Good House: A Novel

by Leary, Ann

  “Well, be careful. Don’t do anything rash. I have a great lawyer, if you want. He’s the best guy in Boston. Maybe you should talk to him before you do anything else.”

  “Is it Dave Myerson?”

  “Yes,” I said. “How did you know?”

  “You said the best guy in Boston.”

  Rebecca, somehow, is able to obtain the services of the best guy at anything, anywhere. It’s another thing I’ve noticed about people who come from her type of money. Somehow they’re just plugged into this “best of” network, wherever they go.

  “Peter’ll be up soon,” Rebecca said. “He needs me.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be up. You know, I think I will have a glass of that wine now, if you don’t mind.”

  Rebecca poured the wine into my glass in such an absentminded fashion, I almost wondered if she even remembered her recent wild accusations. See, this is what I mean about Rebecca’s mood swings. She’s just not very stable. I had a long sip of my wine, then another, and then I felt a warm rush of compassion for Rebecca. Sometimes, when I haven’t seen her in a while, I’m taken aback by her beauty. Her beauty and her fragility.

  “You know,” she said, “we’re collaborating on a project with his moon photographs. We’ve been enlarging them, cutting out the moons and pasting them onto canvas, and then I paint over them with these beautiful colors of the sea, and I’ve even integrated some collage into some of them. Covering them with bits of kelp and shards of sea glass.”

  “They sound so lovely, Rebecca,” I said. “I’d love to see them. I imagine they’re quite beautiful.” I finished the wine in my glass.

  “That’s the thing,” said Rebecca. She was leaning in close to me, the way she always did when she was feeling her wine. “They are beautiful, beautiful pieces. And neither of us could create such a thing alone. Do you see what I mean? I just … I never felt this way about anybody, Hildy. I know we’re meant to be together. I think about him when I wake up—he’s the first thing I think about, and he’s the last thing I think about before I go to sleep. I’ve become so forgetful. Do you know the other day I forgot to pick up Liam at the bus stop? He walked home in the snow.”

  “Oh, Rebecca,” I said. “You have to stop obsessing over him, it’s really not good.” The bottle of wine stood on the table between us—by my calculations, enough left for exactly one and a half more glasses. I wouldn’t move for it. I wouldn’t give Rebecca the satisfaction.

  “It’s not just me, Hildy. Peter’s constantly thinking about me, about us. You have no idea how lonely he is. You don’t know how lonely we both are when we’re apart.”

  I poured all the remaining wine into my glass then, annoyed with Rebecca again. Rebecca had children at home. She had a husband and a lover. Peter had the same setup. I lived alone. My children were grown and I hadn’t had a lover in too many years to count, but they were the lonely ones and I was expected to feel pity for them.

  “You have no idea what that kind of loneliness is like,” Rebecca sighed.

  “No?” I asked.

  * * *

  The next morning, I awoke at four-thirty to my blaring alarm. I made a large pot of coffee and pulled on my thermals and then some heavy sweatpants and a turtleneck and a thick wool sweater. I poured the coffee into a big thermos. I grabbed a box of blueberry muffins I had bought the day before, at Sue Doliber’s bakery. I was rummaging through my closet, looking for some warm gloves, when I heard Frank honking outside. He had told me he’d pick me up at five. I found the gloves and pulled an old pair of Bean boots over my thermal socks and then out I went into the pitch-black morning.

  Frank leaned over and opened the passenger door and I handed him my thermos and muffins, then climbed up into the truck.

  “Where’s yer hat, Hildy?” Frank asked. “It’s freezin’ out there.”

  “I don’t need one,” I replied. I really look awful in hats. I have a rather long nose. For some reason, hats tend to make it longer.

  “Manny has a boxful of hats and gloves and stuff on the boat. Plus some foul-weather gear. It’s wet out there.”

  “Jesus Christ, Frankie,” I said, trying to find a place on the floor to put my feet. The floor of his truck’s cab was filled with debris—empty soda cans, wrappers, old newspapers, door handles, a bicycle seat, a couple of lobster buoys, a tackle box, and what looked like a petrified, half-eaten bagel. I lifted a rusty old horseshoe from where it lay next to my boot. “What is all this crap?”

  Frankie just chuckled and shook his head. “Yeah, she needs a good cleanin’, that’s for sure.”

  “But how does an old horseshoe find its way into your truck?”

  “It’s good luck. Found it on a job site. Thought I’d keep it for luck.”

  “I think you’re supposed to hang them up like this,” I said, holding the horseshoe with the arc in my palm, the two ends pointing up. “Otherwise, all the luck pours out of the ends.”

  “Yeah, well, I just haven’t had a chance to hang it, I guess.” Frankie smiled.

  I propped it up on the windshield.

  “I don’t know how lucky yer gonna feel if I have to slam on the brakes and that sucka comes flyin’ back and breaks all yer teeth, Hildy.”

  I laughed and tossed the horseshoe back on the floor.

  “I brought coffee and muffins.”

  “Didja? Great. We usually have breakfast at the Driftwood when we come back in, but we’re always starving by then.”

  We drove through the dark, slumbering town of Wendover, and there was not another car on the road. When we arrived at Wendover landing, there were a few local lobstermen parking their trucks and calling out gruff greetings in white gusts of breath to one another. They were the diehards. Most lobstermen pulled their boats from the water in November. We parked right next to Manny’s rusty old blue pickup. The night was dissolving into a cold silvery dawn, and the old shops around the wharf began to take shape all around us. We climbed out of the warm truck and I pulled my turtleneck up over my chin. Frankie grabbed some gear out of the back of his truck and we headed over to the landing.

  The tide was low and the ramp from the parking lot down to the dock was steep, and although Frank easily strode down carrying coils of heavy rope and my bag of coffee and muffins, I had to hold the rope railings and walk down carefully. There was a time when Lindsey and I used to skip down this ramp barefoot.

  It was that moment of dawn on the waterfront when the sky and sea both take on the exact same shade of gray and the horizon is lost. There was just a boat, seemingly floating in air, with Manny in bright cautionary yellow. Manny was wearing the yellow foul-weather overalls that are the lobsterman’s uniform even on the hottest summer days.

  Manny’s big. He’s about six-five and rather stout and he still has tufts of curly reddish gray hair sticking out beneath the hats he always wears. I suspect he’s balding, as I haven’t seen him without a hat in a good twenty years. In the summer, he wears grimy trucker’s caps; in the winter, knit fisherman’s hats.

  “Got somethin’ for Hildy to wear? She didn’t bring any gear,” Frank said, stepping aboard and then reaching out a hand to me. I took his hand and tried to leap nimbly aboard, so that it would feel to him that I was just as light a little thing as I once had been. I sort of staggered into him. Frank laughed and steadied me. I pretended that nothing unusual had happened. I just walked back to the stern, examining Manny’s boat. She was called Mercy.

  Commercial lobster boats all have more or less the same design. The bow, directly in front of the cabin, is short and usually swales up in the center, so in rough seas, water can easily fall off to both sides. It was on these sloping planks that Lindsey and I used to sprawl in our bikinis like a couple of young, wet, sunburned figureheads that summer so many years ago. Every time I have a mole removed, I think of Manny’s old lobster boat.

  The cabin of Manny’s current boat, like most lobster boats, was designed for the captain and crew to stand, but there were a couple of
tall, swiveling captain’s chairs. A roof and a windshield offered some protection from bad weather, but the back of the cabin was open to the aft section of the boat, which was designed to hold dozens of lobster traps. Most of Manny’s traps were already set, so there were only a few tied to the sides of the vast aft deck, to replace any damaged traps we might find.

  Manny’s boat was certainly not as high-tech as some of the newer lobster boats you see in and around Wendover harbor nowadays. But it did have all sorts of gadgets he’d never had on his old boats, and Manny proudly pointed them out to me. There was a GPS system, satellite radio, ship-to-shore phone, which you’d think would be obsolete now that we all have cell phones, but Manny said that the cell service gets sketchy once you leave the harbor.

  Manny started up the engine, and the still morning was suddenly filled with the engine’s thick, earnest chugging. The smell of dead fish and gasoline and salt was all around. Manny and Frank poured buckets of dead fish into the massive, reeking bait tanks and started scooping them into tiny mesh bait bags. Frank jumped out onto the dock, untied the lines, then jumped back on board, and we were off.

  It occurred to me as we cruised through the near-empty harbor that I had never been out on the water in the winter. Well, there was the winter in the early sixties when the harbor froze over and we all skated from the landing to Lighthouse Point, but I had not been out on a boat after October, ever. It was freezing. Frank had been right. Manny offered me one of the chairs in the cabin, but even there, the wind burned the tops of my ears and I was sprayed with surf from the side of the boat.

  “Manny, where do ya keep all ya extra gear?” Frank hollered when he saw me covering my ears with my gloved hands.

  “There’s a big old plastic bin down below. Go have a look, Hildy. Otherwise, you’re gonna get soaked,” shouted Manny.

  Shouting and hollering are the only ways to communicate on a commercial lobster boat; the engine is so loud. The men tend to say little to one another while out on the water, which may help explain why they say so much, so noisily, while seated at Barney’s, a local bar, in the afternoons.

  I opened the hatch to the little cabin beneath the bow and found the bin, and soon I was wearing my own pair of fish gut–stained coveralls, though mine were dark gray, and a matching gray raincoat, about five sizes too large. The hat selection was grim. There were two knit hats, both of which were filthy and encrusted with who knew what. I sort of shook out the least offensive and pulled it over my head, and then I slunk to the stern of the boat and pretended I was admiring the view of the disappearing harbor. I didn’t have to pretend for long. I looked at the long jetty leading out to Lighthouse Point and recalled leaping across those rocks with my brother and sister when we were kids. We used to fish off the jetty. My brother caught a sand shark there once.

  At the mouth of the harbor is old Peg Sweeney’s Rock, which is said to be haunted by the ghost of a young Wendover woman who was raped and murdered by a band of pirates there two hundred years ago. Supposedly, at night, you can still hear poor Peg Sweeney’s screams as you pass that rock. Generations of kids have motored, paddled, and sailed past the rocky ledge on summer nights and have scared one another half out of their minds with their own gasping and screaming. We motored out toward Singer’s Island. When I heard the engine lull, I turned to watch Frank take a long hook and snag up one of Manny’s black-and-gold buoys from the water. He pulled the buoy up, and Manny grabbed it and threw it over a cinch. Then he pushed a button and the cinch reeled in the line itself. When we were kids, Manny and his crew’d had to work the cinch by hand.

  Manny saw me grinning at the impressive mechanics of the thing and he hollered, “Hydraulic cinch. Nice, huh, Hildy?”

  “Wicked nice, Manny,” I said, and then I scrambled over to see what he had pulled in. Three keepers, a couple of crabs, and a cull. Frankie reached his hand into the wooden trap and tossed the crabs back into the water. He held a measuring gauge to the cull—it did look like it might be on the short side—but it was good, so he threw it into a holding tank with the others. Then he threw a bait bag into the trap, and I instinctively stepped back. Frankie hitched the lobster pot back to the casting line, which, as we drove off, would yank the trap back along the deck and into the water from the boat’s open stern. One of the reasons Lindsey and I used to perch on the bow is because of the danger of standing on the aft deck of a boat. Your foot can get caught up by the rope and you’d be pulled over in an instant, when the traps are being set. Manny always worried about us unless we were up on the bow.

  Manny was driving on to the next buoy and Frank was busy banding the claws of the captured lobsters to prevent them from culling each other.

  “Give me some gloves, Frankie,” I said. “I’ll band ’em.”

  Frank managed to find me a pair of the thick neoprene gloves and I started snapping bands around the flailing, clacking claws of the lobsters. I’d forgotten how beautiful fresh-caught lobsters are in all their dappled hardness, before their mottled scalloped armor of semiprecious hues—sapphire, topaz, and emerald—fades into a general muddy green. The lobster loses its luster in a tank. You should really see one when it’s first pulled from the sea, when it still defiantly grips a piece of seaweed in its claw and tries to flip you off with its tail.

  Frank snagged the next buoy and we settled into a little routine of catching pots, banding, then baiting and setting the pots back in the sea. The sun was well up above the horizon now and we had all removed a layer or two. The work warmed us up. Finally, we were approaching Grey’s Point.

  “Drive ’er on a little closer to the point, Manny,” Frankie called when he saw me squinting off at it.

  Manny steered the boat toward shore and then I saw it: a big, beautiful Nantucket-style home with a sprawling porch. It faced the end of the point, and yes, it had views from all sides. It was going to be stunning. I noted the cedar shingles on the roof, counted the chimneys, got a glimpse of a three-bay detached carriage house.

  “Whatta ya think it’ll go for, Hildy?” Manny asked.

  “They’ll ask ten and they’ll get eight,” I said.

  I was already designing the brochure in my head. I’d have an aerial photo taken, and one from the water, too. I’d put an ad in Boston magazine and The New York Times Magazine. The Santorelli brothers would be crazy not to list it with me.

  Manny and Frank hooted. It was an outrageous sum. I knew I could get it, if only I could get them to list it with me.

  “Okay, I’ve seen enough,” I said. Then I remembered the coffee.

  “Anybody want coffee or a muffin?”

  “Hell YEAH,” said Manny. I passed out the muffins and, lacking cups, we all took turns sipping the coffee from the thermos. It was still good and hot. We chugged out to the next lobster pot.

  It was late morning when we had set the last trap, and Frankie and I leaned against the side of the boat on the way back to the harbor. I was smiling. I hadn’t had so much fun in years. Out on the water with two old friends. An exciting real-estate prospect. We were heading into the wind on the way back and we all put our layers back on. It had been a good haul. Thirty-eight keepers.

  “Any of that coffee left, Hildy?” Manny called back.

  “Yeah, here,” I said, passing him the thermos.

  “Hey, Frankie, go in the hold. There’s a bottle of Jameson in there. We’ll make us some Irish coffee.”

  Now that just made me smile. An Irish coffee sounded like just the thing.

  Frankie looked at me uncertainly.

  “What?” I asked. “Go ahead.”

  “Okay.” He smiled. “I thought I heard that you quit drinkin’ or somethin’.”

  “Well, I quit drinking too much is all,” I said, which seemed to please him, and he clambered off into the hold and returned with the bottle of Irish whiskey. He poured a healthy amount into the thermos, and then he poured in a little more. He handed it to me first. I took a sip and smiled at its delightful wallop and pa
ssed it on to Manny and Frankie.

  It was a half hour’s ride back to the landing, but we took our time. I felt the sun on my face, and when I closed my eyes, it was no longer winter, but many long-gone summers all at once, beaming down on me with such a golden brilliance that I couldn’t see for a moment when I opened my eyes and I had to blink until the blurred shapes of Manny and Frank took their familiar forms against the horizon again. We cruised past the seemingly endless stretch of beach in front of the Hart estate and then we passed the strip of private beach in front of the Newbolds’ house. We all gazed silently at a small woman in a parka with a fur-lined hood who stood on that narrow strip of sand. A German shepherd was leaping in front of her. She threw a large piece of driftwood for the dog and he streaked across the beach after it, then carried it triumphantly back to her. How lonely she looked, from where I stood then, shoulder-to-shoulder with a couple of Wendover’s own; three old townies with carefully preserved memories of one another, memories of the way we looked and felt in the best of our youth. I imagined that Rebecca would be horrified to learn that I had spent the morning out on a lobster boat with Frankie Getchell and Manny Briggs. She knew them only as they were now, a couple of stinky old bachelors, long past their sell-by dates. I had been madly enamored of both of them when I was a girl, and now I was once again as we moved through the harbor, the hot whiskey thawing my memory. I looked at Manny, whose whiskers were gray but whose teeth, when he grinned, were still strong and white. Frankie, standing a few feet away, had the angular profile of an Anawam chief, from where I stood watching him, and when he turned and caught me looking at him, I blushed like a schoolgirl and looked back at the shore. Rebecca was wrestling the driftwood from the jaws of the dog, then she flung it once again across the beach. I pitied her then. Pitied Rebecca all alone on the beach—all alone on the private beach where she didn’t belong.

  We passed Singer’s Island and Lighthouse Point and old Peg Sweeney’s Rock. We drank the Irish coffee until the morning took on a lovely semilucid calm, and when we got back to the dock, I hosed down the deck while Manny and Frankie unloaded the tanks and traps. Then Frankie took me home. He dropped me off in front of my house. He had to check on his crew. I had to take a nap.