Grief Cottage

by Gail Godwin

  He loved gossip and hearsay, the more shocking the better, stories about the extreme things people had done, true things that made one lower one’s voice in the telling. (“Tell me a true, Marcus,” he would command.) I was always on the lookout for the kind of trues that would appeal to him. (“Did you know that Van Gogh the artist cut off his ear after a fight with his friend Gauguin? He wrapped it in a handkerchief and on the way to the hospital he handed the ear to a prostitute and she fainted.”)

  Wheezer also had trues to offer, including a dramatic one from his own family. His father’s older brother, the brilliant Uncle Henry, who could read Greek and Latin, dropped out of Harvard to return home and become a heroin addict. (“His IQ was off the charts, it almost killed Granny to watch her favorite son disintegrate in front of her eyes. When Grandpa finally kicked him out, he moved into a rusty trailer with rats and died in bed shooting up.”)

  As long as it wasn’t about himself, my Grief Cottage friend also quickened at the lure of a true. As soon as I began, “I’m eleven, and I’m an orphan,” I could feel the air behind me snap to attention. “My mom was killed in a car accident last winter and my dad died before I was born. She never told me who he was but when I’m older I’m going to try to find out.”

  But if I got too digressive or laid on too many details, the frequency between us faded. Like Wheezer, the listener in the space behind me was a sensationalist. He liked me to head straight for the extremes.

  Commuting between Aunt Charlotte and the boy in Grief Cottage, I felt torn. I had specific duties at each place and I told myself my mental health wasn’t in danger as long as I remembered the differences between those duties. It was a matter of keeping separate realities separate and steadying myself inside an awareness that seemed to be expanding too fast. Some days my balancing act felt wobbly or downright precarious and I feared I was on the slippery slope to insanity. If only I had somebody I could ask! But what exactly would I ask them? (“Do you think if your consciousness starts growing too fast it could be just as frightening as the beginnings of insanity? Maybe you could even confuse it with insanity.”)

  One morning as I was returning to Aunt Charlotte’s after my hour with my back to the inhabitant of Grief Cottage, I passed the sunburnt man in his white dump truck heading north. I waved enthusiastically, and he waved back. But I could see that he didn’t recognize me. How could he? I was wearing my helmet and riding a bike. In a flash of insight I understood how it felt to be the ghost-boy, who knew others could not ordinarily see him. For a moment I looked forward to sharing this parallel experience with him until I remembered that references to him had so far earned me a cold withdrawal.

  XVI.

  Aunt Charlotte’s mood was deteriorating. And at supper one evening I made it deteriorate further with a stupid question meant to cheer her up.

  She had confided to me that she had been attempting to paint with her left hand. (“I thought why not try for mood expressed through color? Just those two things: mood and color. Well, maybe a few shapes.”) That morning she had squeezed out her colors and chosen a big flat brush and started to work. (“I was going to do a minimalist version of Grief Cottage. After all, I know the proportions, having painted them so many times. What could be so hard about laying in some sky color and some brushy Constable-like clouds and then roughing in a dark broken shape at the bottom? Who knows, I thought, these restrictions might lead to something exciting.”)

  But her left hand had refused to go where she wanted it. When she tried to hold it steady it started shaking. She got more and more frustrated, then depressed, then gave up in disgust. She drank a bottle of red wine and slept the rest of the day.

  After Aunt Charlotte finished telling me this, I got my dumb inspiration. I asked her what she had done with her days on the island before she started painting. Thinking this would give her ideas on how to while away the time until her wrist healed.

  She stared at me incredulously, as though I had switched to an alien language. “Well,” she said bitterly, “let me see. For one thing I could walk. I walked a lot. Up and down the beach. I walked until I got tired. And I went over and over my rotten past and gave myself credit for finally breaking free. I walked until I walked out of myself. Then, as I told you, I had jobs. I worked for the vet and then with Lachicotte. And, as you know from your mother, a job fills up your days. And then I saw that woman painting Grief Cottage and I thought, ‘I can do that.’ And I could.

  “Now, however, I can’t walk and I can’t paint, and there’s—well, I have other responsibilities. And I’m twenty-five years older. This mishap is like a preview of old age. It’s a foretaste. I can see myself like Mrs. Upchurch in her wheelchair next door. And what’s the point in living on for that?”

  By “other responsibilities” she had meant me. Her ominous follow-up question was even worse. How could I get us onto safer ground?

  “But even if you were old and in a wheelchair,” I reminded her, “you’d still be able to paint.”

  “One Grandma Moses is enough for this world.”

  “Who is Grandma Moses?”

  “An old woman who started painting in her seventies because her arthritis was too bad for her to embroider anymore. She lived to be a hundred and one and there’s a postage stamp in her honor.”

  “What kind of paintings?”

  “Oh, nostalgic country scenes that made people feel safe.”

  She pronounced “safe” in such a sneering way that I thought it wise to drop my safer-ground plan. I could have simply shut up, or cleared the table, but something egged me on. Since I had already done the opposite of cheering her up, since her future in the wheelchair was getting us nowhere, why not go for her rotten past?

  “Why was it rotten?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “You’re always mentioning your rotten past.”

  “I wasn’t aware I was always mentioning it. I’ll try to curb myself.”

  “But I’m interested. We’re from the same family and I don’t know anything about anyone in it! Mom kept things to herself, and the few times my grandma visited us she didn’t want to talk about the family, either.”

  “Ha. I can well imagine. So what did my sister—your grandmother—talk about?”

  “What Mom and I were doing wrong and how we could improve ourselves. And how well she had done for herself. After she left, Mom always cried for a few days. She never said why, but I don’t think it was because she was sorry to see Grandma leave.”

  “I don’t think so, either. How is it that some people can make us feel worthless even when we know we’re seeing ourselves through their eyes? Certain humans are poison. If I had to sum up my past in a few words, I would say: ‘Beginning at age five I was poisoned.’ End of story. But I can see from your face that’s not enough. Well, here’s a shrink-wrapped follow-up. There are very few family stories in this world. My family story consists of a useless cowardly mother, a poison fiend of a father, and an older sister who chose to pretend there was no poison in the house. Take your pick of the variations, down through the ages, of the good old family horror story. Try the Greeks, try the Bible, try Shakespeare, or choose from the abundant pity-memoirs on your local bookstore racks. When you are able to shrink-wrap your family story down to a few words, Marcus, maybe we will exchange further notes.”

  Aunt Charlotte’s screed appeared to have converted her despair into an angry energy. I was congratulating myself for the turnaround, but then she asked me to uncork more bottles of red wine because she had run through all the open ones. I must have displayed some qualm because she harshly added, “This is a bad patch, Marcus. Just do it.”

  A day or so later, more cases arrived from the Myrtle Beach wine shop. She must have made the phone call while I was out on my bike. The delivery man carried the cases in and I later unpacked and stored them, continuing to uncork them as stipulated. But the number of bottles for me to leave in her studio had now increased to three. It was then that I starte
d wondering if it was time to make a phone call to Lachicotte. But Aunt Charlotte would hear me if I made it on the house phone, and this was in the first years of the new millennium, before everyone carried a cell phone. I would have to wait until my next bike trip to the island grocery store, which had a pay phone.

  But would a phone call to Lachicotte qualify as disloyalty—going behind her back—joining forces with “the nag”? I was starting to have an idea about what Lachicotte’s nagging had addressed. I had unpacked some more boxes from my former life and looked up fester in my dictionary. “To form pus to fight off a foreign body.” For there to be pus there had to be some foreign body that needed to be fought off. Mentally, that foreign body was her depression. Physically it was alcohol. Though I wasn’t exactly sure how that worked. Alcohol was supposed to numb your pain. Wheezer had told me how in the Civil War they poured whisky into a soldier before amputating his leg. But though alcohol-numbed pain, could it cause another kind of festering underneath the pain?

  I tried to find a disloyalty comparison from my life with Mom. If a phone call to Lachicotte to snitch on my aunt’s drinking was a disloyalty, what were the ways my loyalty had been challenged when I was living with Mom? Well, Mom wasn’t a drinker for a start. She could hardly move when she got home. Her feet and lower back hurt. I gave her massages. (The thought of giving Aunt Charlotte a massage seemed not only improper but bizarre. I didn’t want to imagine what she would say if I were to offer such a thing.)

  The weak spots in my loyalty to Mom concerned anything in our life that would reinforce Wheezer’s taunt that I was my mother’s little husband. In those last years with her, I was always torn between wanting to give her what comforts I was capable of giving (my last Christmas present to her had been a drugstore kit of massage oils) and feeling shame when the comforts recalled Wheezer’s unforgiveable assessment of my home life. Whereas with Aunt Charlotte the loyalty conflict was between what would be best for her and how much I would sink in her estimation if I went behind her back and reported on her to Lachicotte Hayes.

  While I continued to fret over these options, Lachicotte dropped by one afternoon bearing an oyster pie.

  “These are farm oysters, the season’s over (ovah), but they work perfectly (pufectly) well in a pie.”

  He’d had a haircut since I last saw him and seemed altogether more spiffed up. He smelled like someone just out of the shower, and I could smell the pie as well.

  “If I could make crust like you, Lash,” said Aunt Charlotte, who had taken an urgent hopping trip to the bathroom following his arrival, “maybe I would start baking pies.” Now Aunt Charlotte smelled of mouthwash. “I’m sure Marcus must miss his mother’s pies.”

  I let this go by rather than say our pies were from the frozen section of the supermarket.

  “It just came out of the oven,” said Lachicotte, setting down the pie dish on the kitchen counter. “I’d advise you all to have it for supper. It tastes better before it’s refrigerated. I hope you like oysters, Marcus.”

  “Oh, yes.” Though I’d only had cans of oyster stew.

  “There’s nothing to making crust,” he said to Aunt Charlotte. “All you need to remember is that bowl of ice water for keeping your fingers cold.”

  “Maybe I’ll try it when I have ten fingers again,” she said.

  “Marcus, I bring you a message from Charlie Coggins. He stopped by my shop yesterday. You made quite an impression on him. He wanted to know how old you were and when I said eleven he wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Will you sit down, Lash?” Aunt Charlotte had remembered her manners.

  “What was the message?” I asked when we three were seated at the kitchen table. Lachicotte had turned down my offer of a cup of tea because he was meeting a potential buyer for his 1962 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud at five.

  “It was about that family who got swept away during Hurricane Hazel. Charlie said to tell you he checked the firm’s listings for 1954 and it wasn’t a Coggins rental. It must have been a private transaction by the owners. In fifty-four that cottage still belonged to the Barbours, but they sold it soon after Hurricane Hazel. What was it you were interested in knowing, Marcus?”

  “I just think it’s strange that nobody remembers their names. In those two ladies’ books about the island, the man in the truck who talked to them when they were out looking for their son—he gets named, but not the only people on the island who were lost. It’s like they didn’t count.”

  “Marcus feels the pain of others,” said Aunt Charlotte, “even when they’re dead and gone.”

  “Well, we can surely find out,” said Lachicotte. “We can track them through microfilms of local newspapers at the library (li-bry). I’ll take you there tomorrow if you like, Marcus. Then you’ll be able to bike over there whenever you want.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Aunt Charlotte. “I need to reimburse you for his bike and all those extras. Marcus, would you bring my checkbook from my purse? I’ve been practicing my left-handed signature. I called the bank to alert them to expect the scribble of a five-year-old child and they said no problem. But you’ll have to fill in the rest.”

  Lachicotte insisted there was no hurry and Aunt Charlotte insisted there was, and they almost had a fight before the check finally got written. Then we all played at writing left-handed signatures on Aunt Charlotte’s note pad. Lachicotte’s clumsy attempts got a snort out of Aunt Charlotte. My efforts recalled to me how shaky my early right-handed attempts had been when I was a child. How quickly you forgot how hard it had been to control your fingers when you first started! Aunt Charlotte’s left-handed signature was far better than either of ours, which lifted her mood. “Though of course I’ve had all day to practice,” she said, almost gaily for her.

  “Well, your neighbor Coral Upchurch will be arriving right after the fourth,” said Lachicotte.

  “How is it you always remember such things, Lash?”

  “It’s just this little thing that I do.” He laughed. “My first wife used to call me her walking anniversary book.”

  After Lachicotte left, I asked Aunt Charlotte if she knew why he’d had three wives. “Did he leave them, or did they leave him?”

  “They left him. Lash is the kind of man who lets women walk all over him. I was just the opposite: I always sought out the kind of men I could depend on to hurt me. Then I left them when I’d had enough.”

  “I wonder how many times I’ll get married.”

  “Oh, Marcus, you make me want to laugh and cry at the same time.”

  XVII.

  When Aunt Charlotte told Lachicotte I felt the pain of others even when they were dead, I worried that I had been talking in my sleep. But thinking it over I decided she was simply referring to the interest I had expressed about the nameless boy and his parents and to my sensitivity on their behalf.

  Though he was the most compelling presence in my life, I knew better than to tell anyone about our connection, and certainly not that I had seen him. I was drawing from the same fund of wisdom I had called on when the social services psychiatrist kept asking what I had felt while beating up Wheezer and I kept replying that I had “blanked out.”

  Funny enough, of all the people in my life, past or present, it was Wheezer alone I would have loved to tell about the dead boy. How he would hang on to my every word. His favorite thing was the occult. He would insist on going over every detail.

  “Now Marcus, tell me again, what exactly did you see?”

  “He was there in the door frame, facing me.”

  “What door frame?”

  “It was the front door leading out to the porch. I mean there’s no door, but he was slouching against the frame.”

  “You’re sure the whole thing wasn’t a trick of the light or something?”

  “I’m sure. He was thin and had a sharp jaw and…”

  “Was he tall or short?”

  “More like tall. But very skinny. And he wore a faded red shirt and jeans and boots.
He was somebody specific. And I not only saw him, I felt him.”

  “How do you mean you felt him?”

  “The way you feel people when they’re standing right in front of you. I felt I was being looked back at. I felt his curiosity. He was as interested in me as I was in him. The whole thing was as real as you and me facing each other right now.”

  “What kind of faded red shirt? Polo?”

  “No, it buttoned down the front and it looked a little small for him. It had short sleeves—or maybe they had been cut off.”

  “What were the boots like? Why would someone be wearing boots at the beach?”

  “I’m not sure. The whole thing was pretty intense while it was happening.”

  “Oh, God,” he would have cried out with envy. “Why couldn’t this have happened to me?”

  I liked to keep to my schedule of the early morning bike ride to the north end of the island, but Lachicotte was picking me up from Aunt Charlotte’s at nine-thirty to go to the library, and I didn’t want to seem rushed while I was at Grief Cottage. When you visited someone they could sense if you were in a hurry or had to be somewhere else after you left them. I would go in the late afternoon. After all, it was the late afternoon when I had seen him that one time.

  Lachicotte brought Aunt Charlotte a lettuce and two cucumbers from his garden and some rolls, still warm, that he had baked. I had peeled two bananas for her and sealed them into plastic quart bags. The requisite uncorked bottles were ready in her studio, the ones in the kitchen discreetly out of sight. As she did not come out to say hello, I told Lachicotte I thought she was still sleeping.

  “How’s she doing, in your opinion?” He asked this before the Bentley had pulled away from the curb.