by Nora Carroll
“Have you seen the great blues?”
In spite of his quiet movements, he had a quick smile. Jess could see that the sun had burned the end of his nose, which was peeling, leaving pink skin and freckles showing through. The rest of his body was brown and glistened faintly with perspiration.
“I don’t know,” Jess said. She did not want to let on that she had no idea what he was talking about. “I’ve been reading.”
“Well, I’ve seen you sitting here before. You scare the birds away.”
Jess felt the pit of her stomach tense up.
“I do not! I’ve always seen a lot of birds while I’m sitting here.”
“Not as many as there would be if you weren’t sitting here. The blue herons have been coming—were coming—until you started bothering them.”
“I did not come here to bother the birds,” Jess said. “Look at them.” She pointed to several ducks pecking in a shallow pool.
“Oh, the mallards . . . they don’t scare easy. It’s the great blue herons I’m interested in. They never used to come around here, but now with this mudflat . . . ” He stopped speaking for a moment, scanning the sky. “I’ve been trying to shoot them.”
“You have no business shooting them. They’re wild birds.”
He laughed, tipping his head back and showing his even white teeth. “No, I mean taking pictures,” he said.
He reached down into his canoe and pulled out a camera, with a variety of lenses hanging in their cases from the strap. Again, Jess noticed his unusual grace.
“I like to take pictures of birds. Usually, around here it’s the woodland birds, you know, black-throated green warblers, American redstarts. But now, with the mudflat, we’re getting some of the shoreline birds.”
Jess didn’t say anything else and she looked back down at her book, but she could feel that the boy was still looking at her. She did not know the names of any birds—except pigeons, of course. If the blue herons had been there, she did not believe she would have noticed.
When Jess’s cheeks stopped burning, she hazarded a glance toward the boy. Now, he was squatting ankle deep in the water, his telephoto lens pointed out toward Hemingway Point. Jess examined him carefully, though all she could see was the side of his face and his back.
This summer, she had noticed that most of the American boys had their hair cut short and were wearing these expensive Ray-Ban sunglasses. This guy’s hair was kind of long, and his body was lean. He was kneeling in the sand holding his camera with the telephoto, but Jess couldn’t see what he was looking at.
“There they are,” he said softly, almost to himself.
Jess looked up at the sky but still saw nothing, looked back at the boy who still crouched motionless on the sand.
“I don’t see them,” Jess said.
“Sh . . . ,” he whispered. “They won’t land here while we’re sitting here. You can tell them when they’re flying. They have a wide wingspan and they stutter.”
“Stutter?”
“Yeah, I mean that’s what it looks like. It looks like they stutter.”
Jess scanned the sky again, wondering what stuttering looked like.
“Do you think I could get you to hold the light meter for me, for just a sec? I don’t want to lose my focus.”
Jess stood up from the flat rock, hesitating awkwardly for a second.
“It’s in the canoe, the little flat thing, looks kind of like a flash.”
Jess walked over to the canoe and rummaged in the camera bag. She picked up what she thought he was talking about.
“This it?”
“Just hold it up,” he said. “About a foot in front of me, a little to the left.”
He took his eye off the camera and glanced up at the light meter.
“Perfect,” he said, and squeezed the shutter several times in rapid succession. “You can just throw that back in the bag.”
Jess stared at the empty sky again, wondering what it was that he could see. She saw a couple of birds, black blobs at this distance, an airplane, and a number of scattered cumulus clouds, white on top, their undersides purple. All of a sudden, he jumped up, threw his camera into his bag, and swiftly dragged his canoe back into the water, leaping into it the second it began to fully float.
Jess was left standing there stupidly watching him push. Her ears burned. She hadn’t even learned his name. She wanted to ask him, Were those the blue herons? Did you see them? What did they look like? But before she had prepared herself to open her mouth, he was gone.
He was paddling away, toward the point and the South Arm. Just when he was almost out of earshot, he called over his shoulder, “See you around.” Then, slicing clearly through the water, his canoe rounded the point and disappeared from sight.
Jess was up at the cottage counting sheets with Mamie. Every year, Mamie opened the cottage, putting fresh sheets on every bed in all the bedrooms. They rarely, if ever, expected visitors. Sometimes, a few of Cousin Edith’s daughters would come up from Texas for a week. But most of the time, it was just Mamie and Jess—Mamie downstairs in the master bedroom, and Jess upstairs. She always slept in the same room, the front bedroom with a dormer overlooking the lake on the side adjacent to the woods.
Jess knew that kids said the cottage was haunted; there was an old story about her great-aunt Lila, who had drowned in the lake, ages ago, way before Jess’s time. But Jess found the old cottage homey and familiar. She appreciated its rambling space since she lived in a city apartment for most of the year.
Mamie was holding a yellow legal pad on which she had written at the top, in her distinctive hand, Journey’s End Sheet Count. This, like everything else, was a yearly ritual. Every year they counted sheets, and any that were frayed were either mended or cut into rags. Mamie had always ordered the heavy cotton sheets from a special supplier in Savannah, until one year, the mill closed down. Mamie bought ten sheets and carefully laid them away, folded in crisp white tissue paper on the back of the top linen-closet shelf. Now, she would dole them out one by one as though parting with jewels. Mamie didn’t like change, in sheets or in life, as Jess saw it.
“Jess,” Mamie began, clearing her throat a bit, as if she had something important to say.
Jess looked up at her grandmother warily. They rarely talked to each other about personal matters.
“When a young woman gets to be your age . . . I know that sometimes she starts to think about young men.”
Mamie spoke with an old-fashioned soft Texas drawl. “Living all around as you do, with your mother . . . ”
“All around,” Jess thought, was not entirely fair. Her mother was a journalist. They lived in Paris now, before that London, and sometimes Milan. Other people, Jess had noticed, found their itinerant lifestyle interesting, even admirable. People seemed amazed that she could speak French and that she had visited so many far-off places. Not Mamie though, who seemed to see those cities, all of them, as indistinguishable, foreign parts.
“Well, I just want to remind you, Jess. At Wequetona, there are nice boys from families we know, families we’ve known since your great-grandmother Ada’s time.”
Mamie was folding pillowcases into crisp squares, matching up the hand-stitched embroidered hems just so.
“Look around while you’re here, Jess. I don’t want you meeting someone . . . uh . . . in a foreign country . . . Someone who might not . . . quite fit in . . . at the Club, you know.”
Jess smiled at Mamie in a way that she hoped was pleasant. Jess was used to her grandmother. She knew what Mamie thought, what she cared about. She was old, Jess thought, and as rigid as the stays in her corsets.
Jess’s mother, Margaret, could never take this kind of thing from her mother. “Mamie!” she would holler. “Just stay out of what you don’t understand, which is most things!”
But Jess took a more diplomatic
approach with her grandmother. “Well, Miss Mamie,” she said evenly, “I’ll try to bear that in mind.” Margaret could never accept how set in her ways Mamie was, but Jess admired Mamie in a certain way. Life with her mother had always been exciting and rootless, in equal parts grimy and glamorous. Mamie represented another way. She knew how she did things, the same way as her mother before her.
Jess picked up another of the oblong pillowcases, worn to a silky softness from years of use. All the sheets and pillowcases were identical, but some were more than seventy years old. A few had stamped black initials inside, LT and MT, ones that her grandmother and her great-aunt had used when they were girls. Jess loved the way these old ones felt between her fingers, so soft and worn, and yet the warp and weft of the fabric still maintaining its basic strength.
“I still remember, Jess, my dear daddy standing in the center of the living room downstairs. He pointed up around the balcony. ‘Look how many bedrooms,’ he said. ‘My grandchildren will come here. And their children too.’” She picked up another pillowcase, matched the corners smartly, and laid it on the bed, smoothing it with quick, sure strokes as she spoke. “You will marry well, my dear, and the cottage, someday, will go to you.” She considered her words.
“Not to your mother, Jess,” she said. “The way she lives . . . ”
Jess’s cheeks burned. She hated it when Mamie criticized her mother—could never think of the right way to respond. Most often, she said nothing. But this time, she was thinking about Mamie’s words. Why was Mamie so sure that Jess would “marry well”? It wasn’t exactly something that ran in the family, and what did it even mean?
Losing husbands and fathers seemed to be something that the women in her family specialized in. Her own father was a one-night stand, and Mamie’s husband hadn’t stuck around for long. Perhaps it was understandable, Jess thought, that she had little conception of the married state, nor any reason to think she’d be especially good at it.
“Well, who knows what will happen,” Jess said. “I may never get married. I’ll just have a career.”
Mamie peered straight at Jess, over the top of her glasses. “Young women have a lot more choices nowadays. This is a good thing. I just have one piece of advice for you, Jess. Figure out what matters, then hold on to it. That’s how you keep things together. By not letting go.”
Jess stared out the window of the upstairs bedroom toward the trees, a dense wall of green that blocked out the light. For a while, they continued their task in silence. Jess and Mamie each sat perched on either side of the bed, ankles crossed neatly, folding pillowcases in the same precise way, and then stacking them between them on the chenille bedspread. “Miss Mamie,” she said finally, “you know the other cottage down around the other side of the Tretheway woods out toward Loeb Point . . . Any idea who lives there?”
Mamie laid down the pillowcase she was folding and smoothed it several times before she answered. She prided herself on knowing all the goings-on around Pine Lake. Of course, nowadays, there were lots more condos and time-shares—people up from downstate—weekenders. Those people just didn’t count, didn’t mean anything, were basically invisible to the “real” summer people, ones like Mamie, who had spent a lifetime of summers along the piney shores.
“The Painter family,” Mamie said firmly with a hint of distaste. “Not our kind of people.”
Jess, in her mind’s eye, could see the boy in the red swim trunks paddling off toward the point in the red canoe.
CHAPTER FIVE
MAMIE
When I first visited Coventry Manor, three years ago, I was wearing my little mink jacket. It was a cool, bright Texas day. I had planned my first visit for January, when the weather is chilly, because I tend to think that there is no occasion that can’t be improved by dressing in mink.
At the time, I was in quite good condition, except for my palpitations, and had dressed with care for the visit. I wanted everyone to know that I, Mrs. Mamie Tretheway Cleves, had choices about how I would square things away.
The thick plate-glass front doors of Coventry Manor swoosh open as you walk through them. Inside, there are marble floors and various sitting rooms, furnished with Queen Anne–style mahogany chairs and stiff little velvet settees. I was going to move there before I needed to, before I became a burden to Margaret, when I could still install myself with pleasure into my new little home. Then, I knew how it went after that. At Coventry Manor, they would move you upward, closer and closer to the uniformed nurses and the motorized hospital beds. Up and up, closer and closer to heaven.
Margaret, bless her heart, came all the way from London to help me move in, but I was the one who arranged the furniture and placed the cutlery neatly into the sideboard drawers. I had only lived in an apartment once before in my life, and oh, the pleasure of it. Not more than five steps to anywhere. I reveled in all the clean, gleaming surfaces, and in the order; no more than needed and no less, yet still pretty and pleasing to the eye.
One of Margaret’s greatest failings, if I may say so, is in her housekeeping. That girl was positively piggish, right from the start, shoelaces untied, ribbons falling out of her hair, leaving her things in a tossed-off trail behind her, here a school paper, there a sock, and a few steps later, a shoe. It was just like that when she came to help me move into Coventry Manor. She sat on a sofa in the middle of the room, feet up leaving marks on the coffee table, saying to me in that ridiculous drawl of hers, “Now, Mother, you shouldn’t be straining yourself.”
I was grateful, though, to have an opportunity to talk to Margaret about the cottage.
“About Journey’s End,” I said to Margaret the second afternoon she was there. Margaret was sitting on my good green-brocade sofa, holding her cigarette so as to balance the long ash that was sticking out the end. I was anxiously eyeing the sofa, wondering if it would be ruined and whether my upholstery man was still in business or had already retired.
Margaret looked at me blankly, a look that I knew well, a look that she had perfected as a child. Margaret looked right at me, and she said, sweet as can be: “Journey’s End . . . What in the hell is that?”
It wasn’t her incessant cursing. I had long grown used to that. It was that implacable face, that innocent tone of voice . . .
The long ash on Margaret’s cigarette tumbled off, missing the green brocade, leaving a little soiled pile on the tufts of the cream-colored carpet. I picked up the sheaf of papers I had before me, my notes about Journey’s End written out in blue ink on a yellow legal pad.
“I own a piece of property in Michigan, as you know.” I read to her from my handwritten notes. “There are two separate matters. One is the cottage with its contents, and the other is the adjacent woods.”
Margaret continued to look at me without curiosity, as though I were describing a completely unfamiliar place, though she had spent every summer of her childhood there.
“Last month, I donated the woods to the Little Traverse Conservancy—a charitable organization that will preserve the woods in their natural state and protect some bird habitats. For now, I have retained the cottage and its contents.”
Margaret leaned over and stubbed out her cigarette.
“Upon my death, I have appointed the trustees of the Wequetona Club to act as executors.” I stopped for a moment, watching Margaret, wondering how she would react.
“I have chosen to let the cottage pass out of the family, Margaret. There are many worthy Wequetona families . . . ” Margaret didn’t look up. “The proceeds from the sale, of course, will go to you and Jess.”
“That’s fine, Mother. Just fine. Whatever you want to do . . . ” Margaret wasn’t even looking at me; she was picking some dirt out from underneath one of her fingernails. I never could understand that girl. I paid for her to go to the very best schools, and she always affected this lower-class drawl, and the most repulsive kind of personal hygiene you could i
magine.
“I’m afraid that’s all there is,” I said.
It was the last kernel of my daddy’s once-impressive fortune. I think I have lived in a way that was appropriate to a woman of my station. I can’t say I have ever had to scrimp on anything, and I was careful to set aside whatever might be needed for the future.
About Journey’s End, though, I confess a muddleheaded sentimentality. In the cottage above Pine Lake, I could always close my eyes, and there they would all be: Mama before her nerves set in, Lila smiling and skipping down the walk, even Daddy, tall and clear-eyed, cheeks flushed with success.
For the longest time, I thought I could hang on to that thread, imagined passing the cottage on to Jess, taking her through it step-by-step, teaching her the rhythm of the year. Open it in May: throw wide the windows and let in the light. Close it in late September: shut it up tight as the fall chill creeps into the air. At Wequetona, I see that other families have managed to do it, passing their cottages along from generation to generation, just as they pass their characteristic blue eyes or stooped posture or thin hair.
I’ve arranged it so that Jess and Margaret won’t have to return to Journey’s End in order to pack it up and sell it. The Club will handle the sale, and I know that they will see to it that the cottage goes to the right kind of people—another family that will doubtless go in and brighten up the inside with fresh paint and colored summer chintz. New people, new dreams, another try.
That first night, after Margaret left, I slept in my own bed in Coventry Manor, in my little white room, with only three pieces of my mahogany furniture: a bed, a dresser, and a vanity table. Two sketches of Pine Lake, one in rain, one in sun, hung on the pastel wall. Even with the TV on low, sitting in my bed, I could hear the hum of the elevator as it sped along its tracks, the electric ding that it made when it stopped at my floor to let passengers out.
I thought, Mamie, you’re a free woman again. I didn’t sleep much at all that first night, awakened less by the few buzzy and metallic sounds in the building than by the absence of the familiar creaks and groans of the old houses where I had spent my life. And when I needed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, I was shocked by the cool angularity of it: smooth, pale linoleum and sleek, unstained porcelain that had seen nothing of having lived a real life.