The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  3

  CHARLOTTE’S HOUSE

  Henry looked at her as if he thought she’d gone mad. Wellfleet? What was she thinking? How would they ever accomplish such a move? Where would the money come from? What would they do there? He couldn’t leave the Mirror. He’d lived in this apartment for thirty years!

  When Charlotte was standing in the front yard at the point, thinking how Fiona would climb up into the oak tree with its thick, low branches, it had all seemed clear, but now, back in the city, she couldn’t help agreeing with Henry that it was a foolish, crazy idea. His life, their life, was here. Tomorrow she’d trip uptown in some pair of insane heels, go through the weekend’s photos to see which star was carrying which handbag. . . . She’d have a drink with Natalie after work, the whole city glittering around them as she complained cozily about Henry and got the full and unrepeatable scoop on the police commissioner’s love life in return.

  “How would we ever get all these books down the stairs?” Henry asked, meaning to seal the question shut. And Charlotte’s heart rebelled as if it were throwing off a straitjacket. Were they going to spend their lives in a sixth- floor walk-up because they couldn’t figure out how to get some stuff down the stairs? She saw her father walking his postal route, wrapped up in the Red Sox so he wouldn’t be menaced by troubles that couldn’t be contained in Fenway Park. And her mother, so fragile she’d seemed almost grateful when death rescued her from the difficulty of living. New Hampshire, the stony fields, the fears turned to habits, then beliefs . . . the sense that whatever was beyond the border was unworthy of notice. New York was no less provincial!

  “We will throw the books out the window,” she said. Fiona, who had been coloring at the dinner table, laughed out loud to hear this, and ran to the window to see how they might fall. “Then we will sell a piece of the land, a building lot, and we can live on that money while we get our footing.”

  “How on earth would we accomplish that?”

  She seemed to feel the ground eroding beneath her, but swallowed and pushed on.

  “I don’t know, but I can look into it. We could sell the piece to the east, on the other side of the driveway—so we’d still own the point itself. It’s a beautiful piece of property; someone would be thrilled to have it.”

  “Very interesting, if true,” he said, lifting his newspaper. “The vote on a bill to combat global warming by raising emissions standards . . . rejected, fifty-five to forty-three. The Republican Congress signs our death warrant, with a flourish.”

  He spoke with dread and satisfaction both. The news might be awful, but it confirmed his basic sense of things. The planet was getting hotter and hotter, the ice caps were melting, the water was rising, the people in power did nothing to stem the tide. Despicable. Yet somehow it seemed that as the waves closed over the Empire State Building, Henry would not be grieving, but gloating. It would prove he’d been right all along.

  “. . . and we’d have that money in the bank,” she went on. “We’d fix up the house, insulate it and such. . . .”

  His eyes came up over the top of the paper, incredulous. Could she really be serious?

  “There’s a feeling in the air up there . . . a feeling of people making money in real estate,” she said. “Really. At the coffee shop, the people in line to buy doughnuts were talking about bidding wars.”

  His eyes bored into her, the way they did when she wrote something inexpressibly stupid. Who did she think she was, that she’d decided to take up real estate development? What next, brain surgery? She faltered—he was quite likely right. Then she looked around. She’d agreed with him when he thought she wasn’t good enough for the Mirror; she always agreed with him. She had wanted to agree, to keep safe with him, more than she wanted any job.

  “Well, I’ll just try it, one step at a time,” she said. Her wants had changed. She had to blaze a brave trail for Fiona, even if she was shaking every step of the way.

  She’d seen a law office on Main Street, with its name—Nittle, Speck, and Godwin—lettered in a gold arc on the front window. It looked straight out of the fifties, when trustworthiness had been in fashion. Nittle wasn’t taking new clients, and Speck had passed away long since, but Skip Godwin, the new partner, would be happy to help her. Yes, the land could be subdivided; in fact, the east side would split off quite simply. “You’ll never miss it,” Godwin said. There were maps to be drawn, papers to be filed, the zoning board would have to be appeased, a well dug, electricity brought down from the pole. Every time she made a phone call, her heart slammed—she’d be unmasked as an imposter, a child in dress-up clothes—but she inched forward; she had to. It was one of those feats such as happen in wartime, when you, who mostly loved a bubble bath and a silly novel, found you could carry your whole family fifty miles on your back. One day, the job was done. They put the lot on the market, and sold it just about instantly, for a hundred thousand dollars over the asking price. She resigned from her job. She bought a new car: a Volvo station wagon.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table filling out the post office forwarding form when she became aware that Henry was standing at a respectful distance, his hands folded, waiting patiently for her attention.

  “May I come with you?” he asked.

  “May . . . ?” He must be the only man on earth who would politely ask his wife if he might live with her, in the house he’d just inherited. She looked up at him—his ferociousness had melted away; he seemed nearly abject.

  “It’s your house, remember?”

  “Not anymore,” he said, an escape artist who’s slipped his chains and holds his palms up to show how easy it all was. Charlotte had done the work; thus the house was hers. He was relieved to be rid of it. In fact, the place suddenly became beguiling to him, freed of its WASP taint, the sound of his mother’s lockjawed voice, explaining again that Miles Standish’s daughter had married John Alden’s son, “and that’s the trunk of the family tree.” Wisps returned to him, like fog off the bay: the view through the beach grass to the water; the eternity of a child’s summer morning. He took a year’s leave from the Mirror—he would still write reviews and the major obituaries, but now he could concentrate on his book. In Wellfleet there was a real office—the same low basement room he’d retreated to during the summer vacations, reading furiously, ignoring the catboat his parents had bought him so he could follow the Tradescome seafaring tradition.

  “Of course you can come with us,” Charlotte said. Leaning toward her with both hands on the table, his right elbow coming through the hole in his sweater, he looked into her face openly as he hadn’t done in years, and she caught a wistful flicker, as if someone were waving to her from an impossible distance away.

  They moved in just after Fiona’s fourth birthday, a cold April day. Henry was driving, hands clenched tight exactly at ten and two on the wheel. He never saw an automobile without picturing a twisted wreck. Approaching a green light, he would stamp on the brake with the certain knowledge it was about to turn red. On the highway he crept along, swerving occasionally at a premonition of the inevitable catastrophe. It wouldn’t do to have Charlotte at the helm in such a dangerous situation. The cherry trees were blooming in the city, the forsythia in New Haven, but past Providence the red-budded branches were the only hint of spring, and when they reached the Cape Cod Canal they saw the Sagamore Bridge arching up into a fog dark as smoke, the cars ahead of them seeming to disappear into oblivion one by one—just past a billboard that read, DESPERATE? in enormous letters, giving a phone number for the desperate to call.

  “Flowers!” Fiona cried, reaching her plump little arm toward a bunch of daffodils affixed with pink ribbon to the bridge railing. Someone must have jumped there.

  “Aren’t they pretty?” Charlotte said, glancing across at Henry.

  “ ‘All the instruments agree,’ ” he said grimly, quoting Auden, a line that finished: “The day of his death was a dark, cold day.” Good cheer had not been held in high regard among the Tradescom
es; it suggested a superficial turn of mind, which would lead to an unpleasant afterlife. Henry rejected any notion of an afterlife, of course, but gloom was his family tradition.

  “I think it’s supposed to clear up, late afternoon,” Charlotte tried, but he shook his head.

  “Weather doesn’t improve over the course of a day,” he said. “It can cloud over, but you’ll almost never see—”

  “Henry? Are you serious? You’ve been looking north over Houston Street way too long.”

  She laughed; he brooded. “It’s like this out here more often than not,” he insisted.

  “You didn’t have to come,” Charlotte said. “No one twisted your arm.”

  “No,” he echoed. “No one twisted my arm.”

  Fiona was telling her bear a little story in the backseat. After Hyannis they were nearly alone on the road, the Volvo excruciatingly shiny compared to the old pickups they passed. Mile after mile, they drove through fog so dense Charlotte lost her bearings and was grateful to see a water tower rear up above them, proof they were still on earth. She could see on the map that their course was a spiral—the cape pushed forty miles into the sea and then began recurving toward the mainland, narrowing all the time. The highway ran down the middle, between two forested banks, no sign of water. Henry looked ashen, muttering between his teeth.

  “What?” Charlotte asked, but he shook his head.

  “That I spend my life . . . like this . . .”

  “Driving with your family to your new home on Cape Cod?” But this was disingenuous—she knew it counted to him as defeat. He’d intended to write twenty books; instead his spirit had flagged after the one. So the newspaper would be his legacy, the record of his uncompromising, eagle-eyed view over the neighborhood, the city, the world. Meanwhile, the neighborhood, the city, and the world had changed in directions he couldn’t have dreamed—the last survey had shown that readers of the East Village Mirror turned first to the restaurant reviews.

  Rounding the rotary in Orleans, they found themselves in a ghost civilization—shuttered clam shacks and cottages, a parking lot full of shrink-wrapped boats, minigolf courses with their miniwindmills forlornly turning. They passed a little church with gothic-shaped boards over its windows and a sign that read, JESUS LOVES YOU. SEE YOU IN MAY. Charlotte had been singing “Old MacDonald” for the better part of an hour, but Fiona was losing interest, and suddenly she undid her car seat safety belt and lunged forward between the seats into her mother’s lap.

  “No, honey, it’s not safe.” Charlotte reached back to buckle it again but couldn’t manage it at that angle, and Fiona, whose rosy cheeks and soft blond halo could make her look like an angel, showed a devil’s determination as she launched herself forward again.

  “Stop it!” Henry grabbed her wrist with his left hand, the bad one, gritting his teeth as if he were willing it to be strong enough to hurt her.

  “Mama! Mamaaaa!”

  “Henry, what are you doing?” Charlotte screamed, pulling Fiona by the waist into her lap, and grabbing the steering wheel, because the car had swerved into the other lane.

  “She’ll kill us all,” Henry said, pulling off the road.

  “She’ll kill us? You’ll kill us!” Charlotte said. Fiona was shrieking, in fear, and hurt, and outrage. “If there’d been another car? That’d be it; we’d be dead.”

  But there wasn’t, not one. They were all alone out here.

  “Daddy didn’t mean to hurt you, honey,” she said, controlling the damage, holding Fiona tight, rocking her back and forth as she waited for Henry to explain further, that he was afraid for her safety, had lost control of himself. When nothing came, Fiona’s little body melted into tears. “Henry, can you tell Fiona you’re sorry?”

  Fiona gave a ragged sob and looked up timidly at her father.

  “I didn’t hurt her,” he said. “She has to learn to stay in that car seat. It wasn’t even my good hand.”

  “The expression on your face was plenty.”

  “It wouldn’t matter what I did; you’d make a federal case out of it.”

  “If you touch her in anger again . . .”

  Henry’s face was set. He was furious now; he’d be penitent later. He wasn’t going to hurt anyone physically. The damage he might do to his daughter’s heart . . . well, Charlotte would have to figure it out, make it okay somehow.

  “Here, I’ll come sit next to you, how about that?” She went around and got in the backseat beside Fiona, who was puzzling, trying to understand what had happened. Henry turned back onto the road.

  “Entering Wellfleet!” Charlotte said, reading the sign out cheerfully, hoping to steer them back into the light. “Look, here we are!” There it was, the boat meadow—scruffy as a lion’s coat now, thick in some places and worn nearly bare in others, all shades of dull gold. The channel had cut itself so deeply, all the layers of earth were visible; now there were only a few inches of water trickling out.

  “Here’s where we turn,” she said, seeing the SixMart’s lit GAS sign. Then: MERMAID TAVERN, in neon as they turned past the roadhouse down Point Road. “There you are, Henry. It’s your dream come true.” She couldn’t make herself sound warm, but she was managing to sound less angry. Everyone has some grounding force, something that feels right and familiar. For Henry it was gloom. For Charlotte it was forgiveness. When she forgave she felt she was doing right, and this steadied and calmed her.

  “Finally,” Henry said, taking the chance to cover the breach. “Somebody did the obvious thing. ‘Souls of poets dead and gone / What Elysium have ye known / Happy field or mossy cavern / Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?’ ”

  Keats, not that Charlotte would have known this if it weren’t for Henry. His dream of elbowing in between Shakespeare and John Donne in some eternal tavern—if she could have gotten it for him she would, the same as she’d find a way for Fiona to live in her storybooks.

  “See,” she said. “A good omen.”

  “Omens,” he said, shaking his head. Evil portents counted as realities, good ones as superstitions.

  Two mud-splattered trucks passed them on the road, and as they came over the little bridge they saw more trucks parked on the mudflats, men in waders pulling heavy rakes through the sand, the tide streaming out in silver rivulets around them.

  “Raking clams,” Henry said. “The tide goes out half a mile at the new moon.”

  Charlotte had seen what she’d thought was low tide the day she came up for the zoning board meeting. It hadn’t looked anything like this—the bay was nearly empty now, exposing a whole landscape of seaweed beds and shoals. The oyster racks were lined up in squares of nine or twelve, like rusty bed frames in a dormitory. Each square was someone’s farm and the trucks were parked between them.

  “Look!” Charlotte said. A heron took flight with three huge flaps, its prehistoric silhouette rising over the marsh and the men. Hope rose with it. Things could change; this place could change them.

  The shutters were off the house, and this, along with the few daffodils blooming by the side door, softened the look of the place so it seemed welcoming in its own grim way. Wind as much as water had made this landscape: The tall grass was brushed neatly west to east, and the oak tree had grown so slowly against the wind that it split into branches only a few feet from the ground.

  Henry got out of the car and stretched, pulling one knee and then the other up to his chest like a flamingo. “It’s nice here,” he said, seeming surprised.

  “I told you it would be,” she said, lifting Fiona out of the car seat, settling her on her hip. Fiona could hardly bring herself to look up for fear of coming face-to-face with her father. He went over and picked one of the daffodils.

  “This is for you,” he said, offering the olive branch, but there was no warmth in his voice, and Fiona shook her head against Charlotte’s shoulder.

  “Look me in the eye, please,” he said—commanded. Even he looked disappointed to have lost the thread of the apology.


  “Fiona, I think Daddy’s saying he’s sorry he hurt you before. Can you say thank-you?”

  “No! No!” Fiona kicked both feet, wild with fury. She tore the head off the flower and threw it, and Henry shot Charlotte a victorious glance—did she see what a monster she was raising?

  “Fiona! Calm down! What’s wrong?”

  “Can’t take that flower,” she said. “He’ll know I love him!”

  And what could anyone say to that? Anyway, now they had something beautiful to look at during their wretched silences. From here they saw the bay from an entirely new angle, the estuary snaking out from the east, opening toward the sea. Some of the trucks they’d seen on the tide flats were right out in front of their house. The men moved quickly—carrying heavy sacks back and forth between racks as the tide licked up around the edges of the shoals.

  “This is really our house?” Fiona asked suddenly. She always recovered first. Everything Charlotte and Henry said to each other echoed down through years of efforts and angers and hopes and disappointments. Like a corridor, where one door after another has been slammed shut. “And that’s our tree?”

  “I planted that tree,” Henry said. “My father and I did, when I was about your age. So it must be . . . fifty-eight years old.”

  That he would admit he had once been Fiona’s age—it was a truer peace offering than the daffodil. Charlotte felt Fiona relax, felt her spirit come back, and suddenly she was scrambling down and running at the tree, trying to climb it by throwing her arms around its trunk, as if she expected it to reach down and pick her up.