The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “That’s a good start.” Charlotte laughed, running to lift her up onto the branch.

  “Look! Look at me! I climbed the tree!” Fiona cried.

  Henry darkened. “No . . .” he began, but Charlotte could talk louder than he could.

  “You’ve made a great beginning!” she said. “You’ll be climbing it yourself in no time.”

  “What will become of her if you praise her for no reason?”

  Charlotte set Fiona back on the ground. “Run over, honey, and count the daffodils so I know how many there are, okay?” Then, to Henry: “If we’re angry and critical, she’ll become angry and critical. If we see the best in her, she’ll learn to see the best. If we believe she’ll succeed, she’ll have the strength to try.”

  The great critic looked startled, as if he had never heard of such a thing, and rubbed his temples, maybe trying to push the idea into his mind.

  The sky over the horizon was thick layers of gray, as if torn from blotting paper, and now the sun burst out beneath so that an intense gold light blazed between dark clouds and dark water. Even the oyster farmers stood to see it. Whatever was wrong—and nearly everything seemed wrong—they were here, on their own piece of ground. From this tree Fiona would look out to see the world change day by day, year by year, and no matter how far she traveled, in her dreams she would be walking back down Point Road on a summer evening, toward that place of absolute comfort and absolute mystery: her home.

  “Seven! Seven daffodils!” Fiona said, running back to give this news—she’d done her job.

  “Good counting! Look how beautiful the sunset is.” Charlotte might already have seen half the sunsets she was entitled to—she hated to miss a single one—but for Fiona there were infinite beauties ahead, and she paid no attention. It would be years before the sight of a heron angling up from some marsh would flood her with memories: of her father so alone and upright and unable to yield; of her mother with shoulders squared and hair tangled in the wind, her eyes fixed on the opposite shore.

  4

  WASHED ASHORE

  The key wouldn’t turn until she remembered how the caretaker had done it, lifting the door by the knob. They walked into the kitchen—and another century. The evening light streamed in through the wavery old windowpanes, past curtains printed with potted geraniums, over a saltcellar in the shape of a hen on her nest. A spring of grief opened in the back of Charlotte’s throat and she pressed her knuckles to her mouth for a second: Her mother would have loved it here. Henry stepped in gingerly behind her, tapping his toe on one board, then another, then bouncing with all his weight as if he expected to go through the floor. “Seems safe enough,” he said, giving up on the floors and rapping on the walls.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “It’s a hundred years old.”

  “It’s probably more solid for that,” she said. “They built things to last back then.”

  “My grandfather salvaged the floorboards from a shipwreck,” he said, going through into the parlor. “Some of the boards upstairs came from the old salt mill; they repel water—he couldn’t paint them. Half the stuff in here he brought back from one port or another.” He put the cat carrier down on the rug and Bunbury stepped out, giving them a malevolent squint before he set off on a sniffing tour of the room. Time seemed to have stopped here, maybe when Henry’s grandfather had died, so that along with the shelves full of leather-bound books (Dickens, Trollope, The Life of Sir Walter Scott in ten volumes), the paintings (Women Waiting on the Pier, Genoa, 1865), the things (a brass gong, a collection of jade and ebony elephants marching along the mantelpiece), the sense of another era remained. Charlotte shivered with it, the idea of a man who had read the life of Sir Walter Scott, all ten volumes, in his chair beside the bay window, who had walked through the port of Shanghai in a time when no culture was diluted yet by any other and distant places were still unimaginably strange.

  There was an antique music box—sandalwood, inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. Henry read from a scrap of paper attached: “ ‘Eighteen seventy-seven . . . dragonfly hammers’? Can you read this?”

  Charlotte held the scrap up to the light. It was a corner torn from a newspaper page: the Wellfleet Oracle, June 17, 1972. So, when Henry’s mother scrawled this note in her lax, loopy script, trying to keep something of the past vivid for her son, Charlotte had been eleven years old. It didn’t seem long ago at all, but the paper was brittle and yellowed, as if it had come down from an ancient time.

  “Yup, that’s what it says, all right. ‘Dragonfly hammers.’ ”

  Henry sighed. “Mother was so . . .” But as he searched for the right word, Charlotte lifted the lid, to see the brass hammers fashioned as bees and dragonflies, and bells like the skirts of dancing ladies.

  “Loot,” Henry said, looking away in distaste. “From the colonies. Very quaint. Quaint was my mother’s word for everything.”

  “Nobody got to go to China back then, except on a sailing ship,” Charlotte said. She felt a great community with anyone Henry criticized. “I envy your grandfather. Can you imagine what it would have been like to sail to someplace so very different, a place you’d never even seen in a picture before?”

  “Don’t make a romance out of it. They were the truck drivers of their time.”

  Above the bookshelves hung a pale, shimmering watercolor of Isaiah Tradescome’s last clipper ship, Kingfisher, painted with sails billowing, quayside in Brindisi. In the stairwell a black- and-white photograph of the same ship showed it too tall for its width, ungainly and alone on a sea of towering waves. A haunted life Isaiah must have lived beneath that mast, with no family, not even a tree to tell the seasons by. The bay out their window must have seemed like a saucer of milk to him.

  “Think, a little girl like you would have carried a candle up these stairs to bed,” Charlotte told Fiona, who was scrambling up the staircase on all fours. The cobwebs they’d run into six months ago were gone—someone had cleared them away, in addition to getting the water running and the shutters down. Fiona raced along the narrow hallway, throwing the doors open to inspect each room as if she expected to find real lives happening in them, travelers opening their steamer trunks to set out bathing dresses for the next day. Two bedrooms faced south on the bay; the third, on the north side, had a window seat built into the gable. The mattresses on the iron bedsteads sagged almost to the floor. The wallpaper, stained and peeling, showed full-blown peonies and roses in the big room, sprigs of violet and forget-me-not in the others. You could imagine a woman’s delicate hand drawing the curtain back to look across the bay to Try Point, where there’d been a tryworks back in whaling days—a huge kettle, really, in which blubber was boiled down for oil.

  “It’s like they’re still here,” Charlotte said, nearly whispering so as not to break the spell. There was a washstand in each room, with a pitcher and basin, though a little bathroom had been fitted in at the end of the hall. The tub was against the back wall so you could look out the window while you were washing and see the whitecaps at the end of the point. Only one red band of sunset was left burning at the horizon, and against the dark water she could see the green light of the channel marker slowly blinking.

  “Mom!” Fiona said. She’d found a door no taller than she was, and pulled it open. A linen closet stuffed with the thickest sheets, and towels with . . . Henry’s monogram? Charlotte laughed out loud. The house was like a secret he’d been keeping all those years under the bare bulb on Sullivan Street—a whole life that he’d disavowed. Some women discovered their husbands were escaped prisoners; Henry was an escaped patrician. Fiona saw the edge of something pink and pulled out a bunch of hankies, each embroidered with a different flower. They’d been wrapped around a little bottle of lilac water.

  “Daddy, Daddy!” Fiona ran back down the stairs to tell him all they’d found. Charlotte came behind her to find her talking a mile a minute, with Henry seeming to brace himself against the mantelpiece, beside a portrait of a
woman with his own piercing gaze, her chin outthrust and lower lip tightly gathered as if she were about to smack someone with a wooden spoon, and for a very good reason, too.

  “What is that?” Charlotte asked. “I mean, who is that?”

  The corners of Henry’s mouth turned up happily. “That’s my great-aunt Vestina, the temperance crusader.”

  “If I looked like that I wouldn’t have my portrait painted.”

  “If you looked like that you’d think beauty was a sin.”

  “Well, she’s coming down.” Charlotte took the frame by its corners and lifted it away from the wall, pulling apart a spider’s sac that was spun behind. . . . Hundreds of frantic little spiders poured out, scrambling crazily in every direction.

  She shrieked and dropped the painting, whose thick gold frame smashed into pieces. Charlotte had always been careful to keep calm around spiders, so Fiona wouldn’t catch her horror, and now of course Fiona started screaming—nothing was more frightening than seeing her mother afraid. Henry took off his shoe and smacked at them with it, without killing more than a few.

  “Might as well try to sweep all the sand off the beach,” he said, with a spectral chuckle. “This place is going to take a lot of work.” He sounded as dire as when he talked about getting out of Iraq, and Fiona clung to Charlotte’s leg.

  “We will manage it,” Charlotte said firmly, because Fiona had to see this.

  “That’s clear,” Henry said dryly. Charlotte could fix a run with nail polish, and had once triumphantly unscrewed the drain cover in their apartment shower, fishing up a sludgy mess of hair, but this was the extent of her mechanical skill. He went into the kitchen and came back with a broom and a tin dustpan that must have been exactly where he saw them last, years ago. He picked Vestina up by the top of her frame, the one place where the canvas was still attached.

  “Here, Mother labeled it,” he said. “ ‘Vestina Beasley, 1873 . . . painted by . . .’ I can’t read it.” Every object in the house seemed to have a scrap of paper attached, with a date scrawled on it, and something else as inscrutable as dragonfly hammers—the name of the uncle who had left it to her, maybe, or the ship it had come back on. Everything in the house, everything Henry reviled, had been part of a story his mother was trying to pass on to him.

  “A bibleface, that was the term, I believe,” he said.

  Charlotte shuddered, at the spiders and Vestina both. “Put it out on the porch,” she said. “We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

  “With pleasure. Believe me, it’s just lucky I never took a baseball bat to this stuff,” he said, waving toward a corner china cabinet filled with porcelain teacups. Everything that made him: upright Protestant arrogance and the rage at upright Protestant arrogance, wealth and disgust at wealth, polio, loneliness, a longing so fully stifled that it had finally barricaded its own door—all of it was right here in this house; you could breathe it in with the mildew and the faint stink of mouse.

  Charlotte sat on the edge of the sofa, which seemed to have absorbed years of cold.

  “Where’s the thermostat?” she asked.

  “The heat’s on,” he said, touching the radiator. He pressed his hand against the wall. “I don’t suppose you can make it any warmer.”

  “Oh, Henry.” When Henry was cold it meant the world must be turning to ice. A heat wave was another sign that they were hurtling toward the sun. He’d never attended to science at school; it had interfered with his reading. A thermostat was no more use than a sextant against his general sense that things were getting worse by the day.

  “I suppose they put it on low when they opened up the house,” she said. “Just to keep the chill off. Here’s the thermostat, behind the door. See, it’s set at fifty. I’ll turn it up.”

  He acceded to this with a shrug, indulging her in her superstition.

  Headlights swept through the room—one after another, the trucks were coming up from the beach through their driveway. Charlotte went to turn on the lamp, but the bulb was out. Of course, it had been years since there was a light in this house. As she tried the switch in the kitchen a mouse poked its head up out of the stove burner and gave her an imperious stare. It was used to being master here. Bunbury leaped through the door and onto the stove in one motion, and the mouse dived to safety behind the refrigerator, leaving Bunbury crouched on the counter, teeth chattering in spasms at the lost opportunity.

  Even the refrigerator bulb was out. It was cold—but empty. Charlotte had packed so carefully, making sure they had enough of everything they would need till the moving van arrived . . . except lightbulbs and food.

  “Can we call Lotus Flower?” Fiona asked. Lotus Flower was the Chinese restaurant down the street in New York.

  “No Lotus Flower here, honey.”

  “Mommy, no!”

  “Let’s go back to that little gas station and see what we can find.”

  Henry looked so bleak at this prospect, she expected him to bring up the Donner party.

  “I will forgo that opportunity,” he said, but Fiona couldn’t get into her coat fast enough, proudly pushing its big round buttons through the holes—her newest skill. For the moment, the SixMart was as alluring as the Taj Mahal.

  Outside, they realized it wasn’t dark at all yet: The sky was a vivid lavender that shed mystery over everything, and there was a sharp, astringent breeze off the water.

  “Blustery!” Charlotte said.

  Fiona ran into the wind with her arms out. “Everything’s blustery here!” she said, twirling.

  “That is exactly the word,” Charlotte said. Awake, aware, alive in the wind. Even the barren front of the Mermaid looked seductive as they drove by, the neon Budweiser sign glowing in the one window. There were secrets to be discovered there, and Charlotte wanted to know them. The truck that had just driven past the house was parked at the SixMart, among others with mud-caked tires, and inside, the men who’d just come off the flats were standing around the coffee machine, big, restless guys like a team of oxen.

  “You’re going to lose flow that way, if you cram too many in a bag,” one was saying, in a voice that would have carried easily across the windy flats, and another answered that he’d kept his numbers way down last season and felt they’d grown appreciably faster.

  “It’s your spot,” a third said. Charlotte could feel them respond to her, the slightest change of voice, of stance, in recognition of a woman, an outsider. She was conscious of Fiona’s coat suddenly—it had come from the chic baby store on Sullivan Street and it seemed to scream that they were precious city people who didn’t belong here. “You get better tides for working but it can stagnate; there’s not the volume of water passing through. . . . Darryl and Tim have the creek washin’ nutrients day and night through their herds.”

  “And toxins,” said one, glancing over at her.

  “Darryl, right?” she said.

  “That’s me.” The men were all broad shouldered from work, and dressed alike, in rubber boots and heavy sweatshirts from the same lumber company, but he stepped apart from the others with the same suddenness she’d seen that first day, quick movements and thoughts flashing over his face.

  Then he hesitated. “You’re Charlotte,” he said gravely, wiping his hand on his coat before extending it to her. It was so thick with muscle and hard with callus, she felt she ought to take it in both of hers.

  “I am.”

  He glanced over her shoulder and, seeing the others absorbed in their talk, took a step back, behind the postcard rack.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’ve wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” He’d spoken so earnestly she expected some terrible secret.

  “You know. . . .” He looked into her face with a frank, open gaze, as if he wanted to be sure she could read his thoughts. “For the way I was when you were here last fall.”

  “Oh, I’d forgotten. . . .” At least, she’d meant to forget; she was sure most people would have brushed it off, but his unfriendline
ss had stuck with her, a sort of warning: Keep away; we don’t want you here. She’d just put him on the list of people whose sharp edges she had to watch out for. It was a long list; one more name hardly mattered.

  “No, I regretted it as soon as I left. I just . . . jumped to conclusions about you, and it wasn’t fair. I’ve been watching over that house as long as I’ve been back, and it’s kind of an attractive nuisance; people think it’s abandoned. There’re so many tourists and it’s amazing what they’ll do sometimes. People broke in one summer—not kids, or homeless people, some guy in a Land Rover and his wife. They jimmied the lock so they could ‘look around.’ They acted like they owned the place too.”

  “You were looking out for my interests. . . . It’s human nature to be . . . proprietary like that.”

  He smiled, with rue. “Yeah, human nature, I know it well. It’ll be nice to have real people living in the house, after all this time.”

  “I don’t know if we quite count as real people—we’re pretty much tourists ourselves.”

  “Nah, you’re washashores now.”

  “What?”

  “Washashores! Tourists come and go, but you washed up on the beach, right at our feet. Like stranded whales, either we’ve gotta push you back out to sea or you’re here for the duration.”

  “What a lovely image,” Charlotte said, and he smiled so widely at this that she did too.

  “Everything okay in the house? I tried to clear some of the dust out and such.”

  “It’s amazing,” she said. “It must have been quite a job.”

  “Couple hours,” he said. “Nothing, really.” Then, bending down to speak to Fiona—“How do you like your new house?”

  Charlotte gathered Fiona up onto her hip so she’d be at eye level, but she was too shy and ducked her head into her mother’s shoulder. Darryl waited, a smile playing, until she gave in and peeked up at him.

  “I climbed the tree,” she said, and hid her face again.

  “You did? All by yourself?”