The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  She nodded vigorously against Charlotte’s shoulder.

  “She’s a little shy,” Charlotte explained.

  “But a good climber.”

  Fiona looked up with perplexed delight. “Mo-o-om,” she said. “He’s a nice man.”

  “He is,” Charlotte said, feeling shy herself. “I didn’t think to bring lightbulbs with me,” she explained. “Or dinner.”

  “I should have checked the bulbs,” he said. In fact, they were on the shelf right behind him, beside paper towels and other sundries. To get them she would have to reach past him.

  “You did more than enough,” she said.

  He smiled and shrugged, but otherwise didn’t move.

  “Do you . . . Could I . . . Um, the lightbulbs are behind you, I think. . . .”

  “Oh, oh, sorry. Sixty-watt okay?” It was strange to see something as fragile as a package of lightbulbs held delicately in that huge hand.

  “Are there any hundreds?” Henry liked one-fifty if possible.

  He looked, and shook his head. “You might have to go to Orleans for that.”

  A small, rabbitlike old man came around from the back of the store, wearing a satin-lined cloak and carrying two bottles of red wine.

  “Orson,” Darryl said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “And yet,” Orson replied, in a surprisingly deep, resonant voice, “I can always sense your presence. I’m going up to Provincetown to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; would you care to join me?”

  Darryl’s smile was fond, forbearing. “I have to build gear tonight,” he said. “But have fun.”

  “Fun? I expect I shall be eviscerated,” he said, counting out exact change for the wine. “As Williams intended. Oh, hello!” he said, seeing Charlotte. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.” He extended a soft, white hand.

  “I’m Charlotte Tradescome.”

  “Of Tradescome Point?”

  She nodded, then felt as if she weren’t quite being truthful. “My husband is a Tradescome. It’s my married name.”

  “Henry Tradescome?”

  “Yes,” she said, surprised. “Did you know him when he lived here?”

  “I know his work. A fine sensibility he has. A pure flame of rage.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m Orson DesRoches; please give him my regards. Oh, there’s my cab. I must away. . . .”

  An old green Mercedes was idling outside, and Orson hastened out, gathering his cape around him, and slid into the backseat.

  “ ‘I must away . . .’?” Charlotte asked.

  “He has a dramatic streak.”

  “So I see.”

  That was all. Charlotte got a can of chicken noodle soup and a can of beets, vinegar for the beets, milk with a good date, the lightbulbs, soap, and a package of little cereal boxes that made Fiona gasp with joy. Some Rolling Rock, and the Cape Cod Times, whose headline read, “Global Cod Catch Declines Again.” Darryl gave a low wave as he went out, and she waited behind one of the other guys, who had bought ten lottery tickets and was scratching them off, to the cashier’s apparent fascination. He won five dollars and bought five more tickets. One of these yielded ten dollars, which instantly translated into ten tickets.

  “Excuse me?” Charlotte said, fearful he’d win the big thousand-dollar payoff and she’d never get home. The cashier, a weathered, sinewy woman with a long braid down her back, sighed as if Charlotte’s outrageous demands would kill her, and held her twenty up to the light in case it was counterfeit. Seeing it wasn’t, she completed the sale and turned back to the lottery scratcher.

  “Do you have a bag?”

  The cashier’s shoulders slumped, as if this were the kind of unreasonable demand she might have expected from such a person as Charlotte, but she pulled out a paper bag, dumped the purchases into it, pushed it across the counter.

  “Anything?” the clerk asked the lottery scratcher. Her point was clear enough: Charlotte was wearing a pair of loose-fitting, dull red corduroys and a striped shirt, and driving a new Volvo station wagon with New York plates. And the coat on the little girl—to spend like that on something that would be outgrown before the next winter! No, Charlotte was here because she could afford to be here. The clerk was here because she couldn’t afford to leave. Charlotte wouldn’t be getting one thing from her, not so much as a paper bag or a smile.

  5

  RICH

  The cashier had been right: They had become rich. And almost without blinking an eye. By selling a single acre of land on the point, they had made enough to live on for years.

  They closed on the lot in May, not long after they moved into the house. The town’s pulse had quickened; the boards came off the windows on the Lemon Pie Cottages along Route 6A, and yellow shutters went up. Hammers rang and saws whined from morning till night, and the smell of fresh paint filled the cold air, but the sun that bred lilacs on the mainland produced only fog in Wellfleet; if that fog thinned and turned gold in the late afternoon, you had to count it as a nice day. Charlotte and Henry stood before their furnace, a wheezing behemoth, in prayerful ignorance, with Fiona crying at the top of the stairs for fear it would eat them. How did one gain its favor? Charlotte put on another sweater; she would not admit Henry had been right about the heat.

  Forty miles up the cape, where the land was wider and the water’s influence weaker, the lilacs bent in lush, wet bloom outside the Registry of Deeds. The buyer was a man named Jeb Narville, who’d made millions “in asphalt,” however one did that. Somehow Charlotte knew it was him standing on the lawn beside the flagpole, a short, powerfully built man whose red face was crushed in around an avid, avaricious squint. She’d bumped up against such a person once before—the salesman who sold her the Volvo. She had bought the car just to get away.

  “Mr. Narville?”

  “Are you the seller or the attorney?” he asked, looking her up and down in a way that reminded her of every single flaw she had. She hadn’t dyed her hair since they got to Wellfleet, so there were two inches of mouse brown roots before the mahogany color she’d thought so Brontë-esque, and she was wearing a flowered dress that had looked girlish and sweet on its hanger. But she was no longer a girl, and the uncertainty, the yearning on her face had become embarrassing: She ought to have figured things out by now.

  “The seller,” she apologized, and saw all interest leave Narville’s eyes. “Your new neighbors,” she added, extending her hand, smiling. Her smile showed the best things about her—her general tenderness and curiosity, her true concern. It made her beautiful and persuasive, and she relied on this without really understanding it. Jeb Narville did not attend to smiles, though—he kept his eye on the bottom line.

  “The attorney will be here in a minute,” Charlotte offered quickly, wanting, as always, to please. Henry was hovering behind her, here to sign his name but doing his best to stay invisible. He might have been mistaken for her servant. A bumblebee was flying low around them, trying out the clover blossoms in the grass, but every flower the fat thing settled on bent to the ground under its weight.

  “Here’s Skip now,” Charlotte said. He was coming up from the parking lot and, seeing him, Narville relaxed, reassured by his stride, or his grooming—his hair was blown dry, his fingernails neat, his wingtips newly shined. The bumblebee had found itself a sturdy clover top just in front of them, and without thinking Narville ground the life out of it with his toe.

  “Let’s roll,” he said, invigorated. They started up the marble steps, Skip pulling the registry door open and ushering them grandly through the metal detector. For the next half hour they bent over their papers, signing and signing, no one looking anyone in the eye. Then Jeb said he had a plane to catch.

  “You’re not going up to Wellfleet?”

  “Gotta get back to work,” he said. “A lost hour is a lost opportunity. Speaking of which, Skip, let me ask you something. . . .”

  They were out the door before Charlotte could say good-bye. It felt w
rong, but then all business felt cold and dissonant to her. The cop at the metal detector directed her to the ladies’ room, where she sat with head in hands until her nausea passed, repeating to herself: “We’re millionaires, we’re millionaires.” It had to be a good thing.

  All the way home, Henry glowered until she saw his resemblance to Great-aunt Vestina. “We’ll put it in the bank, obviously,” he said.

  “Oh, I’d been thinking of building a gold fairy castle for Fiona. And a replica of the Trevi Fountain to replace the old well.” He was the most dour and forbidding man on earth, and the only one she dared contradict. “Actually, apart from fixing up the bathroom, and maybe getting some mattresses that are younger than I am, I was thinking we ought to invest it.”

  “Now you’re an authority on the stock market?” he asked.

  “No, I’m going to try to find one.”

  “Where would you begin to look?”

  Natalie’s brother suggested a place in Boston, where men pallid as mushrooms dog-eared folders in a back room, while in the front a person named Richmond Chase—“Call me Rich,” he said without irony—took them out to a lunch of Belon oysters and seared tuna, showing them different pie charts and talking in a voice of plummy self-assurance about the outlook for Standard & Poor’s. Charlotte, hearing the words wealth and investment over and over like this, remembered her parents sitting at the kitchen table, drinking wine and dreaming about what things would be like when they got out of debt. They’d had a few happy evenings that way. Henry looked claustrophobic, locked in a bank vault with his parents’ money and no reading lamp. Rich, sensing their anxiousness, tried an analogy.

  “It’s a bit like raising a sail,” he said. “You leave your sheets loose, or they’d fill before you were steady on your course. We want to take you in easy. . . .” The room was too hot. Words like luff, leech, and boom drifted past, shifting form like clouds. Charlotte looked at her watch: They’d left Fiona with Skip Godwin’s wife, as the Godwins had a daughter about the same age. It was hard to be away from her, almost physically hard—she’d need something, she’d look for her mother, she was too young to understand time, and she’d start to feel frightened and alone. Charlotte tried to catch Henry’s eye, but he was staring out the window like a schoolboy in June.

  “Do you golf?” Rich was asking, sensing he’d lost them. Charlotte touched her toe to Henry’s under the table. She had remembered their beginnings—the way she’d peered in through his curmudgeon’s scowl and seen the lost child back there, timid but fascinated with life, watching it avidly from the safe spot behind his desk. Someone not unlike herself, not at all.

  6

  THE SEAWALL

  Impossible to get away from Rich Chase’s office without running the gauntlet of beggars set up along the sidewalks nearby. A dollar in the cup did nothing to assuage Charlotte’s guilt; nor did it satisfy the woman she’d given it to, who shot her a hard look—why not twenty? Why not a hundred? Trudging up the ramp of the parking garage, Charlotte realized she had no idea where she’d left the car. They circled up and down through the industrial labyrinth, like ants in a machine. “It was right here,” Charlotte kept insisting, standing in a particular corner. But all the corners were the same. A familiar dread settled in her chest—she couldn’t manage, the way everyone else seemed to. Education had only shown her how little on earth was certain; marriage seemed a kind of structured loneliness, and the job—oh, thank God she had found a way to escape that job! To go up in the elevator, up and up until you could see over the whole city, and kick off your glamorous heels under a desk where you are paid to comb through photographs analyzing celebrity style trends! Of course, nothing you wanted to say could actually be printed: “So and so perfectly complements her own natural bovinity with this stunning cowhide vest.” Oh, no.

  And everyone, everyone, would say—“Oh, you write for Celeb,” as if this meant you were a very accomplished person. Only Henry had the wit to sneer at it. Henry, whom everyone looked up to—she’d expected him to guide her. He was twenty years older; it was only fair. But Henry would never have taken time from his reading to buy a car and certainly would never have parked one in some immense garage.

  “There it is,” he said comfortably, pointing to something of a similar shape.

  “Well, that one is blue, and ours is green. And it’s a Saturn, where ours is a Volvo. It does have four wheels. . . .” Perhaps she sounded too sharp. He was like some Darwinian insect who secreted an impenetrable shell made of politics and poetry, and reached a bony claw out only for an occasional morsel, or the necessary mating. Charlotte started to cry, causing him to withdraw more completely.

  The search took nearly an hour, but as they drove back toward home the tint of meaning seeped into things again. There was still a bouquet fastened to the Sagamore Bridge in the same spot, but now it was full-blown peonies with a blue ribbon fluttering in the breeze. In Orleans the middle school was letting out; the buses passed by at the light, all of them named for their destinations: White Crest, Drummer Cove, Penniman’s Landing. Every child went home to his singular spot, a place with its own history, noble or mundane. The Turnip Field bus went through the old farmland; Penniman’s destination was the cluster of houses beside a town landing, once a stop on the Underground Railroad.

  Fiona came bounding out the Godwins’ door, full of news (they had played with the Godwins’ hamster!), and, lifting her up, Charlotte knew the exact weight of grace. At home she clomped up the stairs and pulled off her suit, feeling like a cat that had clawed off its doll clothes and scratched and licked itself to retrieve its dignity. In the bathtub she poured pitcher after pitcher of water over her head, washing off the day. The bay was a satiny spring blue, as smooth as the future spread before them.

  They were sitting at breakfast the next morning when the mason jars on the windowsill started clinking together; the living room chandelier swayed as it must have when it still hung in the Kingfisher’s salon.

  “Tanks?” Henry asked brightly.

  “That is what it sounds like,” Charlotte said, “but . . .” There came another huge shudder and Fiona’s building-block castle crashed to the floor.

  “What’s a tank?” she asked, clinging to Charlotte’s leg.

  “Something soldiers drive in a war, honey, but that’s not what it is.”

  “Earthquake?” Henry tried, cheerful. “People underestimate the New England fault lines.”

  “They do,” Charlotte said, “they do.”

  “Orthquake?” Fiona shrieked, her eyes huge, her teddy bear tight in the crook of her arm.

  It was a bulldozer, biting off huge hunks of their beachfront—well, Narville’s beachfront—followed by a convoy of dump trucks, each one loaded with boulders.

  “Tanks would be better,” Charlotte said as the bulldozer slammed its bucket into the earth and a piece of the shore crumbled forward. “What are they doing?” Charlotte asked.

  A smile crept over Henry’s face. “Developing real estate,” he said. He’d warned her not to play with fire.

  “Well, I’m going out to see,” she said.

  “No!” Fiona cried.

  “It’s safe, honey.” The best view was from the kitchen door—Charlotte held Fiona up to see. “Look, there’s a man driving it, just like a car.”

  “Cars stay on the street!” Fiona insisted, blotches breaking out on her cheeks and neck. Of course, in the city there was that magical barrier, the curb.

  “Come with me,” Charlotte said. “I’ll keep you right on my hip.”

  “No!”

  “Okay, then stay with Daddy and you can watch me out the window.”

  “Nooooooo!”

  “Let Mother go,” Henry said, glowering.

  “Henry, she’s frightened.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “She’s got to learn not to bother you all the time.”

  “She’s not bothering me! Why . . . ?”

  Why couldn’t he h
old out his hand to his daughter? Why couldn’t he say, “Stay here with me, because I’d like that”? The house shuddered as one of the dump trucks dropped its ton of rock, and Fiona screamed: “Mommy, don’t go!”

  “If someone doesn’t discipline that child, I don’t know what’s going to become . . .” Henry said, going back down the stairs into the basement.

  At the stroke of noon the thunder ceased, and the bulldozer operator stepped down and examined his work. “Now?” Charlotte asked. Fiona nodded bravely, and Charlotte lifted her up and ventured across the threadbare lawn. The lilacs were opening finally—she pulled down a branch so Fiona could smell the pure sweetness as they passed.

  She shouldn’t have been surprised when the bulldozer guy turned out to be Darryl—everyone here worked two jobs if not more, and still ends rarely seemed to meet.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “I figured I’d be seeing you,” he said sheepishly.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Building a seawall. I mean, it’s not my idea, just I was hired to do it, that’s all.”

  “But . . .”

  “I know,” he said. “It makes no sense. It’s not like we’re exposed to open water. You don’t get big waves in here except maybe in a hurricane. It’s kind of . . . a fad, really. A lot of people over on Try Point have seawalls now, and then everyone starts to want one.”

  “Like designer shoes.”

  He laughed. “I suppose. Except designer shoes don’t run counter to nature.”

  “Clearly you’ve never tried on a pair of designer shoes.”

  “No,” he said, “that’s true.”

  “This is kind of . . . cataclysmic,” she said. The bulldozer had taken giant bites out of the shorefront and begun to fit boulders—from a pile ten feet high—together to make the wall. Everything else was so peaceful—the tide was low and still, about to turn, and way out a flock of white birds wheeled together and landed in perfect sync. There was a chill breeze off the water, but heat was rising from the ground. Darryl wiped his forehead with his sleeve.