The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Ada smiled at this idea—it was impossible for her to imagine anyone wanting to buy Westie’s cottage, which was no bigger than the stacks of lobster traps beside it. She was so used to seeing the bay gleaming around every turn that she couldn’t imagine what that sight might be worth . . . and so used to the Wellfleet hardscrabble she didn’t guess how little a million dollars meant to some people. Narville couldn’t believe the bargain he’d gotten from Charlotte, and there were thousands of guys like Narville—guys “in asphalt,” or copper, scions of supermarket chains and heavy-equipment companies, inventors of tiny devices to keep arteries clear, or computers cool. The man who figured out how to shrink-wrap things and the guy who thought up Velcro while combing the burrs out of his German shepherd’s fur. Whales, spices, bananas from the islands, those had been the basis of Wellfleet’s wealth. Then it was fish, and now it was tourism and real estate.

  “. . . and tear it down and spend another million on some hideous palace with a ‘destination hot tub’ from which they will not want to look out and see people breaking their backs on the tide flats . . .”

  Ada was shaking her head, as if poor Charlotte were crazy.

  “You know it’s true,” she said, with more heat than she meant to show. “And the precedent will be set; the flats will belong to . . . Mr and Mrs. Abercrombie and Fitch! And that will be the end of it. They’ll have fashion shows out there. The town will be quaint, nothing more.”

  “Darryl is a reliable worker,” Ada said. “He’ll find something else. The birds were here long before any of us, and someone needs to speak for them. Good-bye, dear, give my best regards to your husband.”

  She said this pointedly, as if Charlotte needed a reminder.

  19

  AT SEA

  Fiona knelt in front of her dollhouse, explaining to the dolls in a very calm, motherly voice why she had to rearrange their lives. All the furniture was going, to make way for a pasture in the living room, where a goat, sheep, and cow who had been liberated from their positions as Christmas tree ornaments were going to graze. The dolls would sleep together in a makeshift manger. Charlotte had discovered the dollhouse in the attic—it must have belonged to Henry’s mother. It was made of wooden liquor crates nailed together, so was taller than Fiona, and it had real wallpaper and braided rugs, handmade lace curtains on the windows. The furniture was from FAO Schwarz; the dolls were wire with molded heads, father in a felt sweater and suit pants, mother with an apron over her gingham dress. A baby swaddled in white lace was glued in the cradle, which Fiona lifted now to kiss the baby, setting it in the goat pasture and rocking it to sleep. Across the room, Henry was reading The Well Wrought Urn, drinking a glass of Jameson. He didn’t seem to hear the phone when it rang, so Charlotte, who was stirring a pot of black beans with one hand, picked it up with the other.

  “Charlotte?” It was Darryl. His voice was raw, as if her name tore his throat, and hearing this, a softness came over her; everything else fell away.

  “Hi,” she said, barely audibly, but Fiona looked up like she’d heard a shot.

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked.

  “I . . . let me go upstairs and check. . . .” This sounded ordinary enough, and Fiona returned to her menagerie. Charlotte turned the beans off and ran up the stairs with the phone, wedging herself in on the floor of the linen closet.

  “I’ve been . . . hiding, I guess . . .” she admitted.

  He laughed. “Me too.”

  This seemed to be all she needed. She would just stay here, with her knees pulled up and the phone to her ear in the dark, and they could tell each other how lost they were, how frightened, how grateful to have found another honest soul. So much of life—riding up in the elevator, eyes fixed on the others’ ten pairs of competitively glamorous shoes, or listening to Henry on the phone as he decided whether this or that life merited inclusion in the Mirror’s obituaries—“Prolific, yes, but hardly a first-rate mind”—was a false construction, fitted over the crooked, messy, half-assed truth. Darryl was real.

  “Charlotte? Are you there?”

  “Yes, yes . . . I just . . . didn’t know what to say. . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I shouldn’t call.”

  “No, no, you should! I mean, I shouldn’t want you to call, but . . .”

  “I just want . . .” he said. “Can I tell you the truth?”

  “Of course. Always.” She said this bravely, because in her experience, a person who wanted to tell you the truth was about to hurt you.

  “I just want to come over there and drag you up the stairs and . . . make love to you. . . .” He spoke so roughly she likely should have been frightened, but naturally she was thrilled. Those sweet confidences, the shyness, the hope shining there between them had generated a want more violent than the dainty phrase make love could describe.

  “Darryl . . .” she said hopelessly, so he started to apologize.

  “No!” she said, too loudly, and closed her eyes, drew her knees up so she could pull the closet door shut. “I want you just as badly! I think about you all the time. I think, if we’d met each other when we were younger . . . but . . .” She heard herself whispering with the urgent intensity of a teenager—lost in the enchanted forest at the end of childhood, dreaming of a rescue by love. Crosby, Stills, and Nash echoed in her head: “Say, can I have some of your purple berries . . . prob’ly keep us both alive.” Everything flooded back in on her, the music, the smell of the incense burning in her bedroom while she wrote poems about horses and swans and her mother drifted under morphine in the next room; the way the snow fell in New Hampshire, the lush cloak over every tree.

  “Oh, if only you’d been there,” she said.

  “If you knew me back then you’d have spit in my face.”

  “I’d have made love to you like it was my religion.” She could hear him breathe; she fitted her breaths to his. “If only we’d known each other before our misspent youths.”

  “You didn’t misspend your youth.”

  This sounded like a rebuke: He was the prodigal. She was living in the lighted window while he worked and worked and worked, seven days a week though his back hurt, and now he never went on the flats without expecting trouble, someone who’d want to pick a fight. The guy he was building for on Try Point had signed the petition that went with the suit, asking the town to void the shellfish grants. Darryl heard him talking while he shingled the roof in a bitter wind, dark coming on. He had a painting job too, indoor work he could do in the evenings. He was calling from that phone, so his name wouldn’t show on the caller ID, not that Henry knew what caller ID was. His voice echoed in the empty house as they talked.

  “Not the same way you did, no,” Charlotte said. “Maybe in a worse way—too dutiful, too anxious to please, too grateful for Henry’s shelter.” This was the best she could do to explain herself. “I married too young.”

  “Like Carrie and Tim . . .”

  “Exactly. Too exactly.” She was not going to expound on the class differences while she was hiding in a linen closet. Tim used his fists, Henry his tongue—the effects were the same. Darryl drew a ragged breath on the other end of the line. They were two miserable creatures, shivering together now that they were in from the cold.

  “I’m so glad I kissed you,” she said.

  “I thought you’d forgotten.”

  “Forget the nicest day of my life?” But he meant forgotten on purpose, because forgetting was the right thing to do.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked, picking at a thread on her knee, glad he couldn’t see her.

  “Nothing,” he said, with absolute conviction. “I’ve done enough wrong for a lifetime already.”

  She heard emphatic little footsteps coming up the stairs and pushed the closet door open, but before she could stand up Fiona was there, hands over her mouth, laughing in surprise.

  “Boo!” Charlotte said.

  “You’re funny, Mama!”

  “I
am a riot.”

  “Mama, his head came off.” She held out the father doll, in two pieces. The wire neck had snapped and there was nothing to stitch or glue. It seemed nothing less than a death. Fiona had never yet brought her a problem she couldn’t solve.

  “Sweetheart . . .” she began, but Fiona, who had rarely seen Charlotte show consternation, brightened.

  “Don’t worry, Mama. I know what to do. I’ll put ice on it,” she said, and went off on her healing mission with precise, confident steps.

  Charlotte leaned back against the wall. “Talk,” she said to Darryl, sounding like a reasonable adult again. “That’s what we need to do. Talk, get to know each other better.”

  “I guess,” he said, doubtful, as if she’d said they ought to leap off a bridge together.

  “Listen, I take Fiona to Mrs. Carroll’s, down in Paine Hollow, every morning at nine. You still take your coffee break at nine thirty?”

  “It depends. . . .”

  “Tell me when, and I’ll meet you . . . at the SixMart. . . .”

  “Might as well broadcast it on the national news,” he said.

  “Oh . . . So, at Shadblow Pond.”

  “The gate’s locked for the winter over there.”

  “Where, then?” she asked.

  “Somewhere where no one will see us, but where we won’t be, you know . . . alone.”

  “At the Blind Person Crossing sign over on the Sneed Cartway?”

  “Okay,” he said, laughing. “I see your point.”

  “I mean, I suppose we could write to each other. . . . That’s it; I’ll write you a letter.” This mess, in which she barely knew herself and might start sobbing or praying or panting any minute . . . why not turn it into an English project? She was good at English projects.

  It struck him differently. “Okay, Wednesday morning, nine thirty. I’ll meet you in the smallpox graveyard. Do you know where that is? Off the Old King’s Highway, in the woods there. You turn onto the first fire road, and park right behind the embankment. . . . But I’ll have to leave by nine forty-five. Right now I gotta go pick up my mom from a meeting; I’m late already.”

  And then the conversation was over and Charlotte blinked and saw she was crouched in her own linen closet and had nearly forgotten who she was. She took a deep breath, then another, going to stand at the dormer window to look toward Try Point and the empty house Darryl had called from. A fishing dragger was crossing the mouth of the bay. There was a lighted Christmas tree affixed to its mast—one defiant bright spot in fifty miles of darkness. Each of the Lemon Pie Cottages was edged with lights too, and back in Fox Hollow someone’s boat, up on blocks in the driveway, had the whole hull and wheelhouse outlined in big bright bulbs. Jake had drawn a lobster in red lights on his shed. In town the captains’ houses might have an electric candle in each window, but out here the gaiety was both a cry in the wilderness and a statement of solidarity: We’re here, way out here at sea, but we’re not quite alone.

  “Who was that?” Henry asked when she came down. He had set the table, washed the lettuce, started the rice.

  “Darryl.” She couldn’t think of another answer.

  “What did he want?”

  “He . . . he’s afraid the pipes are going to freeze.” Her cheeks were blazing, and Henry squinted at her, puzzled.

  “That’s why I went upstairs, to start the water running. He thinks we should leave the faucet on, just a trickle, you know, overnight, just to be sure.”

  Fiona was whispering to her doll on its bed in the dollhouse, its head beside it in a miniature bowl. Charlotte could see that this life of hers was very beautiful. Everywhere her eye lit—on Fiona’s head bent to attend to her dolls, the bowl of oranges on the table, on her book, the life of Martha Gellhorn, open on the couch beside Fiona’s, Spot Goes to the Beach, on the Indian carpet worn soft as old denim, the floorboards salvaged from the old salt mill that were so salty the paint wouldn’t stick to them—there was something solid and good. Only one piece was missing, and it was something she had believed she should learn to do without.

  “It is cold,” Henry said cozily. “I think I’ll build a fire after dinner, put my feet up, and read about the interrogation martyrdom of the Russian intelligentsia.”

  It was genius, the idea of meeting in the smallpox cemetery, which had been hidden in the woods more than a century ago out of fear of contagion. She found the fire road without trouble, and the parking spot, but from there, there was no clear pathway. A tough green vine with half-inch thorns looped through the trees like razor wire. The sun was so low the trees cast endless shadows, and she scanned between them until finally she picked out a headstone and made her way toward it. The stones were eroded into shapelessness, with long grass matted between them. Something—deer or coyotes, maybe—had slept here, without fear of men. Nine thirty-five—it wasn’t just Darryl she was waiting for; it was that old hope, the thing that seized her once she realized her mother would die: She’d felt sure then that if she was good, if she bore up bravely, some cosmic gift would come to her to make up for it all. And it would be a huge gift; it would have to be, to balance such a loss. Something really wonderful was going to happen to Charlotte Pelletier. She’d had a radiance about her then, which came from this expectation, and the radiance itself took her a long way, through high school and college and all the way to her desk at the East Village Mirror.

  The cemetery ground was wet, so she crouched to read the names on the stones. They’d been chiseled by hand, and if that hand had been weak, the record it made had worn away. JEB CROL, she could make out, and HANA STED. BABY TIBBO, with some kind of shape inscribed below, so faint now she had to trace it with her finger—a lamb. A long needle of fear went through Charlotte’s heart and she fought the impulse to race over to Mrs. Carroll’s and be sure Fiona was safely stringing the fat wooden beads she loved, her head bent in concentration.

  She heard a car, not Darryl’s truck with its coughing motor. It passed without slowing. Nine fifty- five—she’d been waiting half an hour. He was delayed. Henry had used to stand her up, and was always furious that this upset her. Things came up at the paper, important things, and yes, he could have called, but he hadn’t thought of it; he was preoccupied with world affairs. Darryl wasn’t like that; if he didn’t come there was bound to be a reason.

  She got home to an empty house, called down to Henry with no answer. The living room was flooded with light: The ice in the bay would melt a little every afternoon and freeze again every night, so a hard, smooth layer frosted the icebergs and doubled the sun’s effect. “Henry?” she tried again. Silence.

  Then she heard a splash from the bathroom. She went to the staircase, smelled a faint, old-fashioned fragrance wafting down, light and sweet. “Henry?” A big slosh—he was in the bathtub, in the middle of the day. “Henry?”

  At the top of the stairs the fragrance was stronger, but not unpleasant—there was no musk in it, none of that essence-of-Venusflytrap that made her avoid the atomizer ladies in the department stores. The bathroom door was open a crack, and she heard Henry scoop a pitcher of water and pour it over his head. A lighthearted sound. She knocked on the bathroom door, and pushed it open. There he was, wet and bright-eyed, like a fledgling.

  “Hi!”

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Oh, fine . . . I was getting a washcloth from the linen closet and the phone rang. . . . I knocked a bottle of perfume off the shelf. . . . I suppose you can smell it.”

  “I can . . . it’s nice.”

  “Good, because I think the smell is there for the rest of our lives. . . . I mopped it up but it soaked in between the floorboards.”

  “Was that your mother’s scent?”

  “Mother? A scent? I can’t quite imagine it. Anyway, I had to take a bath; it was overpowering.”

  “Who called? I mean, that made you break the perfume?”

  “Oh . . . Darryl Stead. He was checking on the pipes
again. It’s very moving, the concern he has for this place. The Steads had a great respect for Father. . . .”

  The bathroom being on the east side of the house, she took the phone out the kitchen door, facing west, and scrolled back to find the number he’d called from.

  “What happened?” she asked when he picked it up.

  “Wait . . . just a minute . . . let me just . . .”

  She waited.

  “Listen, I can’t talk now.” He was whispering. “The guys are all here. I couldn’t get away. It would have looked fishy.”

  “It would have looked fishy for you to get coffee at coffee break?”

  “Kara came by with a thermos and muffins. . . . Westie’s wife.”

  “But . . . when can we . . . ?”

  “I gotta go, I gotta go . . . bye.”

  Henry came down, scrubbed and shining, redolent of lilacs.

  “What a day!” he said.

  “Bright,” Charlotte said. “But cold.”

  “I don’t know,” Henry said, standing by the front window, a towel around his hips, both hands proudly on his belly as if all his worldly substance were contained therein. He took a deep breath, as if it were the first day of spring. “There’s just something in the air.”

  “It’s your mother’s perfume,” Charlotte said.

  “Very funny,” he said. “I really don’t think that was Mother’s.”

  “Are you telling me your father wore lilac perfume?”

  He sighed. “When do you pick Fiona up?”

  “Noon.”

  “I’ll go.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll go get her. I’d like to see the place.”

  “And a partridge in a pear tree!” Charlotte said.

  Henry laughed. “Exactly.”

  In other words, yes, this was an odd little gift, his showing this interest in Fiona—a gift prompted by what? A scent, a fog, a half-remembered dream wafting in the air, more powerful than anything you could touch or see. When Charlotte said, out of nowhere, A partridge in a pear tree, Henry didn’t have to ask what she meant. They’d known each other that long.