The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Don’t make a federal case out of it,” he said. “It was her pet kitten, not mine. It controlled the mice. We didn’t have mice back in Boston, so she didn’t need a cat there. People weren’t so sentimental back then.”

  “Well, pardon my sentimentality.” The things people can’t bear to remember are supposed to be loud and dramatic—obvious, like incest, or beatings. They’re not supposed to be sitting there neat and reasonable among the antique teacups a child is taught never to touch. To think of Henry, the lonely child in the picture, growing up in a cold, cold house, with a burning faith in God as his comfort and an obsession with baseball because the best thing about him seemed to be his pitching arm . . . how, if that child became ill, and the spirit went out of the arm, and a bleak clarity dawned as he heard the tired old pieties from the mouth of his minister . . . the bleakness itself might become the solid center, the thing that child could trust.

  “I used to write their obituaries,” Henry said, staring out toward the bay through the branches of the oak tree. “I suppose you could say that was my juvenilia.” Then, turning the subject: “The cardinal’s been right there on that branch for hours, calling for his mate. I haven’t seen the female all day.”

  23

  SEPTEMBER TWELFTH

  “You know who lives in town?” Henry asked. “Selwyn Latrousse, from the Nation.”

  “Do we know him?”

  “Well, we’re part of his community.” Henry spoke stiffly—the great community of arts and letters did not conform to conventional boundaries, as Charlotte ought to have known. “We’re invited for dinner Friday night.”

  “When did he write for the Nation?” Charlotte asked, politely not inquiring whether dinosaurs had still roamed the earth at the time. She had heard in Henry’s voice that ironclad reverence he held for the generation before him, or at least the part of that generation that had disagreed with his Republican father.

  “He’s emeritus, of course.” Case closed. They had escaped New York, but they would never escape the damned intelligentsia, the very circle Charlotte had once dreamed of entering. On Friday she dressed as for a funeral—her own—but standing in front of the clouded mirror, over which she had folded the dove gray gloves, she felt a spring of rebellion start to bubble and went back to the closet, from which a brown dress with big polka dots and a cinched waist was loudly calling. Wearing it she looked dangerous—as if she were on the lam from another decade, making use of a very old-fashioned weapon (red lipstick) to cause unmentionable trouble wherever she went. Henry looked grim when he saw her come down the stairs. He had on the one suit jacket he possessed, the one they had bought him when he went to Andover. Charlotte was his only ornament and he’d have preferred something more dignified. Well, he should have married Susan Sontag.

  They picked Orson up on the way to the Latrousses’. His house, like his person, was very small but very ornate—a Queen Anne fantasia complete with miniature turret and gothic windows that sat at the crest of Pennyfarthing Hill. He came down the stairs with a springy step, and settled himself in the backseat with a flourish, organizing his cape carefully, to prevent wrinkles.

  “Orson, I haven’t seen you all winter,” Charlotte said. “Have you been hibernating?”

  “Something like it,” he said, with grave wit. “I have been rehabilitated.”

  Unsure of the etiquette, Charlotte took her cue from his tone. “Congratulations!”

  “Or condolences,” Orson said. “It’s hard to know.”

  “Where did you go . . . Bridgewater, is it?”

  Orson chuckled. “Heavens, no, my dear. Bridgewater is where they put you. I was at McLean, where you check yourself in. Very interesting group this time . . . a painter, a couple of jazz musicians . . . the weeks flew.”

  “Sounds lovely,” Charlotte said. They were driving through town, down the main street with its shuttered clothing shops and restaurants, past the church where Ada’s father had been pastor. AA met there on Friday evenings, and there was Darryl, holding the door for another man, clapping him on the back as he went in. It was a month since Charlotte had sent the letter, with no response, and seeing him, she felt a twinge like a probe gone deep into some festering abscess—a sick joy.

  “I tried AA once,” Orson said, as if he’d read her mind. “It was over a man, of course. . . .” He laughed to himself, with lascivious melancholy. “The shoulders of a stevedore and the mouth of a Michelangelo . . . I’d have paid to watch him sleep. Alas, I was not invited to partake of such bliss, but . . . he had given up drinking and saw AA as his salvation. Naturally, he wanted to help the fallen.” Orson patted his bow tie happily, proud of his membership in this society.

  “So I agreed to go to a few of their gatherings. It was simple enough—after all, they meet at the Masonic lodge three times a week. So I would take my customary constitutional, and instead of crossing Point Road to the Mermaid, I’d join the Friends of Bill across the way. The manly companionship so intoxicated me, I barely missed my gin. And this fellow, whose beauty was equaled only by his kindness, would pay me the most generous attention, bringing me coffee, listening to my abject stories. . . .” Orson smiled, speaking the word abject with sweet irony.

  “But one night, as I gave the familiar introduction: ‘I’m Orson, and I’m an alcoholic’—I experienced a revelation. I thought, By God, that’s the truth. I’m an alcoholic! I don’t belong here. I ought to be across the street at the Mermaid. So there I went, and there I drank. Happily ever after. With the occasional vacation at McLean.”

  The Volvo was chugging up the very steep Latrousse driveway, and they found themselves on a hilltop that looked down over the town center, the harbor, and across the bay to Provincetown, a narrow band of lights in a wide darkness, like a sheltering arm around the bay. To have been a sailor, weeks at sea, and finally see Cape Cod, literally beckoning—yes, it was easy to imagine a ship anchoring on a windless night, the men uncertain with their parcel, a wide-eyed baby. . . . How had they cared for her during the voyage? Was her mother on board? Some salty old cook heating milk in the galley? And where would such milk have been gotten? Where had the ship sailed from? Spain? Cape Verde? Jamaica? Ada looked entirely northern, born to wear her tartan. These questions fell aside, though, when you looked down to see the steps leading up from the harbor, straight to the church—the spire shining in the same moonlight that would have lit the path that night. Real life can never stand up against a story. Still, Ada must wonder about it every minute of her life, though she insisted that she did not, that her own life was no different from any life, a mystery from beginning to end.

  Selwyn Latrousse, portly and bright-eyed, took Charlotte’s hand with warmth. “I’m so glad you could come,” he said, looking at her as if he were drinking up her youth like medicine. His wife, Natasha, took her and the polka-dot dress in, in one sardonic glance. “A bit much, mais non?” she said over her shoulder to a woman in an immense caftan, and to Charlotte, “You needn’t have gone to such trouble. This is just a little dinner for friends.” She meant that it was very rude of Charlotte to be young still, when the rest of them had lived their lives already.

  “Oh, I was just feeling lighthearted,” Charlotte said, not entirely without spite.

  Natasha made a little face, but Selwyn said, “I’m glad to hear it. Lightheartedness is in short supply around here these days.”

  There were twelve for dinner, in a glass and concrete house that seemed conceived to thwart comfort—designed by Wuidenueven, (or that was what she thought she had heard Orson say in a reverent hush), one of his very few private homes. Charlotte supposed he had designed mostly airplane hangars. Henry’s generation had embraced modernism in reaction against what went before. They’d all wanted to smash up their parents’ teacups with baseball bats, to claw down the flocked wallpaper and chop up the Chippendale dressers for kindling. . . . They lived among ideas, not furniture. Their ideas, by now, seemed like their furniture—sad and spindly, attempts
to strip life of its emotional welter, reduce it to something clean- lined and reasonable. Charlotte, who had never felt suffocated by a house full of colonial assumptions and tasseled draperies, felt lonely amid the spare, sleek tables and chairs. She looked around at Mrs. Latrousse’s paintings—huge citrus-colored abstracts—while the others ate marinated fava beans and discussed architecture, naming men she thought she’d never heard of until she began to penetrate their language and realized they were having skirmishes of pronunciation, so Weed-ah-noo-ven became Vweed-ech-noo-ay-ven and then Vwid-aa-noyven , and Latrousse shook his head and said, “He himself preferred Woy-dan’-ach-wen.”

  Charlotte laughed out loud, certain this was a joke, but everyone looked at her as if she must be mentally defective, which, probably, she was.

  A baked fish was set out, with a special white-corn polenta and broccolini. The conversation turned to politics, and the Republicans were eviscerated in a few quick phrases. All too easy, just another way of looking away from problems too frightening to approach. President Bush talked about the enemy without being able to say who the enemy was. People believed him because they didn’t know enough to doubt him, and they needed something to believe in. The money that could have been spent on education was spent on war . . . in which the ignorant were dying. The Democrats weren’t doing any more about it than the Republicans, and Charlotte wasn’t doing any more about it than the Latrousses. Probably that was why they infuriated her. She missed Fiona sharply and glanced around, spotting things she’d like to bring home for her—a malachite frog crouched in a potted plant; a molted horseshoe crab shell, thin as parchment, that she could have slipped into her pocket unnoticed.

  “My cleaning lady’s brother comes home next week,” Mrs. Latrousse was saying, in her deep, cultivated, savage voice. “Not in a box, though he’ll wish he were. Head wound. Pass the broccolini, Selwyn. Twenty-three years old, enlisted September twelfth. His parents are gone; his sister will have to manage it, somehow. Selwyn, the broccolini . . . ?”

  Across the table someone was speaking of Joan Didion with a tender disapprobation, as if she were a rebellious niece. Over the salad Latrousse got in that Salman Rushdie had blurbed his son’s book. However, there was a professor of physics two seats down whose son had a blurb from Coetzee.

  “What is it about?” Charlotte asked.

  “Who can say what a book is about?” Henry said, irritated. She was constantly pulling a conversation down out of the theoretical stratosphere. He was always in danger of embarrassment. She blushed—it was true no one else had asked; maybe the man’s son, and the book, were so famous it was wrong of her not to know.

  “It’s a history of man’s relation to the animal kingdom,” the physicist said, his eyes brighter for Charlotte’s interest.

  “Disgrace—what a book,” Henry said. “Coetzee doesn’t waste a word.”

  “And certainly he doesn’t waste a feeling,” Charlotte said. “In fact, there’s no feeling in that book at all.” Poor Coetzee was about to take the blows she meant for Henry. “Really, it was less a book than a diagram.” This might have crossed her mind once before, but she felt it with a vengeance now, and saying it was nearly as effective a rebellion as putting two carrot sticks in her nostrils and intoning, “I am the walrus,” something she dearly wished to do. Henry looked as if she had, but the physicist, having begun to tell his story, was ready to continue, and she turned to him.

  “Why did your son take up that subject?” she asked him, and while the others discussed Coetzee he told her how as a very young child his son would pull caterpillars apart as if they were toys; then empathy came over him, and his curiosity, interwoven with guilt, became a larger fascination. The physicist had a large, bald head and gray complexion, and he had made Charlotte think of a mushroom, but as he talked about his son, his face came alive and it was only natural to love him.

  “I’ll get a copy,” Charlotte said. “Henry’s writing about cruelty too.”

  “Coffee?” Mrs. Latrousse was asking. The physicist asked for cream, but the cream had turned.

  “I’ll run to SixMart,” Charlotte said. “It will only take a minute.”

  “I think I have some Cremora,” Mrs. Latrousse said, rooting in the back of a cabinet.

  “Really,” Charlotte insisted, thinking greedily of all the air she was about to breathe. “I’m happy to go.”

  She resisted the urge to run home and give Fiona a quick kiss. Or to run home, grab Fiona, and head away, away, away. But you can’t run away from the place you’ve just run away to. And she wanted to bring the physicist some little gift, in return for his being so human. The SixMart smelled of gasoline and coffee; she loved it. And the rack of tabloid newspapers, and the jar of bloated pickles in brine. Della was at the cash register; her café was struggling, so she was doing some nights at SixMart to make ends meet. The bus from Boston had just pulled away, and the people who’d gotten off—a middle-aged couple who looked as if they must have been homeless for some time—made their way to the back of the store and began kissing each other against the dairy case. The man pushed the woman’s gray, greasy hair back with both hands so he could look into her eyes. Neither of them noticed Charlotte, lingering beside the Doritos, not wanting to interrupt them.

  The bell on the door jingled: Darryl.

  “Della!” he said. “Any winners so far?” Everyone asked, on the guess that there must only be a few winning scratch tickets on each roll.

  “No, darlin’,” Della said. “We save all the winners for you.”

  “Hello,” Charlotte said, from behind him.

  He wheeled around. Her voice had an effect on him too. She had her parka on, but he took in the polka-dot dress, the high-heeled boots. He was wearing a green sweater with his name machine-stitched above the logo of a local electrician.

  “We were at a dinner party. They needed some cream for the coffee, so I . . .” She explained and explained, as if she were very, very guilty—of course, she’d grabbed the chance to go to SixMart because she’d seen him going into AA, and known he would likely stop there after. His eyes darted around the room as if he were checking for spies. They’d both have been less jumpy if they were stealing plutonium to sell on the international black market.

  Darryl glanced purposefully toward the door and Charlotte nodded, following him out to his truck.

  She took a deep breath. “Did you get my letter?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t . . . I couldn’t think how to respond,” he said. “I can’t stand to call; certainly I couldn’t write . . . I . . .”

  “Darryl, do you not want to see me?” An idiotic question. He’d kissed her. He’d stood her up. He’d breathed his hopes and fears into her ear over the phone. He’d avoided her as if she were a live wire carrying about a hundred thousand volts.

  “Oh, my God—no, no, I don’t. I don’t. I mean—I do, but . . .” Whatever he said in words, his eyes were telling a larger truth. Or that was what it seemed like to a woman who had just gulped down a great deal of Gewürztraminer, umlaut and all. The heels made her tall enough to kiss his mouth without getting up on her toes. The Gas sign blurred overhead.

  “It’s all wrong, Charlotte.”

  “Darryl Stead, it is not wrong. It is a gorgeous, amazing, beautiful thing.” She started laughing. “All through history,” she said, shaking her head, “starting with Eve and Adam, up through every religion, every civilization, women have trusted their senses, and men have lived by, or against, the rules.”

  But Darryl tensed, as if she were laughing at him.

  “It’s not all nice,” he said, angry, ready to blurt his worst thoughts, how he’d noticed her tits first—that reflexive little rush of lust while she was standing there imperious on this land he’d worked and known all his life; he’d thought of pulling her into that shuttered, creaking old house and fucking her until she was shaken free of all her New York assumptions, gasping and crying and wanting more, Then there was the question of how ex
actly a strange old man like Henry Tradescome could have come into possession of such a wife, the pleasure Darryl would have finally in saying, Take the land, the house, the birthright; I’ve got her. That was the beginning. It was only after this that he’d seen the way she talked to Fiona, and listened to Fiona, as if a four-year-old’s prattle really meant something to her. And found her shaking after the run- in with Tim. The play of interest and concern over her face, the sense that she had seen the best in him, in one glance . . . the shock of love; they would feel it together. . . .

  “I haven’t got the courage,” he said. “That’s the truth.”

  “For you to admit that . . . takes more courage than I have,” she said, so quietly she doubted he’d hear. But he was a man who had worked to re-create the sound of snow falling, and he listened to her so well he could barely hear anything else.

  He was looking at the ground; he couldn’t meet her eyes. She picked at the sleeve of his sweater, where the hem was unraveling.

  “Oh . . . oh, I see . . .”

  “We’re lucky to get out of it now,” he said, his arms coming around her waist, pulling her in, to console her. “The deeper we got, the worse it would be in the end. Or, maybe not for you . . .”

  “I can’t sleep; I can’t think about anything else,” she admitted, talking into his collarbone. “I think, if we got married . . .” This was the bitterest word she’d ever spoken. “I’m too old—you have to have children; I see that—you need someone younger, and how on earth would we make ends meet, and then I think, We’d manage, it would be worth it, because—”

  “I’ve gotta go forward,” he said, almost angry. “I’ve got to . . . find someone, first of all, never mind the rest.” The harshness went out of his voice. “Every time I meet someone, I think . . . I feel like it’s wrong, like I’m betraying you.”

  “Darryl, you don’t owe me anything,” she said.

  “I know.” He nodded. He dropped his arms and stepped away from her and this was intolerable, like being plunged into ice water, and they pulled each other back to safety. It was some minutes later that Charlotte heard loud, scratchy laughter and saw that the grimy old people who’d been necking in front of the refrigerator case were watching them from the market door. She and Darryl had been there under the Gas sign, kissing as if they had nothing to hide at all.