The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Look at this, brother,” she said, waving an arm toward the driveway, where Tim stood, with a blank face and rigid bearing. “Look who’s home.”

  “ ’Lo, Darryl,” he said, and walked toward his house, toward little Timmy standing tough in the doorway, watching without a word.

  27

  TRY AGAIN

  Charlotte went straight from Darryl’s to pick Fiona up at the Godwins’. She was early, but Fiona was her center of gravity; she had to see her. Betsy’s new kitchen was in progress, sealed off behind a tarp, but the appliances had already been delivered and stood magnificently in the center of the living room. The girls were playing hide-and-seek while Betsy considered tile samples she had spread out on plywood on top of the stove.

  “Hi, everybody!” Charlotte said in a very cheerful voice, though her face was blotchy, her hair looked insane, and her eyes seemed to be focused in different directions—she could feel a migraine starting up in her temple. Betsy took one quick look, saw that the problem was beyond her, and got busy packing up Fiona’s things. Alexis kept a cool eye on Charlotte, though—she was a quiet child, always watching. “What’s wrong?” she asked finally, without sympathy.

  “I think I’m coming down with something, Alexis,” she said. “Or getting over something. A psychosis probably.”

  “Is that when worms get in your eyes?”

  “No. No, it’s not.”

  This apparently was satisfying, and Alexis returned to a favorite theme. “Fiona doesn’t know how to play hide-and-seek.”

  This was true. Fiona’s idea of hide-and-seek was that she stood in the middle of the room while Charlotte made a huge drama out of searching for her. She hated being stuffed into closets and under furniture by Alexis, who was brilliant at hide-and-seek and had nearly tricked them into calling the police the week before by burrowing into the laundry basket and refusing to come out when she was called.

  “None of us is perfect,” Charlotte said, wanting to add: And you talk just like a spider.

  Henry had been having a good day. There was a new young writer at the Mirror—one Moishe Nakamura—“A Japanese Israeli!”—whose perspective was so fresh and his prose so muscular, he was going to draw a brand-new readership. “A paper like the Mirror is vitally important in times like these,” Henry said, while Charlotte peered into the refrigerator so he wouldn’t see her face, which must have looked like a Picasso.

  “The Times called Moishe up, but he was having none of it,” Henry said. “He feels the way I do.”

  He had not looked at her since he came in. He always averted his eyes from hers. She and Darryl could have been working through the Kama Sutra on the living room floor and Henry would have stepped over them to get his copy of The Economist off the coffee table.

  “I brought oysters,” she said. “Westie was selling them out of the back of his truck. Eliminating the middleman.” How she lied! But then, she’d been lying to Henry every day for years, when she didn’t tell him something for fear of his condescension, or when he was too busy to answer her and she pretended not to care. The day she stopped her mindless, and no doubt tuneless, singing around the house was the beginning of a long, long lie.

  “We don’t have an oyster knife,” he said. “Not much we can do with ’em.”

  “Are you kidding? Did the seafaring Tradescomes do without an oyster knife? All their silverware is still in the drawers. We have monogrammed lobster picks, enameled crab crackers, and a sterling silver fish fork in the shape of a cod with gilded scales! Yes, we have an oyster knife!”

  Oh, she needed to jam a knife into something. She scrubbed the oysters violently, cleaning them with a wire brush under water so cold her fingers went numb. “You say oyster, and I say erster . . .” she began, and she went on, very loudly. Fiona came running over and peered up at her, to see if Charlotte might have gone mad. By “tomato, tomahto” she was singing along.

  Charlotte had seen Darryl open oysters—you held it down with one hand, pushed the point of the knife in hard beside the hinge, and twisted it to pop the shell apart. Like this.

  Or . . . like this . . .

  No . . . like this . . .

  “Ow, ow, oh, my God, oh, God, ow . . .” She had borne down on the oyster with all her strength, and the knife had slipped and gouged her left hand, in the soft place above her thumb. She balled it up tight in her fist—really she’d rather cut off the whole hand now, so as not to have to look at the wound.

  “Mama!” Fiona rushed to help, with Henry behind her.

  “We’d better go to the emergency room,” Henry said.

  “Is it that bad?” Charlotte had kept her eyes squeezed shut. Now she opened them just enough for a quick peep. “It’s all the way in Hyannis. I had a tetanus shot last summer.”

  “A tetanus shot,” he said. “Do those even work anymore? The diseases are winning; antibiotics are losing their power. . . .”

  Eyes shut tight, Charlotte heard him better than usual—he sounded less like a punishing patriarch and more like a frightened child. The planet was too hot, the deficit too big, obesity ballooning, diseases winning out against cures. . . . You never knew when suddenly you’d be imprisoned in an iron lung . . . by parents who didn’t know what a child was . . . who wouldn’t think you might be lonely and terrified, who would tell you how lucky you were.

  “Henry, was the iron lung here, in this room?”

  “What? Yes, right in the middle. At night I’d hear the mice running over the rafters. . . . What does that have to do with this?”

  “Oh, never mind.” She sat up and opened her eyes. “Bleccch—it looks awful, but it doesn’t look life-threatening. Fiona, can you get me a Band-Aid, and the ointment I use for your cuts?”

  Fiona set off like Joan of Arc. Henry looked inconsolable. “Would you mind making dinner?” she asked him.

  “Of course not,” he said, happy as could be. She was going to live. She needed him. “Omelette?”

  He settled her on the couch and poured her a glass of wine. Shock after shock ran through her: Darryl had acted as if he didn’t know her, kissed her as if she were all he wanted, pushed her angrily away. She was back from throwing herself at him and Henry was making her an omelette. Fiona returned, brandishing her first-aid items.

  “Here, I’ll put on the Band-Aid,” Henry said.

  “I’ll put on the Band-Aid,” Fiona said.

  “No, no, I’ll put on the Band-Aid.”

  Fiona started to cry. “I got the Band-Aid; I get to put it on.”

  “Henry, I think Fiona’s old enough to put on my Band-Aid, don’t you?” She gave him a fond, laughing glance to say it would be good for Fiona to feel she could take an important part, but he had that stiff, hurt look he could get so easily. He wanted to take care of her. Charlotte’s father had just said, “I can’t cope,” when her mother was ill. It was something he’d heard on a TV ad. Everyone had said how well Charlotte rose to the occasion, learning to change the IV bags, sitting with her mother hour on hour, and never late with a single homework assignment. She’d been frightened out of her wits, of course. Like Henry. Like everyone.

  Henry brought the omelette. “Did I salt it enough?”

  “Yes, it’s good.”

  “Are you sure, because—”

  “I’m sure, Henry. Thank you. You know, I keep trying to understand why, if the King’s Law affects Truro and Wellfleet, they can move the grants south of Try Point. Shouldn’t the laws be the same down there?”

  “ ‘The law is an ass,’ ” Henry quoted, glad for the opportunity.

  “What if the court is wrong?”

  He chuckled; she was so naive. “If the court is wrong, the law they make is still law. I mean, it can be appealed, I suppose, but it sounds pretty cut-and-dried to me. I’m sure a lawyer could explain it. I have no idea.”

  He said it as if it were inappropriate for her to have an idea. She wasn’t a lawyer; she wasn’t even much of a journalist. She was just a woman who used t
o be pretty, before he married her, and was in no position to have ideas.

  “Of course you have no idea. All you ever do is touch up your obituary of Norman Mailer. I have an idea.”

  And he was just looking at her with that amusement he got when he gazed down, down from his great lofty perch to see her, wa-a-y below, shaking her little fist at him, when Fiona picked up the beater with both hands and struck the gong her great-great-grandfather had brought back from Indonesia, causing an earsplitting thunderclap that frightened her so badly she dove, shrieking, into Charlotte’s lap, knocking the omelette off the plate onto the floor. Bunbury hissed and tore up the stairs, and Henry jumped, but in half a second he was composed and wry.

  “Mother would be so pleased to see someone getting some use out of that gong,” he said.

  Love affairs, to judge by books, movies, operas, biographies, and gossip magazines, were so common you’d expect you could order one at a drive-through window. One great suffering oysterman please, who’s lived out his longings to the same music I have, who has the same secret dreams. Oh, thank you, I was just starving. Russian nobility, French bourgeoisie, senators in high-end hotels, cowboys on the high sierra—how did they manage what Charlotte and Darryl could not? At two a.m., three a.m., while Henry slept with Bunbury curled in the crook at the back of his knees, Charlotte worried this question. Oh, to slip the skin of this marriage, its distance and disappointment! To escape Henry Tradescome, who despised her . . . and adored her, who had spent years now working around the stone of refusal in the center of his personality, to get just a little closer to his wife and child. Just one long night with Darryl, just one!

  At four, she got up and went down to the kitchen, wrapped a dish towel around her right hand to protect it, and opened the oysters. It took half an hour to do all ten, but there they were, and she tipped her head back and gulped them one by one as if she were swallowing the sea. Thoughts that had been flitting at the edge of her mind for weeks found their way in finally. Tomorrow she would call Orson and try to figure out how the King’s Law worked on Mackerel Bay, and whether there was anything she could do about it. And she was going to try to rent a refrigerated truck. If the restaurant that Rich, the financial manager, had taken them to had served Belon oysters for a price that made Charlotte dizzy, surely Wellfleet oysters would be welcome somewhere else. If Darryl could sell direct to the restaurants . . . then there was a chance to buy a house lot, have his own place, his own family.

  The moonlight blazed a pale path across the water; the green light of the channel marker bobbed with the swells. She had spilled oyster juice down the front of her nightgown. She could still feel Darryl’s hand at her back.

  “I’m sorry, Orson, did I wake you?”

  “You sound awfully chipper,” he said. “What time is it?”

  “Eleven thirty—a.m.” And she had been waiting since dawn.

  “I never rise before noon, darling,” he said. “And may I know who’s calling?”

  “Orson, how can you call someone ‘darling’ before you know who they are?”

  “Once you know a person, ‘darling’ never seems right,” he lamented.

  How had Orson ever been a lawyer? Charlotte tried to imagine him, armed with his squint and his fountain pen, dissecting dry and convoluted phrases, brandishing a telltale comma to prove his point.

  “Can you talk, or do you want me to call back?”

  “Let me just get my specs out. I find it difficult to hear without them.”

  “Do you remember the night we had dinner at the Wharf Grill, last fall?”

  “Ahhh, calamari . . .”

  “Does it come to mind . . . Didn’t you say that night that you didn’t think the Narvilles could win their case?”

  “In matters of law, I am wrong only about half as often as in matters of love. A respectable record, when you consider it.”

  “So you were wrong?”

  “Seems so . . .”

  “But you said yourself that it was going to be about the judge’s interpretation. . . .”

  She could remember this as clearly as if it had just happened: hear Orson’s fulsome voice enjoying his pronouncement; see Henry’s face, glad as he always was for the company of men. Every moment surrounding that gift of calamari had been preserved exactly in her mind.

  “It always is,” he said. “But here, there’s a clear precedent. . . .”

  “Orson, everyone talks about that precedent. But if it rules Mackerel Bay, what about the south shore of Try Point, where they’re going to try to move the oysters? Why wouldn’t the same law work there?”

  “I . . .” He was going to tell her how wrong she was, how little she understood, how she ought to stay out of matters that were beyond her, and he was surely right. So she couldn’t let him talk; she interrupted him and went on.

  “Orson, the oystermen had no lawyer. The Narvilles had Skip Godwin, and judging by the new appliances in his new kitchen, he was working pretty hard. Surely a knowledgeable, accomplished attorney could have found something to tip the scales the right way.”

  “They can appeal that decision, of course.”

  “But they won’t. Tim just got out of prison. Darryl’s managing his rent, barely. Jake would stay home and paint all day if he could afford it, and Bud . . . They’re all used to living on everyone else’s leftovers. They’re not going to say, ‘We have rights here and we’re going to fight for them.’ Jeb Narville is the kind of person who assumes he’s entitled. He thinks, ‘I want this,’ and then he just figures out how to get it, whether it be a wife or a house or a hunk of money. If that means other people suffer, so what? People suffer everywhere, every day. Skip Godwin, he says to himself, ‘I’m doing a job; I’m being paid for it; that’s how the world works.’ If no one stands up and tells them to look again, they’ll all be right.”

  “I suppose.” Orson sighed. “Now that you say it, that’s why I retired when I did. I had expected that as I aged I would lose the idealism of youth, that I’d be able to say: ‘Life is unfair, but I’m debonair,’ or some such. I guess you could say I’m naïve. . . . I went to law school hoping to fight injustice, and then I seemed to find myself perpetuating it. . . .”

  Orson had lost his haute-homosexual accent as he talked, and hearing himself sound so earnest, he laughed. “So, I decided to change the letters after my name from LLC to IFD . . . in flagrante delicto. Yes, there are many strange turns on the glorious path to the grave.”

  “Wanna take another one?”

  “My dear, that sounds almost illicit. . . .”

  There, she had him.

  “Though I doubt there’s much I can do.”

  “Oh, so it’s ‘not very much,’ not ‘nothing’!”

  Henry had come up to get a cup of coffee and, hearing Charlotte on the phone, had lingered. Who? he mouthed.

  Orson, she mouthed back, but he didn’t take it in and asked aloud, “Who?”

  “It’s Orson,” she said.

  “Oh!” Henry reached for the phone.

  “No, I called him.” Henry’s brows knit, and Charlotte motioned for him to go back downstairs, but when he was curious nothing could stop him. He’d gotten a big spurt of blood in the face the day Fiona was born.

  “I do still have my license,” Orson was saying. “I’ve never argued in land court, but naturally in my practice as a trust lawyer, the subject of real estate was not unknown to me. But what grounds are there for an appeal?”

  “I only know one thing,” Charlotte said. “There’s land south of Try Point that Darryl said . . . It was mapped more recently, or zoned differently, or something, but somehow people say it’s clear the upland owners don’t own those flats. Maybe they’re wrong, or maybe . . . I don’t know, but it seems like, if the King’s Law doesn’t cover every piece of the waterfront, then . . . there’s a chance it wouldn’t work here.”

  Henry was goggling at her—what on earth did she imagine she was doing?

  “It would requir
e some serious research,” Orson said.

  “I’m good at research!”

  The corner of Henry’s mouth twitched. He had spent a night drinking with Bob Woodward once; Bob Woodward was good at research.

  “Where do we begin?” she asked.

  “Well, I’ve got a big book on littoral rights somewhere around here . . . and then I suppose we go down to the registry and undertake a title search.”

  “How about Friday?”

  “The Rose Tattoo is playing at Cape Rep. I have two tickets for Friday night, and I don’t, of course, drive. I had a different sort of date in mind, but . . .”

  “It’s a deal, Orson. Friday, the registry by day; then I’ll take you out to dinner and we’ll revel in Tennessee Williams.”

  “I shall wear my cloak.”

  28

  THE SHORT HISTORY OF A WATERY PLACE

  Charlotte wore the same dress she had when she went to the registry to meet Jeb Narville. She hadn’t bought new clothes since they moved in, except the canvas jacket from the church thrift shop, and a serious pair of rubber knee boots from the marine supply store. Tying the dress at her waist, she felt pretty: lighthearted, openhanded, easily moved, likely to evoke tender feelings, to be loved. Why had she ever felt that dress was wrong? She found Orson standing on the tiny balcony of his tiny house, in white trousers, a navy jacket with brass buttons, and his fisherman’s cap, and Charlotte couldn’t help thinking of Stuart Little’s yacht race.

  “How natty!” she said.

  Orson stood a little straighter. “Clothes make the man,” he declared. “Come in for a minute; I’m still polishing my shoes.”

  The house had been a guest cottage, a tiny replica of a tycoon’s Victorian folly, which had stood farther up the hill. The tycoon’s son had inherited the big house and gone quietly insane there, driving to the dump every day to rescue broken chairs, lengths of rope, half-used cans of paint, and other perfectly useful but abandoned items, with which he stuffed every single room. When the sills rotted and the back part collapsed, he simply moved toward the front, and when he died, the place was condemned and razed. Orson bought the cottage, kept the exterior intact, tearing down the inner walls so the place felt like a studio apartment, all white and open with the bed in a loft space above the kitchen.