The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “And I was a girl . . . he assumed I’d marry.”

  “But you never did.”

  Ada darted a quick look into Charlotte’s face, but they were sitting up too straight for confidences. “No,” she said quietly. “I never did.”

  “So you’ve always lived in this house.”

  “Yes,” Ada said. “Or from the time I was about twelve, when we moved from the parsonage. Even when I was young I always preferred to be here, at home. I suppose my first few weeks had enough adventure for a lifetime.”

  So this door was open a little. “Is it true that someone brought you in from a ship?”

  “That’s what they say,” Ada said. “Of course, I don’t remember, but my father used to tell me it was a bright, moonlit night, and he thought he heard someone rowing in the harbor. Then he found me on the doorstep—all swaddled and nestled in a lifesaving ring.”

  “A lifesaving ring?”

  “They were made of cork back then, you know. I don’t suppose they had a basket on shipboard. They had to make do.”

  “Did it say the ship’s name?”

  “Not that I know of, but of course I never saw it.”

  “Your parents didn’t save it?”

  “They weren’t sentimental,” Ada said sharply, as if Charlotte had insulted them.

  “Do you still wonder—about your real parents and everything?”

  “Oh, no,” Ada said quickly, her delicate hands folded in her lap. She was a lady, and if she wondered at all, she certainly would not be caught doing so in public. But her smile looked wistful. “It’s so long in the past,” she said. “There were lots of orphans back then. It was hardly worth remarking.”

  “That’s funny,” Charlotte said. “I grew up in the same house with my parents, and I still wonder about them all the time.”

  Ada’s eyes sparkled. “I used to imagine they were from some exotic place, Japan or maybe India. . . .” She held out her translucent, thick-veined hand and smiled. “Not very likely. In fact, people who didn’t know better were always telling me I resembled my father—Pastor Stewart, I mean. Most people don’t look very closely at life . . . they only see what they expect to. After all, you’re not supposed to stare.” She spoke lightly, mischievously—then she blinked and her pale eyes focused out the window again.

  “So you never found out . . .”

  “I’m Ada Town,” Ada said, almost by rote. “The town’s daughter. The baker used to give me a slice of bread out of the oven whenever I went by—‘I’m just one of your fathers, Ada,’ he’d say. I suppose it made me think more about mothers and fathers and what they do, than most people. I always felt sad for my mother. I suppose she didn’t believe she could care for me, so she sent me away.”

  “It changes you forever, having children,” Charlotte said, with a moment’s clear sense of this. “If I were young and alone, and it was the year nineteen . . .”

  “Twelve,” Ada finished. “I was born in ’twelve. Of course, we don’t know when exactly, but I arrived on the church steps on Midsummer’s Eve, so that was the day we celebrated.”

  “Why there?” Charlotte asked. “I mean, why do you suppose?”

  “If the Congregational Church hadn’t been built where it was, I might have been a Methodist. But you can see the Congregational steeple from all the way across the harbor, and if you moored east of the wharf in Duck Creek it would be the most natural thing in the world to go up the alley there. . . . It comes out right across from the church steps. Every kind of problem found its way to a church doorstep, back then. The pastor was doctor, lawyer, social worker, even a banker in hard times. The woman who owned this house left it to my father—he’d taken care of her during her illness.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Emmy Carver. She was a Stead, somehow, I believe . . . but, oh, that was long ago, and she didn’t have children, so I don’t suppose anyone thinks of her anymore. It was a sad little house back then, and they built the highway right at the back of the yard, but what you see out the window . . . as my father used to say, God shows himself by the waters of Mackerel Bay.”

  It was high tide. The water had spilled from its winding channels and flooded to the tops of the spartina in the boat meadow. To see it was to feel what it would be to have all you wanted from life.

  “It’s true,” Charlotte said, thinking of Darryl. “Did you know he was going to leave the house to you?”

  “No, no. I admit I was surprised. He tried to divide his property fairly between the boys—they were men by the time he died, of course. I’ve wondered if he just forgot to put it down, when he was parceling everything out. He only left ‘the rest’ to me. He never mentioned any land.”

  “So, then, he didn’t mention any water.”

  “What?” Ada looked up from her reverie.

  “He . . . Ada, the land the Narvilles sued over—the tide flats at the mouth of Oyster Creek where the oyster grants are, I think they belong to you. Luther owned them, and it seems he left them to the church . . . without really thinking, because the land was underwater. So, when your father’s will says ‘all the rest’ comes to you . . . well, that’s a part of it.”

  “Oh, no,” Ada said, with a quick glance toward the desk. “I don’t think . . . I don’t . . . at my age. I forget things, you know.”

  “You seem to remember a lot.”

  “Well, I miss appointments; I lose things. . . . It seems less that I’ve lost my memory and more that I’m lost in my memory. I remember much more vividly now—I can see my father’s face as clearly as if he’d been here this morning, and it may be just that I heard the story so often, but I seem to remember the storm that took the lighthouse—that day after Christmas, it was. Deeds, wills, though . . . I’m helpless with these papers.”

  “I could help you,” Charlotte said.

  “I used to babysit for Henry, you know. He loved his little blue blanket. He couldn’t bear to be parted from it.”

  “Really?” The image of Henry clinging to a soft little scrap, like Fiona with the lint from the dryer, struck Charlotte painfully. She had always understood that loving him was like nursing a wounded animal. You couldn’t be surprised if he snapped at you; that was just the natural way.

  “One didn’t imagine he would marry,” Ada mused. “Even before the illness, there was something . . . removed about him. Life was whirling around in front of him and he just stood there watching because he didn’t know how to get on. I’d ask him to hand me the pins as I hung up the laundry, and he took it as an honor.” She smiled at the little boy she remembered.

  “Ada, let me help you now. I’d take it as an honor. Let’s just start and see what we find. . . . We don’t have to do anything. Wouldn’t you like to know exactly what you own? I mean, we can begin right here. . . .”

  Charlotte stood up, meaning to take some of the papers from the secretary, to show Ada how easy it could be. Had she learned nothing from the fox poised outside the window in the mornings? One must keep still, perfectly still. Ada jumped up and stepped firmly past her to show her the door. She wore a light perfume, and Charlotte asked her what it was to stall for time.

  “Oh . . . it’s very old-fashioned,” she said. “Eau de Lilas . . . lilac water. My father bought me a little bottle when I was fifteen and I’ve always used it. When the company went out of business I bought a case, and I still have four bottles left. I suppose I’ll die the day I use it up.”

  “Ada, did you sit for Henry often?”

  “I kept watch over him when his parents were away.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “They spent most of their weeks in Boston, came out for the weekends. But they liked Henry to be here, by the sea. He had a kitten he loved; I remember that.”

  “You must have been his second mother. Will you come and visit us? I expect he’d love to see you.”

  “Oh, I don’t go out a lot, dear, but thank you.” Her instinct was like Henry’s: Keep your distance, even�
�no, especially—from those you love. “Preston Withers is coming to have a cup of tea with me this weekend, and I will speak to him about the land.”

  Preston Withers was the man who’d been with Ada at the Wharf Grill—director of the Wellfleet Ecological Life League, champion of sea turtles, piping plovers, and hognosed snakes. WELL was supported by donations, mostly from the wealthy owners of waterfront homes, whose interests seemed to coincide with those of the endangered species. Ada’s tide flats would make a fine addition to the league’s holdings. Charlotte remembered thinking that Preston Withers looked like a pastor—the kind of man Ada would trust. Why would she pay attention to Charlotte, who sat here with her jeans rolled up and her hair tied back in a shoelace, as if she were still sixteen? If she’d listen to Preston, though, she might listen to Henry too.

  “It’s been very nice to get to know you a little. I like to see you with your daughter—it’s a lovely sight for an orphan and old maid.”

  Charlotte glanced away—the flash of Ada’s loneliness was too painful, and the praise made her shy—but she felt the truth of it: She was uncertain partly because of her openness. Henry could press ahead and crush his opposition because he didn’t stop to ask himself whether he might be wrong. Charlotte let life flow through and change her; and if this would have made her a very bad critic and a dreadful real estate developer, it had helped her become a good mother, the most ordinary, most important thing on earth.

  She walked away down the driveway as the fog thickened into rain. The first green of spring seemed to bleed its tint into the air, and there was the fresh, fizzy smell of the plankton blooming. It filled her with hope, though she hardly knew what she was hoping for.

  30

  CLASS

  She found Darryl in the house on Try Point, working down the punch list before the owners arrived. The smells of new wood and fresh paint, the whine of the saw, were more portents of spring—every shop downtown was getting reshingled or repainted, Sundae, Sundae had a new striped awning, and the Wharf Grill was adding a take-out window. With Speck dead and Godwin departed, Nittle had decided to retire, so Betsy had bought the storefront and moved the jewelry shop there. There was the feeling that a great curtain was about to go up and the town must be ready for its star turn.

  Charlotte knocked on the door, though it was open. Darryl was planing a door set across two sawhorses, and he stood up and pulled his goggles off. He didn’t seem glad to see her.

  “Guess what? Guess what!”

  “What?”

  “I think everything’s going to be fine!”

  “Whadaya mean?”

  “The lawsuit . . . the shellfish grants . . . you know.”

  “But how is it all going to be okay?” he asked, with a quiet contempt toward anyone naive enough to make such a pronouncement.

  “Orson and I went down to the registry and did a title search, and that land doesn’t belong to Jeb Narville, or to us, or anyone. Ada owns it, Ada Town.”

  “How can that be?”

  “It was willed to her by her father, by accident really. You can’t build on it, and back then oysters weren’t farmed, so no one counted it as being worth anything.”

  He smiled suddenly, as if he’d had the same thought she did. You never knew what something, or someone, was worth.

  “So,” she went on, “there’s more we have to do, but I think we might be winning.”

  He was quiet, looking away out the window, and she felt she’d presumed. “Or you might be winning.”

  “Charlotte, what is it?” he asked, careful not to meet her eyes. “What’s wrong between you and Henry?”

  “Oh!” she said, surprised by the question, and surprised she had an answer. “It’s not Henry. . . . It’s . . . me and you. I feel . . .” Her throat closed, and he reached across to touch her arm, to reassure her. “There,” she said, “just that, that’s what it is.”

  He shook his head. “What?” He was naturally, mercurially responsive. He had no idea this was something to be proud of.

  “It’s just . . . life is so . . . frightening; there’re so many mistakes you can make, and to be able to be honest about it, so you’re really together in it . . . it feels like that would be the way with . . . with us. That’s all.”

  His tension broke and all the sweetest things flooded in; the room filled with hope and light and tenderness, a love untroubled by reality. Darryl picked up the door he’d been planing and leaned it against the wall, so he could walk through and hug her.

  “I want to trust you,” he admitted, bowing his head against hers. “I do. I . . . Charlotte, there’s something . . . I . . . Do you know the letter you wrote me?”

  “Um . . . by heart.”

  “Well, I had it in my checkbook, and I lost it.”

  “You saved it?”

  He nodded. “So, I thought I’d lost the checkbook, but really my nephew took it—little Tim, Carrie’s son.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows? He thought he could write a check on my account or something. You know how kids steal.”

  Charlotte tried to imagine Fiona stealing someone’s checkbook, and failed.

  “That’s too bad. But you got it back and everything?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I got it back. Carrie found it under the kid’s mattress. But big Tim got the letter somehow, and . . .”

  Charlotte laughed at the idea of Tim reading that letter—she saw a crocodile with a violet in its claw.

  Darryl frowned as if she were very silly. “He’s threatening to give it to Henry.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s trying to blackmail us,” Darryl said.

  “What? How would that work? I mean . . . it’s just a little letter.”

  Darryl made a not very convincing laughing noise. “Do you know why Tim was on probation?” he asked.

  “He bit off Rob Welch’s ear.”

  “Yeah, because Rob was trying to keep him away from Carrie. She was bartending at the Mermaid back then and someone told Tim she was flirting with one of the guys over there. Tim hit her so hard he broke her cheekbone, Desiree called the cops, and when Rob got there Tim just went after him. It was when I was . . . away, so she didn’t have anyone to look after her.”

  “She didn’t leave Tim?”

  He shook his head. “She says it’s only that he’s afraid of losing her, that he’ll never do it again. But I feel a lot better knowing I’m right across the street. When I hear voices rising over there, I go over to borrow some rice or something. It kind of breaks the spell.”

  “Tim must be very fond of you.”

  Darryl laughed. “There’s faces he’d rather see.”

  “So now he’s turned the tables and you’re the sinner.”

  “I guess.”

  Charlotte sat down on the front step. The marsh was greening up and the wind struck spray off the whitecaps in the bay. She could see her little world across it: the Narvilles’ with the sun blazing off the copper roof on the tower; her house small and plain beside it, with the oak tree Henry had planted fifty years ago just beginning to leaf out.

  “Blackmail!” she said. “It’s so nineteenth century.”

  “You’re not taking this the way I expected.”

  She laughed. “Does he suppose I’ll pay him to keep Henry from hitting me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It might be worth a few thousand dollars to keep Henry from criticizing that letter,” she said, thinking of the way he would slash his big editor’s pen through anything he considered sentimental.

  “You don’t take this seriously.”

  “Well, my God . . . blackmail? I mean, we’re not even lovers.”

  “It’s the way we looked at each other,” he said hopelessly. “Everybody knows.”

  This was true. Tim, Henry, Jeb Narville—their eyes were like two-way mirrors that allowed no glimpse into their hearts, while Charlotte and Darryl gave themselves away with every glance, and the more they kept apart, the
more their feeling took on its own defiant life. If it was not to be acted upon, it demanded at least to be shown. Darryl might nod and say, “ ’Lo,” to her, as he poured out his coffee at the SixMart, and she would answer softly, “Hi,” and every single thing they felt would ring in the ears of whoever was standing in the lottery ticket line.

  “This is about class,” Charlotte said.

  “Nah . . . don’t be silly.” But a contrary electricity had come over them; it made him restless and he went to the window. “What a view,” he said. “What a job, looking out over this every day.”

  “What’s it all costing?”

  “Oh, God, you wouldn’t believe it. Look at this—air-conditioning! Special ducts all through the walls for air-conditioning, in a seaside house. And then the Carrara marble for the shower; that was about thirty thousand dollars right there.”

  “Did you ever take a shower here?”

  “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  “Right, you shower in a rusted tin box. And Tim wants to be sure you stay there. If he’d found us in a motel room together, he’d be glad you were getting a piece of ass. . . . It’s not the sex; it’s the love he minds. He thinks you’ve gotten above yourself. He wants to bring you down.”

  “All the time I was in L.A.,” Darryl said, “Tim was here working, supporting my sister, raising those kids. . . . Now I’m back and you’re here, and Tim and Carrie . . . well, maybe it is a class thing. Since before my father was born there’ve been the summer people and the locals, and we’ve done the work, and they’ve laid on the beach. They come and go while we act like the world over the bridge is a foreign . . . planet . . . where we can’t even breathe the air. And maybe we’re right. After all, I left, and look what happened. Look around, Charlotte; do you see a lot of marriages between locals and washashores? No, they—your class”—bitter word this was, to him—“they use us for whatever they need us for. Sometimes they need us for love.”