“Point Road was still the cartway when my grandfather bought the place,” Henry said, rigid in the shoulders. “The road came later, after the automobile.” He was the only person Charlotte had ever heard speak the word automobile, and he said it with some suspicion, as if it was still a newfangled idea as far as he was concerned. “Sedgewick’s Gutter, I don’t know.”
“The Boat Meadow?”
“Oyster Creek is only full at high tide. It runs through the marshland—you can take a canoe through the channels but there’s high grass on all sides, so it’s as if you’re paddling through a wheat field. I used to spend whole days in there. In some places the cordgrass is ten feet high. It’s mysterious; you don’t know what’s around the next bend.”
His voice was soft and distant, and he slid the brass knuckles off and took the deed out of her hand as if he might see himself there, a boy kneeling at the edge of the marsh, keeping still enough that the life of the place would continue, the hognose snake slithering off the bank and across the water, the fiddler crabs popping out of their holes.
“So, you do remember something from before you were twelve,” Charlotte said. He’d always insisted that his first memories were the things he could see in the mirror over the iron lung, the year his parents took him out to Wellfleet to try to escape the polio outbreak. Nothing from before that mattered, anyway—it might as well have been someone else’s two-handed life.
“I don’t,” he said, looking up from the deed. “A few flashes maybe—being out in the canoe, or all the women like black statues at my grandfather’s funeral.”
“And the game,” Charlotte prompted. He’d lived for baseball back then, had begged until he was allowed to stay in Boston to pitch the first Little League game of the year. If they’d left when they wanted to, he might not have gotten sick; everything might have been different. “The one that was nearly a no-hitter.”
“I do remember the game,” he said. “I felt like I could fly.”
This was a jeer at the naive boy he’d been. The one who emerged from the iron lung a month later had only scorn for such innocence. He’d kept hearing how lucky he was—how he should be grateful to God for sparing not only his life, but his right arm as well. That the left one hung there helpless was a very small thing when you thought of what might have happened. Of what happened every day. He’d had nothing to do but read while he was in the machine; he’d discovered all kinds of things. Things like Auschwitz.
“Lucky to be alive,” he said now, treasuring the foolish phrase. “I’d believed in God up till then.… But there was the minister saying God had been watching over me. He sounded like a salesman.… I thought: ‘This man must never have seen a newspaper.’”
Charlotte laughed. It was funny how people who had just been kicked in the teeth by life would go on profusely thanking God. It was not funny that Henry had lost hope when he was twelve and never seemed able to catch a glimpse of it again.
“A boat meadow,” she said, hoping to change the subject before a rant could get started. “Fiona would love that, floating through a boat meadow.”
Henry looked over the top of his glasses, amused. Fiona had just taken her first steps. He had no experience of children, no inkling how fast she would grow.
She went on reading the deed:
“‘All of these boundaries, except the waterlines, are determined by the court to be shown on the plan, as listed in the Barnstable County Registry of Deeds, book seven, page two seventeen.…’ Well, we’re landowners.”
She spoke with the light drama Henry used to love, fifteen years back when she was the eager girl in the corner of the Mirror’s tiny newsroom. She could bring the sparkle and mystery out of things; she’d seemed at first to be the cure for him, but she mostly irritated him now. She had no gravitas; had never fully accepted his authority, though he was vastly more experienced, better read than she was. When he refused to let her write the bigger pieces at the Mirror (nothing personal, it was just that she didn’t come up to their editorial standards) she had, inconceivably, left the paper altogether to take a job at Celeb magazine, a fashion/gossip weekly Henry had never even looked at except once when he was waiting for a root canal.
“Landowners,” he echoed, contemptuous, his dark gray eyes darkening further, his mouth pursed. He did not traffic in landownership, but in ideas. Well, she had wanted to please him, had tried for years, but having never been able to measure up, she’d turned it around and learned to enjoy flicking the red flag, watching him charge off in a rage. If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em. She’d made real money at Celeb while he was holding the fort for serious journalism in his dark little office. She bought an orange patent-leather handbag, red stiletto heels with shark’s teeth painted on the side, like hot rods for your feet. All very irritating, but calling him a landowner was the worst thing yet.
“By the waters of Mackerel Bay,” she went on. “It’s poetry! A ‘boat meadow’? The idea of it…” Wellfleet was just a word to her, a word from that seminal text, the Oyster Bar menu—Wellfleet, Chincoteague, Blue Point, gusts from the seaside, where the lowing of foghorns, the fresh cold wind off the water, could make loneliness seem like a beautiful thing.
“We’re rich! I can’t believe it.”
She knew this would drive him crazy. His glance was poison and he put a finger to his lips. Was that what she cared about, money? If they had to be rich, she could at least keep from mentioning it, and most certainly from trumpeting it while fanning herself with the deeds to their seaside properties, et cetera.
“It’s only the truth, Henry.” She laughed. “We… well, you… have inherited the place. What are you going to do with it?”
He sighed. He’d walked up the endless stairs to his rent-controlled apartment every day for thirty years, from the time he started the Mirror through the era of his little renown as a political reporter and critic, to today, when there would occasionally come a volume in the mail, a first edition of his collected essays, discovered at a garage sale, which some supplicant was begging him to autograph so as to fill out his (always his) collection of the representative works of the Vietnam era. These little packages made him shudder, reminding him of what he’d meant to become. And the shudder itself infuriated him—his ambitions had not borne out, so what? He could hardly call himself disappointed—he had expected little from life. At the Mirror he was the wise man, unfailingly thoughtful, open to all points of view. Charlotte was too young for him, lighthearted, light-minded, too. He’d had more serious, sophisticated women who would have made much better companions, but some idiot instinct had compelled him in this direction, caught him in this subliterary life. Fiona’s crib stood where his desk used to be.
Back in the city, Charlotte looked down over Houston Street, where flocks of black-garbed young people were picking along through the icy puddles. It was the winter of 2003; she still couldn’t help stopping at the corner of Sullivan to stare south, toward the empty sky where the Trade Center used to loom. The billboard across the way showed a woman whose stony face made a strange contrast to the breasts welling softly from her lace brassiere. If you bought the brassiere, maybe your face would get that hard and nothing would hurt you; maybe that was the point. Whatever, Fiona needed a wider view. She was a squiggle in a yellow sleep suit, who must sip up sweetness and strength until she blossomed into the whole, capacious creature Charlotte willed her to become. Yes, willed. Charlotte’s own natural disquiet, that sense that any minute she’d put a foot wrong and fall off the edge of the earth, which she had prayed to transcend by becoming an adult, a journalist, a wife, had finally been stilled with her first look at Fiona’s face (as she was lifted, bloody, from between Charlotte’s thighs by the obstetrician). Of course. You walk toward the light, keeping the little hand tight in your own. That’s all.
“So, what are we going to do with it…Tradescome Point?” she asked Henry.
“I am not going to do anything with it,” he said, pressing his temples. “I
have work to do. It’s been closed up for years, and as long as it doesn’t ask anything from me, I’ll let it stay that way.”
“It’s land, Henry; they’re not making it anymore.…”
“What would we ‘do with it’?” he asked, his patience stretched to breaking.
“Float through the boat meadow, on the tide!”
If he’d laughed, or made any response, she’d have gone along. It was one of her gifts, the ability to go along. But instead he shuddered, a little spasm of disgust that touched the sorest spot in their marriage.
“We could live there…” she said lightly.
“I live here,” he said, with icy finality.
Then he gave a small, spectral laugh: “I sounded just like him then—my father.”
The Harbormaster's Daughter Page 31