Gay Fiction, Volume 1

by Mel Bossa

  The men who came from Scituate to repair the well knew a great deal more than they let on. Standing in the foyer, burly and indifferent in their work clothes, one of them said they had stopped in Etty’s dinette for breakfast before coming here. Blurted it out, really. That was said so they wouldn’t have to accept my offer of breakfast, of coffee even, so they wouldn’t have to come any further into the house. The other one—the darker, heavier one—nudged the first when he said that about stopping in the dinette, as though I weren’t supposed to know about it. They just had a job to do, was his opinion: his firm, dense typically-closed-into-life-as-I-am-closed-into-death New England opinion. He didn’t want to know any more than that. I could tell. How he stood in the foyer, peering about as though he expected bats or ghouls or I don’t know what to fly down out of the ornate ceiling molding, as though he expected the stained glass skylight above us to suddenly shatter, sending shards of glass to impale him.

  Of course they must have known something about me—even about Amity—by the time they drove up to the house. Etty would have seen they were strangers and asked what they were doing, coming over from Scituate. It’s rare enough that she sees strangers here in the autumn. In summer, of course, it’s different, what with all the summer residents and their visitors.

  Oh, the Pritchard place, she would have remarked, when the men told her where they were going, she speaking casually, yet not hiding her surprise. He’s repairing the well, she would have asked, in the fall? I thought people fixed wells only in springtime. But that Mr. Lynch wouldn’t know any better, would he? He isn’t like other folks here in Nansquett. A stranger here, really. Only moved here two years ago, although his family always had a summer home here, for over a century. On the other side of the river. Old Ralph Lynch built it. Guess you’ve heard of him, even in Scituate. Big man in the county a dozen years ago, even up at the statehouse for years, right through the Depression. Built that big house there in the ’teens. I was just a little girl then. You can see it if you turn around. There, that one, with the dozen dark painted gables and the big porch wrapping three-quarters around the bottom floor. In summer you can only make out the third-floor windows, because of all the foliage. No, that’s not where Mr. Roger Lynch lives. He’s farther up, off Atwood Avenue. Didn’t he give you directions? No, the old Lynch house has been turned into a summer hotel for people down from Providence. Filled up every summer now that rents have gone so sky-high on those boxy little cottages around the river they call villas. Villas, my eye! No, sir, the current Mr. Lynch lives up at the Pritchard place. Bought it and restored it to look as it did over a hundred years ago. Bought it, lived in it, and scandalized the town from it in less than eighteen months. Not really a stranger to Nansquett though. His mother would bring him and the little girl up to visit the grandfather once a year. Why, I believe he even spent a summer here, when he was a boy. So, he isn’t really a stranger. I recall him coming in here for a sandwich and a soda. With his cousin, Chas Lynch. You know Chas Lynch, don’t you? A shame about him. Mr. Roger Lynch always did seem to have one foot in this town and the other somewhere else, in New York, I suppose.

  How much more did Etty tell the men from Scituate? Filling up their coffee cups as she spoke, so they wouldn’t notice the time passing, even cutting a jelly doughnut in half and putting it on their plates (without charge)—a small sacrifice just for the thrill of telling someone new what she and everyone else in Nansquett haven’t gotten sick of gossiping about yet. The only real gossip they’ve had for a hundred years, I’m sure. Since Amity’s time. That’s the way it is in these small, hidden-away New England coastal towns: towns located off the new highways that connect cities, towns without suburbs. If you fart in Nansquett, Grandpa Lynch used to say, everyone knows within the hour; and furthermore, everyone knows whether it stunk or not.

  Not that Grandpa ever cared. He’d grown up here and moved away to Providence. After he sold his newspaper, he came and lived here for years and loved the town. Taught me to love it too. Mother never cared for it, though she’d been here for years. It was what she’d escaped from when she moved down to New York to work at the World’s Fair in ’39, displaying the first television sets in the General Electric Home of the Future. All Mother wanted was to get away from Nansquett and to stay away. To meet Father and remain in New York. And that’s what she did, until Janet and I were old enough to travel easily, and Grandpa was getting so old he began to want her company. So she would pack us into the big new Plymouth station wagon and drive up on holiday weekends. The station wagon was a dream, with wooden side panels inside and out and a third seat facing the rear of the road, which Janet and I would take turns sitting in, watching the other cars behind us—a seat that folded flat for storage. No, Mother never much liked it here, even though she was good about coming up to see her father. She would drive over to Point Judith where a few of her old friends had married and moved to, and she would spend afternoons with them, playing canasta or bridge with them and the other wives of the Coast Guard officers who would drive over the state line from Groton.

  I sometimes think Mother only came up to Nansquett to show off to the townspeople. To show off her Town and Country station wagon—a new model every year. To show off her New York clothes and New York manners and New York husband and children. Also to show off by going away again with great fanfare. She never loved the town the way I came to. I don’t think Karen did either—crazy as she was about the house we restored and lived in. I sometimes think Karen remained here only because of me and later because of Chas.

  Chas. I’ll never really know what he thought of Nansquett, even though he alone of all of us lived here all his life. He must have cared for the quiet and hot blooming smell of the town in summer, the patterns of branches and bushes shadowing the streets. Yet how eager he was to get away, as soon as Karen wanted him to. Not that they ever got too far, not even outside the town limits: just as far as the highway entrance off Atwood Avenue.

  Did Etty tell the men from Scituate all that? She might have. What difference does it make? They came here anyway, even after she chewed off their ears about us. They had a job to do, as the heavier one—the frightened one—said, and they did it. Stopped only once to have lunch, eating in their car down below the terrace, outside the garage that once had been stables. Looking out of their front windshield at the bleak November day, they would have had a good view of the Pritchard place: leaves turning, dying, everywhere, for thousands of square yards around them, the silence of the woods, the gray light sharpening every twig of tree, every architectural detail of the house—Amity’s house, my house—restored to look exactly as it did in 1865.

  From the second-floor sitting room, I watched the men eating in their car. Sipping tea from my lovely old china (found in the cellar, along with so many other beautiful old things), I could see them clear the decades of debris out of the well, then drop down a rope ladder and shimmy down it into the well shaft. I saw them repair the broken sections of the wall at the bottom of the well, almost twenty feet down, then install new plumbing; and I saw them come up again and put in new side drains here at the ground level so the well wouldn’t overflow after storms. They did an excellent job, a professional job. Hardly speaking to each other, except to call out “Here!” or “Push now!” or “Harder!” or “Give me that.” Silent men. Like most of the men around here. Like Grandpa used to be, fishing. Silent. Until they have something to say or until they feel comfortable, when they begin to talk and will go on for hours.

  I wonder if Etty told the men from Scituate about me and Chas? That’s probably why they wouldn’t come any farther into house beyond the foyer, why they wouldn’t even come in to use the lavatory, pissing behind the garage like dogs, like wild animals. No. She couldn’t have told them. No one in Nansquett could know that about Chas and I. Or did everyone know, all the time? What difference does it make? They repaired the well. Soon the circle will close in completely.

  As the men worked, wet leaves
from around the well stuck to their boots and trousers, right up to their thighs, as though determined to decorate the dull gray corduroy the color of this November day with patches of shiny yellows and deep reds and orange-browns. Looking like the pants kids used to wear in the ’60s—colored patches on old denims. Comic and unaware, the two silent men worked on, their decorated trousers looking wonderful. Until they finished repairing the well, looked down and saw the leaves and brushed them off roughly. When they came to the foyer again to get paid, the leaves were gone, but the spots from where they had festooned the men’s legs and thighs were still damp, as though shadows of colors still remained.

  Even so does the past mark us, fleeting as the dampness of a fallen leaf, yet strong enough to be felt. Or deep as a well. Amity’s well. My well now—and my future.

  I do not fight this future anymore. Not since Chas and Karen left or tried to leave and discovered too late that leaving was a very particular action in the play they had allowed themselves to become enmeshed in.

  I am reconciled now. I accept. I submit. I am even eager to embrace the future—and the past. Amity’s life becoming my life, finally; Amity’s story, my story. More so than I could have dreamed possible fifteen years ago, when I first heard of Amity Pritchard.

  Chapter 1

  It was the year Mother’s Chinese baby died.

  Of course, it wasn’t really Chinese, much as it looked it. But that’s what Janet, my younger sister, nine years old and sassy, called it. What it really was, was a Mongoloid baby—or would have been, if it hadn’t turned bluish and died all of a sudden one afternoon a month after it and Mother had come home from the hospital. Mother tried to breathe life back into it, holding the baby across her arms, crying and rocking and blowing air into its mouth—gaped open like a caught fish—all at the same time. She wouldn’t believe it was dead. Wouldn’t even put it back into its crib, until Grandma came and made her, leading Mother upstairs then, and coming down to take me and Janet across the street to her house, where we had sweetened frothy Viennese coffee and cookies.

  She wasn’t really our Grandma, of course, just our Hungarian neighbor lady from across the street. But she was old enough to be a grandmother, and as our grandmothers were both dead—and even when they had been alive had never been as near to us, as interested, as good to us as she was—we called her Grandma. I had run to get her when I saw the baby turning blue and Mother crying, knowing something was wrong. Afterward Grandma said what a smart and grown-up boy I was for only twelve, doing that. She let me leaf through all her husband’s old copies of Esquire, I suppose because I was now so grown-up.

  Mother stayed in her bedroom for almost a week. But that didn’t seem to make her any happier about losing the Chinese baby. She wouldn’t go to the funeral with Janet and Father and me—all dressed up, even though it was a rainy Thursday afternoon, following the big-backed Caddy containing the little coffin from the funeral home. Neither Janet nor I had ever been to a funeral before, even though this wasn’t a real funeral—we were the only people there, with no churchman or anything because the baby hadn’t even been old enough to be baptized. Still, we were both quiet, taking our cue from Father, who was very sad.

  When Mother recovered enough to get out of bed, she wanted us to move away from the house so she wouldn’t always have to pass the spot where the Chinese baby had turned blue and died in her arms.

  Father said we couldn’t move right away. But he did say we could go stay with Grandpa—our real Grandpa, Grandpa Lynch, Mother’s father, up in Nansquett. Mother didn’t really care for this, but I guess she finally gave in, because all of a sudden we were set to go, the day that our school term finished. There was just barely enough time for me and Janet to get home from school, to change our clothes into jeans and T-shirts, to bring down the suitcases and cardboard boxes—Mother had been packing all week—and stow them in the back of the station wagon. Then we were off.

  It happened to Janet and me so quickly that we were a hundred miles away from our home, sitting on plank-wood benches at a plank-wood picnic table on the shoulder of the Merritt Parkway, eating egg-salad sandwiches and watching the sun begin its slow summer setting through a strand of tall trees, before we realized this was going to be a different kind of summer than any we’d had before.

  Mother did a lot of remembering in that half hour or so of picnic. She told us how she had first gone to Grandpa Lynch’s summer house when she was nine years old—the same age as Janet—for their first summer by the shore and every summer thereafter until she’d met and married Father and come to stay in New York. She’d had her first sweetheart in Nansquett too—a boy everyone called Sourpuss because he frowned so much—when she was my age, twelve.

  She kept on remembering when we got back into the car to take off again. She enjoyed driving the station wagon, full as it was, and despite her always seeming worried as she asked one of us to look back and make sure there were no cars in back of us while she changed lanes, as we swooped up and then down the highway, like a bug riding along the inside of a ribbon unfurling in the wind.

  Janet and I were so happy to see Mother happy for the first time in over a month that we didn’t give a thought to all of our friends we’d left behind and wouldn’t see for months. We were eager to believe Mother when she told us what a good time we’d all have in Nansquett. Grandpa’s house was big enough so we’d each have not only a bedroom, but also a sitting room to ourselves. There was a river right behind the house where we could fish and swim every day, and the shore out in front. Grandpa would take us to his favorite places in the woods nearby. And if we asked him, our cousin Chas would show us the best places for going quahogging, clamming, and crabbing along the tide pools of the shoreline. Surely we remembered our cousin Chas and his little sister, Cathy? Surely I was old enough to remember Grandpa Lynch’s house, Mother asked.

  I had been to Nansquett once before, for a weekend I think, but of course I really had been too young to recall it. I did remember Grandpa—a tall old figure smelling of tobacco and looking like a waxed yellow scarecrow with his bald head that shone in strong lamplight, and his huge yellowing mustachio. But that was because he’d come to New York to visit us on the Christmas holidays.

  If both Janet and I looked forward to seeing Grandpa Lynch again—each of us loving him as much for how odd and old he looked to us, as for remembered kindnesses he’d rendered us—both of us were a great deal more doubtful about our cousins Chas and Cathy Lynch. I had thought about Chas a little in the week before we’d left home, but that was because I could look at a photograph of him in Mother’s bedroom, starchily standing—small and blond—between Aunt Linda and Uncle Al. He’d only been seven when that photo was taken, and would be thirteen or fourteen by now. And from the way Mother always talked about Chas—her favorite nephew, she remarked every time his name came up, although why, she wouldn’t say—he seemed a formidable companion, one I doubted I would have much to do with.

  Not that Chas had ever been brought up as an example for me to follow. No, he was a bold enough, even an impudent child, from all the stories I heard of him, active and always getting into something new. But he had his problems—fights, delinquency even—two years before—running away from home for two days. That made Chas almost bad—although not quite, because Mother said he was still the most mannerly and helpful little boy she knew and still her favorite nephew. All I could think of was all Chas had done to outstrip me. He fished, he hunted, he’d water-skied, he could drive a car. Too much competition for me, whose one real outdoor sport was bicycling and who preferred sitting in a hammock and reading to anything more strenuous.

  I don’t think Janet met her age mate, Cathy, with any such trepidation. Once we’d arrived in Nansquett, they met, played together, joined other girls their own age, had spats, made up, bought and made a constant stream of gifts for each other, and finally parted at the summer’s end with much crying and promises they never kept to write each other every week.


  Maybe girls have it easier than boys do. All I know is, nothing that simple happened to Chas and me. And, having the girls—and soon after, even our parents—otherwise occupied, we were thrown together a great deal more than we expected, even going so far as to having to share a bedroom—a situation that had to intensify what already seemed a relationship with many built-in tensions.

  But all that wouldn’t happen right away, wouldn’t happen until after Mother and Janet and I had settled into Grandpa Lynch’s big house. For a few weeks we would have its many barely furnished rooms and huge expanses to ourselves to enjoy. I took a bedroom at the end of the second floor, with an attached room that opened up to Janet’s bedroom. I found exactly the lounge chair I liked for reading, on the shore side of the three-quarter wrap-around first-floor veranda. After dinner, but before the late summer sunset, Mother took Janet and I walking along the shore to see the ocean, and to remark on how big the property was, there being no house on either side of Grandpa Lynch’s for a half football field’s length. The weathered clapboard siding glittered dully in the sinking daylight as gleams off the chipped places in the gutter and side trim made the gray and white wood look brown and pink—like a big sandcastle someone had built with a ruler and plane. Janet would count the house’s windows—eight on each side of the bottom floor, four dormers on each side upstairs—and then each one of us would pick out the windows to our rooms, with pride and pleasure.