by Anita Shreve
To the north is a house on a hill, its white facade gleaming. Sydney spots a fox. Occasionally, she can hear, but not see, a car. All along the road, thickets of beach rose and something else make a nearly impenetrable wall. From where she stands, Sydney can peer into the backyard of the house next door. A slim boat waits in its blue plastic sleeve for summer. The windows of the cottage have been shuttered.
Across the marsh, the grocery store and lobster pound are closed. A few fishermen are coming in for the day, but they will have unloaded their catch elsewhere, perhaps in Portsmouth. The low-tide waters are reflective in parts, corrugated in others.
Sydney fingers the white curtain. The Reverend “Hemmings Motor News” ?used this bathroom. So did Art and Wendy. Sydney flashes on the image of a lamp in the shape of an antique car horn. Over the years, the house has sheltered perhaps hundreds of guests. Did the nuns have visitors? Did the unwed mothers? Would parents have come and scolded their young daughters and then wept at their bedsides? Would the political agitators have ignored the beauty of the marsh entirely, interested only in signs of smoke from the mills beyond?
Sydney thinks about Mrs. Edwards’s confession. A death, her grief, has given Mrs. Edwards license. There will be no more dinner parties now. Sydney is reminded of the small double bed in the parental bedroom, of the photo on Mr. Edwards’s desk. Sydney can never know how much love, physical or otherwise, there was between husband and wife.
Mrs. Edwards is now a widow. At last, Sydney thinks with some irony, the two women have something in common.
Sydney hears a knock on the door.
“Yes?” she calls.
“You okay?” The voice is Ben’s. “You’ve been in there forever.”
“I’m fine,” she answers. “I’m just coming out.”
She washes her hands, dries them, and opens the door. Ben is standing in the hallway, holding two sweatshirts.
“Want to go for a ride?” he asks.
Chapter 13
Sydney, asked to hold the faded navy sweatshirts, wonders what they are for. They walk to a Jetta parked at the back of the house.
“Where’s the Land Rover?” she asks.
“Sold it,” Ben answers.
She takes the passenger seat and shuts the door. Ought she to be apprehensive about being alone with Ben, a man with whom she has never felt comfortable? But then the moment passes. The man has just lost his father, Sydney reasons. Isn’t everything a little different now?
They drive in companionable silence the length of the beach road and into town, each place infused with both new life and abandonment: the new life in the girders and rafters of construction on the beach; the abandonment in the shuttered windows of the houses in the village. Only the post office has a vehicle parked in front of it.
Ben says, “You may have to get the cuffs of your pants wet. Is that all right?”
Sydney answers, yes, that is fine. It seems to her, as Ben turns on the engine of the Whaler, that she has hours ago stopped caring about her clothes or her appearance.
She zips up the sweatshirt and sits on the bait box.
The blue above the ocean is determinedly cleansed and rinsed after a long hot summer. The salt wind seems full of pure oxygen. The engine strains against the tide. It is impossible to speak to Ben, who is standing at the wheel behind her. Perhaps he means to round the point and have one last look at the summerhouse before it no longer belongs to his family. She understands that impulse but wonders why he wanted to bring her along. Possibly, having overheard his mother, he is only being kind.
But when they clear the gut, Ben heads west rather than east, his destination unclear to Sydney. The wind whips her hair straight back. The Whaler picks up its pace, slapping against the chop. She notes that the white cushions have turned a faint pink in spots, that the abraded deck is stained. A sense of disorder pervades the boat: a balled T-shirt in the bow; uncoiled rope on the console; a fishing rod, unsheathed, its hook dangling.
They round a promontory she has never seen before. They travel what seems a good distance, and Sydney begins to doubt the wisdom of having accepted Ben’s invitation. She wonders, too, if she ought to have called one of her colleagues: Will they worry about her?
The Whaler heads along a shoreline she is not familiar with. Sydney is aware of islands, lobster buoys, a fishing boat coming into port. She feels, too, an odd sense of freedom, of having escaped the village as they run fast along the shore. Perhaps there is an agenda after all.
Ben slows the engine. Ahead of them is an island on which stand three or four shacks. He cuts the engine even further, and the Whaler drifts. He examines the water depth closely. She, too, peers over the side, and sees below them an unending bed of shells, dark shells with pearl-like spirals in between. She wishes she could reach down and touch them.
They drift on until there is only sand under the boat, rippled sand like that at the bottom of a river. Sydney runs her hand through the water and is surprised at its warmth. Between the boat and the island are several sandbars.
“We’ll have maybe twenty minutes,” Ben says.
He anchors the boat and lets the line play out in shallow water. Sydney heaves herself over the side of the Whaler. She has rolled the cuffs of her black pants, but instantly they unravel. She wades through the seawater to where Ben is standing.
“Sorry about that,” he says, looking down at her soaked legs.
But Sydney is gazing at the island in front of her. “This is amazing,” she says.
The sand on the bars is rippled as well, and the ridges massage her feet. Sydney is struck by the number of shells, some in piles, some at the edge of the bar, all begging to be collected. Sydney and Ben cross one sandbar and then another and then begin to climb up a steep slope. Ben leads the way.
The cottages are clustered at the top of the hill. All but one have been boarded up for the winter—or perhaps they have been that way for years. There are four, each one facing out to sea. The island is the size of a baseball field, and in its center is a well. Someone has mown the grass, suggesting recent habitation.
She follows Ben to a modest brown-and-yellow cottage with a porch. The shingled roof has four dormers in it—each one a point of the compass. Sydney can see the shoreline of the mainland half a mile away.
“Where are we?” she asks.
“Frederick’s Island,” Ben says. “The locals call it Freddie’s.”
“Is this the one. . .?” Sydney asks, thinking of her wedding day.
“No,” Ben answers quickly.
The brown stain is badly weathered, the yellow trim nearly cream-colored. Lobster buoys hang from an outside wall. Beside a door that Ben unlocks, two plastic rain buckets hold what looks to be discolored water. He steps inside the house and waits for her to enter.
It takes a minute for her eyes to adjust. She discovers she is standing in a small kitchen, all the walls and rafters whitewashed. Sydney notes a rudimentary stove and a tiny refrigerator with rusted hinges. On a shelf by the front door is a spotted mirror, a plastic glass full of toothbrushes, a pair of scissors, a can of Off. Below the shelf is a soapstone sink filled with plastic water jugs. To its right is a glass pitcher with red and yellow stripes, reminiscent of pitchers her mother might have used in Troy for iced tea. On the wall next to a counter is a kerosene lantern.
“There’s no water or electricity,” Ben explains. “The stove and fridge run on propane. Let me show you the other rooms.”
They step inside a charmless living room with thin white curtains at the windows. A gas lantern hangs from the ceiling as do brass chimes meant to move in the wind when the front door is open. The bare wood floor is covered with furniture: a maple sofa with a blue quilt, a chrome chair from the 1970s, four green molded-plastic chairs of the sort one might keep on a porch, two lovely old wicker chaises, unpainted, and to one side a round table covered with an oilcloth printed with red lobsters. A worn braided rug that matches nothing sits in the center of the room.
/>
There is a bedroom, too small to hold much more than a bed and a bureau, a bathroom that looks as though it has been recently used by fishermen. Sydney likes the dining room, with its slanted ceiling and the exposed azure boards of the walls. Flower-patterned oilcloth covers a dark table. A matching sideboard and chairs seem oddly formal. In the center of the table is a green-glass kerosene lantern, and Sydney imagines dinners in the lantern light. She notes a vinegar cruet on the sill, a rolled flag, a whisk broom.
“Is this yours?” she asks Ben, who is standing in the doorway with his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
“I just closed on it. It needs a lot of work.”
“The people who owned it left all this stuff?”
“You have to with an island house. It’s too much trouble to haul it back to the mainland.”
“Why did you buy it?”
“I did it when I learned that my mother was selling the beach house.”
“It’s funky,” Sydney says, “but it’s kind of wonderful—like stepping back in time.”
Ben leads the way up a narrow staircase. “There are three tiny bedrooms on this second floor,” he explains, “but I’m going to knock the walls down and make one big room. Here, let me show you this.”
At the landing, Ben opens a window and steps outside onto the slightly pitched roof of the porch. “Come on,” he says to her. “It’s pretty flat.”
Sydney crawls out onto the roof, the asphalt rough on her knees. When she has settled herself, she looks out to a startling view of islands to the north and, beyond them, the Atlantic. There are no sounds except for the faint slapping of the water against rocks. “The view is fabulous,” Sydney says. “Do people really live here?”
“You can’t live here year-round. None of the houses is winterized. But people do come out in the summer. I’ve met one or two of them.”
“How do you get on and off?” she asks.
“At low tide, you can walk. There’s a sandbar on the other side. You can drive, too, but you really want a four-wheel-drive to do that. I shouldn’t have sold the Land Rover. Usually, I come over in the boat. I’ll do a little work this fall. I’ll probably get a secondhand truck for the job.”
“I’m confused,” Sydney says. “What about your other job?”
“I guess you could say I’m on sabbatical. Indefinite sabbatical would be more accurate.”
“Did you get fired?”
He laughs. “No. I’ve quit. For now anyway.”
Ben leans back against the frame of the window. “At one time, most of the New England coastline was like this,” he explains. “Small cottages without running water or electricity. There were one or two on the beach when my parents bought the big house, but they’re gone now. Torn down to make way for newer construction.”
Sydney is impressed by the simplicity of the view. “It’s disturbing in a way,” she says, “all this beauty, isn’t it? You want it forever, but you can’t have it. Your father once said that he thought all the people who had owned the beach house had come for the beauty.”
“My father said that?” Ben ponders the thought. “It’s not true, though, is it?”
“How do you mean?”
“The beauty is there, certainly, but the beach has its ugly side as well. Even this view can be harsh if you look closely enough. Those flies all over that seaweed there? The rocks there covered with gull shit? And can you smell the diesel fumes from that lobster boat?”
“I’ve always wondered if beauty is simply trying to capture something you never had,” Sydney says, “or if it’s something you once had in childhood that you want back. The wonder of it, say, or the magnificence.”
“It’s the light,” Ben says. “The same scene on a cloudy day is depressing as hell.”
Ben adjusts his position. “Sometimes I think it’s a kind of pornography, this lusting after beauty,” he says. “I used to see a lot of it in my job. The great rooms with the granite and the Sub-Zero, the triple-paned windows and the French doors, the walk-in closets as big as their grandmothers’ living rooms used to be. Everything I wear all summer could fit into two drawers in a bureau. That’s why I loved this place when I saw it,” he adds, gesturing to take in the house they are sitting on. “You were too well mannered to say so, but it’s pretty grim.”
Sydney laughs. “It’s authentic,” she says.
Her pants dry in odd shapes. The roof is hot. She wonders what it would be like to be here in a storm. “Ben, what happened?” she asks. “Why did he do it?”
Ben turns to look at her. “Are we talking about Jeff?”
“Yes.”
Ben sets his jaw, and there is a kind of hardening of the lower part of his face. “I can’t answer for him,” he says, “but I do know that we had a remarkable conversation at the airport waiting for his flight.”
“Jeff took the flight to Paris?” Sydney asks.
“He felt he had to get away.”
Though Sydney had imagined Jeff going off to Paris, the reality of it rattles her. “What did he say?”
“He said he’d just done the worst thing in his life.”
A vestige of hurt moves through Sydney’s body like a cloud. In seconds, it is gone.
“I agreed with him,” Ben says.
“That afternoon,” she says and hesitates—now on the verge of assuming more than might be true—“he said he did it to you.”
Ben is silent for a long time. “I suppose he did.”
“He’d done it with Victoria, too, he said.”
“He had.”
“What happened?”
Ben, head bent, picks at a loose shingle. “Vicki and I had just started going out. We’d been together maybe ten days, two weeks. I think we’d gone out to dinner and we’d been to a party. Then Jeff met us at a benefit, and next thing I know, they’re a couple.”
“You weren’t mad?”
“I was surprised, let’s put it that way.” Ben pauses. “I thought, you know, may the best man win, water under the bridge. What was I going to do? Ask for her back?” Ben looks up. “But when he did it again. . .I realized that even Jeff’s taking Victoria had been deliberate. I could forgive him the first time, but not the second, and he knew it.”
“But why did he do it?”
Ben is hesitant. “He saw I noticed you, so he wanted you,” he says after a beat. “End of story.”
“That was it?” Sydney asks.
“That was it.”
“And I let him have me.”
“So you did.”
Sydney closes her eyes. A sense of shame, of foolishness, engulfs her.
“Jeff was always competitive,” Ben says, perhaps sensing her embarrassment. “Some of it was just the natural order, some of it was pure Jeff. When I was twelve, Jeff was eight. When I was eighteen, he was fourteen. By definition, I was better at most things than he was. Athletics, for example; he could never compete in that arena. He used to try, and then he just gave up, decided to find other ways to beat me. School was one. Women was another. He got very, very good at getting women.” Ben glances sideways at Sydney. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“I think so.”
“Jeff was brilliant at it. He would seem to do it without really trying. I’m not quite sure how he pulled it off. You would know better than I.”
Sydney remembers the day Jeff came out onto the porch and traced his finger from her knee to the hem of her shorts, a shockingly intimate gesture given how little had gone before. She can see that such gestures might make for an effective technique—throwing a woman off balance, taking possession of her before she understood that she had been possessed.
Sydney straightens out her legs on the rooftop.
“I’m going to build a small deck right where we’re sitting,” Ben says. “I’ll put in a door where the window is, and then have a space big enough for a couple of chairs and a small table.”
Sydney is amazed at the absence of sound. No children running on
a beach, no cars, no whine from a boat engine. “You know, I had a sense, that first day on the porch, that I was upsetting the family equilibrium. That I was intruding.”
“People were intruding all the time.”
“Not like I was.”
“No, probably not.”
“I was seduced.”
“By Jeff?”
“Well, yes, but also by the beauty of the place, I think, and the sense of family.”
Ben studies her. “I can see that. A double whammy: beauty and family. Though, truthfully, I think you fell a little in love with my father.”
Sydney is taken aback by the suggestion. “But not in the way—”
“No, I didn’t mean that. Everybody was always falling a little in love with him.”
“He was a great man,” Sydney says.
“Yes, he was.”
“I thought Jeff would be like him,” she says.
“Fatal mistake.”
“Ben, why didn’t you tell me? About Jeff. Before the wedding.”
Ben takes a long breath and lets it out. “At first I was reluctant because I didn’t want to see you get hurt, and then the longer it went on, the more I thought maybe Jeff really cared about you, that this was it for him.”
“So you stayed away.”
“If he was doing it to spite me, I didn’t want any part of it. And if he loved you, I had to stay away.” Ben pauses. “Listen, that night in the snowstorm, at the bar, if I’d told you about Jeff, would you have believed me?”
Sydney remembers the slush underfoot, the green martinis, the way Ben captured her hand on the table.
“Probably not,” she says.
Sydney unzips her sweatshirt. Her blouse is wrinkled. “What will happen to your mother?” she asks.
“She got a good price for the beach house. And she’ll get a good one for the Needham house as well. I’m trying to find her a condo in Boston.”
