Grief Cottage

by Gail Godwin

  Mom and I had always shared a bedroom and a bed. I had never given this a second thought until the day I brought Wheezer to our apartment back in Forsterville. It was a far better apartment than the one we were to have in Jewel, but there was only the single bedroom. I invited him home with me reluctantly—it was much nicer to go to his house, where he had his own room and his grandmother, who ran the household, made us special treats. His father traveled around the state selling Forster’s furniture, and his mother—they had long been “estranged”—lived in Palm Beach, organizing women’s golf tournaments. Wheezer had confided to me that he had been “an accident.” His mother had been eager for his big brother, Drew, to leave for college, “but then when Drew turned eighteen, she and Daddy messed up and I was the result.” Drew, who worked for an accounting firm in Charlotte, was old enough to be Wheezer’s father. He came home frequently on weekends, tanning himself in the backyard if it was warm enough and shut up in his bedroom listening to jazz and blues except for mealtimes. He treated Wheezer and me with a grumpy, bemused forbearance.

  Wheezer was fascinated by my closeness with my mom. He was also curious—perhaps too curious—about the “socioeconomic” differences between us. It would be safer, I thought, for him to go on romanticizing my home life as frugal but noble, like the homes of the poor in Dickens. But he persisted in digging for details about how we lived until Mom said to ask him over one Saturday when she wasn’t working at the furniture factory. She would go out and get pizza for our lunch. (This was to be the first time her going out to get pizza would precede a disaster.) She said it was only right that we return his hospitality when I spent so much time at his grandmother’s house. How different our life might have been if I had not invited Wheezer over that Saturday!

  “Wait a minute,” he said when I was showing him our bedroom. “You sleep in the same bed with your mom?” “Where else would I sleep?” I flashed back. “Some poor families sleep four to a bed.” That shut him up until I made the fatal mistake of showing him the picture of a man I was never supposed to show anyone. Mom kept this small framed photo in a tin box at the bottom of a drawer, and said she would tell me more about him when the time was right. But after Wheezer’s remark about our sleeping arrangements, I was desperate to divert him with a new mystery. Without a word, I walked over to the bureau, opened the bottom drawer, opened the tin box, and took out the photograph. “This is my real dad,” I said, “but you can’t tell anyone. He’s dead now, but when I’m older she’s going to explain everything.” In his eagerness, he snatched the photograph out of my hand. He examined it, turned it sideways, shook it in its frame, scrutinized it some more, and then handed it back to me. “This is something that’s been cut out of a book,” he said, giving me a hostile look. “This person could be anybody. You and your mom are both crazy. I need to leave.” Those were the last words he ever spoke directly to me. By the time Mom got back to our apartment with the pizza, he was gone. I told her he’d felt an asthma attack coming on and rushed home for his medication.

  At recess on Monday he had waited until I was in hearing range and then announced to the other boys. “Guess what? Marcus sleeps with his mom. He’s his mother’s own little husband.”

  And then I did go crazy. I grabbed a hunk of his beautiful salon-cut hair and banged his head backward against a rock wall until there was blood on the wall. The asthmatic boy gasped and gagged and then stopped breathing altogether. Everyone including me thought he had died. But I went on punching that neat little face until others pulled me away. He almost lost the sight in one eye. Mom gave up her job, and as soon as my sessions with the psychiatrist came to an end we moved away. I had felt thankful when I heard the eye was out of danger. But deep down, below the level where right and wrong stayed separate, I was awed at myself for being able to summon such wrath.

  When the psychiatrist had asked what I had felt when I was attacking Wheezer, I said I had “blanked out.” But even as I lied I knew that to bloody Wheezer’s head and crush his face and stop his breathing had been my supreme task. And as I saw this being accomplished before my eyes I was filled with elation. I felt that I was driving out the badness from my life through my fists and feet. But I had been wise enough to keep this from the psychiatrist. He would have judged that anyone admitting to such things needed to be in an institution. Yet I had also been able to tell him, in all truth, that I had been sickened and appalled when I heard how badly my friend had been hurt. It was as though Wheezer had been in a terrible accident and I was hearing about it afterward.

  Aunt Charlotte had not mentioned the boxes again, but as the rain hadn’t let up I got the first one from the garage and carried it to my room. After a quick glance inside, I fetched a black trash bag from the pantry. The slow-cooker could stay; I could impress Aunt Charlotte with my pulled pork. The rest—aspirin, Q-tips, even our old toothbrushes, for God’s sake, and two pathetic chipped mugs—into the black bag. Some social worker-in-training had probably packed these boxes. “This boy lost his mother and had to go into foster care,” the supervisor would have said. “Pack everything even if it seems worthless. There are always lawsuits to consider.”

  VI.

  During the rainy spell I dreamed that the sunburnt man picked me up on a motorcycle. The dump truck was in the shop, he said, so our job was to ride up and down the beach on the motorcycle and check the levels of the yellow trash cans. Riding behind him felt wonderful. I was the one who had to hop off and inspect each can. He laughed so hard I could feel his back shaking when I said, leaning against him as we rode straight into the wind: “Yuck, you wouldn’t want to know what was in that last can.” When we got to the trash can in front of Grief Cottage, I said, “I guess we won’t need to check that one.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because. Nobody has been in there since Hurricane Hazel.”

  “That’s what you think,” he said. “I’ll check this one out myself.”

  “Just as I expected,” he said when he returned. “Remember what I told you, Marcus. Do not go in that house.”

  “But what was in the can?”

  “I could tell you,” he said, laughing, “but then I’d have to kill you.”

  ***

  The rain beating down on Aunt Charlotte’s tin roof shut out the sound of the ocean. At supper a few evenings back, she had announced that she was within days of completing the McMansion painting. I told her I had made a start with the boxes. “Then this rain has been good for something,” she said. In the bathroom I always rinsed the sink after using it and wiped it dry with my towel. Mom had taught me this when she had to take a second job cleaning houses. It was the little touches, she said, that pleased people. Dry sinks and soap dishes, shiny taps. A single hair in the tub could ruin the whole effect. And I always made sure the seat was back down on the toilet. So far, I had erred only once, and Aunt Charlotte had let it go with a dry comment about sharing a bathroom with a man.

  I brought in a second box only to shrink back as soon as I had taken a sneak preview. This box contained a different set of sorrows. Underneath some childhood books (Goodnight Moon, Mrs. Ticklefeather, Winnie the Pooh, and The House at Pooh Corner) were my mother’s winter coat, her sweatpants and tops she wore at home, her shoes, nightgowns, underwear, elastic stockings (which held in her varicose veins from standing at work), her laminated badge (“Section Manager”) that she had proudly worn at Forster’s furniture factory, her makeup and moisturizers, a box, half empty, of super-sized Tampax. Had the social worker-in-training made a phone call to his or her superior? “Listen, should I go ahead and throw some of the really personal items out, or what? I mean, Goodwill would take the winter coat, though it’s sort of shabby, but the other stuff?” And the superior must have repeated the lawsuit spiel.

  The whole of that box, even the coat (let Goodwill find its own shabby coats!) went into the black trash bag. After paging nostalgically through Goodnight Moon and feeling sad, I tossed the books. Then remorse overcame m
e and I rescued the Pooh books. Mom had been so proud of herself for finding them at a library sale. (“They’re like new, except a child crayoned over a few pages in Pooh Corner.”) Best to pace myself with these boxes. What if they were going to get incrementally worse, each one harder to take than the one before?

  It was a relief to return to the books by the privileged ladies with their cruel ignorance about anything outside their own history. When I was out on the porch in the hammock, the ocean noises drowned out the softer patter of the rain. I watched the Turtle Patrol, clad in slickers and rain hats, make regular visits to our clutch. And from Aunt Charlotte’s porch there was always the chance of spotting the little white truck bouncing north or south.

  I went back to the “Fierce Storms” chapter in Chronicles of a Legendary Island, remembering how I had aced my research paper at the mountain school where I was Baby Wonk and Pudge who had skipped a grade. Our teacher, who liked me so much she often looked at me while she was addressing the class (which didn’t lessen my freak reputation), said that instead of rushing to start writing your paper you should read your material through several times and treat it like clues in a mystery. Because each time you read through something, the more things you would realize that you had missed the time before. What clues like in a mystery could I extract from the single paragraph that dealt with Hurricane Hazel at the end of the “Fierce Storms” chapter?

  In the early parts of that chapter, which had recounted lost lives in the bad hurricanes of 1822 and 1893, all the drowned family members and their drowned servants were named. Even visitors and strangers had been diligently listed by name, even if only part of a name. (“Also drowned on that fearful night, a century and a half ago, were Mr. Warren Botsford’s nephew, Botsford Channing; Captain Wise, a visiting architect; a Dr. Venn from Charlotte, N.C.; a Miss Satterwhite and a Mr. de Vere…”)

  Yet the only missing people after Hurricane Hazel hit on October 15, 1954, were not named. There weren’t yet telephones on the island in 1954, but due to an “efficient neighbor warning system,” most of the islanders made hurried evacuations to safe places on the mainland.

  The only people who could not be accounted for were the fourteen-year-old boy and his parents, the out-of-state family staying in the Barbour cottage after the summer season. It was an unfortunate chain of circumstances, the out-of-state family most likely being unfamiliar with hurricanes, and underestimating the force of this one. One evacuating islander, Mr. Art Honeywell, reported having been stopped in his truck on Seashore Road by the desperate parents searching on foot for their son, but the boy had not been seen by anyone. It was later surmised that he had set off in another direction in search of the parents. As their bodies were never found, it is assumed that all three were washed out to sea. The house itself, the oldest on the island, withstood the tempest, all except the south porch, which had been mysteriously destroyed by fire during the hurricane. Afterward the cottage was sold and the new owners allowed it to remain empty and fall into ruin. Because of its sad fate, islanders took to calling it “Grief Cottage.”

  ***

  What exactly was the “efficient neighbor warning system”? Did it mean only your neighbors got warned? What about strangers? Especially out-of-state strangers unfamiliar with hurricanes, who underestimated their force? Why hadn’t Mr. Art Honeywell in his truck said to the parents, “Climb in and we’ll search for your son together?” Where did the “age fourteen” come from? Had the parents told Mr. Honeywell, “We are out looking for our son, who is fourteen …”? Why hadn’t the boy been in school? And what kind of family stays in a beach cottage in October, “after the season”? Most likely a family who needed to take advantage of reduced rates. If Mom and I had ever gone to the beach we would have had to wait for after the season.

  I was almost sorry this wasn’t a school assignment. I knew exactly how I would go about making the most of the material from the privileged lady’s storm chapter. Baby Wonk would have aced that assignment and earned more contempt.

  I would have called my paper “Who Is My Neighbor?” after the story in the Bible where that “gotcha” lawyer tried to pin Jesus down by asking, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus had trounced him with the story of the Good Samaritan. (“Luke ten, twenty-nine!” the little kids at the foster home would have shouted wildly.)

  Last year Mom had started imagining a future for us. In this future, she would pass the high school equivalency exam and we would “start college at the same time.” The more excited she got about this plan, the more conflicted I became. I began counting the years ahead of us: seventh grade through twelfth. I saw myself turning into my mother’s “own little husband,” as Wheezer had called me at school in front of our friends.

  Mom would often say, “I may not be able to afford the best, but I do know what the best is.” And where I was concerned she did go for the best: the best dental treatment at a clinic free to children, but not open to adults (while sadly neglecting her own teeth), the best life insurance for $24 a month (a stretch when you’re making less than $24,000 a year). I kept hoping I would have an important dream about her. I had seen her in several dreams, but she was not at all like herself or else hurrying away in order to avoid me.

  The weird thing was I regularly dreamed of Wheezer, who still lived in Forsterville. In the dreams I called him by his birth name, Shelby, and he was very much like himself. Occasionally he wore a patch over one eye. (“See what you did, you devil?”) In the patch dreams he really had lost sight in that eye but he had forgiven me. In the dreams we were closer than ever, learning about the world and growing up together.

  VII.

  The Aunt Charlotte I went to live with when I was eleven could have qualified as a hermit. She made use of modern conveniences, but lived the life of a solitary. And even after I came, she maintained most of her solitary ways. She called out on her land phone to order things but never picked up incoming calls. The caller was transferred to voice mail and could leave a message—or not. She often let days go by without checking her messages. She used the laptop computer that lay sleek and closed on the kitchen counter to look up information and weather and “to see if the world still existed,” as she put it. Much of her business was conducted online, between her website and potential customers. She also had linkups to local and online art galleries who liaised between her and potential buyers and charged finders’ fees. As I didn’t pine for it, she continued not to have cable television. So far, I had not seen her turn her old TV on. She usually retired soon after we’d had supper, taking her wineglass and the unfinished bottle to her studio with its sleeping quarters behind a curtain.

  She could rise to most household emergencies: change a fuse, replace a washer on a leaky faucet, fix a misbehaving toilet, rewire electrical switches, unstop a gutter, replace rotting boards. Near the ocean, boards were always rotting. After buying her “beach shack,” she had required the services of professionals to add rooms (her studio and her bedroom, which was now mine, and an indoor bathroom) but she had done most of the finish work, teaching herself from books the way she had taught herself the basics of landscape painting. She could even do rudimentary carpentry and had built shelves and trestle tables to hold her art supplies.

  She had no official religion and didn’t call on God or Jesus, either for help or as an oath. I think painting was the closest to any religion she had. For proof that she practiced charity, you had to look no further than myself. Of course there was the “nice stipend” attached to my person that she had been so “aboveboard” about at the start, but I soon dropped any notion that she had taken me only because of the money. If my mom hadn’t bought that policy, I believe that Aunt Charlotte, once aware that she was my only kin, would have welcomed me under her tin roof no matter what.

  When I first laid eyes on her at the airport, she wore her wiry white hair in a very short brush cut. But in 2004 the shorn look was becoming fashionable for women, because of feminism or because they were cancer patients o
r because they wanted to announce to the world they were lesbians or because it made them look more dramatic. It made Aunt Charlotte look like a Roman centurion and emphasized her well-shaped skull. She cut it herself.

  She had no love interests of either sex. Had the three good-for-nothing husbands in a row soured her on relationships altogether, or had there been intimacies during the earlier island years, when she was always in the company of carpenters and plumbers and electricians? After all, she had been in her early thirties when she moved here. My mother was already twenty-eight when I was born and was asked out by men until she died eleven years (five months and four days) later. Mom never went out with anyone more than a few times, but she would report on what she called her “dates” when she got home. “Never again,” she might say. Or, “He’s kind. When you get to my age kindness becomes a major attraction.” But no one lasted very long because, as she said, she could recognize the best and she had loved the best. The mere memory of my father would always outclass all living suitors. There was a quote she liked: “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” It was from a long poem Tennyson had written after the death of his beloved friend. It took the poet seventeen years to put down all the thoughts and emotions he felt about the loss of this friend.

  After the remodeling of her house was finished, Aunt Charlotte had continued to work with men: first as a receptionist for a veterinarian on the island and then as a receptionist at a foreign car repair shop on the mainland. (“I also changed the oil and did other unladylike repairs when the customers weren’t present.”) Later she and the foreign-car man, a local old “scion” named Lachicotte Hayes (pronounced “LASH-i-cott”) became partners in a taxi service. They took turns picking up people in vintage cars. (“For a while we were driving a 1935 Rolls-Royce, until Lash got an offer for it we couldn’t refuse.”) Eventually, they sold their taxi business for a profit. (“My half provided me with an income until my paintings started to sell.”)