Grief Cottage

by Gail Godwin

  On the first day we had clear skies again, Aunt Charlotte finished her big McMansion painting. “Good timing,” she said. “Now I can examine it in natural light. Come into the studio, Marcus, I want your opinion.”

  “Oh,” I said, when I stood in front of it.

  “Oh, what?”

  “It’s different from how I expected it to be.”

  “And how was that?”

  “You said it was a bread and butter commission, not one of your honest paintings. This looks pretty honest to me.”

  She was standing right behind me, so I couldn’t read her face. But I could hear her indrawn breath and sniff the ferment-y smell of the red wine she sipped all through the day. I sensed that she really was anxious to have my opinion. The painting was different from what I had expected. It had the qualities of the ones I liked the most on her website. Actually, I thought it was wonderful, but wonderful was such a used-up word. “It has your mood,” I said.

  “My mood?” she coaxed.

  “It’s in your sky. It’s in the house, too. I mean, it’s more than just a painting of a McMansion. It’s saying something about how life is. I wish I could express myself better.”

  “You’re doing fine. How is life in this painting?”

  “You know the way you painted Grief Cottage? When you look at it, you think right away of the overall sadness of life. But your McMansion house’s sadness creeps up on you. The way you’ve painted it, you can feel it thinking. ‘I’m new and too big, and if I have a message it’s a shallow message. But I can’t change what I am.’ ”

  My aunt’s hand gripped my shoulder, and then quickly let go. She wasn’t a toucher.

  “Well,” she said, moving into my sight line, “I hope the Steckworths won’t see all that in my painting, but I’m obliged to you, Marcus. I especially like the sky in this painting. It came out just right. I agree with you, the McMansion does have its own quality of sadness. A hint of impermanence for those who wish to see it.”

  “Could they turn it down and not pay you?”

  “I’ve never had that happen, but I suppose it could. On the commissioned ones I always take a deposit. Nonrefundable. And this is a very big canvas. It costs money to buy enough pigment simply to cover a canvas this large. And I have another kind of protection, too. It’s called ‘hard to get’ or ‘what if she turns me down?’ or ‘waiting list.’ By now I’m known well enough for people to want a Charlotte Lee and be willing to wait for it. Oh, hang it, I have to clean the house before they come. People expect some occupational clutter in an artist’s studio, but I’ve let things go too far.”

  “I can help. I know how to clean.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed you don’t leave the bathroom a mess. Your mother raised you well.”

  “My mom cleaned houses. I mean, that’s one of the things she did to supplement our income. She taught me some tricks people like.”

  “Well, I hope you will teach me those tricks.”

  “She must have been a gutsy woman, your mom,” Aunt Charlotte said the next day while we were doing the kitchen together. “It’s not easy to be a single mother. I’m sure I would have got on with her. We might have had things in common. I liked her that time your grandmother brought her to visit when she was a teenager. Too bad we never got to know each other better. Though Brenda would probably have ruined it, warned your mom off the hippie aunt. Not that I ever thought of myself as a hippie. I have worked nonstop all my life and will go on working till I drop.”

  “You had things in common,” I said. “You both ran away from home when you were young. Mom ran away before she finished high school.”

  “Now that I didn’t know. Why did she run away from Brenda?”

  “It was Brenda’s father. He was coming to live with them and Mom said she’d rather die than live under the same roof with him.”

  “Her grandfather was my father. I ran off at sixteen to get out from under his roof. Isn’t it just bloody amazing how defilement can become a family tradition? Why on earth did Brenda ask that monster to come and live with her?”

  “She needed him to help her run the lumber mill after my grandfather died. When Mom heard about it, she ran away with an older man who was a foreman at the mill. She talked him into marrying her. The two of them moved to North Carolina and got jobs in a furniture factory. Mom said he was kind and a good worker and she felt safe with him. It broke her heart not to get her high school diploma, but she had to escape a worse situation.”

  “Damn right.” She dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor. “Always escape a worse situation, even if escaping it is going to rob you of an education and ruin your life. Hand me that scrub brush, Marcus.”

  “But I’m not tired yet.”

  “Just hand it over. I need to scrub something within an inch of its life. It’s either that or kill someone.”

  She snatched the brush from me and began making angry circles of soap foam on the tiles. “Why don’t you go down to the beach?

  “But—”

  “Just go, Marcus! Don’t make me ask you again.”

  VIII.

  I would have liked to hang out in my room or the hammock until suppertime, but Aunt Charlotte had ordered me from her house, and it wasn’t raining anymore, so I went to the beach. What had I done to turn her off? We had been getting along so well; she had even gripped my shoulder when I said something good about her painting. Then I had told her what cleaning products she needed and we had driven to the island store and I found them for her on the shelves. We had been dusting and polishing and scrubbing as a team, saving the tiled kitchen floor for last so it would gleam for the Steckworths the next day.

  Had I said something wrong? We had been talking about my mother and how Aunt Charlotte and she might have been friends. It was the first time I had heard my mom described as a gutsy woman and it made me proud to think of her like that. Everything had been going so well.

  I stopped to check on the dune that held the protected loggerhead eggs. All was quiet and untrammeled. Caretta caretta was their Latin name: the world’s largest hard-shelled turtle. Fully grown they ranged from almost a yard to a hundred inches long and weighed anywhere from three hundred to a thousand pounds. They could live until the age of a hundred, but they didn’t reach sexual maturity until they were in their thirties. “Which, when you think of it, isn’t such a bad idea,” said the old guy who had compared the hatchlings’ dash for the sea to “Normandy in reverse.” His name was Ed Bolton and he said these turtles had been doing their thing for forty million years, whereas modern Homo sapiens had appeared on the scene a mere two hundred thousand years ago.

  I walked down to the surf and studied the patterns the outgoing tide was sketching in the sand. But the shrieking children all around me only intensified my agitation. It was too late in the day to look for the sunburnt man. The little white truck was gone from the beach by noon. What did he do for the rest of the day? Did he have other trash routes on the island or did he go to a second job?

  What would happen if Aunt Charlotte’s tolerance for human company were to run out? (“Listen, I’ve given it a try, but I’ve been a solitary too long. He’s a nice boy, but I’m too set in my ways.”) Would she send me somewhere else? (“He was a nice helpful boy and the stipend that came with him was nice, but I have worked nonstop all my life and will go on working till I drop. And I have my painting. I’m known well enough for people to want a Charlotte Lee and be willing to wait for it.”)

  I would go as far as the fourth yellow barrel and then head back slowly and sit on the steps leading up to her boardwalk. I would keep company with the turtle eggs for a while. Funny, I usually thought of Aunt Charlotte as a self-sufficient older person, but when she had dropped to the floor like that and started that desperate scrubbing, I had glimpsed a scared and angry girl.

  It was too late for the white truck, but I could create my own dialogue with the sunburnt man as I walked north.

  He would be surprised to see m
e still on the island.

  “You? Still here at the beach?”

  “I live here. With my great-aunt.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Back there. It’s the gray shingle house with the dark blue trim. It was just a shack when she bought it, but she added on. She’s a painter.”

  “A house painter or the artist kind?”

  “Artist. She’s pretty well known. She does paintings of the beach and of people’s houses. All the local galleries show them. She has a website, too. There’s this one painting people keep asking for. She must have painted it fifty times. You know that old cottage at the north end of the island? That zombie house they call Grief Cottage?”

  “ ‘Zombie House’ is the perfect name for it! That place is waiting for a major accident. Why they haven’t torn it down beats me.”

  “It’s pretty bad. I ate my lunch on its porch. But I didn’t go inside.”

  “Don’t even go on that porch again. The whole structure is rotten through and through.”

  “A boy and his family disappeared from that cottage. They were staying there after the season was over, and they didn’t know about hurricanes, and Hazel came and washed them all away. But their bodies were never found.”

  “That was a long time ago,” says the sunburnt man. “Long before my time and even longer before yours. Look, dude, it’s one thing to be interested in history, but you want to stay away from that house. Because people who go in don’t always come out.”

  IX.

  I had never met people like the Steckworths. They were half an hour late, which got Aunt Charlotte’s bristles up.

  “Now we’ll wait to hear what their excuse is,” she said, pacing up and down the scrubbed and gleaming kitchen floor. “You can tell a lot about people from their excuses.”

  “How?”

  “Nice people simply apologize. Others, the sort who want to impress you, give you a story about how something really important came up. To put you in your place.”

  “What would something ‘really important’ be?”

  “Oh, our good friend the governor dropped by—or my uncle the senator. Or, the plumbers who are installing our ninety-foot hot tub showed up unexpectedly. That sort of thing.”

  It was hard for Aunt Charlotte and me to keep a straight face when the Steckworths had hardly stepped through the door before announcing that they were late because the tree company putting in the thirty-foot mature palmetto trees around their Olympic swimming pool had dropped by unexpectedly to check measurements.

  The Steckworths—Ron and Rita—were suntanned the color of mahogany and both wore heavy gold chains around their necks. They lingered just inside the front door, which opened into the kitchen, and treated us to a blow-by-blow chronicle of the building of their McMansion—though naturally they didn’t call it that. The two of them made it into a kind of duet, Ron vocalizing the measurements of rooms and staircases and trees, and Rita chiming in with the frustrations of having to deal with architects and contractors and landscapers. “Not to mention the decorators,” wailed Rita.

  This was my aunt’s cue to say, “Well, let’s go into my studio and have a look at your forty-two by fifty-six painting.”

  I watched from the doorway, nervous. What if they took one look and said in chorus, “Oh, this is not what we wanted at all!” Aunt Charlotte would be stuck with only the non-refundable down payment. Or what if one of them asked a stupid question and earned a caustic retort from my aunt which would humiliate them, make them feel obliged to retaliate in some way—perhaps to quibble over the agreed-on price, or ask for changes in the painting?

  “Oh, look, Ronnie!” was Rita Steckworth’s first reaction. “All our palmettos are already in!”

  “If only life was that simple,” said Ron Steckworth, winking at my aunt. “Have you ever painted one this large before, Mrs. Lee?”

  “No,” said Aunt Charlotte. “Ordinarily I prefer to work on a smaller scale.”

  “How small?” asked Ron.

  “Oh, sixteen by eighteen, twelve by sixteen. I have a particular fondness for four by sixes, about the size of my palm.” She held up a palm.

  “A sixteen by eighteen would be completely swallowed by our mantelpiece,” said Ron.

  “That’s why we agreed on a forty-two by fifty-six,” my aunt replied.

  “Wait, is that yellow paint I’m seeing up there in the sky?” Rita asked, standing so close to the painting that her nose almost touched it.

  “Very observant,” said my aunt. “It’s cadmium yellow. If you’ll step back a bit, you’ll see it disappearing into the blueness. Someone standing at the proper distance when it’s hung in your house will see a richer blue sky than if I had used blue pigments alone.”

  “Oh, richer,” Rita Steckworth echoed, obediently stepping back. “Yes, you’re right.”

  “Turner used yellow in his skies a lot,” Aunt Charlotte said. “And Sisley. I learned the trick from Sisley.”

  “Sisley? Now where does he—?”

  “We’ll Google him when we get home,” Ron cut her off. Sauntering around to the rear of the big studio easel mounted on wheels, he examined the reverse side of the canvas. “What will you do back here?” he asked.

  “Do back here?” inquired Aunt Charlotte.

  “I mean, you gonna put something back here? Or do you leave it open like that?”

  “Most professionals leave it open. An oil painting never completely dries. If you were to cover the back, it couldn’t breathe and condensation would set in … followed by mold.”

  “Euw, mold!” cried Rita.

  “Your framer may want to finish off the back with a sheet of porous brown paper so the air can circulate,” Aunt Charlotte said. “But the paper is mostly for looks.”

  “We were thinking gold for the frame,” said Rita, “but what would you suggest?”

  “If it were me, I’d keep it simple. You don’t want the frame to distract from the painting. I’d suggest a simple molding. No more than an inch. And I would go for chrome or silver rather than gold.”

  “Maybe just a thin gold molding?” Rita Steckworth entreated.

  “Well, if you keep it very thin,” said Aunt Charlotte.

  X.

  After Ron Steckworth had written his check with a flourish, and Aunt Charlotte had given loading directions to the strapping handyman waiting outside with a van to transfer the forty-two by fifty-six safely to the Steckworths’ McMansion (“No, do not cover it, let it breathe during its short ride. And please be careful of those impasto areas where the paint is thickest …”), my aunt, sighing and looking inconvenienced, said she ought to drive over to the mainland to the bank. “I don’t like keeping a check this large in the house. If I should drop dead tonight, Marcus, it would make things difficult for you.” She asked if I wanted to accompany her and when I said an enthusiastic yes—I had not left the island since the day I arrived—I thought I saw a flicker of annoyance on her face. Too late I realized that she probably looked forward to going somewhere all by herself again.

  However, she had brightened by the time we were rattling over the causeway. It was early afternoon and some black men with fishing rods were leaning over its railings. Aunt Charlotte replayed some choice Steckworthian utterances (Rita’s “Look, Ronnie, our palmettos are already in!” and Ronnie’s “What will you do back here?”)

  Then she floored me by announcing she was going to buy me a really nice beach bike out of her cash cow. Struck dumb by her offer I let the moment go by during which a proper boy would be voicing his excitement and gratitude. Moreover, I couldn’t yet ride in her Mercedes without recalling the shrimp vomit from our first day. Did a whiff still linger?

  When we got to the bank she merely said, “I’ll be right back,” not asking if I wanted to go inside the bank with her. What had she meant about dropping dead when the check was still in the house? Why would that make it difficult for me? Why had she said such a thing in the first place? It seemed insensitive g
iven that the only other person in my life had just died.

  Back on the island again we stopped at the store and bought a chicken roasted on the spit, various cold cuts and salads, and more bananas and yogurt for Aunt Charlotte. “I’m going to collapse,” she announced as soon as we got home. “If I’m not up by suppertime, go ahead without me and I’ll see you tomorrow.” Off she went to her studio/bedroom carrying an unopened bottle of red wine and the corkscrew.

  I put away the things and ate a banana with a cheese sandwich and drank a glass of milk. The chicken, still warm from the spit, called out to me, but I imagined her getting up late in the afternoon and finding one of its legs hacked away. (“Couldn’t the boy have waited for me?”)

  Soon it would be the longest day. I had hours more daylight to get through. I could leave a note and walk to the north end of the island and back and the sun would still be strong. Checking myself in the bathroom mirror that cut me off at the collarbone, I marveled that my aunt could exist without a full-length mirror. At our poorest, Mom had always had a full-length mirror. A woman had to know how she looked from behind, she said. A hem could be crooked, a heel worn down, or something hanging that wasn’t meant to show. But Aunt Charlotte seemed to get along fine without knowing how the rest of her looked. She cut her hair in front of the mirror above the sink and that must have been as far down as her grooming concerned her. As she wore only pants and shirts and sandals, there were no skirts or heels or slips to worry about.