Grief Cottage

by Gail Godwin

  On one trip I hauled home three art books for Aunt Charlotte. I picked a heavy book of English landscape paintings, making sure Constable was included. Mrs. Daniels, the librarian, had recommended my other choice: a slip-cased two-volume collection of Paul Klee’s drawings and paintings. “Your aunt Charlotte might find him an inspiration while she’s recovering. He can be playful and quite philosophical. And it has his notes about what he’s doing. These volumes aren’t really supposed to go out of the library, but since it’s your aunt …” Aunt Charlotte was touched when I showed her the books. She made me lug them off to her studio. What she did with them after that, I didn’t ask. It would be like asking someone if they were enjoying your gift. When it was time to return the books, she remarked how thoughtful I always was; she said Klee could be a hoot and it was nice to see all her English friends together in one book.

  She was at her most sociable on our porch around the time the pelicans were flying home in their straight line from their day’s fishing. She seemed to enjoy whatever I had to say.

  “Well, Marcus, what do you have to report?” She would ask this while gazing at the ocean, not turning her head to look at me. This freed me to talk more easily. I remembered how, in my old life, after Mom and I had moved to the mountains and we didn’t know anybody, I had wished for someone to “report to.” Mom mostly came home too exhausted to make more than a dutiful inquiry into my day. Aunt Charlotte, facing out to sea as if she could accept whatever arose in my mind, was the ideal listener. Like the ghost-boy, and like Wheezer before him, she harkened to a good “true.” As with them, I could feel her interest quicken when I was on the right track. She liked hearing about my first trip to the library with Lachicotte.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t have better luck,” she said when I complained about the slim pickings on the microfiche and in the fiftieth anniversary magazine. “I know you were hoping to find something about that family, the boy in particular. I can see why he would capture your imagination.”

  That’s when I came close to telling her about the ghost-boy. Not dangerously close, but closer than I had ever come to telling Mom about showing Wheezer the forbidden photograph and about why I beat him up the next day. I had learned during my sessions with the psychiatrist that certain experiences must be kept to myself—perhaps forever. So all I finally said to Aunt Charlotte was that it made me mad that a whole family could be wiped out of human memory as though they’d never existed. Her reply was that billions of people had suffered that fate and billions more were destined to be forgotten as though they never existed. (“That is, if we don’t all destroy this planet first.”) She sounded satisfied with the prospect.

  The finger-painting part of the library story made her snort with laughter. She wanted to hear again how I had first thought Lachicotte had been painting a white mountain and then a white beast, and didn’t know till he told me later that it had been a farewell portrait of his Bentley. Then she wanted my assessment of the niece’s painting of the yellow roses. I told her she would have judged it a competent little painting, “like you said about that woman’s painting of Grief Cottage that started you painting.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, I never saw that woman’s painting, but the niece’s roses were something you might want to frame, or at least tape up on a wall, especially if you knew the artist. The roses in a jar had a nice—I don’t know the art word for it, but the way the paint sticks up from the paper sort of imitates the way the artist painted it.”

  “I think you mean impasto, if it was thick. Was it thick?”

  “Yeah, it stuck up in little whorls. Of course, she was pinching it up with her fingers.”

  “Or you could say ‘brushwork.’ ‘Fingerwork’ in this case. You describe paintings very well, Marcus.”

  “She told Lachicotte she hadn’t enjoyed herself so much in years. She said adults forgot how to play. That’s why he bought her that paint set while you were having your surgery.”

  “What kind of paints did he get?”

  “I think he said water-based. But they weren’t just kids’ finger paints.”

  “ ‘Water-based’ covers a large choice. And they all wore gloves?”

  “Those thin latex gloves. The kids had little kid-size gloves.”

  “I can see the advantage of gloves when you’ve got a roomful of pre-kindergarteners, but I would think gloves would deaden your tactile advantages. I don’t know. I’ve never finger-painted.”

  During our afternoon porch talks, Aunt Charlotte extracted more of my history. Some information I volunteered; other disclosures escaped as a sort of overflow. Since I had already spilled the beans to Lachicotte about my secret father, I figured I might as well admit to my only living relative that I had no idea who he was. I had been unpacking more boxes from the old apartment life. It made me increasingly sad that so many of the contents, things Mom and I had formerly liked or needed—or were even proud of—went straight into the black bags. I showed Aunt Charlotte the small photo in the silver frame that had ended my friendship with Wheezer. Like Wheezer, she turned the picture sideways and shook it.

  “Could we open this frame?” she asked, making me wonder why I had never thought of this myself. She handed it over to me and as I was folding back the four metal clips that held it in place, I let myself imagine there would be a name of somebody on the back of the picture. But it turned out to be a glossy photo cut out of a book, most likely a yearbook Aunt Charlotte said, because there was a photo of another man, posed the same way, on the back.

  “Well, that’s that,” I said angrily.

  “What do you mean, ‘that’s that’?”

  “I’ll never know who my father was because there’s nobody left to tell me.”

  “Well, he’s a nice-looking man,” she said. “He has your wide-apart eyes and quizzical eyebrows, and I definitely see a likeness in the set of the mouth when something annoys you.”

  “You know the actor Alec Guinness?”

  “Not personally, but I know who he is,” said Aunt Charlotte with a welcome return to her old dryness.

  “His mother never told him who his father was, either. She died without telling him and he never found out. He wrote about it in his autobiography. Mom said this photo was taken before she knew my father, when he was a lot younger.”

  “So you did talk about him.”

  “Not much. She said he would have been proud of me if he had lived to know me and that I would be proud of him. But she wanted to wait until I was a little older before she said any more. The reason I have Mr. Harshaw’s name is because people at the factory remembered him, though he had moved away by then. So Mom could get away with saying that they had tried for a reconciliation and it hadn’t worked and I was the result. Mr. Forster, the factory owner, was one of those—what’s the word for someone who owns the business but wants it to seem like everybody’s just one big family?”

  “Feudal? Paternalistic? I know what you mean.”

  “Somebody once told Mom Mr. Forster was a patriarch in socialist’s clothing. I think the person meant it as a joke, but I’m not sure.”

  “It’s a provocative remark, however it was meant.”

  “But Mom liked the way Forster’s factory took care of its workers. They even had a free nursery so the workers could visit their babies at lunchtime. She said long before I was thought of she used to pass the nursery and think how nice it would be to have a little somebody she could pop in and see.”

  “Did she and Mr. Harshaw ever think of having children? They were married for a long time, weren’t they?”

  “She ran away with him at sixteen and they split up when she was twenty-six. So that’s ten years. He was a lot older than her and had been married before. He didn’t have kids in that marriage either, so maybe he couldn’t. The reason he and Mom decided to separate was because he was sick of doing what he called ‘fancy side work.’ He wanted to go back to logs and own a sawmill. The sad thing is he did get his sawmi
ll and was crushed by a log falling off one of his trucks. But Mom loved Forster’s. When they made her supervisor of finish work there wasn’t much of a raise, but she said she felt appreciated. And even when we had to leave, Mr. Forster wrote her a recommendation to a custom furniture maker he knew in the mountains and that’s why we went there. But Mom only worked at that place for a short time because he went out of business and she had to start looking for other jobs.”

  “Did you ever tell me why you and your mother had to leave Forster’s?”

  “It was my fault. I beat up a boy so bad he stopped breathing and almost lost an eye. He was my best friend. He was also Mr. Forster’s grandson. His family had settled the town and pretty much ran everything. The name of the town itself was Forsterville.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you, Marcus. Did he do something?”

  “He said something really horrible and they say I went crazy.”

  “My word,” Aunt Charlotte said, pressing her left hand flat against her heart.

  “After that I had to go to a psychiatrist for some mandatory sessions and when those were over we packed up our things and drove to the mountains to start a new life.”

  “Well, Marcus, if you ever want to tell me more about it, I’m here. And if you don’t want to, that’s fine, too.” She repositioned her left leg in its cast on the stool in front of her. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to know who your father was before your mother died. But from the little you’ve told me, he sounds like someone who would have loved you and been proud of you. I did know who my father was, for all the good it did me. It turned out he was the devil incarnate.”

  “How would a person know that their father is the devil incarnate?”

  “You wouldn’t at the time. It would be later, when you were safe enough to look back. At the time all you would feel at first would be a misgiving, that something wasn’t as it should be. Later on, it may grow into a full-blown sense of wrong. But it’s a wrong you’re part of. You can’t do anything about it because you’re a child and you have no way to compare your life to other people’s lives. Your foremost need is to stay safe within the only life you know.”

  The only specific past history she had offered in our porch talks were some caustic anecdotes about her no-good husbands and more information about her former jobs. She and my mom would have had so much to talk about. Aunt Charlotte had stocked shelves at a Home Depot (“I loved riding around on the forklift cart”), mixed drinks in a bar, seated people at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, been secretary to a funeral home director (“I also did the makeup on the stiffs, undercover, of course”) and a “Jill of all trades”—house cleaning, yard work, caretaking, and pet sitting—her third husband serving as the titular and mostly useless “Jack” of their short-lived enterprise. (“We lived from hand to mouth, most of the time.”)

  “Where did you get the money to buy this house, if it isn’t rude to ask?”

  “I won a lottery. No, I did, really. Actually I won two lotteries. Every week I bought one of those cheap scratch-off tickets. Without fail, every week, tongue in cheek. The first time I won thirty-five dollars. The second time I won ten thousand. Just enough to get out of West Virginia and buy a beach shack in South Carolina.”

  “What about your husband? Didn’t he want his share?”

  “Luckily, we were divorced by then, or he would have wanted it all. At the time of my lottery windfall I was bartending at night and I was still in a state of ecstasy to be free at last. You have no idea.”

  “So that was the beginning of your solitary life?”

  “Yes, I guess it was. You’re good company, Marcus. You listen and put things together.”

  XX.

  While being good company for my aunt, I was also thinking about the ghost-boy who waited for me at Grief Cottage. Did he feel slighted that I had cut down my daily visits to the single morning ones? Did he wonder what he had done wrong, or was I pushing my human tendencies onto him? In my afternoon talks with Aunt Charlotte, I felt disloyal about neglecting him. Or maybe I should start thinking of him as the ghost-man. After all, Lachicotte’s niece’s little granddaughter had mistaken me for a man. (“Who is that man spying on us?”)

  But stop, I would warn myself: What sane person would be equating one’s loyalty to a great-aunt with one’s loyalty to a ghost? What, after all, was the figure I had seen once in a dazzle of afternoon light? How could I consider it a relationship when the person I thought I saw had been dead fifty years? The truth was, I felt love for him the way someone feels love for another living person.

  I went back and tried to track the whole thing from the beginning, as you would trace on a map a route taken. When had it started, our strange relationship? Well, with Aunt Charlotte’s story about Grief Cottage—the history of the place itself—and, following that, the story about what that derelict cottage meant to her, what it stood for, when she walked up there in her first days of freedom on the island. It had reminded her of the debris in her past, but then also it had started her painting.

  Having heard her say it had a haunting quality and a powerful mood, my first view of the actual thing had been a letdown: what an eyesore, the sooner it’s leveled the better. And then I had crawled under the wire fence and eaten my lunch on the porch and fallen asleep and dreamed that the sunburnt man was standing in the broken doorway behind me, watching over me while I slept. And then I woke up and was scared to turn around and face the doorway. I sensed something watching me from behind and I felt its motives were not as friendly or protective as the sunburnt man’s had been. But then, what were they? And I had caved and fled.

  And then the rains had come and I’d read the two ladies’ books and felt anger on the part of the boy. He and I had things in common, except that he was dead and couldn’t stand up for his rights, or even how truly or falsely people remembered him. And then Aunt Charlotte finished her big McMansion painting for the Steckworths, and later that afternoon I had walked to Grief Cottage and actually seen him. And that same night, I lay in the hammock and watched the moon rise and concentrated on sending my spirit north. And then, without my ever leaving the hammock, there was the embrace and the rapture. From that point on, I couldn’t account for it in literal or sane terms. We were connected: he was always with me.

  I used to cringe with embarrassment when the foster mother talked about how Jesus followed her around the house, always a few steps behind her, just out of her line of sight. He is always with me, even in my most private places, she told us. I had imagined what private places she meant and cringed some more. But how was my connection with the ghost-boy any less embarrassing than hers with Jesus?

  Sometimes I resurrected the psychiatrist back in Forsterville who had grilled me so patiently and professionally about what my feelings were while beating up my friend. I imagined sitting down in his office once again and explaining to him, this time without holding anything back, my relationship with the ghost-boy. What questions would the psychiatrist have asked? What diagnosis would he have given? So far this exercise had not been very fruitful. I could hear the psychiatrist asking the first thing Wheezer would have asked: was I absolutely sure what I saw wasn’t just a trick of the light? Then he might ask me to describe the onset of the fascination, what had triggered it, how long had it been going on? He would end up prescribing medication, “just for a while, to see how it goes.”

  At the end of our final session, the psychiatrist in Forsterville had given Mom a prescription for me—“If needed”—but after we left his office she said, “I don’t think we need to cash this in, do you, Marcus?” and she had torn it up and thrown the pieces into a trash can on the sidewalk. “Let’s make a completely fresh start in this place where we’re going,” she had added, with forced courage in her voice.

  Unlike Aunt Charlotte, Mom never said it was “up to me” whether or not I wanted to reveal what Wheezer had said to make me fly at him. I had told Mom that Wheezer had said something about the way we lived. And I
told her this only after we left Forsterville. I never told the psychiatrist even that much, because I knew he would pass it on to her.

  Naturally I never explained to Mom why Wheezer left our apartment. That would have meant admitting I had gone into the tin box and showed the secret photo to someone else. After she came back with the pizza for our lunch, when I told her he had felt an asthma attack coming on and had bicycled home, she had said, “Oh dear, I hope it wasn’t something in our apartment that set it off.”

  But right up until the night she died, she would wait for moments when we were close and then tilt her head wistfully and spring it on me afresh: “I wish you’d tell me what he said about how we lived, Marcus. After all, I am your mother. Whatever it was, it might not be as bad as you think.”

  Oh yes it was.

  ***

  The Fourth of July came and went, much to the relief of the island’s Turtle Patrol, whose members had set up NO FIREWORKS! zones up and down the entire length of the beach and had taken turns, in twos and threes, guarding the nest sites of the loggerhead babies, due to hatch soon and make their live-or-die dash for the sea. I had made friends with the retiree on the Turtle Patrol. After he became aware of how often I checked the site below Aunt Charlotte’s boardwalk, he gave me his beeper number on a laminated card so I could call him from our cottage, whatever the hour, if I spotted any threat or change in the protected dune. (“I always carry my beeper, when I’m out on the beach or working on my jeep in the garage.”) This was his beloved wartime 1944 Wilys Jeep, with its original camouflage paint, which he drove up and down the beach to check on the nests. He also lent me one of the patrol’s infrared flashlights. Soon we would be in countdown mode, he said, and proceeded to explain ways we would be able to tell when the hatchlings were going to crawl up through the sand and “boil out” of their nest, usually a few hours after sunset. (“Last year we rigged up a microphone and amplifier and installed it next to the site. We’ll do it again this year when we get close to hatching time. You can actually hear the hatchlings as they crawl up through the sand. It’s a rattling sound, like pebbles being thrown against a metal roof. The first time I heard the amplified sound of those little fellows I had to wipe away tears, it was so affecting.”) His name was Ed Bolton, a retired high school science teacher from Columbia. He’d lost his son, a helicopter medic, in the Viet Nam war. After he retired, he and his wife moved full-time to their beach cottage. “It’s one of the real oldies, with the brick footing columns and the tongue-in-groove joints. But we’ve modernized it a lot, of course.”