Grief Cottage

by Gail Godwin

  Marcus Aurelius, who I was named after, had been three when his father died. Later Marcus was to write that he had learned “manliness without ostentation” from what he had heard and remembered about that father. In those days, a father acknowledged a child as his own by lifting the infant up from the hearth in a special ceremony, which I thought was a wonderful idea. Marcus’s father had lived long enough to do that. Marcus’s mother stayed faithful to her husband’s memory. She had always been rich, and died young without remarrying. Marcus remembered her in his meditations as his model for “piety, generosity, refraining from wrongdoing, simplicity in life, and distancing herself from the ways of the rich.” I liked that phrase: distancing herself from the ways of the rich.

  After his father died, Marcus was adopted, raised, and educated by his grandfather, from whom, Marcus writes, “I learned courtesy and serenity of temper.” At seventeen, Marcus was adopted by the emperor, whose wife was Marcus’s aunt. The emperor had no sons of his own and named Marcus as his successor. Marcus later wrote of his adoptive father that “all men recognized in him a mature and finished personality that was impervious to flattery and entirely capable of ruling both himself and others.” I also liked the idea of a mature and finished personality, and wondered if I would have one someday.

  When Marcus was forty he became emperor and ruled wisely until he died of the pestilence at fifty-nine.

  Alec Guinness’s mother refused to tell him who his father was. Later, when he was an old man, he confided to a friend that she probably hadn’t known. A snob, she gave him the surname of a famous brewery family on whose yacht she had once been a guest. However, it was a banker who had been sixty-four when Alec was born who paid for his schooling and visited him often in the guise of an uncle. Alec was ashamed of his mother and stayed angry with her all his life. She sent him away to boarding school when he was five, paid for by the banker. Alec loved his school. When he got his first acting job at seventeen, his mother showed up intoxicated at the stage door and asked him for money.

  When Aunt Charlotte gave over her bedroom to me she left it so hospitably bare that, as I’ve mentioned, it took me longer than it should have to realize it had been her room. When I entered it for the first time back in May, I faced a double bed with two views of the ocean, front and side, a table with a lamp on it and a straight-backed chair tucked under it, an empty bookcase, and a bureau with four drawers. Nothing hung on the walls, which had been freshly painted an off-white color that I would discover took on the yellow of clear mornings, a pearly gray on overcast days, and changed into a lavender-blue as it grew dark outside.

  On the table that served as my desk were Mom’s GED test books, which I had been studying, and the island histories authored by two local ladies who remembered the days when turtle eggs were gathered for fun breakfasts. The bookshelf, which Aunt Charlotte proudly admitted she had carpentered herself, along with the ones in her studio, was too long without a middle support and sagged in the middle. So far I had refrained from displaying any of my possessions above the top shelf, but the Gaston & Sons Lumber truck was the first thing I judged worthy. It was part of my heritage and also it diverted attention from the sag.

  I felt conflicted about the black bear in the hoodie; my first impulse was to toss it. Eleven was too old to be holding on to a toy bear, though it wasn’t so long ago when I insisted on having him. I was not at my best that day and it hurt to remember it now. Mom and I had been in the new Walmart in Jewel, buying my school supplies. When you were on a budget like ours, you calculated the difference between a $1.99 and a $2.39 box of pencils, and decided that it would be foolish to pay forty cents more just because Batman was on that box. I was accustomed to reading my mother’s face and I knew how almost every shopping trip turned into an ordeal for her because she was one of those accursed “crossovers” in society who knew what the best was but couldn’t afford it herself. Sometimes she would let resentment get the upper hand and point out to me someone “trash-shopping” in the stores we shopped in by necessity. (“Look at her, she just snatches up something without looking at the price and drops it in her basket.”) On that day when I was not at my best, we were already in line at a checkout counter when I noticed a bin full of black bears in hoodies. They had probably been placed there strategically for people like me who were following a parent through the checkout line. I plucked one off the top of the pile and fell in love. He was so soft. He smelled so new. “Isn’t he adorable?” I demanded. Mom looked at me rubbing him against my cheek. After scarcely a beat she asked: “Would … you like it?”

  For now, in honor of my mother, the bear got to ride in the truck. Grandma alias fault-finding sister Brenda went facedown into a lower bureau drawer, not the upper drawer that held Mom’s tin box with the only photo of my real dad and other cherished items: snapshots we had taken of each other with those throwaway cameras, Mom’s supervisor’s badge from Forster’s Furniture, old Mr. Forster’s To Whom It May Concern letter, which got Mom her nice first job in Jewel. It was a letter of high praise and must have cost the old man some moments of soul-searching, considering that he wrote it while his grandson was still in recovery from her son’s brutal beating.

  The two Marcus Aurelius volumes joined the other books on my desk. In the scholarly bilingual hardback, whoever had handwritten their own translation between the lines stopped halfway through the book. Midway down a page of Greek, the penciled interlinear translation broke off at the end of a paragraph.

  The same paragraph on the English side of the page completely balked you with its antiquarian twists and turns:

  What then there can be amid such murk and nastiness, and in so ceaseless an ebbing of substance and of time, of movement and things moved, that deserves to be greatly valued or to excite our ambition in the least, I cannot even conceive.

  The unknown person’s penciled translation was simple and clear.

  In all this murk and mire, then, in all this ceaseless flow of being and time, of changes imposed and changes endured, I can think of nothing that is worth prizing highly or pursuing seriously.

  XXIX.

  Before Aunt Charlotte’s accident, I told her I would learn to use her digital camera and take new pictures of Grief Cottage. The plan had been to bring her up to date on its dereliction so she could incorporate it into her future paintings—if she chose to. How my new photos would affect her new paintings I hadn’t been sure. Either she would be inspired by more ruination (“How sad! Do you think I can capture this added sadness in pigment?”), or she would be turned off by it (“No, this has gone too far, Marcus. If I painted it like this it would be a Halloween cartoon”).

  After she came home with her casts, I decided to put off even the mention of it. It would be cruel to hand over a bunch of new photos—assuming they turned out well—to send her rushing off to her studio to see if inspiration struck when she was no longer able to control a brush.

  The other reason I had decided against taking the photos concerned the ghost-boy. It might set back our relationship. I had to base my behavior on how I would follow my instincts with living people, and I thought he might feel threatened if he saw me outside, clicking away at the cottage that had sheltered him for fifty years. Was I trying to take something from him? I had heard of those tribes who wouldn’t let you take pictures of them because you would steal their souls.

  Anyway, that was how I had reasoned up until now. Since I had failed to measure up to our last confrontation, my old precautions no longer applied. His spirit still remained inside the cottage, but he had turned away. Maybe he heard me, maybe not. Perhaps he had removed himself to the collapsing upper floor, where the roof had caved in to make him skylights. He could see and hear the birds without hearing me. The worst had happened to him a long time ago and some part of him had endured. This part had managed to exist without friends and without hope. And then I had weaseled into his space and offered false hope. All the ghost-boy desired now was to get outside the range of
any more overtures from the coward-boy and be at peace with what he’d had before.

  After making room for the things I had chosen to keep out of the latest box, I revisited my mom’s memorials in the tin box. The tin box had been with me since she died—except while I was in the foster home. During that interim, I entrusted it to William, my ad litem. I didn’t want the curious foster mom or some nosy child to be rifling through its contents—or stealing something—while I was at school.

  First I studied for the umpteenth time the photo of the man Mom said was my dad. I took it into the bathroom to compare my face with his in Aunt Charlotte’s only mirror. Did the picture, which Aunt Charlotte said had been cut from a school yearbook, reveal any more secrets since I had last studied it? It did appear we shared the same arched (“quizzical”) eyebrows and wide-apart eyes, but that might just seem so because Aunt Charlotte had suggested it. The man’s face looked too mature for a high school yearbook, so it must have been college. Compared to his, my face looked undeveloped and embarrassingly open. His face above the coat and tie was still the face of a young man but it had shut down in some way. Aunt Charlotte had said my mouth was like his when I was annoyed, but it was hard to “look annoyed” on demand in the mirror. My mouth was fuller than his and slightly puckered, like someone expecting a kiss. His lips were set in a thin derisive curl as if serving notice to the photographer that this was a crappy waste of time.

  Then I reread for the umpteenth time old Mr. Forster’s To Whom It May Concern accolade to Mom. (“… this young widow … exemplary work habits … bringing up a son on her own … uncompromising values…”)

  For the first time cynicism raised its ugly head. If I had been the grandfather of a boy who had almost lost an eye, who had stopped breathing, wouldn’t I praise to the skies a factory worker whose son had done the deed in order to get her out of town?

  Next I looked through the photos Mom had chosen to save from those we had taken over the years. Until now her small collection hadn’t excited me much, because she was still in the world and we expected to be taking many more pictures. As it turned out, our bleak time in Jewel had offered nothing we thought worth memorializing on film. The photos she had saved had all been taken back in Forsterville. Most of them were of me: “graduating” from kindergarten in my white cap and gown; standing on a stone wall looking down at her like I owned her; caught studying unaware in my pajamas under lamplight (her favorite). We had become expert with our Kodak throwaway cameras. Learned when to use the flash, when to move someone out of direct sun, when they were overshadowed. The sunshine was never too harsh at the Forsterville Cemetery because we walked there after my school day or in summer evenings after Mom’s shift. I particularly liked the one I had taken from the top of the hill looking down on all the graves. It had just rained and there was a glowing mist over the landscape—it looked almost like a painting. There were several shots I had taken of Mom, sitting in front of some upright gravestones at the top of the hill, hugging her skirt close to her knees, her head tilted, smiling shyly to herself.

  “Why don’t you move over to that weeping angel and stand next to it?” I asked.

  “I like it here,” she said, patting the ground in front of her. “The view is nicest from up here.”

  “But I’m the one who’s supposed to be picking the views!”

  To oblige me, she stood by the weeping angel for a couple of shots. But either her eyes were closed or the body language was wrong: she had not kept those pictures. She did look best on top of the hill, though that whole upper section was filled exclusively with Forster headstones.

  “Well, of course,” she said, when I pointed this out. “They were the first people to get here, so naturally they picked the choicest spot.”

  The island market where I shopped every day stocked those throwaway cameras. If you turned in your camera by five P.M. you could have your photos back by noon the next day. It was popular with islanders and tourists who couldn’t be bothered to drive to the mainland for the one-hour service.

  I bought two cameras with twenty-four exposures each and set out the next morning with them tucked in my saddlebag. It was too chancy to wait until Aunt Charlotte got her cast off and I had mastered the complexities of her digital camera. The cottage was falling apart atom by atom, minute by minute. I would kick myself if I showed up one morning to find it razed to the ground or cordoned off by a sizzling electric fence. OUT! THIS MEANS YOU, MARCUS. YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE.

  For a start I took distance shots of the cottage. Sky above and behind, dunes on either side, roofs of other cottages receding to the south, a wide expanse of empty beach in the foreground. If I angled the lens craftily I could make the wire fence all but invisible. From this distance my subject could pass for a tumbledown cottage rather than a hazardous wreck. I stood at the water’s edge, near the spot where I had met Barrett. For a last panoramic shot, I removed my shoes and stepped back into the water up to the line of my biking shorts until I could include the mirrory surf.

  As I was wheeling my bike toward the cottage to hide it in its usual spot behind a dune, a figure appeared atop this dune and began a cautious descent. Waving his arms for balance, he partly stumbled, partly slid down the steep incline until he pitched sideways into the waiting spikes of a Spanish bayonet. His sun hat flew off and rolled downhill ahead of him. I was close enough to hear the outraged string of expletives though not the specific swear words. Now he was scrambling to his feet and patting his behind for damage. It was Charlie Coggins, the realtor. He looked around furtively to see if anyone had witnessed his disgrace. I jumped on my bike and pedaled in the other direction so he wouldn’t know I had seen. Shit. I should have come an hour earlier.

  By the time I approached him openly, walking alongside my bike, he had brushed off his pants, shaken the sand out of his docksiders, and restored his sun hat to his head. He had his back to me, surveying his real estate, so I called out a good morning in order not to startle him.

  “It’s Lachicotte’s young friend, isn’t it? You’ve gotten so brown. Did you ever tell me your name?”

  “Marcus.”

  I indicated the empty spot in the sand where his strange land-and-water vehicle had been parked last time. “Where’s your amphibian today?”

  “At home in its custom-built hangar. I use it mainly to impress out-of-town clients. I drove up by the road in the company car. Took a right smart spill getting down that blasted dune. You want to avoid those evil Spanish bayonets at all costs.”

  “My aunt already warned me about those.”

  “The artist. Broke her arm, right? Last time we met, you were going to come back with a camera and take some pictures for her.”

  “It was her wrist, but it’s still in a cast.” No use complicating matters with the ankle as well. “Today I brought some cameras. The cottage is getting worse by the day.”

  “Tell me about it! When I hear a siren at night, you know what I pray for? That some firebug will have burned it to the ground before the trucks get there. Every time I come here I run through my litany of ‘why didn’t I’s: Why didn’t I sell it to the highest bidder before the roof caved in? Why didn’t I keep the empty lot next to it and donate the cottage to the Historical Society, claim my gift deduction, and let them deal with property taxes and hazardous structure policies and erosion engineers’ fees until they got fed up and torched it themselves and had the state put up a nice historical marker? Why didn’t Pop sell it back in the sixties after he bought it from the people who made a mess of the renovation and then ran out of cash? What were we at Coggins Realty thinking? That it was going to magically reconstruct itself one night while we were sleeping, and we’d wake up to find the pristine new cottage as it looked in 1804, with the shoreline of 1804, and assessed at twentieth-century value?”

  “I thought I’d better get some pictures while it’s still standing—so Aunt Charlotte will have something to go by when she can paint again.”

  “What kind of cam
era do you use?”

  I took my throwaways out of the saddlebag and showed him.

  “These do everything you need if you know how to use them. You can get the prints back from the island market overnight. I brought two cameras so I’d be sure to have enough exposures.”

  “And what pictures were you planning to take?”

  “I thought some close-ups from inside the fence—maybe a few from up on the porch.”

  “I’m guessing this won’t be the first time you’ve crawled under that fence.”

  “It will be more official now you’re here.”

  “I suppose you expect me to accompany you in your trespassing.”

  I didn’t, but I saw the advantages. If Charlie Coggins trespassed with me under the fence and up on the porch, he would serve both as my buffer and my cover. If the ghost-boy was watching from some new vantage point, he would know not to “count” this visit even if we had still been on good terms. He would know to remain invisible because I came in the company of the realtor who must have inspected this cottage on many occasions over the years. And the bonus was that with Charlie Coggins in tow I could brave the inside of the cottage with no fear of being surprised by more ghost than I could handle.

  XXX.

  I need not have feared. The ghost-boy was so not there. Charlie Coggins held my cameras while I crawled under the fence, then I held his hat and sunglasses while he shimmied under with some grunts and groans.

  I went first up the rickety steps. “I always hold on to this part of the railing. And watch the porch slant, it comes as a surprise.”

  “I see you’ve become a pro at this.”