The McQueens, Bill included, regrouped for dinner. Ruth had made pasta with red sauce and clams, which she served with a Caesar salad—Kat picked out her anchovies and lined them around the edge of her plate—and fresh bread from Borealis Breads. For dessert there were Maine blueberries with vanilla ice cream. Neither Adam nor Kat had ice cream. Hannah had a second helping. Bill was the only one to have coffee with dessert. Ruth gave Percy, at his usual perch on the credenza, a small bowl of melted ice cream, which he lapped up immediately, much to Adam’s obvious disgust. (Like his mother, Adam was adamantly anti-pet.)
The kids—who had been fed, predictably, gourmet macaroni and cheese that Adam had brought from home, and who had eaten at the bar in the kitchen, which they had declared very fun—had been put to bed with little fuss before the adults’ dinner. Tilda couldn’t help but think that they welcomed the chance to get away from their father’s shiny new girlfriend, who, Tilda had noticed, was awkward with them, though nice enough. Maybe they welcomed the chance to get away from their easily distracted father, too. Tilda felt momentarily guilty for thinking this. Adam was probably a good father, though his parenting style was not half as warm and fuzzy as Frank’s had been. Well, Adam and Frank had been entirely different in all respects, opposites really, and though they had never fought (that Tilda knew of) they also had never had more than a completely neutral conversation with each other. “How about those Red Sox last night?” and “Did you see what the market did today?”
Susan said, “I wonder if Craig will show for the memorial.”
“He’ll show up if it benefits him,” Adam said scornfully. “If there’s free room and board, he’ll be there.”
“That’s not fair, Adam,” Tilda protested. “Craig always pulls his weight when he stays with us. Last time he visited he mowed the lawn and trimmed the front hedge and he fixed the dishwasher. If he hadn’t been able to fix it I would have had to call in a repair service. He saved me a few hundred dollars.”
“And how much money did you spend feeding him? He’s really got you fooled, hasn’t he? Poor Tilda. Always a soft touch.”
Tilda couldn’t deny the assessment. She did have a soft spot for Craig, her wayward brother. She was aware that their mother had largely ignored him and in some ways Tilda was still trying to make up for that lack of maternal care. When someone criticized Craig, which was often, her stock but heart-felt answer was: “He’s my brother and my friend. I don’t go looking for his defects. I know they’re there. I just don’t feel the need to fixate on them.”
“Whatever,” she said now. “I’m looking forward to seeing him.”
Hannah loved her younger brother, but cautiously. She could never quite decide if he was a decent person or a bum. Still, he did make her laugh and really, he had always been on her side. Hannah remembered when not long after her coming out, Craig had stood up to a kid in his high school who said something derogatory about her. Though a lot smaller than the jerk, Craig took a swing at him in his sister’s defense, and wound up with a black eye for his pains. Hannah had to thank him for that. He had been suspended from the wrestling team for a month, even missed an important match, but had not once complained.
The puzzling thing to Hannah was that while Craig liked to pretend that he was all free-floating and not to be tied down, he consistently returned to his family, and if that didn’t show a talent for loyalty then what did? But if Craig ever felt nostalgia for his childhood at Larchmere, he didn’t let on. At least, not to Hannah he didn’t.
“I just wish that boy would settle down,” Bill said now. “Get a steady job, learn how to pay some bills. He has no sense of responsibility.”
“He’s not a boy, Dad. He’s forty years old and he’s done absolutely nothing with his life. He’s a waste of oxygen, if you ask me.”
“No one did ask you, Adam,” Hannah retorted. “And where’s all this hostility coming from? What’s Craig ever done to you? Except get more girls in high school.”
“I just wish he would do something constructive with his life,” her father was saying now. “It’s such a waste. He showed such promise when he was young. He had a real talent with numbers.”
It was sad, Tilda thought, that her father was so disappointed with his younger son. What it was, exactly, that Bill had wanted for Craig Tilda couldn’t say, but it certainly wasn’t the nomadic life he had been living since college. She thought she understood her father’s disappointment. She would not be thrilled if her own son chose Craig’s rambling, unsettled way of life. Still, she wished her father could be more loving and less judgmental of her brother. After all, he was an honest, kindhearted person. He didn’t do drugs. He wasn’t a criminal. He just wasn’t—usual.
Ruth kept her mouth shut during this conversation. While she was often inclined to judge, she saw her younger nephew as more sinned against than sinning. She alone knew things about the circumstances of his birth. She alone knew with what tepid welcome he had come into this world.
Kat had been silent throughout the discussion, of course, but Ruth had noticed she looked to Adam every other moment, after every bite of food or sip of wine, almost as if he were the repository of all wisdom, as if she was looking for a clue as to how to behave or maybe as if she was hoping for an encouraging wink or pat on the head. You’re doing just fine, honey. Just follow my lead.
But maybe, Ruth thought, she was reading into the situation. She didn’t know Kat at all. Maybe that almost reverent, almost worshipful look was really her disguised version of disgust. Doubtful, but she would wait and see what developed during the couple’s visit before making any big or final judgments.
After dinner, Bill and Ruth each retired, Bill to his bedroom to read, which he did every night until late, Ruth, a lifetime lover of blues and jazz, to the York Harbor Inn with Bobby, where Lex and Joe were playing their usual gig in the downstairs pub.
Kat excused herself before long. Of course she had nothing to contribute to the conversation, which was all about the family, and after watching Kat closely, Tilda suspected that the conversation had been making her uncomfortable. She read that as a possible sign of the young woman’s sensitivity. One could wear deliberately provocative clothes and still be sensitive to situations in which one did not really belong. Tilda tried to be careful not to make assumptions about the book based only on the cover.
“She seems very nice,” Tilda said, when Kat had gone up to bed. “How old did you say she was?”
“I didn’t say,” Adam replied. “She’s thirty-two. She’s never been married.”
“Putty in his hands,” Hannah muttered.
“Excuse me?” Adam said, frowning.
Susan shot her a look of warning.
“Nothing. I said nothing.”
“Has she ever been to Ogunquit before?” Tilda asked.
“No, but enough about her. I want to know about this girlfriend of Dad’s.”
Hannah shrugged. “You know as much as we know, which is next to nothing. She’s divorced, owns her own business, and lives in Portland.”
“And has a good eye for an easy mark.”
“You don’t really think—” Tilda began, then she caught herself. She didn’t really want to hear her brother confirm his opinion that their father was being fooled. She didn’t really want to contemplate the notion that someone might be out to snatch Larchmere away from the McQueens. Larchmere was essential. It was safety and security. Larchmere was her emotional inheritance. If anyone was to be Larchmere’s eventual caretaker, Tilda felt that it should be her. She was aware of her cheeks flushing just slightly.
Adam fixed his sisters with a stern stare. The notion of “home” meant absolutely nothing to him. He was proudly un-romantic and unsentimental. And he was proudly a fan of expensive real estate. “I’ll do anything it takes,” he said now, “to prevent the passing of Larchmere from this family.”
“I didn’t know you cared so much about the house,” Tilda said. She felt a bit angry, a bit confused, e
ven a bit desperate. She wondered if Adam would be her ally or her enemy in the looming, perhaps imaginary, battle for Larchmere.
“Do you know how much money this place could be worth as a luxury bed and breakfast? Or, when the market fully recovers, as a luxury home sale? I’m not letting a financial opportunity like Larchmere get away.”
“But the house doesn’t belong to you,” Hannah pointed out, “not legally.”
“It will someday. I’m the oldest child. It stands to reason Dad plans to leave the place to me. And I’m not letting anything or anyone get in the way of my inheritance, especially not some tarty gold digger.”
For a brief, awful moment Tilda wondered if her brother was capable of murder. Ridiculous! There was that flair for the dramatic! Frank used to tease her about the number of gothic and mystery novels she devoured, classics and contemporary stories, anything she could get her hands on. If there was a masked murderer afoot or a nasty demon in the attic, Tilda had to read about it.
“God, you are presumptuous!” Hannah cried. “Really, how did you come by that sense of entitlement?” Mom, she thought. Mom is to blame. She made him think he’s entitled to and deserves anything he wants. “And you know nothing about this Jennifer person,” she added. “No more than we know, anyway.”
“Which is virtually nothing.” Susan stood and stretched. “I’m going to bed. The sea air makes me sleepy. And I think I ate too much.”
“I’ll come with,” Hannah said.
Tilda, reluctant to remain alone with her older brother and his presumptions, also went up to her room.
6
Tuesday, July 17
Marginal Way, a one-and-a-half-mile long walking path along the coast, stretched from Perkins Cove to Ogunquit Beach. It was, in Tilda’s opinion as in the opinion of many, many others, one of the loveliest spots on the northeast coast.
It was about nine in the morning and Tilda was making her way along the path. Attractive stone and wooden benches, memorials to former residents, dotted its length. The path was for pedestrians only; bicycles and skateboards and roller skates were not allowed. At places the path was so narrow that baby strollers and wheelchairs gummed up the flow. But a town—especially one that relied so heavily on the tourist trade—could hardly prohibit the passage of baby strollers and wheelchairs.
The craggy cliffs and spectacular whirlpools below the Marginal Way were gorgeous in a romantic sort of way, but they were best kept away from and respected. Still, every summer a few foolish middle-aged men and women (never teens, who, interestingly, seemed to know better) would attempt to climb down the cliffs, maybe to get a close-up shot of some rock formation, or to capture on film a violent little eddy, and invariably wind up injured and stranded, at the mercy of the fire department. It was a bit of a joke among the locals, the idiocy of people on holiday.
The pines and scrub along the Marginal Way were distorted and scoured and stunted by a lifetime of exposure to the often brutal wind coming off the water. But the view out to sea was spectacular, grand, intimidating in its beauty and scale. In summer the path was alive with dragonflies of immense proportions and shimmering colors. Tilda had once read that there were over 113 species of dragonflies and 45 species of damselflies in the state of Maine alone. That was a lot of winged creatures.
Tilda finally reached her destination, a small dip off the concrete path, a natural alcove of sorts, a protected, shaded little spot before the massive drop of the cliffs. On a drizzly, summer morning two years ago, just as dawn was struggling to break, she and Jon and Jane had sprinkled Frank’s ashes from just this spot. She had cried, but soundlessly. Jon, trying hard to be strong for his mother, had remained dry eyed but Tilda was sure that it had cost him. Jane, sixteen at the time, had clung to her mother’s arm. “Good-bye, Daddy,” she had whispered when the last of the ashes were lost to the ocean. “I love you.”
How deeply lonely she had felt that drizzly morning, in spite of her children’s presence! And how much more lonely she had become since then!
Tilda sat on a large gray rock in the little alcove and looked out at the sea. It was glittering in the morning light. Unconsciously, because it had become a habit, she twirled her wedding ring with her thumb. She had kept Frank’s wedding ring, first at home and then in her safety deposit box at the bank, in the hopes that someday Jon might want to wear it, if he decided to get married, that was. Of course, she had not expressed that hope to her son. That would seem like pressure. She didn’t want to presume anything about the lives of her children. Maybe Jon wouldn’t want to marry. Maybe Jane wouldn’t either. Maybe she would never have grandchildren.
Tilda sighed. She knew she was indulging in self-pity, more than ever lately, and she knew it was an unattractive quality, but she just couldn’t seem to stop it. After all, she had been virtually dumped by the majority of their couple friends. She wanted to tell them that death was not contagious. “I don’t have a taint on me,” she wanted to say. Frank’s cancer wasn’t an infectious plague. Or was it that some people didn’t want her around because she was a reminder of death, a reminder of what dreaded possibility they, too, might face? If it could happen to Tilda McQueen O’Connell, it could happen to me. If Tilda could wind up all alone, then so could I.
There was an antiquated notion of married women not wanting their single girlfriends around for fear they would try to steal the husbands. But Tilda refused to believe that anyone she and Frank had called friends would indulge in such a dated, sexist stereotype. They had all gone to college. All the women had careers. So what was the problem?
About a year earlier she had read a blog in which the writer, a woman divorced after almost thirty years of marriage, had warned that single women could be “ghetto-ized” if they didn’t “live strong.” At first the choice of words had struck Tilda as overly dramatic but as time went on, she had come to agree wholeheartedly with the writer’s observation. Only in movies were single women—some of them—glamorous and wanted.
It had been different in the beginning. Soon after Frank’s death, friends had reached out and invited Tilda to dinners and card parties and picnics, but the mood at such gatherings was invariably tense, as if no one wanted to be the first to laugh and thereby declare that life went on even after the death of someone special. So then the invitations to dinner and card parties and picnics waned and in some cases, mostly the cases of married couples, eventually stopped coming. Tilda had told herself that she didn’t really care. And for a while, she really didn’t care. She did nothing to encourage a social life. She stopped making friendly phone calls, stopped replying to e-mails, stopped suggesting lunches or movies or shopping trips to the outlets in Freeport.
Now, two years and some months after Frank’s death, she found that she had become alienated from the majority of her old friends and acquaintances. Now, two years and some months after Frank’s death, she found that she did care about being alone. She cared very much.
Invariably, weekends were the loneliest. She was hesitant to invite a couple over for dinner, or to ask them out to a movie—wasn’t Saturday night date night for most couples? And didn’t couples spend lots of time on the weekends hunkered down with their children and running errands and doing chores they had not managed to squeeze in to their hectic work weeks? No one had time for a single woman, divorced or widowed. Or so it sometimes seemed to Tilda, who, as she readily acknowledged, struggled against self-pity but all too often succumbed to its dubious comforts.
She couldn’t very well beg Jane and Jon to spend their weekends with her. It would be unfair to them, and unreasonable. The kids had homework and jobs and social lives of their own. She felt she should be thankful they still lived at home, though more and more it seemed that they only stopped by for the occasional meal or to sleep. But their moving away from her was inevitable. Time brought change.
It was just that Tilda had never expected this particular change, that at the age of forty-seven she would be single and alone. Not that every s
ingle woman was alone or even lonely. Her college friend, Clarice, had never married, and claimed she had never wanted to marry. She had moved to Seattle after graduation and had been living alone there ever since. She seemed perfectly content to date men without any desire to build a relationship. Not long ago, Tilda, feeling very much the social pariah, had called Clarice and asked if she ever felt the same. Clarice had laughed at the notion. “Maybe,” she had said, “some people don’t want me around for whatever twisted reasons they have, but I’ve never noticed any discrimination. I go where I please when I please. And I don’t ever feel lonely.”
Tilda believed her old friend. She had never known Clarice to be hesitant or indecisive or fearful. She seemed always to be—content. Tilda now envied her. She wanted Clarice to teach her the secret of contentment. There had to be a secret, a magic button she could press, a wand she could wave, something.
Or maybe it was all about hard work and courage. And courage was hard to come by when you were an emotional coward by nature.
Tilda sighed. It was time to get back to the house. She got up from her seat on the rock and made her way back along the path to the parking lot in the Cove. Once there, a small crowd of people in party clothes caught her attention, a photographer and her assistant laden with cameras and other equipment, and most importantly, a bride and her groom. The couple was having their pictures taken against the backdrop of the glittering blue ocean and the gray, rocky shore; no doubt the group would wind its way up onto Marginal Way before long for more spectacular backdrops. Maybe they would gather for a picture just where Tilda had sat that morning.
Tilda stopped to watch. The bride wore a white, strapless dress, which seemed to be the most popular style these days, and her hair was piled high on her head in an intricate updo, interwoven with small pink flowers. She looked very pretty, like a sugar confection. The groom was standard issue in a neat black tuxedo and black shoes highly shined.
The Family Beach House Page 5
