The Family Beach House

by Holly Chamberlin

  “Yeah, it does. But I know what you mean. It’s about partnership. Sharing the burdens and the laughter. I sound like a greeting card.”

  The conversation rested a moment while Tilda sipped her plastic cup of wine and Hannah watched a small pleasure boat drift by the dock. She was thinking about her sister’s situation. She knew that Tilda felt alone, almost friendless. Some of that wasn’t her fault. Some of it was. Hannah and Susan regularly asked her to join their social activities in town. They asked her to movies at the Nickelodeon, to openings at the Portland Museum of Art, where they were members, they asked her to join them at the free summer evening concerts in Monument Square, they asked her to the monthly networking events sponsored by the DownEast Pride Alliance, they asked her to readings and signings at Longfellow Bookstore. Most times, Tilda found an excuse not to go along. Tilda’s reluctance to move on with her life was beginning to worry Hannah.

  “Hannah,” Tilda said then, breaking into her thoughts. “I don’t mean to sound naive, though I suspect I probably will. I was wondering. What’s—I mean, what would you say is the main difference between our marriages? Aside from the obvious, of course, and aside from the prejudices gay couples face. How is marriage between two women, or two men for that matter, different than marriage between a woman and a man?”

  Hannah raised an eyebrow. “Gay couples can share clothes.”

  Tilda was mortified. “I’m sorry. I offended you. I didn’t mean to.”

  “It’s okay. I’m not offended. I’m just still surprised when people ask that sort of question. For me, my life is normal. But for others, I guess it still seems very foreign.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tilda said. “Again. Anyway, I suppose we’re all strangers to one another. In the end, I mean. No one ever really knows another person’s truth.”

  “Well, that’s a little depressing. What is it with you harshing everyone’s buzz?”

  “Sorry. Lately I seem to be, I don’t know, wallowing.”

  “Well, stop it. It’s not good for your health. Anyway, I want to say one more thing about our earlier topic, relationships. I don’t mean to sound too goopy or sentimental, but I agree with you. I believe any good relationship comes down to respect and friendship. The kind of unglamorous, work-a-day, committed love you won’t find in the pages of a romance novel.”

  “You haven’t read widely in the genre,” Tilda said. “There are plenty of writers who talk about day-to-day love. It’s true that not all of them would call themselves romance writers.”

  “Well, you know what I mean. I’m not talking about heaving bosoms, though I’ve got nothing against heaving bosoms.”

  Tilda nodded discreetly toward a guy who was coming toward them, dragging a cooler. He was technically gorgeous and perfectly built. Tilda could tell because he wasn’t wearing a shirt and his shorts were riding very, very low.

  “I know,” she said when he had passed. “And I’ve got nothing against six-pack abs, though in the end they have nothing to do with love. But they are nice to look at. Even though that guy should be wearing a shirt. This is a restaurant, after all. I think there are sanitary laws about such things.”

  “You sound like a mommy.”

  “I am. I’m a middle-aged mommy with no partner.”

  “Now you’re being all self-pitying. Again.”

  “I know,” Tilda admitted. “Self-pity comes easily to me. I’m not saying I’m proud of it.”

  “Self-pity and wallowing can kill you. Sorry. I meant, figuratively.”

  “I know you did.”

  “Do you think Dad would ever really consider willing Larchmere out of the family?” Hannah asked suddenly. “I mean, if he and this Jennifer person get married. It seems impossible but stranger things have happened.”

  Tilda paused before replying. “I’ve been thinking and thinking about that. Obsessing, really. I just don’t know. I wish I could say with certainty that I did know. Either way, then I could deal with his decision. Maybe we’re being Nervous Nellies for nothing. I hope so.”

  “Nervous Nellies? I haven’t heard that expression in ages. Didn’t Mom used to say that?”

  Tilda laughed. “Yes. She used to tell me to stop being a Nervous Nellie every time gym class came around. I think my fears annoyed her somehow.”

  Of course they did, Hannah thought. Their mother had not tolerated weakness or vulnerability or anything that might vaguely be considered a nuisance or a disruption to her daily life of self-preservation. My thoughts about her are so harsh, Hannah realized. She tried to summon even a shred of positive feeling about Charlotte McQueen and could not.

  Hannah, disturbed, wanted to get back to the subject of Larchmere. “Sometimes,” she said, “it seems to me that Larchmere has a personality of its own, or as if it’s a being of its own, not just an inanimate object. I feel sometimes that it’s something alive and breathing. It makes me uncomfortable somehow, to think that what is essentially a big pile of stones and mortar and glass has a life independent of its inhabitants. A piece of land or a house isn’t supposed to have so much power over a person, is it?”

  Tilda frowned. “I guess not. I’m not really sure I understand what you mean.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s just that I can’t deny the power of Larchmere. I feel it now more than ever. Now that I know its future as our home is threatened. I know it’s all very romantic of me. You’ve read Rebecca, haven’t you?”

  “Of course,” Tilda said. “Several times. I even taught it one semester. But in the novel it was a person not a house who wielded a bizarre power over the hero and heroine. It was Rebecca herself, from beyond the grave. At least, it was the memories of her and the stories told about her that wielded the power. Rebecca’s legend.”

  “You think so? Maybe Rebecca had a hold on the unnamed heroine but not over Max de Winter, at least not entirely. Don’t you remember why he stayed in that god-awful marriage to that god-awful woman?” Hannah asked. “Basically so that no taint of unpleasantness would touch his beloved home. When he comes clean to his second wife, about murdering Rebecca, he admits to something like having loved Manderley too much. He says that that kind of one-way love is doomed to fail, or that it can’t grow. He says something like that. One-way, unrequited love.”

  Tilda nodded. “Yes, I do remember now. His point was that love has to be reciprocal in order to flourish. Do you want the last steamer?”

  “No,” Hannah said. “You can have it. But about love for the house, or for things, inanimate objects, I wonder. Doesn’t, say, a tree, repay your love—your tending to its needs, feeding it fertilizer, watering it—by thriving? Isn’t that a form of reciprocity?”

  “Maybe,” Tilda said. “In a way, yes, though the tree isn’t sentient. It’s alive but it’s not making a conscious, thinking choice about its thriving or failing. It’s just—reacting, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” Hannah said, but she wasn’t so sure a tree was just reacting to its environment rather than also acting upon it.

  “And a house, a structure,” Tilda was saying. “What really does it give us in return for our care? In return for repainting its exterior and replacing its old and broken windows and cleaning its chimneys?”

  “Shelter,” Hannah said. “Warmth. A sense of comfort and security. Adam would say financial security.”

  “But aren’t those qualities really the result of human action? I don’t know, the people who inhabit a house seem to me to be the source of all that’s good—and bad—about the notion of ‘home.’ Not the structure around them.”

  Hannah thought about that for a moment. “So, you believe that home is where the heart is. In other words, that home is an emotional state having little to do with physical realities?”

  “Not entirely,” Tilda said, “but largely. Anyway, I guess we’re not likely to come to any final agreement on this matter of the life—as it were—of the inanimate objects we say we love. I guess it’s not important to agree. Well, I guess one thing we can
agree on is the fact that we both love Larchmere.”

  “You’re right.” Hannah stood and stretched. “Let’s get going. I want to call my office when we get back to the house. Just to check in.”

  It was on the drive back home to Larchmere that the thought first occurred to Tilda. She didn’t know why she had not seen the parallel before. It was so obvious. Max de Winter had tried to make the death of his wife look like a boating accident. Tilda’s own mother, Charlotte, had died in a boating accident. Or, at least, because of an accident that took place on a boat. Tilda refused to believe that her mother had been anywhere near as horrible and manipulative as the character of Rebecca, but…She wondered. Was Charlotte McQueen the abiding—the controlling?—spirit of Larchmere? And if she was, that meant that each of the McQueens’ feelings about the house was to some extent colored by the relationship they had had with Charlotte.

  Tilda shook her head. These were fanciful thoughts. They were pointless, really. But there was that gothic streak (good-humored Frank had said a morbid streak) again. Still, Tilda was curious. Was Charlotte McQueen indeed the presiding spirit of Larchmere?

  10

  Adam and Kat had gone up to Kennebunkport to have dinner with one of his colleagues who was vacationing there with his wife. He had not asked that the family watch his children. He had simply announced that he would not be around all evening. Ruth had made Cordelia and Cody hot dogs and beans for dinner. They had asked for seconds and then clamored for ice cream, which Ruth also gave them. Ice cream with chocolate sauce. Then, she settled them in front of the big, flat screen television in the living room and put on one of the loud and cartoonish animated movies they had brought with them. Situation dealt with, problem solved. If Adam wanted his kids to eat organic, then he should stay home and feed them himself.

  Dinner then was Bill, Ruth, Craig, Tilda, Hannah, and Susan. Percy, as usual, was lumped on the sideboard, eyes wide. Susan had taken a turn in the kitchen and prepared for them a chicken dish flavored with lime and cilantro. (She had cooked a piece of plain chicken for Percy, who had accepted it as his due.) There was no further talk of Charlotte’s memorial or party, except when Bill mentioned that Carol Whitehouse, the woman who had been with Charlotte in the sailboat on that fateful day, had called to say she could not be there for the events. Her daughter-in-law was in the hospital and Carol was going down to stay with her grandchildren in New Hampshire while her son went to work.

  Tilda thought of the kind of grandmother Charlotte had been to her children. It had been pretty clear to everyone that Charlotte favored Jon over Jane, maybe because he was the firstborn, maybe because he was a boy. Whatever the reason, her mother’s obvious preference for one child over another had bothered Tilda, though as far as she could tell, it had not affected Jane in a negative way. Charlotte McQueen had been good about buying gifts and sending cards on holidays. And she had been fairly tolerant of having Jon and Jane underfoot during their visits to Larchmere. But, and Tilda felt almost disloyal remembering this, she had not been very willing to visit the children in their South Portland home. She had never offered to babysit, even for a night. Tilda had never felt comfortable asking her.

  Of course, Charlotte had never known Adam’s children, as she had died before they were born. Would she have been closer to her son’s progeny? It was impossible to know. And how would she have felt about Hannah and Susan’s children, assuming they had any someday?

  After putting the kids to bed, Ruth went to her room, claiming exhaustion. In fact, she was eager to get back to the book she had started reading earlier that day, a shamelessly sexy novel by a new young writer who claimed to have worked as a high-class call girl. Susan, who had brought along her laptop because she had a project deadline looming, went off to the room she was sharing with Hannah to work. Plus, although she would never admit it, not even to Hannah, she was a big fan of InStyle.com and wanted to check the Look of the Day.

  Tilda, Hannah, and Craig were in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher and scrubbing pots, when Jennifer came by. Tilda was acutely aware of her own rather messy appearance after a long day in the sun and kitchen cleanup. Jennifer, in contrast, looked rested and fresh; her beige blouse was crisp and unwrinkled and her hair was neat. A quick and hopefully furtive glance at Jennifer’s feet indicated that she had had a pedicure recently, maybe even earlier that day. Her gold tone sandals looked expensive. Tilda wondered if Jennifer owned a pair of baggy jeans or ratty sneakers. She chided herself for being snippy and jealous, even if it was just in her head. Thoughts were real, too, in their way.

  Jennifer and Bill went into the library to play chess. Tilda had never mastered games and puzzles. She couldn’t play chess, couldn’t remember how to play checkers, didn’t play cards. While she could handle a word search, crosswords left her stumped.

  “I’m glad Dad has someone to play chess with,” Hannah was saying, bending down to replace a pot in its proper cabinet. “He never did find a chess partner after Mom died, did he?”

  Craig shook his head. “Not that I know of. I do know he plays against himself but that has to get boring. I know that he and Bobby used to play poker. There was a whole group of guys who would play. They’d move from house to house, Larchmere one month, someone else’s the next.”

  “That’s right,” Tilda said. “I remember now. Mom would put out chips and dip for the guys.”

  Hannah looked to Craig. “The other wives put out sandwiches and cold slaw and Maine shrimp salad.”

  “And desserts,” Craig said. “I remember Dad telling me that Teddy’s wife made the best blueberry cobbler he’d ever tasted.”

  “Even Bobby, who’s not exactly Mr. Domestic, put out a good spread.”

  Tilda frowned. “What are you saying? That Mom was cheap?”

  “No. I’m saying that Mom didn’t really care about Dad’s poker nights. She didn’t want all those men in the house. Obviously, she thought that chips and dip would deter them. But they came, anyway.”

  “Because Dad would bring out the good scotch when she went up to bed!” Craig added. “He knew how to treat his guests, even if Mom didn’t.”

  Tilda felt uncomfortable. She knew that memory was unique to each individual, that time and psyche tended to distort what had occurred into what you wanted or needed to think had occurred. Siblings who grew up under the same roof each grew up in a different family. She knew that.

  Still, it bothered her when Hannah and Craig said disparaging or critical things about their mother, even if for them, these disparaging or critical comments described the truth. But Tilda’s truth about her mother was different. At least, it was partly different. Adam’s truth was different, too.

  “How about a nightcap?” Hannah suggested.

  “Sounds good,” Craig said. “Let’s go out onto the porch. It’s chilly. I could make us Irish coffees?”

  “Perfect!”

  Tilda chose not to join her sister and brother. Instead, she went upstairs to her room and sat again at the chair she had drawn to the window the other evening. She could hear Hannah’s voice, and Craig’s, but just barely, as a murmur. Then, Craig laughed and Hannah hushed him.

  She wondered if this was the first time she had really listened to her siblings talk about their mother. She felt as if so much of what she was hearing this week was new. Charlotte hadn’t liked her father’s poker games or his buddies. Why hadn’t she known that? She was older than Hannah and Craig. She should have been more aware of family dynamics. She wondered if she was the only one who cherished good memories of Charlotte McQueen. She wondered what Adam would have added to that conversation in the kitchen.

  Tilda sighed and decided that she didn’t really want to know. She closed the window to block out the sound of her siblings’ voices.

  11

  Thursday, July 19

  Tilda was on the beach. It was a little later than she liked to walk but Jon had called that morning to say that the air conditioner that serviced most of the downstair
s, the kitchen and living room at least, was on the fritz. He wanted permission to call the repair guy, which, he knew, would cost money. “I’d fix it myself if I could,” he had said, “but I’m not Dad.”

  Nobody is Frank O’Connell, Tilda thought now. Not even Frank O’Connell is Frank O’Connell anymore.

  She remembered how horrible it had been when Frank was finally gone and the simple yet devastating realization hit home—that never again would Frank’s hand touch hers. The loss of his physical body and of their long habit of living together in all its physicality just struck her down. While he was dying their physical relationship had altered, of course, but his being entirely gone was a tremendous blow. No one told her how deep and meaningful the affection for the parts of a loved one’s body could be, so that when the loved one was gone, you would ache to see just once more the shape of his fingernails, the pattern of hair on his wrist, the freckles on his nose, all the little things that made the loved one utterly and entirely unique. All of these peculiarities would be gone and it would hurt so badly at times, the missing.

  “‘Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”’” Tilda said the words aloud. There was no one to hear but the seagulls. The line was from Edgar Allan Poe’s most popular poem. Almost everybody knew “The Raven” but how many people knew, as the poem’s narrator did, just how deep grief and loss could take you?

  It was simply all over. Frank was dead. There were no ifs, ands, or buts, no second chances, no do-overs. If only she could say: No, I didn’t like the way this turned out, it isn’t fair, let’s start again.

  Tilda suddenly remembered something else she had read, something else that had stuck in her head. It was from Kafka Was the Rage, Anatole Broyard’s memoir of his years in Greenwich Village. In one chapter he talked about the early death of a good friend. About receiving the bad news of his friend’s illness, he had said: “We never believe such things until they’re over.” Tilda had found that observation to be stunningly true, at least in her case. You knew it was going to happen. And then, it happened and you were surprised, as if you had had no clue.