All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  Oh mama when you were a young girl

  Did you ever love a man so much

  The woman driving the boat spoke to us in Italian. She pointed at all three of us and said, “Tre sorelle?”

  We nodded. “Yes, three sisters.”

  “I can tell,” she said in English. “You have the same laugh.”

  We put our mother’s ashes in the lake to join our father’s. The two of them are one, I thought as the water lapped against the boat in the flat calm. Dancing together as one.

  “We live on such a perilous dune,” my mother would say as the August storm season approached and the waves bounded up to our dune. “All of this could just go”—and she’d snap her fingers—“like that.”

  The house by the sea ended up being on a perilous dune indeed, though in retrospect I realized that my mother had been speaking less about weather than about the vicissitudes of inherited property. As was the case with many houses founded on the notion of family legacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, economics and other exigencies conspired so that after my mother died, the house by the sea fell to us to sell, and thus my father’s dream of a family compound was washed away—not by any ministrations of nature, unless one thinks of the IRS as a natural disaster. As fate would have it, the L fell off the driveway sign the year she died, and Children at Play became what it suddenly was: Children at Pay.

  Perhaps my father should have realized you can’t sink roots in sand. Only my mother, raised in hurricanes, foresaw the perilous “après moi, le déluge” truth.

  After casting about for someone to carry out the sale, my sisters and I hired an icily handsome real estate broker named Ed whose chiseled good looks and slick bravado put one in mind of the superhero the Silver Surfer. He slapped a price tag on our beloved house befitting, he told us, its status in the minds of the “hedgies” now purchasing the real estate in town.

  “The whatsies?”

  He didn’t look up from the papers he was leafing through. “Hedge fund managers, hedgies. The hedgies and celebs are lapping up houses like this.” He snapped his fingers. “Primo real estate,” Ed told us. “It rocks their cashmere socks.”

  “Faded glory, a vestige of a world gone by,” Ed wrote as a description on the tear sheet, next to the pictures of our house taken both from the land and from the air.

  “Now, some,” Ed the broker warned us, “might call your place a ‘tear-down’—so don’t be alarmed if they do.”

  “Our mother would die,” Catherine said. “It would kill her.”

  “She is dead, honey,” Ed said with a voice so gentle it was as though he were breaking the news to us for the first time. “I’m sorry.” Then he shifted back to broker-speak. “I just want to prepare you ladies.” He looked up. “Uncle Ed cares about you. That’s no joke. So”—he took a deep breath—“I suggest you all take your kids and go down to the beach. Stay out of earshot of what you don’t need to hear. I know it can be hard to sell a home, but really, trust me, people flip real estate all the time.” He shook his head. “Selling a childhood home can be rough, so take the kids and go make a day of it, relax. On the beach. With those striped umbrellas in the back of my van, why not. I’ll bring them out. And while you’re down there you might throw a ball or a Frisbee around. Do you have cute dogs, any of you? You know, suggest how it can be for a family here.” He snapped his fingers again. “Mood setting.”

  People flip real estate all the time. In my mind, I saw a home being placed on one side of a child’s seesaw; then the owner would run and leap on the other side. The home would jump in the air, do a flip, and land upright on the ground, suddenly simply a house, a property—free of any deep association with home. It seemed to me a disingenuous term, meant to make it look like child’s play when in fact it was never easy. Home base, homeward bound, give me a home, it was not child’s play to leave one’s home, and the equation between home and real estate became a blurred line. Where, in this equation, do we fit the delicate calculus of memory?

  At that point, on the South Fork of Long Island, new residents were also landing their private planes at our local airport, and our house was right on the flight path from New York City. We gamely suggested to Ed that to court his target group of buyers, arriving each weekend not by the Cannonball but by private plane, we might send a young nephew or two up a ladder to write “4 SALE” in white paint all along the roof of Children at Play.

  Ed laughed, a short snort of a laugh, until he stopped, midlaugh, and said, “Cute.” Then he went back to the notes he had on a clipboard. “Did anyone get married here?” he asked. “Maybe we could have some pictures in the house, along the mantelpiece in the living room, of celebration and happy times. Could really work as a sales pitch, particularly for the young fiancées and wives coming through.”

  I thought of Nonnie’s collection of table settings. A table setting lasts forever.

  “We have no pictures,” I answered.

  “Then,” he said, “we’ll have to go with the kids. Do they play on that swing set?” He pointed to the garden where Dean and I had gotten married years before, and where more recently my mother had had her gardener erect a colorful play area for her young grandchildren. “If they do, or even if they don’t, can they do so when I bring couples by for a second visit? That way, they see beach and kids, dogs, toys, visit number one, then visit two, swing set. Ladies, sounds like we have a plan. Okay, let’s get to work.” And he made several notes on the clipboard. “I like it,” he said, writing. “Slam dunk.”

  We buffed the house, made each bed so not a wrinkle showed, swept the long halls clean of sand from toddler feet, and when potential buyers came, we removed our entire menagerie from the premises down to the beach, where they could look cute and inspirational to young couples coming by to do exactly what our father had done in 1964: put down roots. Only now it appeared the putting down of roots also came with the desire to make a statement.

  As we waited on the beach, Ed welcomed intruders who sniffed and prodded, pulling open closet doors and inspecting views from all possible vantage points. The private jets crossed overhead each Friday, traveling east from New York City to the East Hampton Airport.

  “I still liked our marketing scheme best,” I told my sisters one day on the beach, pointing up at one of the small jets flying overhead while our children dug in the sand to make forts and moats. “These people right there might well bid on the house if they saw our ‘4 SALE’ sign on the roof.”

  One day, gazing up, we saw Howard Stern, the “shock jock” radio personality, poised above my mother’s prized geraniums on the deck outside her bedroom. The implausible image, his black shirt, black aviator glasses, and signature black tresses amid the gentle arrangement of pink flowers just beyond her boudoir, would have so mortified my mother and endlessly amused my father that I couldn’t help but appreciate it as a ridiculous reminder of the difference between home and real estate.

  The final summer, as we were packing up, we went looking for my mother’s ball gowns in the attic. It was late one night, and braced by the spirit of nostalgia and wine, my sisters and I trudged the boxes down two flights of stairs to the living room and started pulling them out. There was the burgundy one with the dyed-black ostrich-feather cuffs, the emerald green with the fitted bodice and long train. What resulted from the sudden discovery was a spontaneous fashion show for our husbands, each of us taking turns doing exaggerated catwalk steps around the couches, littering feathers along the pale green carpet in our wake. In a video taken that night, the men are smoking cigars, while my sisters and I, flushed and giddy, segue from one costume change to the next. Yet the mirth had a disdain to it that was at once murky and palpable, that such a costume would have been so much a part of the accepted pattern of our life, and that that life—the sheen, the glow, the mythic glamour—could pass from our hands so easily and definitively, and all we could do was watch.

  But what was it, really, that was passing? In truth, wearing a fea
thered ball gown, I discovered that night, is an uncomfortable sensation. The gown hangs heavily on the shoulders and makes a discordant swish as you labor the fabric across the room. Furthermore, the feathers tickle the cheeks. Simply putting on my mother’s costume, smelling, vaguely, the stale whisper of her Chanel perfume, I calculated that this outfit, plus the teetering on high heels for an entire evening, could not have been as glamorous or regal as it was painful and tedious. On some of the white feathers, there were faint stains of her bright red lipstick. My mother always wore very, very red lipstick.

  By the end of the night, the entire collection of dresses lay abandoned, collapsed like overspent party girls in a pile on the couch. Just then I thought of my wedding dress all those years before, how it lazed on the chair in the hotel room the morning after I married Dean; rumpled, sand at the hem, a costume of fragile lace I put on to carry through with grace and style, no matter what the circumstance. Now here were my mother’s long-ago dresses, also collapsed like worn-out party girls. We drank one more toast to the passing of time, and in the end, I think my cousin’s daughters, both girls in their early twenties, took a few back to college with them—good for a party maybe, get a laugh, one of them said, shrugging.

  “This was an amazing place to be a kid,” I said to my sisters the last afternoon, looking out over the sea as the movers packed up the last of the living room, wrapping the little cabbage-leaf and romaine-leaf cigarette lighter holders in newspaper, carrying out my father’s black leather armchair and my parents’ couch to their waiting trucks. The couch our parents shared when they no longer shared much of anything else.

  Amaze: to fill with wonder. Also: to bewilder.

  Three little girls in matching dresses following their parents through a life they could no more accurately explain than apologize for. Down by the wild tangle of honeysuckle off the guest cottage, I pulled the old driveway sign out of the dirt that afternoon and placed it in the back of my van for safekeeping. “Children at P_ay.”

  The summer before we sold the house, I had taken my young children, Sam and Charlotte, to Georgica Beach so they could boogie-board under a lifeguard’s gaze. It was a late August day, the water warm, the sky dark blue in anticipation of autumn. The corn was lush and tall in every field we passed as we headed toward the parking lot. For a while Sam and Charlotte flung themselves through the surf, buoyant puppies. When they were exhausted, they dragged their boards out, and the three of us stood together at the shore looking out at the view I had watched my whole life up to that point from the quilted bedroom at the top of the stairs in the house by the sea. The waves that just keep coming and coming and coming. Sam stared quietly for a while at the horizon while he caught his breath; then he turned to me with his gap-toothed smile, his eyes full of the sheer exuberance of wonder, and said, “Think about it, Mom. Infinity. Come on. I mean, you gotta love it.” Being almost nine at the time, Sam liked to boggle his brain with big concepts like that. And I thought, So there it is. His and Charlotte’s legacy isn’t about any cushion of wealth that’s going to soften their ride. Their legacy is infinity, the sense of infinite possibility. Possibilities are endless, after all, endless as the waves. They just keep coming and coming and coming.

  Soon after my mother died, I went to see Helen. She was living in a small apartment alone down the road from their family house. After Raymond left, she had had a brief career as a Representative in the Maine state legislature, and I loved that after years of nurturing her family, she was busy nurturing the entire township. She had cartons of small Maine blueberries in a basket she gave me to take home. “For your kids,” she said. “A little taste of Maine. I remember you love them, honey.” And once we’d settled into her living room, she told me this:

  “You know, one of my regrets is that I wasn’t stronger in standing up to your mother, the weekend of your wedding to Dean. It was wrong that we stayed, that we went ahead with the wedding with your father in a coma, and I knew it at the time. All I wanted to do was throw my family back in the car and drive home to Maine. We didn’t belong there. You kids were too young to make that call, but I should have. I wish I could have been a stronger mother to you two, but your own mother was so imperious, I was cowed. I didn’t dare.”

  I wish I could have been a stronger mother, but I didn’t dare.

  I wish I could have been a better mother to you then, but I was numb.

  One day shortly before that visit to Helen, my daughter, Charlotte, had come home from school and told me she was going to die. “Gus told me I didn’t have a heart.” Her almond eyes, the same eyes as my mother’s, grew wide. “And if I don’t have a heart, I’m going to die.”

  “I think, maybe, Gus meant that you aren’t returning his affection. Not that you’re going to die.”

  Look, a heart breaks, that doesn’t mean you don’t use it.

  If I don’t have a heart, I’m going to die.

  “So then I’m not going to die.”

  “No. Trust your mother, you’re not going to die.”

  “Phew,” she said.

  We were heading toward Hudson River Park, Charlotte beside me on her scooter. To steer she dragged the toe of her blue high-top sneaker along the cobblestones outside our house. Once we were safely to the other side of the treacherous crossing at the West Side Highway, Charlotte tore down the promenade south along the Hudson, off to meet her friend Gus at the pier. Gus, who earlier in the day she had disdained, now was once again her main man. She darted confidently through the oncoming traffic of baby strollers, couples hand in hand, dogs without leashes. Under her helmet, her penny-colored hair flew up behind. “Careful!” I wanted to yell. “Come back!” But Charlotte was already well beyond earshot, riding high and free. Someday, I was thinking, no amount of knee pads and helmets I could provide would protect her from having her own heart broken. I knew that, but I also knew I’d never stop trying.

  A mother can fix a lot of things, but she cannot fix a broken heart.

  Look, a heart breaks, that doesn’t mean you don’t use it.

  Patch as much as you need; it doesn’t hurt.

  Trust your mother, you’re not going to die.

  The last time I saw our house, I didn’t intend to find it there. I wasn’t looking for its presence, but rather its absence. The new owners, a young couple with plans to start a family, tried to put in the very amenity my mother had scoffed at, air-conditioning, and the shambling old infrastructure couldn’t sustain it. My sister Darcy had heard at a holiday party that the house had been knocked down. And so, visiting the area later that week, on New Year’s Eve, I left my own family, Sam and Charlotte and their father, in the car down at the end of the driveway by the honeysuckle bush, and walked alone to see the barren site. But the news had been wrong, or slightly wrong. The house was indeed slated for demolition, but it had only been demolished on the inside. The windows were blown out, in some places the frames charred black. So it had been a tear-down after all.

  Soon it would be gone, and in its stead a brand-new state-of-the-art facsimile would be erected, with all the modern conveniences: air-conditioning, a pool, a gated security system. The tangle of wild honeysuckle would be cut down, and the security gate at the driveway would be braced by two stone pillars, the street address engraved on a bronze plaque at the entry.

  The salty air smelled faintly of wood smoke, a winter fire burning in the hearth of a living room nearby. In my childhood, summer nights often smelled like this as the sparks of numerous bonfires up and down the shore lit up the beachfront. On the Fourth of July, fireworks launched from the Main Beach nearby burst just beyond us, as if we could reach out and touch them. The resultant booms made the house tremble while shrieks of children’s laughter pierced the air. We squatted by the fire with long sticks melting marshmallows for s’mores, our sunburned faces and sweatshirts lightly illuminated in the glow. We ran relay races along the soft sand later in the season while all the fathers, and later our husbands, stood at the water’s
edge with fishing rods surf-casting, hoping to bring in the blues and stripers that ran just offshore at sundown, as the mothers tended littler kids in a circle around the fire.

  Maybe I conjured it, that winter day, the warm smell of wood smoke on the deserted beach, or the smell wafted up from the charred driftwood scattered here and there from bonfires last season. Under demolition our house looked hurt to me, blistered by circumstance. And yet at the same time noble, serene, and resolute.

  The fading light glowed in long rays across the beachfront as I turned to retrace my steps up along the dunes to my car and my waiting family. It was almost dusk. The magic hour. Or, as the French would say, “l’heure bleue.” The hour when anything might happen. I took one last look back. In the few fragments of broken glass still clinging to the sills of the windows of the house, the last light of the day reflected red. When I was young, and the windows were enflamed by the setting sun, it appeared to my naively intoxicated imagination as if the house were filled to the brim with roses. As my mother would have had it, tomorrow would be a perfectly glorious day.

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks are due first and foremost to JDT, for his generous insight, his gentle grace, and his undying support, all of which completely inform this story.

  This book would never have happened without the wonder that is Karen Rinaldi. She signed this project when it was a three-thousand-word essay, then she waited me out while I thrashed and dithered; she continued to believe in me, and in this project, beyond all reasonable doubt. Every single day she sets a kickass example as a skilled and dedicated editor, as a passionate and honest writer, as an exemplary mother, a loyal friend, and as one of the bravest women I know. My agent Binky Urban similarly waited me out, and even when I felt I had to dive behind a couch to hide when I’d run into her, being simply out of excuses for why this book wasn’t done, knowing she was there believing in me was a gift and a miracle. Thanks to the Harper Wave team, Hannah Robinson, Penny Makras, and ace publicity director Yelena Gitlin Nesbit. These women answered my every question and awed me on a regular basis with their resourcefulness, humor, and energy.