The loss of the fish has long since devastated Cape Cod, much as the loss of small farms has had a brutal effect on areas all across the country. There’s a pride that goes with working your own piece of land or sea that’s unique and irreplaceable. But we live in an era of depletion and we’re going to have to find a way through.
Q. You know a lot about the history of Cape Cod. Is there any historical tidbit that stands out for you?
A. So many! I suppose the one I come back to most often is the story of Billingsgate Island off Wellfleet: named for Billingsgate Fish Market in London because the fish were once so plentiful there. A small community grew up on the island in the eighteen hundreds—thirty houses, a lighthouse and lightkeeper’s cottage made of brick and granite. But the sea kept rising, forcing residents to move to the mainland (which meant floating their houses across the bay on rafts). Finally only the lighthouse was left standing; it was destroyed during a storm in 1915. It’s a particularly concrete example of the power of nature over our lives, and a testament to human adaptability.
Q. Are you in a book club? Would you care to share something about your own reading preferences, or perhaps some recent discoveries?
A. I am in a book club. I was invited to discuss The House on Oyster Creek and never left! My reading preferences—honesty, awareness of the fragility and yearning of human life, how hard we try toward each other, how badly we fail. Short stories from Chekhov to Cheever to William Trevor and Alice Munro, because they catch all that happens in one ordinary moment. George Saunders and Sam Lipsyte, who make me laugh until I cry. All authors who “sing of human unsuccess, in a rapture of distress” (W. H. Auden).
Q. Are you planning more novels set on the Cape?
A. Oh yes, absolutely.
CONVERSATION GUIDE
QUESTIONS FOR
DISCUSSION
1. For many people, the true test of a novel lies in its ability to make them care deeply about the characters. Does The Harbormaster’s Daughter pass the test for you?
2. Many of the characters in the novel are deeply flawed, yet the author seems generous and forgiving toward them. Do you share her attitude? Do you enjoy reading about characters who aren’t necessarily easy to like?
3. LaRee has raised Vita with the goal of creating a safe, wondrous world for her, and protecting her from the full ramifications of her mother’s murder. In some ways, that has kept Vita isolated from the community. What do you think of how LaRee has raised Vita? Would you have done it differently?
4. The media love Franco because he’s “authentic.” But is he? What does our attraction to people like him say about us?
5. Have you ever known a woman who shared some aspects of Sabine’s character—her insecurity and the ways she tries to mask it, her benighted search for love, her devotion to her daughter?
6. As fishing declines, the Portuguese community suffers. Discuss how various characters adapt, or fail to adapt, to the subsequent losses—for example, bartender Franco, fatherless Dorotea, bitter Amalia. Do some of their choices add to their grief?
7. When Sabine is murdered, people assume an “outsider” did it. When they learn otherwise, they blame Sabine for somehow inciting her own killing. How do you explain this familiar pattern? Do the townspeople bear any responsibility for the murder?
8. LaRee is very accepting of Vita’s first sexual experience at the age of sixteen. Why is that? What does her attitude say about what she wants for Vita? What do you think of the way she handles the situation?
9. Not everyone is lucky enough to experience a first love as sweet and wondrous as Vita’s. Were you?
10. Vita is vitally aware of the natural world around her; she draws strength and healing from it. What role does the natural world play in your own life?
11. Oyster Creek is portrayed as a small town in which very different people, the Portuguese and the “washashores,” are forced to interact through close proximity, their loves and resentments becoming entwined over the years and being perpetuated through rigid patterns of behavior. Have you ever lived in such a place? How does your experience compare with what happens in the novel?
12. Talk about that bicycle. What do you think is the author’s intention?
13. Did you find the end of the novel satisfying? Why or why not?
Read on for an excerpt from
The House
on Oyster Creek,
the first novel in
Heidi Jon Schmidt’s series depicting life
in the fictional town of Oyster Creek,
on the tip of Cape Cod.
A LETTER FROM FATE
Charlotte had known when she married Henry that he would inherit Tradescome Point. It helped weave the little veil of romance over him: He was the only child of only children, from a long line of Maine Puritans whose names he knew only from the stones in the family plot. They’d been shipbuilders, ship captains, and his grandfather, having sailed around the tip of Cape Cod to avoid a gale, had found this crooked finger of land in Wellfleet and decided to retire there. Tradescome Point, called Mackerel Point back then, looked south over the serpentine estuary known as Oyster Creek, which opened into Mackerel Bay and then into Cape Cod Bay. The island at the bay’s mouth had been named Billingsgate because fish seemed as plentiful there as in Billingsgate Fish Market in London. Lobsters washed up in heaps after a storm, and a man could rake in bushels of scallops at low tide, like leaves. And of course there were the famous oysters, reefs of them in the shallow water, and cod, and mackerel drying in sheaves on every one of the wharves that bristled out all along the shoreline—every fisherman was proud as a king.
By 1902, when Isaiah Tradescome arrived, almost every last mackerel had been caught. The big wharf at the end of the point had been swept off its pilings in the Portland Gale, and there was no reason to replace it—there were no mackerel left in Mackerel Bay, and the point, accessible only by water or by the narrow cartway alongside the creek, which lay under two feet of water at high tide, was of no use to anyone. Isaiah bought it, all eleven acres, for a hundred and eighty-seven dollars, built his house, and lived there the rest of his days.
Henry spoke of the place slightingly, as the last relic of a tradition he’d managed to escape. He was the last Tradescome except for his father, who lived in a nursing home outside Boston: a staring old man who crimped the edges of his blanket with nervous fingers all day and all night, waiting for death.
“Hold his hand,” Charlotte prompted Henry the last time they visited him. It was four hours by train from Grand Central; they’d sit with his father and spend the night in a hotel, reassuring each other about what a good place they’d found, how clean and bright it was, how the nurses seemed genuinely concerned. Charlotte had put up pictures of Henry Senior, looking up from his desk at his insurance office, showing off a wire basket of littlenecks he’d dug out of the tide flats off the point. She wanted everyone to remember that he had once been a whole, living man.
“Or just rest your hand on his head, so he can tell you’re here.”
“He doesn’t know me,” Henry said with profound irritation. One of his hands had been weakened by polio years ago; the other was tensed along with his jaw at his wife’s notions. She believed in the healing power of a touch, and other banalities.
“He’ll feel it; he’ll sense something, some deep memory. It’ll comfort him even if he doesn’t know it’s you.”
“Conventional wisdom,” he said, seething. Conventional was his worst insult—he pronounced it with such contempt that Charlotte feared it as she would a red-hot poker. Emaciated, translucent, his father looked up at them with watery, frightened eyes.
“It can’t hurt him,” Charlotte insisted.
Henry gave in and took the crooked fingers in his. A little frown troubled his father’s long, pale face and the old man pulled his hand away. One corner of Henry’s mouth turned up—now did she get it? Tradescomes came from cold granite; they did not want comfort against life’s blow
s.
“You’re young, that’s all,” Henry said to Charlotte, with a chuckle. “Your view will darken; give it time.”
Before she’d had Fiona, Charlotte had believed this, and most of the rest of what Henry told her. He was twenty years older than she was, an author, a staunch and learned man, and she’d been grateful to have him as a guide. Charlotte was made of empathy; she would accidentally glimpse the hopes and fears of the stranger behind her in a supermarket line. Her heart went out to people and she could never get it back. Henry’s heart seemed to have hardened until it cracked; she’d been sure she could restore it, bring it back to life again. It hadn’t occurred to her that Henry might not want that.
The phone call woke them all. The light on the Empire State Building was out; it must be after midnight. Charlotte took Fiona up from her crib and settled back in bed to nurse her.
“Thank God,” Henry said. “Yes. No, there won’t be a service. There’s no one left to mourn him.” He gave his characteristic bleak laugh and hung up, breathing a long sigh.
She reached her free hand out to him, and he allowed it to sit on his shoulder for a moment before picking it up and returning it to her.
“It’s hardly bad news,” he said.
“Still, it’s sad.” Fiona was drifting off again and Charlotte’s nipple popped comically out of her mouth, though she kept trying to suck, making fish lips in her sleep. To think that Henry’s father had been someone’s baby; someone had gazed down at his face with this wondering love that amounted nearly to prayer.…
“An old, stale sadness,” Henry said.
“So, sadness has, like, a shelf life?”
He did smile at that. “No,” he said. “Which means it will still be there in the morning, so you might as well get some rest.” He got up and went to the bathroom for the hot water bottle, pulling a T-shirt of Charlotte’s out of the laundry to wrap it. The warmth and smell would trick Fiona back to sleep in the crib.
“Is this too hot?”
Charlotte pressed her wrist against it. “Just right,” she said. Henry was nothing if not helpful. Getting the rice cereal to the perfect consistency, or the water bottle to the exact temperature, these duties he undertook in earnest. And he would hold Fiona whenever Charlotte needed a free hand, though always with a slightly rebellious look, as if just because there was a baby here in the crook of his arm didn’t mean he had to feel anything for it. Certainly not.
He leaned down to make up the crib—his naked backside was poignant, two stick legs supporting his thick torso and the head of gray hair he raked with his good hand all day, racking his brain for exact phrases. His back hurt him, the doctor said he needed a new knee, and the bad hand hung strangely as always, an unclenchable fist, proof of the cruelty of life. He settled the water bottle in, smoothed the wrinkles out of the sheet, and Charlotte tiptoed behind him, leaning into the crib, careful to keep the baby tight against her until the last second. Fiona didn’t wake up, just snuggled closer to the hot water bottle, and they stood over her, watching her sleep. It felt like they were a real, whole family, the kind where each brings his own spark so there’s always a soft light burning, even in the darkest time.
“I’ll read awhile,” Henry said, going into the living room and turning on his lamp. It had been a bare bulb when Charlotte met him, shining harshly on the jammed bookshelves, the piles of books on the floor beside the armchair, the table where he pushed the books aside to make a bit of room for his dinner plate every night—usually scrambled eggs. He’d read until his eyes felt “like boiled owls,” then go down the six flights of stairs and around the corner to McClellan’s Tap. “He lives like an Athenian,” one of his acolytes at the newspaper had explained. “His life is in the marketplace. Home is just a place to sleep.”
Charlotte had been another of those admirers, in awe of his devotion to work and thought, his stark austerity. She’d been so young, embarrassingly young, with no idea what mundane materials lives are made of. Wanting to distinguish herself, do something brave and important, she had gone to work for a pittance at the East Village Mirror, which Henry had started printing on a mimeograph when he first saw the danger looming in Vietnam. Now he was the visionary-in-residence, whose purity of journalistic heart made all the rules and tricks Charlotte had learned in grad school seem tainted. The Mirror’s tiny circulation did not trouble him—better to address a small group of serious readers than be a cog in some big, shining wheel. Did you see more deeply into the subject? Did you find the details that would etch the story absolutely into the reader’s mind? Then you could hold your head high; never mind the byline, the prestige. His chin was always stubbly, his sweaters worn through at the elbows: He didn’t waste a thought on such things. The trace of a Maine accent left in his speech added to the sense that he belonged to an earlier and much better time, and his left hand, flaccid at his side, gave a certain glamour, giving the easy explanation for his ferocity, his steely refusal to take part in the ordinary round of life. Everyone was curious—the men drank with him; the women slept with him. They made a myth of him and loved him for it. Only Charlotte, whose brand of hubris was emotional, had tried to get to know him.
And she’d succeeded; she’d made her way into his heart. And been so smug about it too, being favored by the great man. Henry was almost the age her father would be now. Her father had remarried soon after her mother’s death (he was one of those men whose wife was his soul; he couldn’t live long without one), and been absorbed into the new family, leaving Charlotte as a sort of fifth wheel. She’d call him on holidays, and they’d have a bit of conversation, but she wouldn’t have thought to confide in him, and when he died one morning as he was setting off on his postal route, she’d felt only a dull, distant grief, an echo of something so old it had become ordinary. By then she had made this strange marriage and didn’t know what to do.
She had only herself to blame. She and Henry had taken a trip to France together, in those early years. Provincial creature that she was, she was attracted to everything that glittered: Henry pulled her down alleyways into restaurants that seemed like caves, full of students smoking Gauloises. Paris had been Disneyfied beyond recognition, he said; only the beauty of the women was worthy of note anymore. Away from his desk, he was unmoored; nothing pleased him and he barely spoke, though his face would knot suddenly with fury and he’d address some bitter expostulation to the editor of the International Herald Tribune. Holed up in the garret hotel room with him, Charlotte had suffered a loneliness so bleak it seemed almost physical. On the train to Marseilles he went to the men’s room and never came back; after an hour she went to look and found him in a different car, reading a history of the Dreyfus affair and looking fit to kill. She tiptoed back to her own seat, thinking she’d get off at some stop midway and go on alone. Except that Henry, having never owned a credit card, was carrying only a hundred dollars in traveler’s checks. She couldn’t abandon him, any more than she could have left a child alone. They alighted in Marseilles as married as ever. Charlotte saw a young couple striding past, deep in conversation, and Henry, watching her watch them, said with perfect tenderness: “Poor girl, that’s what you ought to have had.”
Now, with Fiona safely asleep, he tucked an old wool blanket (his father’s) over himself and tried a few pairs of glasses from the side table before he found the right ones. The cat jumped into his lap. Bunbury was the ugliest cat Charlotte had ever seen—a square head, a mean face, and fur stiff as a bottlebrush—but he and Henry had some kind of understanding, and as Henry started to scratch behind the cat’s ears, Charlotte saw grief overtake him. His shoulders went rigid, he clenched his fist, that was all. Charlotte tried to sleep—Fiona would need her again in a few hours—but it was impossible. She lay there trying to piece the dead man together, from the bits she knew. The man in those pictures, his linen suit and trim mustache, a certain energy and pride in his face… had he gotten some of what he hoped for, before he died? Face to the pillow so Henry couldn
’t hear, she cried for him. Somebody had to.
He had structured it all so smoothly, before he lost himself to dementia—probate went without a hitch. The nursing home had absorbed most of his savings, and after the taxes there was barely a dollar left. But Henry was the only heir, and they received by registered mail the key to a safe-deposit box that contained such jewelry as Charlotte could not have imagined—blue diamond teardrop earrings, a gift to Henry’s grandmother on the occasion of his father’s birth, and a cameo depicting a barefoot woman on horseback, thrusting a spear into the breast of a lion.
“Ship’s captains,” Henry said, barely glancing, as Charlotte held the brooch under the light. It was translucent pink, carved from a shell. “They brought things back.…”
They were shut up in the anteroom off the safe-deposit vault. It was paneled in gleaming mahogany, and about the size of an elevator. “Dross…” Henry said under his breath, pushing aside a packet of old letters. Underneath, there was a set of brass knuckles, well used.
“Mutineers,” he said with a gleam, trying them on his good hand. “You had to be ready for them. You have to be hard as a ball bearing, Grandfather used to say.” He made a quick, tight jab in the air, with real hatred on his face, as if his enemy were right in front of him.
“Is this the deed?” Charlotte asked, to turn the subject. Clearly it was—a fold of thick, brittle paper, covered in tendriled script, tied with a stained satin ribbon. It looked like a letter from fate.
“‘Know all men by these presents…’” she read out. “‘In consideration of one hundred and eighty-seven dollars, I, Luther Travis, do hereby grant unto the said Isaiah Tradescome, his heirs and assigns forever, a parcel of upland and meadow in South Wellfleet, being about ten and three-quarter acres more or less, bounded northerly by the Oyster Creek cartway, seventy-three lengths of fence as the fence now stands, and southerly by the waters of Mackerel Bay, extending eastward to the bridge beside the boat meadow, and westward to Sedgewick’s Gutter.…’”
The Harbormaster's Daughter Page 30
