The Ocean House

by Mary-Beth Hughes

  THE

  OCEAN HOUSE

  Also by Mary-Beth Hughes

  The Loved Ones

  Double Happiness

  Wavemaker II

  THE

  OCEAN HOUSE

  Stories

  Mary-Beth Hughes

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2021 by Mary-Beth Hughes

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the Canada

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: January 2021

  This book is set in 1.5-pt. Scala LF by Alpha Design and Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-5753-9

  eISBN 978-0-8021-5754-6

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  For Duke,

  and for Pod,

  all my love.

  Contents

  The Ocean House

  Outcast

  The Healing Zone

  Here You Are

  The Elixir

  Dove

  The Pitch

  Summerspace

  Fragile X

  How the Poets Learned to Love Her

  California

  Acknowledgments

  The Ocean House

  They were tiny girls lying on their bellies by the wide windows of the playroom, spying on their mother far below. She tiptoed along the seawall, holding steady on puddled dips and sharp edges of the black jetty. Waves burst and sprayed at her feet. The girls pressed in close, touching clouds and crabs etched in the glass along the lower rims. Their fingers worked into the grooves as they watched their mother—so light-footed, her bathing suit beneath a sundress—climb over the fence between the neighboring beach club property and their own. She’s a fish! their father liked to declare, but she didn’t like to be inside the ocean. She preferred salt water in a swimming pool where she could see the beginning and end.

  Midmorning, Mrs. Hoving, despite her bad hip, walked all the way down the back stairs to retrieve milk and peaches. Their playroom was a round attic room on the turret end. But directly below, the grandest room of the house was empty. In the master bedroom a plinth raised the bed so high that, waking, their mother might see the waves first thing. Above the bed, a built-in carved canopy of shells and rosebuds lifted by four columns all painted white. The vista windows had ribbons of more rosebuds in pale-pink stained glass; the thorns were blunt and blue. A sleeping place for a sea queen. But their mother didn’t care for it. Thought it corny, trite. The window shade manufacturer’s silly dream for a wife who left him anyway. Then he went bankrupt. Why would she want to sleep there?

  Their mother was content in a regular rectangular bedroom with cross breezes. Besides, the grand circular bedroom with the plinth, the canopy, the flat pink glass roses and stubby thorns was haunted by a small boy who swung by his feet and made slurping noises nibbling at the sleeper’s nose. Their mother said he liked to be left alone.

  Of course they wanted to know how old he was, but she couldn’t say, which was frustrating because age was crucial to them at the time. Courtney was five, nearly five. Paige was three. Their mother was twenty-seven, so an old woman she said. Their father twenty-eight. But they were a year and a half apart, like Courtney and Paige. Mrs. Hoving claimed to be 103.

  On the turret side of the house, below the haunted bedroom, was the circular dining room. Lower still, a cellar of sand and rock, entirely off-limits. But in the bright round dining room, where they were free to come and go, their mother hung a new wallpaper. She’d imported the white herons standing in the lime-colored reeds from Japan. The house made me do it, she said. And that made sense because it looked, when she was finished, as if it had been here from the start. Something to appease the fleeing wife, the broken husband, the hungry boy. All of them.

  Don’t be flip, said their father, as if she’d said something cruel. Mrs. Hoving didn’t allow cruelty. Nor did their mother. Their father could be changeable on this point.

  The year was 1962. The house except for the newly arrived Japanese herons—and their bending inquiring white necks—was ninety years old at the time but seemed much older. It was the last of the great oceanfront houses left in Long Branch.

  Built in the same exuberant era, the Beach Club aimed for grandeur, too, with its herringbone boardwalk and a vast saltwater pool, the cunning trellised card room, the vaulted seaside dining terrace, the clubhouse itself, like a vast white Victorian wedding cake. A cliché, said their mother. It was meant to seduce those living in the houses who had plenty to keep them at home. But later, with the towers, business improved.

  The Beach Club stood directly north of their house. Its property continued for about an eighth of a mile until it petered out—their mother shrugged—at the tennis courts, then the high jagged jetty wall picked up again and continued along the Ocean Avenue for a while before crossing the town line into Sea Bright, which was filled with newer beach clubs vying for sunbathers and swimmers. To the south toward Asbury Park, all the new slinky apartment towers lined up, with concrete balconies like gray tongues that stuck out on the ocean side only. Tucked in, here and there, were the few other survivors. A nunnery. Two oil tycoons in retirement. Syrian Jews. And next to them, the Lebanese Catholics. Houses like their own, shingled and sometimes sagging, behind iron gates and high hedges.

  The Beach Club was eager to tear down their house and build its own tower. Sheep, said their mother. Sheep with demolition kits.

  When the house first came up for sale—something quick and private to settle a complicated estate—the club lost the bid. And their father won because, their mother said, of his exceptionally good character. And also the windfall that came to their mother quite by surprise, a gift sent from overseas. Money that had once been her own mother’s now all these years later released to her. They paid cash, she told the girls, and Courtney liked to think of a wheelbarrow full of bills and coins.

  The club president never gave up about the house. He’s a terrier! said their mother. A sheep, a terrier, a snake, the shape and sound of his threat changed day to day. Baa, woof, hiss.

  At least he can’t sue, said their father. He can only send spiteful letters.

  But he can, true? He may do much worse.

  This over breakfast coffee in the human-scale kitchen, another rectangle, whitewashed beadboard to the chair rail, then blue plaster walls. And bluish morning light off the ocean through the windows to match. Mrs. Hoving scraping carrots into shreds at the sink. For later. Their father would welcome
a lawsuit. That would settle things for good. Though of course there are no grounds, he said.

  But there were. And this was something Courtney would look into much later, the shady deal that briefly gave them their beautiful house and then allowed them to lose it. And she would think about the wheelbarrow full of money.

  Still, at the time, the girls understood a truce had been struck with the Beach Club about their mother’s essential swimming. She was allowed in the pool. Soon, she would bring them, too. When they were ready to learn to swim. The girls believed all of this was an extraordinary concession. For their mother, who deserved special treatment. But it turned out they’d had a membership all the years they lived next door. Something that evaporated when they left and moved inland away from the ocean. As if without their mother they were no longer welcome at the Beach Club. So the special-treatment theory held steady for a long time.

  In those years, they’d never use the club’s front entrance. Like their mother, they’d learn to pick their way over the slick jetty, a shortcut. By their own front gate, a too-grand affair of iron curlicues, black-green cypress spires grew high enough to block out the sight of the summer traffic and to screen their mother’s chosen bedroom from any prying eyes.

  She especially liked the room for its red marble mantle, which reminded her of London. In summertime, the windows would be thrown open and the hum of car engines on the avenue and the bang and hiss of the waves would rush in all together. The lion-skin carpet at the foot of her bed had a doggy smell.

  The only pet you’ll ever have, my loves, said their mother, who was against keeping animals because of what had happened to her dog in the war.

  As they grew older, their mother spoke more about her life in London. One morning in London, for instance, their grandmother Bess—whom they’d never meet, though Paige had her dark round eyes exactly—one morning their grandmother put their mother, seven years old, on a train to the country. With other girls just like you their mother told them. She had a fat ham sandwich and a clean blue dress folded in a paper sack. Ten weeks later she came home to a crater in the sidewalk. And all because their grandmother Bess refused to fold up her food tent just for the sound of yet another sputtering engine in the sky. Beneath a white fluttery tablecloth strung up on poles to keep out the sun overhead, Bess gave sandwiches to anyone in need. Her card table set at the end of the front walk. Samson the beagle lay at her feet, ready to ward off danger if it came along. From above, among gray stone houses and gray roads and rooftops the white tablecloth must have shone clear.

  But when they were still tiny enough to keep to the playroom, the most frightening thing they believed their mother knew was the hungry boy who swung upside down over the deserted master bed. She was keeping clear of him.

  Far below, their mother on the tips of her toes stepped off the seawall, her sundress fluttering away from her in the wind, her famous black swimsuit just visible when she straddled the Beach Club fence. Mrs. Hoving’s cool hands fell on their shoulders smelling of peaches. Come away from the window now, girls. Let your mother have a bit of peace.

  Later their father moved them two miles inland. The new house in the neighborhood behind Our Lady Star of the Sea had a flat lawn, closets with louvered doors on metal tracks, and a screened-in porch where their new stepmother, Ruth, would set up shop, she said, until it was time to switch the thermostat up in the fall. Then her friends would visit in the den. If the girls needed permission for anything, they always knew where to find her. She had a voice that carried and wanted them to talk louder, too. And stop walking so much on their tiptoes. They were quiet girls, especially Paige. The elder, Courtney, ten turning eleven when they moved to Honeysuckle Lane, often spoke for them both now.

  Once they were settled in, their father decided he’d keep the ocean house a while longer.

  What for? asked Ruth, taken aback. You won’t see a better offer. This is it, the sky-high limit. Trust me.

  Their father winked at the girls. Oh, I might hear something a little more persuasive. And they smiled. This was the old game they knew.

  Okay, said Ruth. Not my beeswax.

  From Honeysuckle Lane the girls could walk themselves to school. Ten minutes flat, back door to Star of the Sea parking lot. A new school for the girls, they were Catholics now, like Ruth. Their mother had been agnostic. Just in case, she’d said. Their mother let them wear shoes whenever they liked. Ruth handed out their school shoes only in the mudroom. She didn’t want them tracking in the muck of their shortcut through Mr. Kemp’s apple orchard. The whole house would stink of rot, like stale cider then.

  Mr. Kemp’s shortcut was mostly avoided by the neighborhood kids. The old orchard was overgrown and dense with pricker bushes and poison sumac. Paige spotted three snakes and a water rat on a single afternoon. Once they saw a group of boys from the seventh and eighth grade smoking cigarettes and sitting on a fallen tree trunk by a half-collapsed wood structure, an old outhouse. A thorny holly sealed up the door. It was a windbreak, and the boys squeezed the still-lit butts though the cut sliver moon in the door, as if daring the place to catch fire. Courtney and Paige walked the farthest path then, heads down to avoid notice.

  But one day Courtney had detention after school. While Sister Joseph was sorting the attendance book entries, a counting mistake she couldn’t make sense of, Courtney let out a fake sneeze that had words embedded inside: Aren’t you? Aren’t you fat?

  Silence, Sister Joseph said. Heads up.

  And Courtney whispered something about the knot in Sister’s forehead, a mysterious lump that popped out between her eyebrows.

  Don’t move! shouted Sister. Freeze! Then, when she’d fully assessed the class: Courtney Ruddy? Right here, right now.

  Sister pointed to a spot near the chalked detention list. Add your name and stay right there.

  And Courtney felt her face go hot red with the effort to keep it still, not to laugh or cry. Made to stand against the blackboard until dismissal and not wriggle, then given the task of stacking the chairs in the corridor, all thirty of them.

  On the way home, her boots unzipped, her coat unbuttoned, seeking penance, Courtney heard her sister Paige’s voice. A shiver of a laugh for the kind of ugly joke they might tell each other in the night, a supposition about Ruth and her wide fanny. Or the big bosom they liked to wrap their arms around, Paige in front, Courtney behind, then re-create the shape of, amazed. It was that same laugh, a bit of a hiss, but she couldn’t see Paige. The trees in October were already scratchy tangles against a gray sky, so there was no place to hide except the outhouse. And there she was, standing with her back to the outhouse door, a big boy—maybe a seventh grader, maybe even an eighth grader—pressed against her. His arms stretched high, fingers splayed on the wood. Paige’s head stuck out just beneath his armpit. He angled his big body like a plank into Paige. Don’t, she said, without a laugh now.

  One big boy said, He’s only playing. But Paige said, I can feel his thing!

  Courtney kept walking to her sister. She didn’t speed up and she didn’t slow down. She closed her coat carefully as if the motion might break something. When she was near enough to be heard, she said, Hey?

  They all looked at her at once.

  Are you all right? she said directly to her sister. Courtney made her eyes simple. Pretending she was just a wispy leaf, maybe orange colored, that had landed on Paige, nothing to be scared of.

  The boys looked at Courtney. There were more than she’d thought; some had cigarettes burning.

  Are you okay? Courtney tried again.

  No one answered her. And when Paige looked at her, her eyes went blank, as if she were a door Courtney couldn’t go through today.

  Courtney didn’t want to say her sister’s name, in case the boys didn’t know it, so they wouldn’t be able to find her later or the house on Honeysuckle Lane. Should I wait? she said to Paige.

&nbs
p; Nope, said a boy with black hair and pink cheeks. Everything’s fine. We’re playing a game.

  Paige, under the boy’s armpit, looked so small. At least her coat was buttoned. Go home, Courtney. It’s a game, she said, but Paige sounded like the doll talking when the string was pulled: Go home.

  Courtney turned around and started walking, feeling the way she had earlier today when everyone looked at her as they left the classroom. Sister Joseph had succeeded in marking her as repulsive as her own wart. And now the big boys could see this about Courtney, too. It was as clear to them as Sister Joseph’s protuberance. Ruth’s word, giving the big lump with gray hair sprouting out like a spare eyebrow some dignity. Courtney was a protuberance. The boys liked her sister and wanted nothing to do with Courtney.

  But then maybe Paige was only faking. She was often a liar now. They both were. Courtney spun back whether they wanted her to or not, but they’d taken their game elsewhere. Quiet as snakes, they’d already vanished from the orchard.

  When Courtney got home, Ruth was serving sweet pickled onions on pumpernickel toast rounds in the den for four o’clock cocktails. She waved Courtney upstairs, sighing: Homework, please.

  Don’t you care where precious Paige is? whispered Courtney.

  But Ruth was repeating her sigh, more amplified now for her friends. Upstairs in the room she shared with Paige, the lavender flounce on Courtney’s twin canopy bed looked stupid. She ripped the ruffles off hoping to get rid of it once and for all. But she left the top of Paige’s bed intact so she could make her own decision.

  In the ocean house their mother had been against ruffles. Forced down your throats your entire lives, why start now. They were dressed like little English girls in gray and navy blue, good linens, good wools. They wore their hair in single braids, tied beginning and end with white cotton ribbon. Mrs. Hoving did the brushing and the braiding and the baths with the transparent brown soap.