The Ocean House

by Mary-Beth Hughes

  Mrs. Hoving vanished when they moved to Honeysuckle Lane. They asked their father where she’d gone. And Ruth answered quickly: To Newark, to her family. Lots of trouble there and she’s the only one with any sense.

  Would Mrs. Hoving be coming back when the trouble was over?

  Now why would she, asked Ruth. And the girls looked to their father for confirmation, but he was busy watching out the window, guarding the flat lawn.

  After the day in the orchard with the boys at the old outhouse, Paige told Courtney she wasn’t allowed there anymore. The boys have made it out-of-bounds.

  For both of us?

  No, Paige said. Just for you. And just in the afternoon. The morning it’s still fine to cut through.

  Which meant Courtney now had to take the long route home all the way down Oakes Road to the far end of Honeysuckle Lane. She was the only one walking this way. But soon Andrew Kennedy cycled slowly around her, an eighth grader with big flat hands and coat hanger shoulders, stiff and pointing. A shorter, thinner older brother’s school blazer riding up to reveal the pale skin above his flannel trousers. This bike’s only four years old, he explained. It’s still perfect. As if Courtney wanted to know. He tipped sideways to tighten the loops around her, stinking the air with pockets of his breath and sweat. He made her dizzy, just to look at him. You don’t frighten me, she said. They were out in the wide open and any neighbor or even Ruth might drive by in an instant. But every day now included a blister of time with Andrew Kennedy and his chipped green three speed.

  What does he want? asked Paige, from the top of her pristine bed. She always made it up carefully and slipped into the sheets and blankets at the last minute just to sleep.

  He must be lonely, said Courtney, though it had never occurred to her before. Those boys still in the orchard?

  Not really, said Paige. Then she was pulling back the bedspread as if it stank of something and inserting her skinny legs one at a time into Ruth’s stiff bleached sheets.

  Courtney was the oldest in the fifth grade at Star of the Sea. She’d been left back the year they moved to Honeysuckle Lane. Now Paige in fourth had almost caught up to her. Courtney had started out smart but now she was in the bottom percentile.

  She’s not much of a trier, Ruth explained to their father. Ruth had done her best. But given the steep task and the short time allotted, there was talk of cutting losses. Sometimes the older takes the brunt, she said. We have to face facts.

  And Courtney, folded into her hiding spot between the back of the tweed sofa and the heating vent, assumed she’d be sent away like Mrs. Hoving, so the more promising Paige could be given more of what Ruth had to offer.

  Paige is a sweet thing, so helpful. But it was the dead of winter, their father pointed out, as if that were relevant. As if when the snow lifted, Courtney might bloom again. This point was met with silence.

  When the spring finally came, the orchard filled in with blossoms and then the buds of tiny apples-to-be. The fruit already at Mr. Kemp’s farm stand was imported. Ruth shopped there and one evening told their father that Mr. Kemp had made a pass at her, had tried to rub his nasty fingers where they don’t belong.

  The girls didn’t believe it.

  Handed me my bag of cherries and nearly twisted a you know what off me. Their father laughed, and Ruth laughed, too.

  Oh, such a rookie, he said.

  At afternoon cocktails, Ruth often related the woes of her new life. The girls were stubborn, selfish, contrary, though never rude. I’ll give their mother that much, she’d say. She taught them manners. Too much, if you ask me.

  Never rude? Of course not! Their mother was born in England, her own mother, Bess, gone early in the war. Her father earlier still.

  Sometimes Ruth pumped them for information so urgently the girls wondered if their father ever told her anything at all.

  They do the snaky dance and that’s it, said Paige. Courtney caught their father in the kitchen rubbing his front against Ruth’s bottom. When Courtney arrived with dessert plates he wheeled back and pretended a golf swing. He doesn’t even play golf, said Courtney later to Paige.

  One thing Ruth really wanted to know was who found their mother first. She didn’t lead up to it, just asked outright. So? Ruth pressed. The girls looked astonished. Or at least that’s how Ruth described them to the afternoon ladies. Mouths hanging open, eyes like marbles, she said. She had her work cut out for her with those two, all right.

  Sometimes a shock like that does brain damage, she said.

  The women agreed, but also said they liked her new egg salad. Catsup, Ruth confided. It’s my secret.

  When Ruth whimpered late in the night on the other side of the wall and woke up the girls, they decided that their father was shaking catsup on her bottom. This was the funniest thing in the world but also nauseating. Paige would go into the yellow bathroom and put her finger down her throat until nothing came up but green. She’d come back into bed, stinking of stomach juice.

  Are the boys nice to you? asked Courtney.

  What boys? said Paige.

  Let me show you something, said Courtney. She got up and gathered her seashells off the top of her dresser. Sometimes, if I put these in a special order—she arranged a circle of shells with two brownish sand-encrusted fragments in the center—Mama just appears.

  Shut up, said Paige.

  Not in the firm way, more in a dreamy way.

  On your canopy, I suppose. Just shut up.

  That was only a story, said Courtney. That was pretend. Then she swept up her shells and put them in a drawer where they wouldn’t get contaminated.

  It wasn’t Paige, as they’d sworn to Ruth, but Courtney who first found their mother. And right away, Courtney knew she was the lucky one. Worse to have to make up a picture in your mind to fill such a giant meaning. The actual picture was of their mother asleep on the lion rug. Curled almost like a kitten, one leg stretched out, the other tucked in. She lay on her side, and the cheek not covered by her hair rested close to but not exactly on the lion’s paw. Her cheek was mottled and only slightly gray. Courtney came in to tell her that nothing Mrs. Hoving said on the ride home from school made sense yet and it had been a whole week of speaking French in the car and it still didn’t mean anything beyond bonjour and je t’aime. Her mother’s sundress was lifted all the way to her waist as if to cool her legs off. Bonjour, Maman. Je t’aime. Her favorite bathing suit, the black one, was loose around the tops of her thighs. Je t’aime, Maman. Her mother was being too careful lately with her diet.

  Thirty-three years old is awfully young to have a tricky heart, said one of the women in the den. My goodness.

  It wasn’t quite so simple, said Ruth and then whispered her motto about small ears and big mouths. They could all see Courtney at the kitchen counter.

  Looking for the oranges, dear? called out Ruth like she was the darling wife and mother in a black-and-white movie. So many people liked her for what she was doing. The neighborhood women who sat with her, drinking gin and tonics, admired her and said so. You’re a trooper, Ruth.

  They’d never seen her in the days when she wasn’t a trooper at all. Ruth at the Beach Club snack bar, dipping the French fry basket into bubbling oil. Then she was Mrs. Carter, and one day she had a chevron-shape burn like a red arrow stuck on her forearm. Hard not to get hurt in such tight quarters.

  She’s blind and foolish just like me, their mother said. It was a hot day and her temper got the better of her. That’s how she explained it. Later when they were back over the fence, back on their own rocks, tiptoeing toward the back steps. The heebie-jeebies, the creeps.

  It’s not that poor woman’s fault, their mother said.

  The first summer on Honeysuckle Lane and the first without the Beach Club. In fact no ocean at all, which was strange. They were still quite close. But Ruth preferred a day camp for the girl
s, with itchy woodland hikes and swim practice in a scummy chlorine pool.

  They were both older now than their mother had been on the day she returned to London from the safe countryside to find only the crater where her house had been. And when Ruth was being annoying, going through their dresser drawers, insisting on a particular order to their underwear, Paige would whisper to Courtney: At least she’s not as bad as the crater. Which was funny but not very.

  When she was returned by train to London, with the other children, their mother was able to find an aunt to help her—really only a courtesy aunt, a neighbor named Florence Kinney. And their father liked to say how resourceful their mother was and, for a little girl, how very brave.

  In the ocean house, down the hall from her bedroom, their mother made a kind of dressing room of a windowless storage closet. There, inside a cigar box, she kept the striped handkerchief she wore around her neck in case she needed it as a mask at the end of the war. In Hampstead the air was often filled with ash. And every single day, Florence Kinney would say it was all beyond her. The care of a child in this misery was completely outside her ken. Every other person had a crater, after all, but not everyone had an orphan thrust her way.

  That’s why when their mother was very tired or had the heebie-jeebies or the creeps, their own father knelt beside her and put his arms around her legs, as if she were only a tiny girl, like them. In the house by the ocean everyone who needed a mother had one. This was their joke as a family. A surplus of mothers. Mrs. Hoving thought this was funny, too, because of course she was one of them. Their father held their mother tight around her knees until she laughed, saying: Off! you’re a nuisance, her fingers curled soft around his wrists.

  In mid-August, everyone on Honeysuckle Lane was asked by the Long Branch township to stay home and indoors as much as possible while the authorities cleaned up the mess and the danger after the surprise hurricane. This came over the radio.

  Though the rain itself lasted less than a day and a night, the rivers and creeks overflowed, taking bits and pieces from the waterfront inland. A dinghy landed as far as the lawn at the end of Honeysuckle Lane. And the Beach Club and all the towers went dark.

  As soon as Ocean Avenue was passable, defying municipal orders, Ruth loaded the girls in the car for some fresh air and a little snooping. She’d had some news, she said. Through the grapevine. They’d go investigate if it was true.

  The ocean house belonged to their father, of course—­completely, irrevocably. But now the town—in a plot!—was considering some kind of eminent domain. All because the seawall had been breached for half an hour!

  They were going to see this travesty in motion. The girls didn’t know what Ruth was talking about. But now they waited on the sodden salt-burned grass behind the cypress trees while Ruth spoke to a police officer who’d set up a table in their old seashell driveway. Firemen in high waders came by and drank water from Dixie cups then pulled masks down over their faces and went up the high white-painted back steps where the girls once liked to hang their bathing suits on the railing to dry.

  Inside, said the policeman—a grouchy man with a wide flat nose—the water had made a mark, like a finger run all along the dining room wall. A grubby, little girl’s finger, he said to Paige. Someone who didn’t wash her hands before dinner.

  That’s enough of you, said Ruth. But too late, they could see the slimy trail marking their mother’s Japanese silk wallpaper. Through the white herons and the reeds. About three feet high, said the policeman to Ruth. I swear it.

  All a charade, said Ruth. I don’t believe a word. A finger mark on a dodgy wallpaper? And you’re taking a house? Every one of us will be out on our keesters at this rate.

  A fireman slogged toward them. He lifted a Dixie cup in a soot-black hand. The house is deserted, he said and smiled down at Ruth in an ugly way. A way that Courtney recognized as pleasure. And felt a funny twitch of being glad for him. Glad for his happiness.

  Nothing like it, said Ruth. Not for a minute.

  The girls were marched back to the car, and Ruth made the sign—a zip on the lips—of not saying a thing about this adventure to their father.

  Despite their silence, at dinner that night their father looked downcast. So he knew. Though he said it was just the weather. That and something about taxes and a faulty plan. A thieving accountant. No recourse. He was speaking in code, to Ruth only, but they could tell by her face the news was shocking and bad. There was a very long pause after he finished talking. Chewing was impossible. Courtney remembers this night after the hurricane, the feeling as if her jaw had been welded shut by all the electrons Ruth said were flooding the air.

  Wait, Paige said, as if she’d figured the whole thing out. Maybe things would be much easier if Ruth could just have her wish.

  And what’s that? asked their father.

  They—she and Courtney—could be taken by someone else along with the ocean house for good. Save a lot of trouble all round, Paige said with the slightest fake British accent.

  Their father studied Paige: her long straight brown hair, the feathery arch of her eyebrows, her mother’s mobile, easily happy mouth, grim now, serious. He studied Paige for a long time, as if in reappraisal, before he answered in the low quiet voice. The voice that told them they didn’t need to believe him at all. He said that someday they’d recognize the jewel they had in Ruth.

  Right after the hurricane, Mrs. Hoving came to visit Ruth on the screen porch. The back lawn was covered in broken branches of still-green maple leaves. All the jetsam and debris half-swept into piles for the municipal trucks to remove one yard at a time.

  Mrs. Hoving had been helping Mrs. Lanahan down the road. She still did a bit of piecework stitching on the side, drapes and so on. She could do light upholstery, too. If Ruth ever needed such help. And she was so nearby today she thought, Oh, let me just lay eyes on the little ones again. Her niece’s husband was delayed picking her up, and she said to herself and then to Ruth: I told myself to walk down the lane to where that kind man has made a new home. A new start. But was it true?

  Mrs. Lanahan had been full of news about the ocean house. Mrs. Hoving couldn’t believe her ears. Condemned?

  Courtney came home from school but not Paige. All Mrs. Hoving had time to do in front of Ruth’s frowning, scouring eyes was pat Courtney’s wrist and say, You always had your mother’s pretty hands. Then her niece’s husband pulled all the way into the circle drive in a loud Oldsmobile with a discolored bumper. Mrs. Hoving went right out the front door. Just like that, Queen of Sheba, said Ruth to their father that night and imitated a wide sashay that looked nothing like Mrs. Hoving’s aching hip or her careful steps.

  Did Mrs. Hoving leave a message for me? asked Paige.

  She talked about Mama’s hands, said Courtney. Probably that was for you, too.

  The main thing she said was that she was grateful, said Ruth, yes, very thankful that you two were so well loved now. At long last.

  That sounds like a fib, said Paige.

  Apologize, said their father.

  Paige scraped out her chair and darted out of the dining room and up the staircase. Upstairs, the door to their room slammed shut.

  Courtney kept her face averted from Ruth and waited for her father to make sense of the situation. He seemed confused. As if Mrs. Hoving had moved something important or stolen something and left the door wide open to worse. Finally he said, Eat your dinner, now, Courtney. It will only get cold.

  It’s too gross, she said quietly. But he was distracted, listening, as if he could still discern Paige through the ceiling. I want to puke? whispered Courtney, as if telling her father what he really was listening for. Though he didn’t know it yet. Spoiling a surprise.

  Oh, for the love of god, said Ruth. That’s it! That’s it. And she, too, scraped back her chair and let the tears in her eyes show before rushing out, hugging her belly,
looking to Courtney like a troll who’d swallowed a poisoned frog.

  Everyone’s so upset, said Courtney with a smile to her father.

  Maybe Mrs. Hoving should mind her own business, he said and went off to comfort Ruth.

  The night before, Ruth told them that the hurricane had flooded the Olympic-size pool at the Beach Club, so much that waves formed and pushed the French fry cooker out of the boardwalk snack shack and onto the jetty. Only the benches on the boardwalk bolted in place had any chance of staying still, she said, but then the boards buckled up like a wave themselves and the benches went with them. Those that were commemorated—for Mrs. Lawrence Thees and for Miss Ethel Bolmeyer—were retrieved and being repaired first. Their mother didn’t have a bench. Which seemed right, since she had a whole house to be remembered by. But the pool rising up was a frightening idea. What if the waves had come high when their mother taught them to swim? She’d hold them tight and leap into the pool and help them flutter up to the surface and find their breath. The two of them so tiny and so strong their mother swam them around and around in her arms until they learned to kick free.

  Hurricane or not, the new school year began just after Labor Day. Courtney was in sixth grade now, Paige in the fifth. To get to Star of the Sea they had to climb over and around the storm debris, downed tree limbs still uncollected, some shellacked in a dried greenish sludge. Seaweed.

  Red tide, warned Ruth. Don’t touch anything.

  Now, each morning before she left for school, Courtney arranged her seashells in a straight line, one touching the next, on top of her white dresser. Before she went to sleep at night, she shaped them in the circle. Bon matin, Maman. Bonne nuit. Je t’aime.

  The first Friday back at school, she came home and the shells were gone and she knew exactly what had happened. Just to make sure, she stood in the archway to the den. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres on a tray, Ruth in the middle of a story about Mrs. Hoving. Ruth paused and waited.

  I’m cleaning my room, Courtney said.