The Ocean House

by Mary-Beth Hughes

  Smoke? Lee-Ann said, fishing around in her patch pocket for the butt. Before Faith could speak, she cried, I’m just fooling with you!

  Faith decided to smile, to be hospitable now, and for one half second saw something almost redeemable in the messy blurry profile beside her. Her head was starting to split wide open. Outcast. Outcast something. That was the film. A real doozie. But Faith remembered something else now besides the elephants. A late strange perplexing shot of the native girl. She sits shivering on the rocky outcropping just outside a twig hut. The river stretches out below. The rain pounds down. Inside, her lust-maddened lover howls and howls. He’s ready for her now. But she just hugs her knees in close with wet arms. She bows her stylish head down low. Telling the viewer that as pretty as she is and as hard as she tries, somehow she’s stumbled and there’s no turning back. Is that the end? That can’t be the end.

  At the Beach Club, in the lush early evening pink sunlight, young Pete Hetzler lounges under the green umbrella at the gate. Black mirrored glasses, freckled cheeks, and a puffy sweet mouth just visible beneath the floppy tennis hat he wears. Black sneakers, black socks. A declaration that Andover can’t rub away his hellfire edges.

  Faith pulls up too close, but he laughs. Hello, Mrs. Barlow. Faith puts the car in park and steps out. Come on! she says to the girl, who seems to be struggling to locate something between her knees.

  Pronto, says Faith, but that sounds a bit harsh. Let’s find the kids? They’re excited to meet you. And finally the girl pushes out of the low car.

  This way, Faith sings and notices that Pete Hetzler ignores Lee-Ann. She’s invisible to him. He smiles right past Lee-Ann to Faith as he slides into the driver’s seat. The girl gathers her hair in one hand and pulls it back as if bracing herself. Triangular pennants clack in the wind at the top of the flagpole. For boats, right? Lee-Ann says to Faith.

  Right. But in this case, mostly decorative.

  The girl nods, earnest, learning on the job. And now she’s got Pete’s attention. He too is studying her knees, carefully, slack-jawed.

  Pete? Faith calls out. Don’t lose the car. I’ll be right back.

  And just like that, he’s restored. She leads the girl under the long awning to the entrance. Faith waves to old Mrs. Ekdahl, guardian of the keyboard, on whom every face of every member—and their parents and grandparents before them—have made their endearing indelible impressions. These days new people upset her. She can be a bit ferocious.

  Don’t worry, Mrs. Ekdahl, says Faith, soothing, heading off the attack before it erupts. Don’t worry! She’s with me. She’s mine. Just the new Bernadette and perfectly harmless.

  The Healing Zone

  1.

  Connor was still in his crib, an elaborate crib, something with slide bolts between the slats and a mattress made of material astronauts might sleep on. Restorative. Connor was still sleeping in this crib and very tiny when Owen brought home the first airplane. It was gorgeous with sleek wings painted blue as a morning glory and a belly of yellow. Propellers that buzzed incredibly loud, sound amplified by the water, as Owen directed the plane to loop first one way then the other over the cattails out into the channel, watching Connor in his carrier in the grass to see if the baby followed the sound or the colors or the motion. Not yet.

  Cece bounced up and down beside her father. Please, she cried. Please, Daddy. And he let her wrap her hands over his and together they flew the little plane back over Connor and landed it sideways, with a crash in the tulip blades. No harm done, declared Owen, and Connor cried—more a ­mew-mew—not because of the plane or the crash. Cece said, He’s hungry, Daddy. Cocoa’s hungry.

  Owen wasn’t in love with this nickname. It made him wonder the first time he’d heard it, Faith curling the baby close to her chest, sort of, always a pocket of air for safety sake. Oh little Cocoa bean, she whispered. Funny bean. She stroked with one finger the black down that fell into a widow’s peak on the baby’s forehead. What a character! she cried. Little Cocoa.

  When Connor was born, and this was startling, he looked exactly like his father, a replica but almost too small to survive. He’d lived for two months in the neonatal intensive care and then like a miracle he was home. Owen felt he could cry sometimes, for just the relief of seeing him flex and curl his fist, seeing the funny bud of his mouth purse, a miracle of strength and genius, how much it took for this baby to blink his eyes and strain to see his father watching, laughing, saying, Good boy, little sweetheart. There you are. There you are.

  Connor still had a hospital bandage, very professional looking, wrapped around his miniature forearm. A monitor or feeding tube or some apparatus had bored a tiny hole into his arm that failed to heal before they brought him home. On Monday, Faith would travel into the city for a checkup, she’d already alerted the Sheas. Tom Shea would pick her up early and drive her up in his old-fashioned limousine. A Cadillac, one of two he’d bought with his brother, Brendan, in the late seventies, when it was popular to go to dinner and a show in the city and then have one of the Shea brothers circle while disco bouncers were softened up with hundred-dollar bills to let in the couples in blue blazers and good pearls. A laugh for all concerned. Except for the Sheas, who had never charged enough to be cheerful. Besides, they lived, the two men in their forties, with a mother who still had a voice that tripped any decent day directly into irritation. Brendan was nicer than Tom, but Tom was the better driver and knew the city. It was still a good business but not enough apparently to warrant a new fleet. The polished old limos were a nice joke and a pleasant convenience. She’d sip a cup of coffee and hold Connor’s toes wrapped in his white cotton socks, belted in the car seat. And the news would be good, for the most part. And the difficult news, a slightly fragile heart, they could live with and help in certain ways. But for now, Connor’s face seemed to flicker once or twice with delight, a slight lift of the dark-rose lips as if he could drink that swooping plane his father guided only for his pleasure right out of the sky. And then he was hungry and crying and the plane as light as a butterfly crashed in the mulch. We’re all hungry! claimed Owen, and he left the plane tangled in the tulips so he could lift his nearly weightless son in his carrier by the plastic handle and hold his daughter’s sticky hand.

  Such a wonderful father! said everyone in the neighborhood. Only three houses tucked impossibly along the tidal basin at the tip of Little Rest Road. Now they never would have been allowed to build, but in the early thirties who was looking? Any construction was good construction. And the three houses were placed at angles only determined by how many windows in each could find a water view. The houses were tossed down like a handful of seeds, Faith liked to say, no rhyme or reason. But when they first saw it, she wasn’t so blithe. My god, she said to Owen. How is this place even possible? And it wasn’t quite possible, but Owen sold the stock that was his inheritance and borrowed money from his brother, Hadley, a disaster waiting to happen, he’d said at the time as a joke, but Faith remembered it later as prophecy.

  For a couple of years they slept on a mattress on the floor—like hippies, declared Faith—but Owen always wore a tie, and she herself ironed every garment she wore. A mattress and an iron, what more do we need? They laughed and sat out on the back-porch steps, sun setting orange, bright as foil in the pricker bushes low near the water. But once Cece was conceived they got serious about furniture. Hadley offered a book of Japanese erotic prints delivered by UPS. For the nursery, read the card, with love from Uncle Hadley.

  On the night of Connor’s first airplane, Faith was attempting an oyster stew. Formula for Connor, hot dog for Cece, but for their triumphant parents, a stew, just like the one Owen and Hadley ate as boys on Middle Island.

  This house had been the great compromise. This house made it possible for Owen to lay aside—for a moment—the avalanche of bad ideas that seemed to him to flourish when Faith and her mother were near one another, even briefly. Ten mi
les apart? How would they all survive? Even small dinners at big absorbing restaurants in New York had failed to diminish the wrapped misery they could generate in a flash. What a pair! Didn’t Faith want a new life? Wasn’t that the big idea?

  What are you talking about? said Faith. A stance she maintained as long as she could, and then she’d sigh. It was very hard.

  Hard! Hard? Owen would have been jubilant with relief that she could admit this much, but that possibility had already passed them by.

  The house was the glory of their marriage. He felt it every time he turned in between the twin white pines and drove the arc that edged the lily pond and the toolshed and the collapsed barn, a miniature left over from the one farmer who’d planted from here to the Sea Bright Bridge. From the barn, two cypresses, twinned again and spanning the blue gravel, and on the other side his house would reveal itself, a beauty, low and welcoming. He liked the lawn to sweep right down, then the lace fringe of cattails, then the walkout dock, a long slender stretch almost to the buoy marker and the gray-blue, purple-black deep water of the channel. He’d said Paris, a place on Île Saint-Louis! Theirs for the asking, an old company flat, overlooking the Seine. What could be nicer? And Faith had considered it, flew to Paris to meet him, saw the apartment in its listed building with the oval stair.

  It smells like tar, she said.

  Impossible, he’d laughed and held her. You’d be happy here. The drawing room had windows eight feet high. The bedroom a dark cocoon. Let’s do this.

  She didn’t say no. She just asked him to do her a favor. Back in New York, they drove down to the shore and she showed him the house at its most cunning hour, six on a September evening. And then they had dinner with her mother, Irene, at a place called Hook Line and Sinker. Burgers larger than his hand. Irene suggested a pied-à-terre in the city as well, something functional, for late work nights. You know, she said, sipping a Seagram’s on the rocks. Just a little pad for emergencies. I see gray flannel. Very spare, very handsome.

  Faith watched his face and opened her mouth wide to bite the burger dripping with cheese and ketchup. Oh, that would be nice, she said, gulping down water, holding out the glass to the passing busboy. More, please. You’d love that, Owen. A sanctuary.

  Irene smiled, Faith smiled, and he considered. The following Sunday he looked at the house again and said to the realtor: I’m going to Bangkok. If it’s here when I get back, we’ll take it. So he flew out the next morning, and when he arrived and called Faith he couldn’t reach her, not that day, not the next. No answer for a week. He delayed his homecoming and flew to Hong Kong, ran into an old girlfriend by chance. She said, Why not just live here, darling? Everything is so much easier.

  They moved in and met the neighbors, to the left—just visible in the winter through the bare forsythia—Pinky Atterlee and her husband, Ralph. On the right, Mrs. Trainforst and her grown divorced son, Anthony.

  A novelist! said Irene with clapping hands. You know that means lots of peace and quiet.

  A prediction that turned out to be untrue. Anthony trysted that first summer with a local teenager. First there were loud shouting orgasms in the forsythia that echoed across the water, and then the police became a regular presence until the father finally brought suit and sent the girl away to work off her bad experience on a kibbutz in Israel. Mrs. Trainforst moved to Fishers Island and thereafter let Anthony fend for himself. A decision, Faith learned at the market, locally applauded. After that, the Trainforst house was vacant until the summer Connor was born. Then it was taken by the Cliffords, Natalie and Steve, with their responsible, athletic, brown-haired daughters, Eleanor and Sue.

  So that was the house that took him by surprise. He was thinking Paris or Brussels maybe. Not Rome, he’d never get anything done, but instead he took the workingman’s house on the Jersey Shore with the white painted porch and the long dock. A dinghy wobbled in the wake, slimy oars left in the locks. Owen would float around along the shoreline, through the cattails, and look at killies under the surface. You’ll get bitten alive, Faith would yell from behind a screen door. Come in, idiot. At least put on some spray.

  The Clifford girls took charge of the dinghy once they’d settled into their teams and clubs at school. They’d come through the hedge with their bellies and short brown bobs, and soon the dinghy was in dry dock, up on the lawn subjected to Brillo pads and bleach scrubs. After that, the sun would work out the rot that Owen had allowed to penetrate. Cece was in raptures, though they wouldn’t let her help. Toxins, Mrs. Barlow, they explained. And Faith agreed. Cece should be worshipful at a distance.

  Two summers passed and Connor remained indifferent to the Clifford sisters. Something that amused Owen. Already he had interesting preferences. Connor watched the Cliffords come and go with placid sweetness. Only Bernadette had his passion. He’d burst into cooing burbles at the sight of her car coming down the drive. Bernadette and Cece, Connor’s two loves. We might as well be trees, Owen said to Faith.

  Don’t be an idiot, she’d said. And he was surprised how angry she was. Idiot, he noticed, had replaced sweetheart and honey. He emulated Connor’s placid good humor in response. Idiot, she’d say, and Owen would coo at her and open his blue eyes and sigh. It was so exact, so perfect to the lash shadow on his high cheeks that she’d laugh. Christ, she said. Two of you. Let’s not speak to him. See if he can find a personality that won’t drive everyone crazy.

  But they doted on him, loved to watch his face, amazed he’d grown so big now, so nice and round and funny. That he didn’t speak didn’t worry them. Lots of boys developed language late. Owen’s brother, Hadley, who could talk the ear off a rock, hadn’t said a word until he was three. From then on he spoke in full sentences, perfect syntax, Owen swore, and Faith believed it. Hadley could be relentless about her turn of phrase. Did you sleep through that semester at Smith? A favorite refrain.

  Owen hadn’t really loved Faith, he thought, until he spotted the mystery bird in her mother’s yard. Later he called it love’s messenger. But that was much later and not the kindest telling of the story. Early summer and Faith had invited Owen for a weekend visit down to the shore to meet her mother for the first time. They’d been seeing each other off and on for a few months in the city. Faith had taken a part-time job at an art gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, behind the front desk. Not far from Owen’s office on Fifty-Ninth. He wandered in one day with a big client who bored him. This would be something to do. Look at art. She was delectable, said the gallerist who hired her. Perfect!

  Expensive! said her mother. The commute cost more than the salary paid, but it was something.

  Later Owen said he’d had a kind of vision in Irene’s garden. Almost a religious thing, he said.

  Irene’s place had become so tidy and verdant, the neighbors slowed their evening walks to view it now. Once her husband died, Irene couldn’t stay out of the flower beds. And Owen’s first visit happened many summers into that urgent gardening.

  Neighbors, Irene’s nosy neurotic neighbors, spotting Owen on their evening walk predicted a wedding next spring. Nonsense, said Irene when poor mad Smitty told her. Someone had been predicting a wedding for Faith since she was born, like a magical princess. And just like a princess, she was impossible to please, and now she was nearly twenty-seven. But that morning, Smitty, her nuttiest neighbor, Smitty from Chestnut Street, had stopped by with this latest forecast and some newly picked currants, translucent and golden and fat. Try one—he’d balanced a plump globe on the tip of a long-nailed finger—just taste. And Irene wiped her hands along her hips and plucked it from him and put it onto her tongue. There was likely a trick here.

  Go ahead, said Smitty, and he watched her eyes while the strange bitter unctuous flavor spread.

  Very nice, Smitty.

  Oh! You kill me.

  The questionable currants sat out in the sun in Smitty’s little chipped bowl on the back doorstep until even
ing when they’d turned to a bumpy syrup. What’s this? called Faith.

  It’s for the bird, said Irene.

  What bird? said Faith. There were so many.

  And Owen lifted his sunglasses to his forehead and squinted up into a leafy magnolia. Right there, he said. Can’t you see it, Faith? He could. It wore a little tweed jacket and had a hungry pointy yellow beak. It was very obvious.

  Irene smiled at him. A rare smile, he’d learn soon enough. Right you are, my boy. Right you are.

  2.

  A very different bird, a once-living bird now with bashed-in brains was lying under a holly bush. Brains spilling on the brash copper-colored mulch. Tiny sparkling bugs moving in spotted sunlight. This was the last thing she should be looking at. Faith almost laughed.

  Her first day after, her own brain had been wrapped in white, foam and gauze, thick and wet with leaking neurotransmitters. This molded helmet had been configured to pad the outrage to her head. The outrage. That was all she could muster in the way of a thought. Disembodied. No story. Though she suspected, and this the slowest notion, that eventually Hadley would turn out to be culpable. Was he driving the car? No. It’s true he wasn’t. It was the girl behind the wheel. A poor driver, no experience. Faith was teaching her how. And where was Faith? Faith was holding Connor, two years old, but still so little, in her lap. Faith was laughing out instructions. The girl had never sat in a driver’s seat before, she said. Ever. It was all so funny.

  We were only circling the drive. That’s all. We never even once pulled out onto the road, not even the little bit, the apron before the new tar. Just that morning the roller truck had smoothed it all down. And the stink! And the stillness, not a breeze. The leaves hanging limp in the trees. No, it was all between the hedges. Who said this? It must have been the girl. There were policemen and two ambulances. Faith went in one, Connor in the other. Cece stayed home with the girl, who was fine. Not a scratch, Faith heard her say over and over. Not a scratch, as if it were a miracle. Later she would say she broke her thumbnail and thrust it forward. Faith remembered this gesture but couldn’t think much about it.