Charlie started to leave then, back to the cabin, away from them all, the din and shrill, but his father put a hand on his arm and said, Stay a leetle, and so he did, lifting a Triscuit to his mouth, mock-boxing, even, with Percy, though his brain was in a shudder,
You have no idea
. He had, off and on, been looking forward to his family coming, but now that they were here he wished them gone. They all looked so familiar, so thoroughly themselves, and at the same time so much like someone else’s family: cheerful, winter-pale, abuzz with energy and talk, except for Caroline, who at fifteen, was hunched in the corner with a book. They discussed the Cambodian invasion one minute, the dock the next, and how a tree limb had fallen on the roof of the maids’ wing at the Big House—has anyone told Gaga yet?—and how the renters coming in July had no teenagers, thank god, things were out of control (this, predictably, from his mother)—in the country, the world, the government, the social fabric, everything (her glasses slipping down her nose) falling apart.
“Like this couch. This couch is shot,” Will said.
It was worn, soft corduroy, faded red. They’d had it for years; they would keep it for years.
“I love that couch,” said his mother.
And for once, Charlie agreed. “I love it too,” he said.
IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE
of such chatter that someone brought up Dick Wilson and the land. Charlie wasn’t paying close attention. He was picturing them all as skeletons; he was remembering his pee that morning after his run, how it had come out the color of Coca-Cola, a dark red-brown—should he tell his father or just let it go, for it had seemed, as he’d watched it arc into the bushes, a sort of purging, a purification,
appropriate
, even as he’d had a jolt of fear. By the time he tuned in, they were in full swing: three house lots, maybe more, a new road being cut, planning board meetings, and was one of the developers really from Japan, and was it true that the elder Wilsons were getting divorced, and if they didn’t want the land, why wouldn’t they just pass it on to their children? The land and house had been, before the army took it, in the Wilson family since 1882, but the first time the army shot all its guns at once, every window in the Point House had shattered, and then the radar caved the floors in and the army bulldozed the house, and when the Wilsons returned after the war, they settled on another parcel of their land midway down the Point, where they built a new house next to their old playhouse, which was put on a flatbed truck and moved, like a parade float, down the road.
“Three modest houses might be better than one monstrous one,” his mother said.
“What are you
talking
about!” Charlie cried out, and for a moment, everyone was silent, remembering, he and they both, what they all knew—the drugs, the hospital no one would mention out of tact or fear or both. Remembering too how Charlie was, had always been, the wildest of his generation of summer children, burrs in his hair, chokecherry juice on his limbs, and how the end of the Point had been his favorite part because the most untamed, and also rightfully (if you believed in the ownership of land; he both did and did not) half theirs. Throughout his childhood, as new houses went up along the road, as suburbia built and trimmed and mowed (here, in New Jersey, everywhere), the base lived in an opposite cycle—its buildings decaying, bushes and trees growing up from cracks in the road.
Just six years earlier, Gaga and Grampa, together with their old friends the Wilsons, had bought the land back from the army, with the fourteen acres adjacent to the Big House, Red House and Portable going to the Porters, and the twelve acres of the choicest part, the tip, to the Wilsons, since it had been theirs before the war. A hotel outfit from New Bedford had shown up at the public auction; so had—everyone was sure of it—a Mafia man looking for a hideout, who gave up $5,000 before the Porter-Wilson limit. At the time, the purchase, $125,000 for the twenty-six acres, had seemed a cooperative and rightful reclamation: the Porters would hold on to their piece for future generations, and the Wilsons would rebuild on the site of their old house. One house, only, they would build, something in scale, modeled after the not un-grand but quite proportionate and lovely gabled house the army had blown up. Because it was the Wilsons, they would welcome other Point families onto their land, which had become, in the years since the army left, a rough playground filled with weeds and wind and souvenirs of war, occupied almost entirely by the kids. Or perhaps (Charlie had hoped for this) the Wilson clan, busy procreating or divorcing or making money in the city or relaxing in their perfectly fine house down the road, would put it off and put it off until the land reclaimed what was left of the base, and the Wilsons let it go, they let it be.
“Dick Wilson,” Jane’s husband, Paul, said slowly. “He—you didn’t hear about this, Charlie? I thought they’d been showing the property. Dick decided he wasn’t going to rebuild there. They had an engineer come in, and it turns out they can’t get rid of the army casemate—it’s eighteen feet high and ten feet thick, too big to blow up or knock down, so they’d be stuck trying to build on top of it.” He shook his head. “They’d never get back that chestnut of a house. I guess Dick needs—”
“
Paul
.” Helen hissed his name. “That’s enough. He’s not—”
And then she was beside Charlie, hand gripping his shoulder, and he had an infantile desire to sink down and wrap his arms around her waist, even as he wanted to shrug off her hand and hear the rest.
“Dick needs what?” he asked.
Dick Wilson was president of a company that put more breakfast cereals on America’s tables than all the other cereal companies combined. Snap, Crackle, and Pop, the boys liked to call the Wilson grandsons, though there were, inconveniently, more than three. Originally, in the 1800s, the Wilsons had bought up the whole Point from the Cooks, a farm family grown tired of battling its rocky soil and exposed fields. Slowly, the Wilsons’ friends from New York and New Jersey followed them: the Porters, the Stricklands, the Platts—just five summer houses, for a time, and even now, as the generations multiplied and barns and barracks were converted to cottages and smaller houses went up behind the old ones, not more than twelve. Dick’s eldest grandson, Little Dick, was Percy’s age and one of his best friends.
“Dick needs the money,” said Paul. Big Dick Wilson was his uncle, his mother’s half brother. “Listen, we tried. Jane—” He looked at his wife, but she shook her head.
“Nobody’s happy about this, Charlie,” said his mother. She had sat back down on the red couch and was jiggling her leg. She was no longer—mysteriously, mercurially—on his side. She picked up an old copy of the
New Yorker
and began to leaf through. “You’re not the only one.”
“Why doesn’t Gaga buy it?” asked Caroline, looking up from her book, and Charlie felt a momentary rise of hope.
“The taxes alone would be too much,” their mother said almost savagely. “You children have no idea! One of these days, this place will do us in. You’ll see.”
And Gaga a widow now. And the future unpredictable. And times are changing, and we should be grateful for what we have. Who spoke? Some of them? All?
The times they are a . . .
One of the cousins started to whistle it, and another joined in. Charlie sat down on the edge of the coffee table; he was sinking, flying, all of them against him, carefree, heedless, except for Caroline, who was stony-faced, reading or pretending to read. Jane’s baby, Maddie, began crying again, and as her voice rose above the talk, suddenly Charlie saw, in a flash of memory he hadn’t known he had, the location of several surveyor tags: one on a stake to the left of Hollow Hill, another tied around a cedar tree near the shore, a third to the right of the army gate.
WHEN HE LEFT THE HOUSE,
no one called after him, nor did anyone ask or require him to stay. Outside, the mosquitoes found him quickly, but he hardly noticed. On the base, he came upon the first surveyor tag, ripped it off and stuffed it in his pocket, found the second tag, the third, then more. He circled the place, untying, pocketing. Somebody’s idea of progress, was it? Big Dick Wilson’s? Like most of the husbands who came to the Point on weekends and for part of August, Dick Wilson looked jovial, casual, a man who liked to sail and amble, wore shorts the color of tomato bisque and napped on his porch with the
Wall Street Journal
spread over his face. But follow these men to work and who were they? They were law school deans, research physicians, CEOs, top attorneys. They were members of Harvard’s Porcellian Club, men whom the communal Hog Farmers at Woodstock would, with one red-rimmed, appraising glance, have marked Establishment Capitalist Pigs. On the Point, Dick Wilson (who had not yet retired at seventy-nine) grew heirloom tomatoes and pale yellow raspberries, which he presented with a flourish to the ladies and the little girls. He told slightly off-color jokes. He often swam, as did Gaga, in the nude. At the luncheon after Grampa’s funeral last February, he stood up to speak, then sank back down, broad shoulders heaving in his dark blue suit, his bald head catching the light.
The surveyor tags were everywhere, proprietary, like dog piss aimed, sprayed and laying claim. Some were half hidden by the brush, others in full view. Charlie had seen them around before, but not knowing their purpose, hadn’t paid them much attention; now, he saw only tags. After he had found them all, he picked up two stones the size of his fists and went to the barracks. Others—his cousins and friends, and the local kids off-season—had come here over the years to smash windows, leaving only a few panes intact. Charlie had gone along with it a couple of times, tossed a stone or two, but until this summer he’d never been a smasher or breaker (
having petals or leaves that roll inward at the edges
); a gentler soul, he, his eyes the bruised blue of overripe blueberries, the lashes so long he’d been told they’d been wasted on a boy. Now, inside the barracks, he threw the first rock high up and watched it sail cleanly through the top pane of a window, above a row of urinals. The glass shattered outward; still his hand flew to protect his eyes. Then the next throw, in the bunkroom, at an already-cracked window. He found another rock and threw it at a solid wall, which lobbed it back. He ducked.
For a few moments, he felt it then: the razor edge of anger, the relieving point of contact: rock to window, rock to wall. And then a pinging sound as he hurled a chunk of broken brick at a metal bed frame and picked it up and threw again, until he saw a human being in the bed, the body of a soldier sleeping, dead or dying or rising, coming at him, out to kill.
And that was when the anger left, replaced by a panic attack the likes of which he’d not had since he’d left Cleveland. He dropped the rocks, knelt on the floor, his fingers scrabbling in his pocket for the Valium. He downed a pill, found his pulse on his wrist and began to count it (it went above 180 during these attacks). By now the sweats had started, his breath was ragged, the number line he used to keep himself on track was jumbling, buckling, no mathematics here, no scaffolding of any kind, just a pile of stones and limbs.
WHEN IT WAS OVER, HE
vomited on the floor of the barracks and went outside and peed, a red stream again, though lighter than before. Then he stumbled down the path to the shore, where he pulled off his shorts and walked naked into the water. It was low tide, and the rocks scraped his shins; still he half crawled until the sea was deep enough to swim, and so he swam. The sun, a swollen ball, was setting over Barney’s Joy. He shut his eyes, dove down, came up, felt a little better. From the Red House he could hear laughter, chatter, the party going on. He went underwater for as long as his breath would allow, then surfaced, eyes still closed. And down again, a beat longer, experimenting, but his lungs were strict masters, bellows. Thirsting for air, he came up to float on his back, eyes stinging from the salt.
The sky above him was the sky; it had been that way forever. The water too. The beach, no matter where you came upon it or who owned frontage, was open to Point residents, if not to members of the outside world.
Stop! Please Turn Around Here! Private Road, Ashaunt Point Association, Special Police Patrol
, read the sign by the gate at the foot of the Point, though a few years ago Charlie, Will and Rusty had nailed a replacement sign over it: “Stop! Please Take Clothes Off Here! Private Parts, Ashaunt Point Nudist Colony, Naked Police Patrol.” They’d gotten Percy and two of Jane’s younger sons to jump out of the bushes and moon the cars and bikes.
Now Charlie made his way along the beach back to the cabin, shorts and boxers in hand, walking up the narrow path, climbing the rickety cabin stairs, sitting—finally—in his bed, where he took up a calculus problem he’d left undone the day before. Soon his hand grew steadier, and he solved one problem, then another. At the end of the bed his toes looked far away, but if he told them to wiggle they would wiggle, so he told them to wiggle and they did. His parents would not come look for him there, though after he got in his sleeping bag, Holly, arrived after dinner from Cambridge, would enter quietly and stand over him, wondering if she should wake him (through one slitted eye, he watched her watch), but deciding, finally, to let him be.
The next day was Memorial Day. On the road, which bisected the Point like flypaper and pulled him into conversation, someone would mention the other Charlie, who’d been only twenty-one when he died.
“He had more life in him than the rest of us put together,” Dossy would say. “And endless reservoirs of charm.”
“Like me?” Charlie would ask darkly, and they’d all laugh (ha ha), and then his mother and aunts would go down to the beach to remember their brother or say a prayer and come back tousled, seeming younger, secretive, their arms linked. Later that day, everyone would pile into cars and go, leaving Charlie with fifty dollars cash, enough leftovers for a week, a few Valium he’d swiped from his mother, and the place (which he could, with great, blindfolded effort, pretend was his own) until July.