What she and Agnes felt but could not say, nor even entirely see, was that the air was full of change that year, fomenting, restless. Jump aboard, make a break, take a chance! But in their own way, retracting, stretching out, retracting, snails in their shells, or perhaps hermit crabs (had they, after all these years, outgrown their space?). I’d go for blue for my room, said Bea. Floral curtains with small sprigs. Like your room in Grace Park, said Agnes. Yes, but lighter, and maybe with a scalloped edge. For me, small roses, said Agnes. In the garden and on the curtains. Peach-colored for the fabric—pink roses is too much like a box of tissues, don’t you think? Bea nodded. She’d read the same article in
Better Homes and Gardens
but didn’t mention it. Peach has a calming effect, she said.
“How would Mrs. P. manage if we left?” she asked one morning, as she and Agnes sat by the window in her room.
“We’d be nearby.”
“What if a toilet broke?”
“Mrs. P. fixes the toilets?”
“No, really. What would we do?”
“We’d call the plumber.”
“Expensive. Very, I think. Isn’t it?”
“We’d ask around for the best rate. We could start by renting. A little flat in Orange, maybe. Then the landlord pays the plumber.”
“But why rent when we can live for free?”
“For our independence. To be not so
reliant
, and so the rellies could visit us at our own place.”
“I think,” Bea said under her voice, “Mrs. P. would be shocked and . . . and hurt—maybe even worried for us.”
“Stewart’s lived on his own nearly the whole time.”
“That’s Stewart,” Bea said. “He’s got a family, and he’s a man.”
“Women live on their own now.” Agnes’s eyes gleamed. “Women’s liberation! The girls are burning—” She waggled her fingers at Bea’s chest. “Don’t you keep up?”
Bea pictured her double-D brassieres going up in flames and laughed. “I’d start a forest fire!”
The next week, a forwarded letter from Callum and, folded inside it, a few letters—not copies, the originals—that Bea had written during the war. Reading Smitty’s name (M
y friend Smitty took me to a picture show
), she tried to imagine the sequence of letters that might have followed:
I’m getting married. I’m moving to St. Louis.
She could have chosen for herself a different fate and written it in a letter—and her brother would have accepted it, found it unremarkable, perhaps because one’s own life was remarkable only from the inside (and she did not, anyway, she told herself, regret her choice). Callum also included some housing estate adverts, for small houses, not flats. The codes and abbreviations were different from the American ads, the prices in pounds. Bea put them away in her smaller valise, and it was not until they were unpacking in Grace Park that she even told Agnes that they’d come.
Still, it would be Bea who would suggest the next visit to Scotland the following spring, her niece Marcy newly pregnant with her second by then (who would be Amanda) and pleased to put her feet up while Bea and Agnes took little Jack to the park. It was Bea who suggested to Agnes that they pop into the housing estate office on High Street, where a pleasant fellow young enough to be their grandson pulled out a binder of photographs and called them Madam and took them round. Agnes was the one to break the news to Mrs. P. back in America, in the yellow sitting room in Grace Park, as Bea stood a few feet behind her, short of breath.
“My word. I can’t believe . . .” Mrs. P. drew her arms around herself. “Do you mean this? Are you sure? I don’t understand—” She turned, first to Agnes, then to Bea.
Agnes prodded Bea.
“My father told me,” Bea said (they had rehearsed upstairs), “that I’d want to end up where I started. Before I left for America.” She felt both sick and driven, as if she were inflicting a necessary punishment on a child. Also afraid of losing the particular house they’d set their sights on, a new bungalow with a sunny garden on one of the better streets in town, on a hill with a view of the fields. She wanted it badly—for its newness, its address, the garden for Agnes, the light-filled corner bedroom that would be her own. “It seems,” she finished lamely, “like it might be a good idea.”
“But after all these years?” asked Mrs. P. “And with your parents passed on?”
“We both still have family there,” Agnes said.
“Of course.” Mrs. P. nodded. “And of course you miss it. It’s lovely there, isn’t it? You know I think so.”
“It’s lovely,” Agnes agreed.
“But—do you mind my asking, have you been, you know, homesick all these years?”
“No,” they said together.
“It’s not that. It’s just,” Agnes said, “with the children grown and us getting on, and my sister and Bea’s brother—”
“Of course.”
“And, well, we’ve found a house we quite fancy,” said Agnes.
“A house already! Have you told Jane yet? And the others?”
“We wanted to tell you first,” Bea said. “I—I was hoping you might break the news to Janie. And then I’d talk to her.”
“No, Bea. I can’t, I couldn’t. Certainly not. That’s your job.”
Bea stiffened.
“She’d want to hear it from you,” Mrs. P. added more gently.
“Do you think,” asked Bea, “she’ll be all right?”
Mrs. P. laughed, the sound stinging. “Jane? Of course! She has a wonderful life, six children, a career. Paul. Me. She’ll be fine. It’s just that”—she drew in her breath—“you’ve been all the world to her.”
“And she to me.” Bea was crying freely now.
“And you to us,” Agnes added, though it did not make sense, not in any precise way.
“And you”—Mrs. P. was laughing now, even as she wiped away her own tears— “to me, dear A. and B. You’ll come back often, won’t you? Promise me. It’s so easy these days, with all the flights. It may as well be part of the same country.”
“Of course,” they said (they would come back once for a visit, and Bea would return again for Mrs. Porter’s funeral, eight years hence).
T
HE SECOND WEEK
of August, the wrecking ball came to knock down the concrete radar tower. Ashaunt was operating at full throttle—swimming, conversations on the road, grudges and hurt feelings, houseguests, bicycles, Beetle Cat races, stoned teenagers, roaming groups of barefoot kids. In some ways, the presences made the absences more palpable to Charlie; freshly, he found himself missing his grandfather and noticing how alien he felt among what used to be his tribe. In other ways, though, it soothed him to hear voices in the distance, to be able to show up for dinner uninvited in any number of houses, even to watch the conflicts play out, mostly trivial, mostly among the women: who wasn’t invited swimming; who had overstayed her welcome; who couldn’t admit that her son was a bully; whose nanny had quit without notice, leaving her, a working woman, high and dry. In August the husbands came too, for a week or fortnight, and while most of them sailed, fished, swam, played tennis, Charlie’s father set himself the lone task of building a shed to house the Red House garbage cans and could often be found leaning over a drawing of his design or squinting at the ball floating in his yellow leveler, as he likely was the day the wrecker came.
If André was not there to watch, nearly everyone else was: Charlie’s two aunts and his mother. Rusty, Will, Caroline, Percy, Bea, Agnes and Stewart. A cousin—Marie-Laure, around Caroline’s age—was visiting from Switzerland. All of Jane and Paul’s kids were there; so were Holly and John, along with two widows, friends of Gaga’s from New Jersey, in dresses and straw hats. Gaga, wearing a faded wraparound skirt, stood shielding her eyes from the sun. Big Dick Wilson was there. He’d clapped Charlie on the back the first time they’d seen each other. Did you get my letter? Charlie had asked, and Dick had said, Sure did, and I agree with you, Charlie, every word—thanks for getting in touch! Then he’d fled. He was getting divorced again and had come without his wife. He’d been drinking (or so went the story) heavily and been sent off by his children to a “spa” out west. His grandson, Little Dick, was there, in a purple Williams College T-shirt. Average Dick, Big’s son, was not around. An assortment of dogs romped on the edges of the crowd. A child had first sounded the call—
The radar tower’s going down!—
and as word spread, people had emerged from houses and paths, from porches and lawns, gardens and boats.
Charlie had been one of the last to arrive, both reluctant and compelled, camera in hand. As a child, he’d played in the tower often with the other boys. They’d pretended to be soldiers spotting U-boats; on the tower’s top story (there were four, including the little top one), you could sit in what had been the old control room and see for miles on a clear day. The tower had been stripped of much of its machinery, but they had used a rusty cookie sheet as their radar screen, scratched circles on it, made up lingo and borrowed it from military (pirate, mystery, whaling) books and movies:
Double nine coming in to rest on the haft end! Nose of a sub out there! Ready the shackles! There she blows! A Hun!
Now, as he watched, he felt Jerry—absent, literally barred—at his side, asking him to witness (How many times could one
not
look? How many times could one turn and run away?). He raised his camera, took a photo, then another. The crowd, obeying some collective instinct, turned south, just as the steel wrecker ball began, quite languidly, to swing.
“
Bam!
” shouted Jane’s youngest son, but there was no bam; the ball knocked almost gracefully, swung back, approached again.
“Stay back, people!” a man in a hard hat called as the group edged forward. “That ball weighs fifteen hundred pounds!”
“I can’t see,” Percy complained.
Charlie readjusted his camera to hang at his side and hoisted Percy onto his shoulders, surprised at how long his little brother’s legs were. Taking hold of Percy’s bare feet, he clapped them together. “Clap for the losers,” he said.
“Who?”
“Them.” He pointed at the men and machines. “And us.”
“Me?” asked Percy.
“No, not you. Me, though. I can’t believe we have to watch this happen.”
“We don’t have to,” Percy said. “It’s just cool.”
Charlie couldn’t help feeling a little awed by the ball’s elegant, destructive power, even as each blow was a punch to his gut. On his shoulders, his brother’s legs tensed when the ball swung forward, released when it swung back.
“I know it’s an eyesore,” Bea said behind them. “But I’m fond of it. I almost wish it didn’t have to go.”
“It scared me as a girl,” said Jane. “I thought its light was an evil eye. My sisters terrorized me with stories about it.”
“Did they, dearie? You never told me,” said Bea. “I’d have set them straight.”
“We’ll have a better view when it’s gone,” Jane said. “At least for a little while.”
“Ladies, I don’t think it’s going anywhere,” said Paul.
It was true: not a chip had come off so far—at least it looked that way from where they stood. Not a dent had been made. Suddenly the whole thing struck Charlie as comical, beautiful. The truck backed up to get more leverage. The group retreated more than a few steps. Even the dogs—some held back by their owners now—were watching, uncertain, keeping their distance as the ball swung harder, faster. Still, nothing gave. And again. Eventually, Charlie’s shoulders started to ache. He set his brother down, took another picture. The sun grew hotter. People drifted off, the crowd halving and then again, until there were just four of them left, an odd, ragtag group: Dick Wilson, Charlie, Percy, Bea.
And then the machine itself had stopped, the driver and workers taking a break, pulling out lunch boxes, popping open Cokes. The foreman was speaking into a CB radio in the cab of his pickup truck. All the while, Dick Wilson stood with his back to them. In his untucked light blue Oxford shirt, khaki shorts and faded hat, he looked, from behind, more like a teenager than an old man, except for how his legs bowed in. Off by himself, he’d been, the whole time. Was it true that no one had talked to him? Gaga had not; his grandchildren had not.
“I’m starving,” Percy said.
Taking in Wilson’s figure, Charlie tried to turn him into a villain, but the man in the flesh looked too human, almost frail. Bleakness overtook him, the pull of a dark mood.
Percy poked him in the side. “I said I’m starving.”
“So get some lunch, Perc. Or find Mummy or Anna. I’m not your maid.”
“Come, Percy.” Bea held out her hand. “We’ll have lunch at the Big House, just the two of us. There’s a lovely leftover ham.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” Charlie stumbled. “I can make him lunch.”
Bea pulled Percy to her side. “No,” she said. “We have a date.”
In the end, it would take days to get the whole tower down, the great ball swinging and bashing, the structure resisting, then giving in, piece by piece, an elephant slow-buckling to its knees. The bulldozers would lift up the concrete chunks and move them to the shore, converting them to riprap to slow the erosion at the tip of the Point. From far enough away, the pieces of the tower looked like rocks.
In stages, Charlie photographed the tower’s demise. In college, his photography teacher had once told the students to take a photo of something ugly, something they hated, and create an image that made it beautiful. Now, he tried to find beauty in the shapes of crane and ball, slab and sea. In one photo, he caught a gull right in the middle. In another, a workman with his hands raised to the sky, as if attempting to grab the wrecker ball—and above it, barely visible, an early moon. He used black-and-white film. Earlier in the summer, he’d gotten his pictures developed at a photo shop in New Bedford, but now he found himself wishing for a darkroom where he could watch the images emerge and control their density and contrast, or even a class where he might share his pictures and view other people’s and learn a thing or two.
J
ERRY’S CAT DID
not like to stay inside the cabin. It either escaped as Charlie was coming or going or complained so persistently that he let it out. Jerry had said the cat was a homebody, but Charlie watched it get into spats with dogs, and it would nose open the screen door at the Red House and peed, once, on the sisal rug (This cat, said Charlie’s father, eez not a girl). Charlie had told his family he was taking care of the cat for a friend from St. Mark’s who was on a sailing trip. Back in a week, he said, and then, when a week passed, back soon. The cat slept by—and sometimes on—his head, and while at first this bothered him, he soon grew used to it, even to like it. Its using his mother’s flower garden as a litter box was more of a problem, and his mother, who claimed to dislike all cats (they’d only ever had dogs), hated this one more.
Keep it in the cabin
, she’d say.
Get it out of here before the weekend, or it’s going to the pound
(an empty threat; death made her squeamish, and her meanness—if not her anger—went only so deep). “What’s its name, anyway?’ she asked once. Charlie did not know but felt an almost ethical obligation not to call it something different from what Jerry had, and, if Jerry had left it unnamed, to leave it unnamed too. “Cat,” he told his mother. “I was afraid you’d say that,” she said.