The Family Beach House (13 page)

“Thank you very much,” she said when the waiter had taken Dennis's credit card. It would have to suffice.

“You're welcome,” he replied.

They both had parked in the small lot around the corner from the restaurant, and now walked there side by side. Their arms did not touch. Tilda wondered what would happen if they did touch, accidentally. Would she flinch?

They stopped next to Tilda's car. “Thank you,” Dennis said. “I had a lovely evening.”

He put out his hand. Tilda put out hers and they shook. “I did, too,” she said. Their hands released.

“Be careful getting home. Do you want me to follow you?” he asked.

Tilda shook her head. “Oh, no, thank you. I'll be fine. I know the roads by heart.”

He asked if he could call her. Perhaps, he said, they could get together again? Tilda said yes, she would like that, and gave him the house telephone number.

“Well, good night then,” he said, and went off to his car at the end of the lot.

Tilda got in her car. She felt strangely let down. She was vaguely disappointed that he had not kissed her. Even a kiss on the cheek would have been nice. And then she was surprised by her disappointment. Only a day ago she had entirely rejected the idea of being with another man ever again. Did things really change that crazily, that quickly? And she wasn't even in lust with Dennis! But a woman wanted to be wanted. She wanted the right to reject a suitor. This train of thought surprised her, too. The right to reject a suitor? She had not thought in those terms since before Frank had come into her life. Maybe she had never thought in those terms. So, why now? Wasn't she too old to be wanted, too old to have a suitor, too old to be sought after?
Apparently,
she thought,
I'm not too old for any of those things!

She started the engine, pulled out of the lot, and made her way back to Larchmere, watchful, as always, of frightened deer, wandering cats, and drunken drivers.

Saturday, July 21

It was morning, the horizon was dimmed with haze, and Tilda was walking the beach. She was hardly aware of her surroundings, though. She was thinking about the previous night.

Hannah had been waiting for her when she got home and had grilled her for detailed information. What had they talked about? Had Dennis paid for the meal? Had he been presumptuous or rude in any way? Had he asked her questions and listened to her answers? What had he worn? Was he divorced, widowed, had he never been married? Did he have children, grandchildren?

“What did he order for dinner?” Hannah had asked then.

“Why does that matter?”

“I'm just curious.”

“He had the halibut special. So did I.”

Hannah had nodded. “Huh. I see. Did he order coffee after dinner?”

“He doesn't drink coffee.”

“Interesting.”

Tilda had not bothered to pursue the topic of food and its special indication of character. But she had talked about how nervous she had been at first, and how gradually, over the meal, words had flowed and they both had laughed and how, by the end of the evening, she was sorry it was all over. She had even admitted that she was disappointed there had been no kiss.

What she had not told Hannah, however, what she had not really been able to put into words, was how it had felt to be perceived as a couple after two years of being on her own. She had seen the glances, meaningful ones from people she knew, and casual glances from strangers who were merely, almost unconsciously registering “couple.” She was embarrassed to admit to her sister that she had felt something like elation, almost a feeling of pride. For a moment she had felt as if she were once again part of that elite club of people who came in pairs. People who came in pairs were attached. They were grounded. They were held in place by bonds of affection.

“Do you think Ruth knows where I went?” Tilda had asked Hannah, just before going up to bed.

Hannah had shrugged. “I don't know. She's been at Bobby's most of the night.”

“Do you think anyone else knows?”

“Well, Susan, of course. Dad is pretty oblivious to lots of stuff. Adam doesn't care about anyone but himself. If Craig knows, or suspects, he won't make a big deal of it.” Hannah had grinned. “Besides, with the gossips in this town, by morning everyone in a twenty-mile radius will know you were on a date. You'll just have to deal with it.”

Now, on the beach the morning after the momentous event that was her first date post-Frank, she thought again about the notion of being “attached.” There were many fine organizations that fought for equal rights for “the unattached.” And while she admired and supported their efforts, she didn't at all like the term “unattached.” She was without a romantic partner but she was certainly attached. She had children and a father, and an aunt and siblings. She had colleagues and friends. She had her students. She had a neighbor whose garden she watered when the neighbor traveled out of town on business. She even had the memory—the fact—of a husband.

No person was an island. Poets and preachers had established that long ago. At least, she, Tilda McQueen O'Connell, was not an island in the sea of life and it was unfair that she was considered by some people to be “unattached,” as if she were incapable of normal human intercourse and communion. She was more than capable!

Though Tilda wasn't a big fan of the Internet, she had spent a good deal of time online after Frank's passing. Her therapist had urged her to do so, in the hope that she might find contact with a community of grievers helpful to her recovery. And Tilda had found all sorts of sites on the Web on which or through which widows and widowers could talk and share advice and sympathy and even meet for friendship or romance. There were sites for widowed pagans, witches and Wiccans, to find comfort with others in their world. There were sites devoted to helping widows in underdeveloped countries. There were sites for war widows and young widows and widows of convicted felons. Every conceivable type of person seemed to be targeted as worthy of friendship and support. There was no excuse for isolation, at least not online. Everyone, thanks to the Web, was in some way “attached.”

A young gay couple was walking from Wells, hand in hand. They smiled and waved as they passed Tilda, up higher on the beach, in the softer sand. She smiled and waved back. Another young couple in love, death the furthest thing from their minds.

She had read somewhere that it usually took one to two years for a person to recover from a major bereavement like the death of a spouse. Well, it had been two years since Frank's death, a little more than that. Could she consider herself “recovered”? Could you be cured of grief like you could be cured of a minor disease? Or was grief like alcoholism or any other addiction, something that afflicted you and that never really stopped afflicting you, even when all outward examples of peculiar behavior had been put away?

A father and his young son (at least, she assumed that was their relation) were tossing a plastic ball off to her left, on higher sand. The son's latest toss went wild and the ball rolled down the beach toward Tilda. She hurried forward, picked it up, and returned it to the boy. The father thanked her, they wished each other a good day, and Tilda walked on.

She knew she was one of the lucky ones, if any widow could be called lucky. She and Frank had made peace with each other and with their relationship long before his final diagnosis. She had been with him when he died. The moment of his passing had been calm.

Yes, in a way she was one of the lucky ones. She lived with no haunting, unresolved issues except, of course, for the fact of her husband's early death. It was a pretty big fact but facts didn't haunt like issues haunted. Facts hit you on the head, smacked you in the face, forced you to deal with and acknowledge them. They didn't sneak around and take you by surprise when you least expected them.

Tilda checked the sky for the eagle that was never there and decided that when Dennis called, as promised, she would suggest they take a drive to Kennebunkport. And, she thought, it might be nice to go to the party at the Ogunquit Museum with someone. Craig might come with her if she asked him but…No. She would ask Dennis to accompany her. She would ask him to be her date. And maybe at the end of the evening he would kiss her cheek. Maybe, she would kiss his.

 

“I want to talk to you.”

Jennifer looked up from the interior design magazine she had been reading, slightly startled. She had not heard Adam come into the sunroom. He stood now before her, hands on his hips, legs slightly apart. It was an inappropriately combative stance.

“Yes?” she said.

“I think it would be best for you to back away from this relationship with my father.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard what I said.”

She had heard. Her comment had been an attempt to buy time and process what she had heard. “For whom would it be best?” she asked.

“For everyone.”

“Not for me.”

“Look, let's be civilized about this. I—”

“Civilized?” Jennifer stood and tossed the magazine on the chair behind her. She was only about three feet away from Adam. He had been looming over her while she sat. “You have no right to tell me what to do.”

“I have a responsibility as the oldest McQueen to protect my family's interests. And those interests include Larchmere.”

“Your father is the oldest McQueen,” Jennifer retorted. “And how dare you assume I'm with your father for his money. That's an insult to me and to your father.”

“My father is an old man. He doesn't know what he's doing. And he's always been a sucker for a pretty face. But I'm not going to let you steal my inheritance. Understand that.”

Adam turned and left the room as abruptly as he had entered. Jennifer sank back into the chair. Her hands were shaking. What the hell had just happened? It was like a scene out of a cheesy soap opera. People in real life didn't threaten each other like Adam had threatened her. He had actually threatened her, hadn't he? Yes, Jennifer decided. He had. His intent had been to frighten her, to run her off the property.

She would tell Bill. No, he would be furious. She would deal with Adam's…threat on her own. But how? She would tell Ruth, ask for her advice. No. She didn't want to drag any of the other McQueens into this craziness. She would ignore Adam, that's what she would do. And she would ignore the suspicious glances from Tilda and the inquiring frowns from Hannah. Thank God for Craig, though she wasn't at all sure that his kindness outweighed the antagonism of the others.

Jennifer stood again and left the sunroom, though she had no idea where she was going. And she wondered what she had gotten herself into as a result of this relationship with Bill McQueen.

It was mid-morning and Craig, feeling oddly restless and unfocused, was taking a solitary walk around the Larchmere grounds. He had slept badly the night before, which might have accounted for his current state of mind. He had been dreaming that he was traveling in the USSR of all places, and had been detained at the airport on his way back to the United States. The police, or state officials, or whoever they were, refused to tell him on what charge or suspicion he was being held. They tore open his bags and began to fling the contents all over the seedy little room. Craig had watched as objects from his childhood came to light—a floppy rabbit, a favorite book, a blanket, even a lamp with a pale blue shade and puppies painted around its base. He had not seen or thought of those objects in years and years. Even in the dream he was surprised to see them. He had struggled back to consciousness and sat up in bed, spooked. He had been lugging his past around with him. People had refused to let him go home. But what people?

A dragonfly, with its needlelike body and glittering wings, zoomed past Craig, inches from his face. A large blue jay chattered loudly from the rim of the stone birdbath. In the front garden, yellow and orange lilies stood tall and proudly. Looking at them now, lines popped into Craig's head, surprising him since it had been years since he had last read them in the New Testament. “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.”

Well, Craig was not a flower, nor was he a bird. Yes, he knew what the historical Jesus—or his pitchmen—had meant by those lines; at least, he thought he knew. But lately, well, for a year or more, Craig had been worrying, and the worrying was about the “big stuff.”

What did he have to show for his life? Was it necessary to have “something” to show, to display? Wasn't being a fairly decent human being, not consciously harming others, wasn't that enough? Maybe. But maybe not. Being actively good and productive might be better than being passive and inoffensive. Doctors vowed to do no harm. But they were also expected to do some good.

Craig laid his hand against one of the stones of the house. It was warm to the touch; it could be said to feel alive. He realized now, almost against his will, how much affection he felt for the house, for Larchmere, in spite of its associations with his mother—and to a lesser extent, with his father.

He walked on and noted that the rose trellis needed painting. He remembered the first night he had climbed out of his bedroom window and down the trellis to the ground. It must have been the summer he was either eight or nine. He had been scared silly to do it but the trellis was so tempting and climbing down it was the easiest way to get out of the house unseen. The trellis held and he had made it to the lawn in one piece, if a bit scratched by thorns. The second and third and twentieth times he had practically skipped down the wooden slats. He had always suspected that his aunt knew about his nocturnal rambling—she had an uncanny ability to know secret things—but if she did know, she had never told on him.

Maybe, in Ruth, he had a true friend, someone he could talk honestly to about his place in the family. Maybe. But to risk inclusion was to risk a subsequent exclusion. To risk acceptance was to risk rejection. He knew that. His attitude toward the notion of “home” had been largely distrustful for as long as he could remember. Most often it was a place to get away from, a place to leave behind, when it wasn't a place he could barely tolerate.

He remembered dreaming about, even planning for an independent, on-the-road existence since he was in fourth or fifth grade. He had run away, of course, several times. Once, when he was about eleven, he had made it as far as York Beach (on foot) before being spotted by a friend of his father's, someone Bill knew tangentially through Teddy Vickes. The guy had called the McQueens, while keeping a surreptitious eye on Craig, who was sitting on a bench reading a comic book, until Bill showed up, Bobby in tow for extra muscle if needed. (When he was a boy, until he went to college, Craig was known for an occasional but disruptive bad temper.)

And yet, for all of the running away, he always returned to Larchmere. Why was that? Why did he always, inevitably, feel the need to come home?

He often thought of Robert Frost's famous line: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Whether or not they actually had to, they, the McQueens, always did take him in. There might be some grumbling about the welcome, but he always got a welcome. At times, he had wished his family had slammed the door in his face. At least that would have put an end to the frustrating and seemingly unproductive cycle of leaving and coming back.

The hummingbird feeder outside the sunroom needed to be filled. Craig made a mental note to check the supply of feed and pick up more if necessary. And the wooden gate to the small herbal garden needed to be repaired, quite possibly replaced. He would pop down to the hardware store and pick up anything he couldn't find in his father's rudimentary workshop in a corner of the basement. He would make the repair or do the replacement himself, save his father a few hundred bucks, earn his keep for the two weeks at Larchmere. He knew that his father disapproved of the way in which he had lived his life so far. He also suspected that his father harbored ideas about his son's life that were patently untrue. Craig was not a criminal. He was not a drug addict. He was not dishonest. He was tired of trying to prove himself as worthy. He should just go away and stay away.

And yet, he knew that he would come back. He recalled now an article he had read somewhere online, in which the author, a psychologist maybe, had explained why people hated leave-takings. It was, she said, because no one can exist without the recognition of other people. In other words, Craig thought, you are no one if another person doesn't acknowledge that you are there, that you are present.

“And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life?” That was another line from that same New Testament passage. And it was very, obviously true. Worrying—thinking—could only take him so far.

Craig went inside, to the basement, to look for tools.

 

Ruth stood at the window of her room, watching her younger nephew wandering the perimeter of Larchmere. Percy was lumped on the windowsill, purring loudly. Every so often, Ruth gave his furry cheeks a scratch.

She saw Craig put his hand against the house and peer closely at the stone. She guessed he was checking the condition of the mortar. She knew, and always had known, that Craig was a bit of a lost soul. But she refused to believe that he was so far gone that he couldn't allow himself to be accepted back into the family he had semi-abandoned. The family that had semi-abandoned him. Her sister-in-law, Charlotte, had virtually ignored her youngest child. But what else could have been expected, given the situation?

Ruth shook her head. She remembered, very clearly, all those years ago, when Charlotte found out she was pregnant with Craig. She had been furious with everyone—though maybe not with herself; Charlotte was not the sort to take blame for her actions. She had been hell to live with for those first weeks. One evening, while paying Larchmere a brief visit, and fed up with her sister-in-law's foul mood, Ruth had suggested that Charlotte just shut up and get an abortion. Charlotte had fixed her with a cold eye and proclaimed that while she didn't want this fourth baby, she found the idea of an abortion “distasteful.” Ruth would never forget that moment.
Distasteful.
Imagine! Not repugnant, not morally wrong, just distasteful. Like bad behavior in public, like blowing your nose at the dinner table or failing to hold the door for the person behind you, nothing more. The subject of abortion had been dropped.

Two things of many about Craig's childhood came to Ruth's mind, watching her nephew from her window. The first were the flares of temper, seemingly random, though to Craig, no doubt caused by some perceived injustice or by some intense frustration. He would hit something with his fist or throw something across a room, rarely causing physical damage but upsetting whoever was witness. He never yelled or cursed. His rages were silent. Bill had wanted to take Craig to a child therapist. Charlotte had vetoed that idea as a waste of money. “He'll grow out of it,” she had said. And the rages had, indeed, stopped around the time Craig went to college. Ruth often wondered where all that anger and frustration had gone.

The second thing about Craig's childhood that came to mind now was the running away, which might have all started the first time he climbed down the rose trellis outside his window. He had not gone far that first night, just around the lawn a bit before climbing back up the trellis and into his room. Eventually, though, Craig's nocturnal excursions had become longer and more far flung, until he was disappearing for hours at a time. Not all disappearances were bona fide instances of running away. Some were just jaunts into town to hang out with friends. But some were deliberate attempts at leaving home “for good.” He had always left a note, though. He had been good about that.

Ruth sometimes wondered what might have been different for Craig if she had been around more often. But there was no point in wondering at this late date. Her job had kept her very busy and often on the road. Still, she had visited her brother and his family as often as she could, first at their house in a Massachusetts suburb and later, after Larchmere became habitable year round, in Ogunquit.

Not that every McQueen had enjoyed her visits. Charlotte had barely tolerated her. And Ruth was convinced that Adam saw her as an enemy. Anyone could see that she made him uncomfortable, though Adam himself would never admit to that. He routinely argued with her or put her down to the other McQueens (she wasn't stupid; she knew what went on) or, most infuriatingly, treated her as someone beneath his notice. Why she should be such a problem for him was unclear, however. She seemed to aggravate every insecurity he had been trying to bury, ignore, or deny since he was a boy. His negative attitude toward his aunt couldn't be entirely due to his mother's antipathy and disdain. Ruth was sure there were other factors at play, but life was too short to waste too much time contemplating her nephew's state of emotional retardation.

The girls, on the other hand, loved and even admired Ruth. She was grateful for this; at the same time she felt as if she deserved such love and admiration. Ruth had always had a sturdy sense of self-worth. She was also brutally self-critical.

Tilda and Hannah had always looked forward to their Aunt Ruth's visits. She was a breath of fresh air, funny and irreverent where their mother was neither, making their father laugh with silly jokes and outrageous stories. And she always brought gifts, odd and exotic things acquired on her travels. There were the turquoise bracelets from New Mexico and the jade animal figurines from Vietnam (that had been a pleasure trip with a short-term romantic partner), the lace from Belgium and the plaid woolen kilt (for Tilda) and polished wood shillelagh (for Hannah) from Ireland. When Ruth had gone to Peru she had brought back native musical instruments for the boys. Adam, she remembered now, had accepted his gift without thanks and dropped it on the sofa, where it sat for the duration of her visit. Craig had thanked her, and though without musical talent, had tooted on his pipe for hours. Charlotte had not been pleased.

Craig, too, had seemed to enjoy hearing about his aunt's travels, though it was clear to Ruth that by the time he could talk, which was very early, especially for a boy, he was already feeling a bit removed from his family. As if he were an afterthought, or a mistake. As if he were someone not intended for too close a relationship with the other McQueens. Craig stayed on the outside of the family circle and watched. Ruth, figuring that he might not want to invest much emotional energy in his aunt, assuming that she, too, would find him unnecessary, had always tried to bring him closer, or, at least, to indicate that it was okay for him to make a move toward emotional intimacy. But he was slippery even as a boy and ultimately Ruth had simply respected him for being who he needed to be.

Yes, there was no point in wondering about the “what ifs.” She had done her best for her family. She had attended graduations though she had missed numerous recitals and plays. She had tried to be with her brother's family for Thanksgiving or Christmas each year and for a few days or weeks each summer. On the whole she thought she had done a pretty good job of being an aunt. At least, she had done what it was in her to do.

Craig was out of sight now, gone around the other side of the house.

Ruth looked down at her fur child. “Well, Percy,” she said, “is it time for a tuna treat?”

Percy said that yes, it was.