The Family Beach House (2 page)

“We got a bit of a late start,” Hannah was saying as she dropped one of her travel bags on the kitchen floor. “Our downstairs neighbor's parrot got loose in the hallway again and would not go home.”

“I finally persuaded her with some sweet talk and a little treat.”

“Why can't her owner handle her?” Tilda asked Susan.

Susan rolled her eyes. “Her owner has issues and let's just leave it at that.”

“That bird rules the roost,” Hannah added. “Polly really should have a trainer.”

Tilda laughed. “Polly the parrot?”

“The owner also isn't very creative.”

Hannah McQueen and Susan Sirico had been married for almost three years. Frank had been too sick to attend their wedding in Winchester, Massachusetts. Tilda, Hannah's witness, had worked hard to muster the joy she knew her sister deserved, but with her own spouse dying she had not been very successful. Hannah had even offered to postpone the wedding, at great financial loss, but Tilda wouldn't allow the too generous offer. Her sister had waited long enough for the right to legally wed. Nothing should stand in the way of her big day. Frank had agreed and had written a warm letter of congratulations for Tilda to give to the brides.

The entire McQueen family had attended the service and reception, with the exception of Frank, of course, and of Adam, who arrived after the service was over, claiming he had been held up at the office. At the reception he downed several cocktails in rapid speed and then took off, again claiming work as an excuse. His wife at the time, Sarah, had just rolled her eyes behind his back, but Susan had been visibly angry. She saw Adam's behavior as disrespectful of her union with Hannah. But Hannah had put a lighter spin on things, reluctant, Tilda thought, to admit the possibility of her brother's being as unpleasant and selfish a person as he in fact was.

“Did we miss lunch?” Hannah asked now. She opened the door to the fridge and peered inside.

Tilda shrugged. “I think everyone is on her own.”

Hannah emerged from the fridge with a pound of sliced turkey, a pound of sliced Swiss cheese, and a grin.

Physically, Hannah, now forty-four, was clearly her father's daughter. Her hair was a deep, burnished red, just like his had been before it had gone white. She was about five foot six inches tall and had an average build. Her eyes were a blue green, not the intense blue of her father's, but large and pretty. But where their familial relation really showed was in their mannerisms. Both consistently crossed their legs to the right. Both tapped the tip of their noses with a forefinger when thinking hard. And both liked to eat scrambled eggs with a spoon. Their similarities had been a source of some amusement for Tilda and Craig when they were all growing up, and a source of unexplained annoyance to Charlotte. Adam had never paid much attention to the peculiarities of his family members.

“Here you go.” Hannah passed a sandwich to Susan, who eagerly set to her lunch.

Susan was from an Italian-American family who had lived in Falmouth, Maine, for generations. She had dark brown hair and eyes and, in Tilda's opinion, the most enviable skin she had ever seen, even toned and with a natural blush on her cheeks. Susan was a fund-raiser for a family advocacy group in downtown Portland, a job that required a lot of energy and people skills, both of which she had in abundance. While friendly, she brooked no bad behavior. Often the first to laugh at a good joke, she could also be intensely thoughtful. And she was very protective of those she loved, Hannah most of all.

Hannah was a production manager at the Portland branch of a large Boston-based advertising firm. Together she and Susan lived in Portland's West End in a condo that comprised the top floor of an old, restored Victorian home. That meant they had no outdoor space for planting or barbequing, but otherwise their home was exactly what they wanted it to be. They had plenty of access to the great outdoors at Larchmere, only a forty-five-minute drive away.

Hannah put the rest of the turkey and cheese back in the fridge, just as the sound of tires on gravel could be heard. “That's Dad's car.”

“He was out playing golf with Teddy,” Tilda said.

“Ouch.” Susan smiled. “Why does he torture himself like that?”

A few minutes later Bill joined his daughters and Susan in the kitchen. Bill wasn't a very demonstrative man but when it came to Hannah, he could never resist a show of affection. He hugged her warmly.

“How did you do?” Hannah asked, with a grin.

Bill shrugged. “I lost, of course. And no, I'm not telling anyone what I shot.”

Bill McQueen was seventy-three years old, a retired Boston businessman. His hair was still thick, though now white, and his eyes were still clear and intensely, piercingly blue. Amazingly his eyesight was still near perfect. The only help he needed he got from the ten-dollar reading glasses he had bought at the pharmacy in town. Bill was just about six feet tall. His taste in clothes was classic, verging on preppy, though Tilda suspected her mother had decided for Bill long ago what he would and would not wear. Tilda doubted her father had bought any articles of clothing since her mother's passing, except maybe socks and underwear. And that dorky hat he liked so much.

Tilda heard the front door open and a moment later her aunt, Ruth McQueen, was in the kitchen. “Greetings all,” she said, putting her white, pebbled leather handbag on the table. (Ruth owned approximately one hundred bags of every description.) “I've been to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and am simply parched. Anyone care to join me in a cocktail?”

“Yes, please,” Bill said. “Losing always makes me thirsty for gin.”

Ruth laughed. “So that's why you play golf!”

Like her older brother—she was sixty-four—Ruth was a natural redhead, but unlike Bill, she maintained her original deep, burnished shade professionally. She was smallish, about five feet three inches, and slim and strong. She dressed, to use her own old-fashioned expression, “smartly,” but always with a bit of drama. Though physically unimposing, Ruth exuded strength of character and a definite individuality. Some people, she knew, found her too outspoken and off-putting. Others thought her eccentric. No one could ignore her. Tilda and Hannah had always been a bit in awe of their aunt.

“So what's new and exciting in your lives, girls?” Ruth asked.

Tilda said, “Nothing.”

Hannah said, “Not much.”

Susan said, “I've got this very interesting new case. Of course, for the sake of the client's privacy I can't give you details but…”

While Susan told her story, Bill, only half listening, sipped his drink contentedly. William McQueen was the patriarch of the family. For the past ten years he had been a widower, living alone in the big house except for the company of his sister, Ruth, now retired. He liked the quiet life they lived, with their small circle of friends—particularly Teddy Vickes and his wife, Tessa, and Bobby Taylor, a lobsterman. But he liked Larchmere better when the house was filled with the sounds of his extended family—his children, now adults, and grandchildren.

When Charlotte was alive, she and Bill had lived at Larchmere as “joint tenants with rights of survivorship.” Now that Charlotte was dead, Bill was the sole owner of the house. It had originally belonged to his parents, a plumber and a housewife, who had bought it for a song (relatively speaking) back around 1937. How they had scraped together the money Bill never knew. He did know that the entire undertaking had been for his parents a labor of love. The house was originally only equipped for residence in the summer. Over time, Bill's parents had added a heating system and insulation and electricity. They had replaced the roof and repaired the mortar where necessary and built the guest cottage, which, years later, Bill had renovated.

It was always known that the house would be left to Bill, not to his sister. Bill had eagerly embraced the legacy of Larchmere, continuing the improvements and expansion, spending more and more time there on weekends and vacations, and eventually retiring to the house when he and his wife were in their fifties. He was never sure that Charlotte entirely shared his commitment to Larchmere. He didn't dare to ask her. It would have broken his heart to know that she would have preferred to live elsewhere, some place more cosmopolitan, some place where the population didn't drastically shrink after Labor Day.

Bill seemed to be the only one who had not been sure of Charlotte McQueen's commitment to Larchmere. She had made no bones about her dislike of the long, quiet winters and her disdain for a good many of the locals, people who had lived in the Ogunquit area for generations. Maybe Bill just hadn't heard his wife's complaints and criticisms. Maybe he had heard but had not been able to bear her opinions. If he had been a different sort of man—his sister would have said a tougher sort of man—he might have confronted Charlotte's discontent. As it stood, Charlotte had gotten into the habit of going off to Portland or Boston and sometimes New York, at least once a week, often for an overnight, leaving Bill alone with his precious house by the sea.

And over the years that precious house by the sea had been grown and improved so that now, instead of being just a two-season house, it was an all-year dwelling, complete with the renovated (it now had a full bath) guest cottage, a gazebo large enough for six people to enjoy a meal, and a three-car garage that housed Bill's 2002 Mercedes S430, Ruth's BMW 3 Series convertible, and a 1961 Volvo P1800, which Bill's friend Bobby just couldn't bear to part with.

No one but Teddy Vickes knew the exact contents of Bill's existing will. Frankly, Bill preferred it that way. Larchmere was no one's business but his own—yet. The one person to whom he would happily have confided the contents of his will refused to accept the confidence. Ruth had told him that sometimes not knowing was best. Bill didn't understand her reluctance to know who would eventually inherit the family house. She had always made it clear that she didn't want to be Bill's heir. Ruth loved Larchmere, but not like her brother did. She had absolutely no interest in taking on the responsibility of a rambling old house, complete with lawns and gardens, and gazebo and guest cottage, especially not at her age.

Ruth had moved in to Larchmere with Bill shortly after Charlotte died. She hadn't asked him if she could, she simply showed up one day, and Bill seemed very thankful for the company. Something had been in it for Ruth, too. She was tired. It was time to take a permanent break from her exhausting career as the senior vice president of a large, international cosmetics firm. Besides, Ruth strongly felt that her brother needed the companionship. Bill had been with Charlotte since they were teens. He had never lived alone. He had never done much of anything without Charlotte besides go to the office to make the money that kept her in tennis lessons, diamond jewelry, and spa vacations.

It had been impossible not to see that though Bill was the breadwinner, Charlotte was the actual head of the McQueen household. She was domineering yet indifferent, difficult, if not impossible to please. There had been little love lost between Ruth and her sister-in-law. For Bill's sake alone they had tolerated each other. Ruth found Charlotte to be mean-spirited, controlling, and parsimonious with her love. Charlotte found Ruth to be vulgar and embarrassing.

Ruth once had found it curious that Charlotte's favorite child was Tilda, a girl so unlike Charlotte herself. By rights, Adam should have been her favorite, self-centered, big-egoed Adam. But then it had dawned on Ruth that Adam could never have provided the near worship that Charlotte required, the near worship that Tilda so readily provided her needy mother. Charlotte must have seen herself in Adam—assuming she was at all self-knowledgeable—and wisely chose her older daughter as acolyte.

Ruth now busied herself with finishing the cocktails and putting out a bowl of mixed nuts (she would fight her brother for the cashews; they had been fighting over cashews since they were children) and a small plate of good olives. She watched Bill chatting with his daughters and daughter-in-law. He was the picture of a contented man.

While some men might have welcomed a solitary existence after so many years with a…determined woman, not Bill. He was the sort of man who needed a woman close at hand; it hardly mattered whether it was a wife, sister, daughter, or a friend. In fact, in Ruth's opinion he had always been putty in women's hands, which, she thought, might partly account for his rather poor relationships with his sons. In her experience men didn't respect other men who allowed women to play them like fiddles. But that was only her opinion. And after all, what did she really know about men? Oh, she had had plenty of romantic relationships and she had worked closely with men for her entire long career, but she had never been married, she had never lived with a man other than her father and now, her brother. And daily life with a man you were sleeping with had to teach you lessons you just couldn't learn otherwise.

The cocktails were ready, gin and tonics for Bill and Ruth, a glass of wine for Tilda, and dry martinis for Hannah and Susan.

“To a happy two weeks at Larchmere,” Hannah said, raising her glass.

“To my someday winning a game of golf,” Bill said, reaching into the bowl of nuts and snagging a few cashews.

Tilda raised her own glass. “To Mom.”

“To my brother leaving me a cashew, please.”

“To the McQueens,” Susan said, “a very interesting group of people.”

Ruth turned from the sink, where she had been washing salad greens, and reached for a dish towel to dry her hands. Charlotte, with the help of a professional designer, had succeeded in creating a popular room for her family. The kitchen was large and arranged on an open and friendly plan. There was a center island, which included the sink and a cooktop. At the far end of the island the counter was at a higher level, forming a bar top, around which were arranged several stools so that a person could have her afternoon tea there, or a glass of wine while she chatted with the person preparing dinner. A small, round table painted bright blue sat in a sunny alcove, a perfect spot for sipping morning coffee and reading the local paper. A larger, scrubbed pine table was often used for lunch and casual weekday dinners. The walls were a creamy lemon yellow and the cabinets were finished with a honey-colored stain. A rectangular ceramic clock, painted with sun-flowers on a vivid blue background, hung on one wall.

“I'm assuming your father hasn't told you about his girlfriend,” Ruth said to her nieces and Susan. “He's never been the most communicative man when it comes to personal matters.”

They were suitably surprised. Susan shook her head and smiled. Hannah's mouth dropped. Tilda felt as if she had been physically pushed, so off guard did this news take her. “What?” she said. “Dad has a girlfriend?”

“For the past four months or so now. They met a few years ago when they were both on the zoning board. She was married at the time. I seem to recall his talking a lot about her, though. She's divorced now, of course.”

“How can you sound so nonchalant?” Hannah asked, her voice rising. “This is a big thing! This is huge!”

Ruth shrugged.

“Who is she?” Tilda pressed. “What does she do? Does she live in Ogunquit? Do we know her? Is she retired?”

Really,
Ruth thought.
You would think they'd found out their father was consorting with a terrorist.
“She's hardly retired. She's only fifty. She has a small interior design business. I hear it's successful. What else? Oh, yes, she lives in Portland. I think she has a condo in one of those developments on the pier. When she's in Ogunquit she stays at a B and B. Rather, she used to. Now she stays here. She has no children.”

“And this has been going on for how long? Four months? And Dad never said a word to me!” Hannah felt hurt. Why hadn't her father told her about this woman? She had thought they were close. “Wait, what's her name? Do we know her?”

“Jennifer Fournier,” Ruth told them. “Some people call her Jen, but not your father. I don't know, you might have met her. She lived in Ogunquit for some time, while she was married. Her husband commuted to Boston every day for work. That can't have helped the marriage, but what do I know.”

Tilda put her hand over her heart. “I'm shocked. Really, I can't believe I'm hearing this.”

“Why?” her aunt said. “Your father's not a kid but he's hardly in the grave. He's handsome, intelligent, nice, if not the wittiest guy around. Why shouldn't he have a little fun?”

Susan, who had been silent until now, said, “I think it's great. People shouldn't be alone. And yes, Tilda, I mean everyone, including you. If one of my parents died I would want the other to find a companion, remarry, something. I'm not saying it would be perfectly easy for me to accept, but I would accept it.”

“She would,” Hannah said. “But she's not a McQueen. She's well adjusted.”

“I'm well adjusted,” Tilda protested. “I'm just surprised. That's normal.”

Ruth sighed. “Well, I suggest you girls get used to the idea of your father having a girlfriend. I have a feeling this is pretty serious. Okay, I'm going up to change for dinner. I'll see you all later.”

When she had gone Tilda and Hannah stood staring at each other. Neither said a word. Neither had any idea of what to say. Bill's relationship with Jennifer was “serious.”

Susan cleared her throat. “If I could interrupt the psychopath convention here, I'd like to suggest we all go and change for dinner. Hannah?”

Hannah mutely followed Susan from the kitchen. A moment later, Tilda, too, went to her room to change. In the upstairs hall she paused to examine the embroidered sampler hanging on the wall close to the bathroom. Her paternal grandmother had sewn it. On a background of cream-colored linen was depicted a simplified Larchmere as it had looked back around the time of her father's childhood. A rudimentary garden with flowers of faded pink and yellow spread from each side of the house to the borders of the wooden frame. Across the top of the piece Grandma Ruth had spelled out “Larchmere” in an elaborate stitch that Tilda couldn't name. (She had only mastered the cross-stitch.)

She went into her room and closed the door behind her. Her beloved Larchmere! Before Grandpa Will had bought the house, it had been, as far as anyone knew, without a name. But Grandpa Will had decided to call the house Larchmere for, Tilda supposed, the number of larches, a type of pine, rimming the back edge of the property. She knew that “mere” meant a small, standing body of water, but as far as she knew there hadn't been such a thing on the land since before her grandfather's time. Another meaning for “mere”—and she had looked it up as a child—was boundary. That made a bit more sense. The larch pines themselves formed a sort of boundary, and she knew of the remains of an old stone wall in their depths.

The house, built largely of stone, was composed of two floors and a large basement in which Charlotte had installed a small gym and a finished laundry room. On the first floor were the kitchen, a powder room (added by Bill and Charlotte), the dining room, the library, the living room, and a screened-in sunroom (also an addition by Bill and Charlotte). Charlotte, a devotee of the sun, had opened up walls wherever possible and added windows, eager to make the big old house as bright and open as it could be. There was a stone fireplace in the living room, used often in winter, and an iron, wood-burning stove in the library, which gave off a tremendous heat. Across the entire front of the house and around one side ran a covered porch, decorated with wicker chairs and love seats, painted white, and small tables of varying heights. When Charlotte was alive there had also been an ornate, thronelike wicker rocker, hers especially, but after her death, it had been relegated to the basement. Tilda was not sure why, or who had made the decision to remove this very personal piece of furniture from the family's sight. Maybe her father had not been able to bear the sight of anyone but his wife in it.

On the second floor of the house were the master bedroom and bathroom, facing the front lawn, off which sat a small but lovely deck; a second full bathroom; and four bedrooms of varying size. To accommodate extra guests, the library had a big, brown leather sleeper couch. Craig, used to sleeping in his van, on other people's beds—indeed, on any horizontal surface he could find—often bunked down in the library, leaving one of the upstairs bedrooms empty. As he was an avid reader, like Tilda, his retreat to the library made a certain sense.

Ruth's bedroom was, interestingly, as she had had a choice, the smallest of the four, and decorated (some would say crammed) with exotica from her travels. There was a swath of watered blue silk, hung from a rod on the wall, that she had picked up in England. On the floor was an antique patterned rug from Iran. On her dresser sat an intricately carved jade box from China, in which she kept her most precious jewelry. Her many handbags were stored floor to ceiling on custom-made shelves. Tilda remembered these details from a permitted visit years earlier. Ruth kept her door locked, though a cat door had been cut out near its base for Percy, her gray and white, five-year-old longhair, to come and go as he pleased.

Tilda sat heavily on the edge of the bed now. Ruth's comment, that she thought her father's relationship was serious, was weighing on her. Serious meant marriage, especially for a man of Bill's generation and disposition. Marriage meant that what was mine was yours and vice versa. Larchmere was Bill's. Would it someday also be Jennifer Fournier's?

Tilda put her head in her hands. She knew she was being dramatic, imagining the worst possible thing that could happen. But she couldn't help herself. With her father romantically involved it felt as if the very foundations of her life were compromised. Larchmere might soon pass out of the family McQueen. And what would happen to her then?

She simply couldn't imagine Larchmere not being home. She simply could not.

 

The McQueens met for dinner that evening in the dining room, the only somewhat formal room in the house and only used when family or friends were staying at Larchmere. Charlotte had enjoyed collecting fine china, which she displayed in a tall and unusually deep cabinet she had bought at an antique shop in Kennebunkport. She had also enjoyed collecting expensive linen table settings—cloths, runners, placemats, and napkins. These were kept in a large, low credenza, on top of which was displayed a Murano glass bowl Charlotte had purchased while traveling in Italy with an expensive tour group one summer. It had never occurred to Tilda to ask her father for a tablecloth, or vintage milk glass creamer and sugar bowl set, or the set of sterling silver napkin rings her mother had bought in a SoHo gallery in New York, as a memento of her mother. Tilda's own home furnishings were of a much simpler and less fine sort and she felt that her mother's possessions would be very out of place in her own relatively humble South Portland home.

The family gathered around one end of the oval-shaped dining room table, Bill and Ruth, Hannah and Susan, and Tilda. Percy kept a close eye on the meal from the top of the credenza. If it bothered anyone that a very furry cat chose to be in the vicinity of food, no one had the nerve to complain about this to Ruth. (If Charlotte were alive, however, Percy would have long since been banished from the dining room.)

“Look at us,” Hannah said. “We could be a print ad for L.L. Bean.” It was true. Hannah was wearing chinos, white boat sneakers without the laces, and a coral colored, lightweight cotton sweater. Susan wore a chino skirt, blue boat sneakers, and a striped linen big shirt tied at the waist. Tilda had changed into fairly new, tan chinos and a lemon yellow cardigan over a matching T-shirt. Bill wore a blue Oxford cloth button-down shirt tucked into pressed chinos. Only Ruth looked urban and out of place, in black linen slacks and a crisp, tailored, very white blouse with the starched collar turned up. Around her neck she wore a bold silver disc on a black silk cord. Her flats were also black silk. She could have been off for luncheon at MOMA in New York City.

Ruth reminded them—not that anyone had forgotten—that Adam, his new fiancée, and his children were due to arrive the next day.

“I'm dying to meet Adam's fiancée,” Tilda said. “I can't imagine what she'll be like.”

Hannah laughed. “Oh, can't you? I've got a pretty good idea. At least, I know she'll be a whole lot younger than Adam.”

“There's nothing necessarily wrong with that,” Ruth commented, with a look at her brother. Bill, busily eating, did not seem very interested in the women's speculations.

“Of course not,” Susan agreed. “But it won't be easy on Sarah if Adam marries someone much younger.”

Ruth, who had remained close to her nephew's ex-wife, shook her head. “I wouldn't worry about Sarah, if I were you. She's not the sort who's easily thrown by such trivia.”

“But,” Tilda said, “she will be concerned about what kind of person is going to be her children's stepmother.”

Ruth nodded. “Of course, as well she should be. Still, she won't be able to prevent Adam from marrying whomever he pleases.”

Hannah, who was feeling impatient with the talk of Adam's soon-to-be wife, took it upon herself to move on to the topic she and her sister really wanted to discuss. “So, Dad,” she said, with false casualness, “speaking of relationships, Ruth tells us that you're seeing someone. Romantically, I mean.”

Bill looked up from his plate and blushed. His embarrassment embarrassed Tilda. But he didn't seem in the least bit ashamed, and that angered her. Her anger, irrational, further embarrassed her. She reached for her wineglass.

“Well, as a matter of fact I am,” he said.

Now that the subject had been introduced, Hannah didn't know what else to say. She looked helplessly to her sister. Tilda shook her head. Plenty of thoughts were racing in her mind but none of them was able to emerge as a coherent comment or question.

Susan, who was sitting next to Bill—Ruth was at the head of the table—patted his hand. “Well,” she said, “I think it's great, Bill. We look forward to meeting her.”

“She'll be here for the memorial, but you'll meet her before that. We see each other pretty often, whenever her business allows.”

Tilda was stunned. Her father's girlfriend would be attending Charlotte McQueen's memorial? Ruth was right; this relationship was, indeed, serious. She wondered if Jennifer Fournier enjoyed sailing and then thought:
What a bizarre thing to wonder about!

Because Charlotte McQueen had died in a sailing accident. She had been out with a friend and had stumbled over a coil of rope that perhaps should not have been where it was. She had fallen and hit her head and that had been that. She was dead instantly. It was a death vaguely romantic and without obvious mess, something, Hannah thought, befitting the rather snobbish Charlotte. Aware of its harsh character, she, thus far, had only shared her opinion with Susan.

“We're all very happy for you, Bill,” Susan was saying now. “Aren't we?”

“Yes,” Ruth said emphatically. “We are.”

Reluctantly, Tilda and Hannah murmured their assent.

 

Tilda was sitting at the window of her bedroom. The lights were off in the room, which meant that she could see the designs of the trees in the dark outside, branches long and clawing, trunks black against the blue night. She couldn't sleep. She was worried about the uncertain future of her beloved Larchmere. She was worried about her own uncertain future.