Osprey Island

It may be thought that I have not dwelt sufficiently on the
generally assumed evil tendencies of certain birds. I have
tried to be perfectly just, but there had been so much exaggeration and sensationalism in writing of birds, that I have
been careful to investigate all accusations.

—OLIVE THORNE MILLER,
The Second Book of Birds

Acclaim for This be Nissen’s Osprey Island

“Much like the great Joyce Carol Oates, Thisbe Nissen creates an exclusive world peopled with both the young and the old. . . . Nissen’s writing is calm and poetic.”

—
Baltimore City Paper

“Well-crafted . . . secrets abound in a place where family bonds often go beyond blood relations.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Finally, a perfect beach book with a literary bent. . . . The story unfolds slowly, letting the reader take in Nissen’s carefully crafted prose, but gains momentum at the end, when everything comes undone.”

—
New York Post

“Incendiary tension, fueled by grief, alcoholism, and island insularity, build to levels so intolerable that one has to fight the urge to read with one eye closed even while tearing through the pages toward the shocking conclusion. Nissen is the kind of writer who sends the reader compulsively in search of everything else she has written.”

—
Library Journal

“Much like her plain-spoken characters, Nissen is a supremely unfussy voice, arriving at surprising places via deceptively simple routes. . . . As a poignant summer reverie,
Osprey Island
should no doubt satisfy readers who can’t get away to the beach themselves.”

—
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“Nissen is out to accomplish more than just telling a good yarn. She shows the damage secrets can cause. . . . Engrossing.”

—
Tacoma News-Tribune

OSPREY ISLAND, SUMMER 1988

THE CHIZEKS
Bud, owner of The Lodge at Osprey Island, 60
Nancy, his wife, 61
Chas, their son, killed during the war in Vietnam
Suzy, their daughter, a teacher, 36
Mia, Suzy’s daughter, 6

THE JACOBSES
Roddy, maintenance worker at the Lodge, 37
Eden, his mother, 56
Roderick, his father, recently deceased

THE SQUIRES AND THE VAUGHNS
Lance Squire, head of maintenance at the Lodge, 38
Lorna Marie Vaughn Squire, his wife, head of housekeeping, 36
Squee, their son, 8
Merle Squire, Lance’s mother, 54
Art and Penny Vaughn, Lorna’s parents, 69 and 66, respectively

THE LODGE STAFF
Brigid, a housekeeper, 19
Peg, a housekeeper, 18
Jeremy, a waiter, 18
Gavin, a waiter, 19
Reesa Delamico, a hairdresser, 36
Janna Winger, a hairdresser, 19

Prologue

THE ONES THEY CAME BACK FOR

“Örn!” cries the Swede; “Águila!” the Spaniard; and the North American or Briton exclaims, “Look, there’s an eagle!” Probably the most
misidentified bird in the world, the osprey or “fish hawk,” with white
on its head and a wing span of more than five feet, much resembles its
regal relative. Even its scientific name,
Pandion haliaetus,
compounds
the confusion, for
haliaetus
literally means “sea eagle.”

—ROGER TORY PETERSON, “The Endangered Osprey”

DOWN AT BAYSHORE DRUG, postcards of Osprey Island sell five for a dollar from a spindly display rack by the cash register. They’re all island scenes—the beach at Scallopshell Cove, the clapboard shops lining Ferry Street, the cliffs at the end of Sand Beach Road—but those postcard photographers all seem to have a similar soft spot for the osprey itself, that majestic bird from whom the island took its name. A sunset beach shot—beautiful—but if they can frame the photograph around that great raptor perched high in its nest, a silhouette against the sherbet-colored sky, well, it does make for a dramatic scene. Add OSPREY ISLAND in scrawling script across the sand. Those are the postcards that sell. Also popular: cards with photos of the Osprey Island Ferry as it pulls in to dock, heaving its mighty bulk against those sea-worn mooring pylons, half rotted and suitably picturesque. And if there just so happens to be an osprey perched atop a decaying pylon, or on the steeple of the boat’s whistle, or at the crest of the captain’s tower, well, so much the better. Portraits of the Lodge at Osprey Island—an architecturally impressive structure in some, though not all, of its many incarnations—are also standard, and if you wait patiently for your shot you can sometimes catch an osprey as it lights upon a turret or gable. Sunsets, boats, hotels—ubiquitous images of vacation, leisure, the idylls of a certain class. But it’s really the osprey that makes the picture. An osprey you don’t find just anywhere.

There was in fact a time when you
couldn’t
find an osprey, anywhere. Back in the days of DDT. But before there was DDT, and before there were nesting platforms built onto abandoned telephone poles, and before the creaking ferry docks, before hotels with gaping lawns just begging to be the site of your daughter’s wedding reception—before everything else on this island was the osprey.

It was the osprey’s cry—
kyew, kyew, kyew
—that heralded the island’s first European settlers ashore. A blustery autumn day in 1655, and their boat ran aground rather unceremoniously on a promontory known forever after as Shipwreck Point. It was a fortuitous shipwreck: the journeying party managed to wash up on precisely the land for which they’d been aiming. The ship bore a British sugar baron, his young bride, and their entourage, all of whom survived the calamitous landing. They’d come for the island’s fabled forests of white oak: the timber of the sugar barrel.

Within twenty years the baron, an enterprising but not particularly foresighted businessman, had chopped down every last white oak on the island and the local economy was forced to shift its focus sensibly, if obviously, to the surrounding bays of calm and eminently fishable waters. Men with nets began to haul up great catches of moss bunker—
menhaden
—and churning kettleworks sprang up on Osprey’s shores. There, in massive iron drums over great fires, the fish were cooked down for use in oil and fertilizer, a grueling process so rank and foul that had a group of wealthy New York businessmen not come upon Osprey in the late 1860s and hatched an entrepreneurial plan along her shores the island might well have been known not for its endangered birds and its beaches and sunsets and quaint summer resort hotels but for its unrelenting fish stink. Those rich New York developers bought up the moss bunker business, razed the enterprise to the ground, and relocated every last barrel, net, and cauldron a safe distance downwind, to a rocky brown patch of undesirable New Jersey coast, eradicating every shred of evidence that a fish-processing plant had ever stood and smoked on the island shores. When the Lodge at Osprey Island held its grand opening in the summer of 1874, folks said that, honestly, you never would’ve known.

The Lodge at Osprey Island that stands on the site today is not quite so illustrious as the original. There have been fires, hurricanes, wars, a Great Depression, and the resort has been built and rebuilt, knocked down and made over again. The Lodge in its present incarnation opened in 1940 under the ownership of a man named Chizek, a wealthy Texan whose oil money the Depression seemed to have passed right by. It’s more of a family place now, hardly as grand and photogenic as it once was, but it’s a nice place to bring the kids on holiday—a couple of hours from New York City by train, then a short ferry ride across the bay. Really, a perfect place to bring the family.

Here’s a popular postcard scene: a man and a boy standing on a dock—the Lodge’s boat dock, which still has some of the old charm that the Lodge itself now lacks—with the water and the shoreline and the world washed in golden sunset glow. The man and boy might be father and son—they aren’t, but they might be. For the sake of the postcard: a man and his son washed in gold and peachy light at the end of a jutting, dilapidated pier. A man and his son, nearly silhouetted against the horizon, gazing across the water toward an outcropping of land where a post rises from the shoreline scrub brush. The post is as tall as a telephone pole, and sturdy. Atop the post, a tremendous nest. Atop the nest, a tremendous bird. The bird—it’s about to take off—spreads its wings, ready to rise like a phoenix. The boy lifts his hand—
An osprey!
—and the man’s gaze follows. They are not hotel guests, these two; both were raised on this island. There were hardly any ospreys when the man was a child, but now things are different: DDT banned, the food chain back on track. See? There’s the proof, up in that nest: an osprey, one of many returned to the island that bears their name. See the boy on the dock—it’s for him that the osprey has come home.

One

THE LODGE AT OSPREY ISLAND

Vacation this summer at the Osprey Lodge—open Fourth of July Weekend through Labor Day—Boating—Tennis—Beachfront—Swimming
pool—Full-service dining room with local reknowned
[sic]
chef—
Cocktail bar with outdoor patio seating—On the shore of beautiful
Osprey Island—The Lodge at Osprey Island—A Family Place!

—promotional brochure, 1988

IT WASN’T UNTIL LANCE AND LORNA SQUIRE showed up to the barbecue—forty-five minutes late, and drunk, hair combed back wet from the shower—that anyone got dessert. The Osprey Lodge’s head cook, Jock, was chain-smoking beside a table full of watermelon he’d hacked into slices with such samurai ferocity that no one would venture near it for fear of losing a limb. But Lance Squire strolled up, surprised Jock with a clap on the back that made him drop his cigarette in the pooling watermelon juice, and took over. “Come on now, don’t be shy!” Lance barked across the lawn. A few brave souls crept tentatively forth for watermelon. Jock glowered from the sidelines.

Jock’s name was actually Jacques, but that didn’t sound any different from
Jock
to anyone around there. Jock looked less like a Frenchman than a truck-stop short-order fry cook, and he took great pleasure in presenting himself as such. He hardly spoke except to swear at his waitstaff in vulgar Franglais. The Lodge’s kitchen help spoke mostly Spanish. Each summer Tito and Juan brought in a crew of their friends and relatives who worked for cash under the table and, for reasons that seemed not merely obvious, but enviable, talked only to one another. It was the waitstaff who caught the brunt and gist of Jock’s rampages. The boys laughed—“Steady there, Jocko!”— and went about their business, filling water pitchers and folding permanent-press napkins while Jock hurled epithets around the kitchen. Waitresses always had a bit more trouble: it was hard to keep count of your dinner salads or remember how many steaks and how many filets when Jock was flinging them on the grill, hollering, “What you say? How many you say? How many fucking shit steak slabs you say, gorgeous? We go outside, I fuck you so hard you speak up then, yeah? Fucking how many you say?”

Lance Squire handed out watermelon slices with the artificial magnanimity of a Good Humor man. A mildew-stained plastic banner was tacked to the front of the table, its faded red lettering giving a conciliatory WELCOME STAFF TO THE LODGE AT OSPREY ISLAND. Lance himself hardly needed welcoming; he and his wife, Lorna, had been at the Lodge for more than two decades. They lived year-round in one of the cabins up the hill and served—mostly euphemistically— as caretakers. When she was sober enough to walk, Lorna was the chief housekeeper. Lance was head of maintenance and claimed, loudly and often, that he didn’t touch a drop. He was officially in charge of everything from preseason repairs to upkeep of the Lodge’s small stable of vehicles to, say, rolling the clay tennis courts every summer morning for the early-bird enthusiasts who got up to practice their backhands before breakfast. Most often, though, Lance was too drunk to lay a straight baseline, or dig a posthole, or pick his nose, for that matter, and the Lodge was known for its “rustic disarray,” which, fortunately, guests seemed to find quaint.

Lance Squire Jr.—Squee—was Lance and Lorna’s only child. Eight years old that summer, hyperactive as ever, Squee skipped around the watermelon table, hovering behind his dad, as high on sugar and people and occasion as his folks were on whiskey. Squee waited all year for this Friday in June when everybody—all the college-kid waiters and Irish housekeeping girls—arrived on the island again to prepare for the busy summer season ahead. The kid had a tendency to get himself underfoot, everywhere, always, except at home: Squee was in the kitchen at five a.m. with Jock and Tito and Juan; he trailed the housekeeping girls room to room, telling jokes and stories and bringing them sodas from the bar and peanut butter cookies from the pantry; he sat on a barstool during happy hour at the Dinghy and played cards with Morey until someone else needed the seat; and he hung out at night on the side porch with the waiters until the last beers had been drunk, the last cigarettes stubbed out, and the last staffers straggled up the hill to a lonely camp-cot sleep.

Lance lifted the watermelon knife. “Squid,” he said to the boy, “go get your ma a chair to sit down in.” He jerked his chin toward a tower of plastic lawn chairs stacked against a wall under the deck. The Lodge held a piece of prime Osprey Island real estate on Sand Beach and the hill that rose sharply from its shores, and the hundred-room hotel had been designed to maximize the view. The basement was cut into the slope, exposed in front and buried in back, and a large deck on the main level overhung a stone patio that extended from the basement and bled onto a great lawn, where such momentous annual events as the staff barbecue were held.

Squee darted toward the chairs, the stack of which teetered a good yard above his head. He stared at the tower, reached out and gave it a nudge, then swept his eyes over the crowd on the lawn. He saw no empty chairs.

There was one person in the crowd who was neither sitting, nor eating, nor interacting with anyone at all, and it was this person who noticed Squee’s dilemma. He was one of the newly arrived waiters, a lanky, brooding boy named Gavin who’d just finished his freshman year at Stanford University far away in California, and he stood alone, smoking, as he leaned against a pillar under the deck of the Osprey Lodge.

Gavin ground out his cigarette, sauntered over, and stepped between the boy and the tower of chairs. With a shake he disentangled the top one from the others and set it down before Squee like Superman plucking Lois Lane from the Empire State Building. Then Gavin gave Squee a polite and obliging nod, like a Japanese bow, turned and walked away without a word.

For a moment Squee just stared at the chair. Then he snapped to, turned, and sprinted back toward his parents, grabbing hold of the chair with one hand almost as an afterthought and letting it bump across the patio behind him as he ran.

Though Lance and Lorna were standing not five feet from each other, Squee delivered the chair straight to his father, who took it with little or no acknowledgment of the bearer, laid aside the watermelon knife, wiped his hands on his apron, and set the chair down for his wife as though he were a gentleman. Lorna giggled, demurred, and then sat with a plop, her face wrestling to stay composed, growing redder by the instant as it dissolved in mirth. She was higher than heaven.

For an elongated second Lorna looked truly gleeful, and then the joy on her face swerved into fear as the plastic legs of the chair began to bend and buckle beneath her. She went over awkwardly, slowly enough that the impact didn’t hurt her, just elicited a short “Oh!” of surprise. Squee looked on, frozen: he’d set this terrible domino-train of events in motion and was powerless to stop it now. Lance, too, was halted for a moment by incomprehension. But as his wife tumbled over before him, his confusion turned to anger. He flashed his young son an accusing glare. Then he bent over to help Lorna up off the ground.

Bud Chizek wore a chef’s hat to scoop the potato salad and coleslaw onto Styrofoam plates. Bud and his wife, Nancy, owned and ran the Lodge at Osprey Island and had been doing so since Bud inherited the place from his father almost forty years before. Bud had learned early that housekeeping girls could be imported very cheaply through an overseas Irish employment agency and that a dining room could be quite adequately staffed with college boys who were thrilled to settle for low wages in exchange for a summer at the beach with an in-house stable of attractive, young, and impressionable lasses eager to experience the American way.

Once upon a time the Lodge’s season had run Memorial Day to Labor Day; now there weren’t enough guests to make it worth Bud’s while to open earlier than Fourth of July weekend. The staff arrived on Osprey mid-June and spent the rest of the month getting the lay of the land, getting the Lodge ready for guests, and getting good and drunk most every night. At the barbecue to welcome them to Osprey the Irish girls held their hot dogs awkwardly, as though unfamiliar with the concept of the frankfurter. They sipped generic colas and orangeades and sat tentatively on the grass as if afraid to muss their shorts. The boys—the waiters—clustered by a large trash can like hobos around an oil-drum fire, as though it gave them a greater sense of purpose to guard the garbage, keep tabs on the rate of paper plate discard, see who might fail to heed Nancy Chizek’s infamous sign: DON’T HAVE EYES BIGGER THAN YOUR STOMACH—TAKE ONLY WHAT YOU WILL EAT.

“Is the food this brutal as a rule, do you think?” said one of the seated Irish girls, a buxom, redheaded Dubliner called Brigid. She poked suspiciously at a stewy splotch of potato salad, yellow with unidentifiable flecks of red and green. The other girls shrugged blandly, unwilling to pass judgment just yet on this strange new place and its American accoutrements. They were jet-lagged and knew they’d do better to hold their condemnation until they’d had a good night’s sleep, or at least a pint of beer.

Brigid’s new roommate—with whom she could look forward to sharing, for the duration of the summer, a shoddily wallpapered heat trap on the first floor of the staff house—was a girl from County Cork named Peg who was neat and mousy with smooth skin and thin lips that she pursed as though in great distress. Brigid’s sister, Fiona, had worked at the Lodge the previous summer, and Peg reminded Brigid of her, which was both comforting and repellent. Had they been back at home in Ireland, Brigid and Peg would have loathed each other on sight—an arrogant Jackeen from the city! a bloody mulchie!—but as it was, in this new place, the girls would likely cling to the familiarity of their own until they’d gotten steady enough to detach from the clan.

As paper plates mounted in the trash can, Bud Chizek climbed atop a picnic table, tapping a plastic spoon against the side of a Styrofoam cup. “Hello,” he said. He raised his voice: “Hello and welcome!” He swept a hand out at the panorama of sea and sky before him, a gesture at the crescent that was Sand Beach. “I couldn’t have ordered a better sunset for you tonight,” he said, and his wife, Nancy, applauded softly, proud as a grandmother of that pink-plumped sky. The evening was indeed exemplary, the western horizon streaked like a tropical drink. Seagulls flew in from the beach and lit upon the Lodge lawn to poke their beaks at fallen hot dog buns and discarded melon rinds. And in its nest atop a utility pole near the shoreline, a lone osprey stood displaying its profile to the crowd as if aware of the dramatic silhouette it cut against the horizon.

“So, welcome,” Bud said again, “to the Lodge at Osprey Island. We’re glad you’re all here, ready for another busy season. And I know all of you who just arrived this afternoon have your unpacking to do and settling in, so I’ll let you get to that just as soon as I introduce some important folks who keep this place running.” Affability was something Bud Chizek could manage to muster only through great and diligent effort, but he’d found over the years that if he could display something that approached graciousness during these first few interactions with his summer staff, then he could pretty much drop the charade for the rest of the season and keep them all on their toes, afraid they’d disappointed him somehow and scrambling to regain his favor. “I’m Bud Chizek,” he boomed. “I own this beautiful place here”—he gestured to the Lodge and its grounds and up the hill toward the guest cottages scattered around the tennis courts and swimming pool—“been in my family . . . oh, what is it now, Nance? What did we say?”

“Nearly fifty years,” his wife chimed in from the sidelines.

“My wife, Nancy Chizek,” Bud said proudly, and Nancy gave a wave, turning side to side like the Queen Mother on motorcade, and with as little sense of irony.

Bud continued: “And, with us for the past twenty-six of those summers, our chef, Jock. Let’s give a hand to Jock for this delicious barbecue!” There was a wave of polite applause. Jock continued to glower from behind the serving table.

Bud Chizek looked around at the picnic guests. “OK, on with the family: Where are you, Mia?” he asked into the crowd.

“Here!” A voice came from beneath the deck where Squee was frantically pointing at the little girl seated beside him on top of the Ping-Pong table, paddle and ball in her hands, waiting diligently for her grandfather’s speech to be over so they could continue their game.

“Thank you, Squee,” said Bud. “That’s Lance Squire Jr., there—his folks are our heads of maintenance and housekeeping . . . Lance? Lorna?” Bud looked for them, but they had already retreated up the hill. “Anyway . . . my granddaughter, Mia. And somewhere out there . . . is her mother . . . my daughter, Suzy . . . out from New York City for another summer at the family hotel . . .”

He panned the crowd. His introduction was intended as a jab, and both he and his daughter knew it. Suzy was hardly a part of the family business—hardly a part of her family’s life on Osprey Island but for these summers when she accepted her parents’ offer of three rent-free months of vacation with built-in babysitters and maid service. She and her parents had been on speaking terms again only since Mia’s birth. It appeared that
granddaughter
trumped
grudge.
Or at least the
idea
of granddaughter. Mia and her grandparents never seemed to know what to do with one another once they were in the same place, but the Chizeks liked the sound of the phrase
We’ll have our granddaughter with us for the summer.
Suzy was never entirely sure why she ever agreed to the arrangement, and usually spent much of the summer trying to figure out what in god’s name she’d been thinking. Suzy Chizek thought her parents ungenerous, judgmental, and phony, and she was quite certain they’d have traded Suzy’s life in a fraction of a second to have her older brother back.
Chas,
she was sure, would have merited a nice room at the Lodge. A room with a view, say. Suzy Chizek was not a daughter who deserved a view. Bud never gave Suzy and Mia a particularly nice room. Those were for the paying guests, not for the wayward daughter and her (for all intents and purposes) fatherless child, the daughter who’d sworn her distance from Osprey Island’s oppressive confines as soon as the Island High diploma was in her itchy hand.
That
daughter took what she got: a room that looked out over the parking lot, on the kitchen and delivery entrances.

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