The End of the Point (29 page)

Now, alone, he lingered longer, went into bedrooms, even: Jane’s and Paul’s one day, not sure what he was looking for. He found a pacifier and books on the nightstand and then, when he opened the drawer, a bottle of talc and a small pink case, and, inside, a rubber diaphragm. He started to touch its rim, then pulled back; it had been inside his aunt (everyone knew Jane had meant to stop at five children, Maddie a surprise, having come just as she’d started teaching reading again). When he was back outside on the paths, the image of the diaphragm stayed with him, its round smoothness, but also how it spoke of a life smack in the middle of itself, and of sex, which he imagined between Jane and Paul as tender, steady, unfrightening, nothing like it would have been for him if he’d gone further with Melanie (enflamed, engorged, obliterating, or—worse—surgical and cold).

He felt, then, something like yearning. Jane seemed to go through her days with a kind of steady, pointed focus—first you do this, then that—and because she had married Paul Strickland, they lived in the oldest house on the Point, the original farmhouse, its central fireplace big enough to park a car in, its rooms a crooked labyrinth. Jane and Paul’s children had been born, both sides, into Ashaunt. Their father was not a foreigner. Their mother was not torn, unpredictable and full of judgments, nor forever struggling to write a dissertation. Jane and Paul seemed
happy
together, in a steady way (how rare this was, he realized, in the couples he knew). If they had moments of real unhappiness, together or alone—and surely they did—you almost never saw them, nor did you see them battle with their kids, except in the usual ways. Of course, Jane kept things to herself, which irked his mother, who thought herself an open book. Still, it seemed, all told, from where he stood, a smoother, less divided life.

Charlie would have liked to live in Jane and Paul’s house. Was that it? He would have liked to be the baby in the crib, lifted, when he cried, by capable hands. But of course there was no choice. You moved forward—everyone did—from your own tangled origins, belonged to your own particular set of parents, whether you wanted to or not. He was cutting a new path that meandered from the cabin to the beach, and as he clipped and sawed, the familiar motions calmed him, and it was not until he got back to the road that he saw the bulldozer, neck swinging down, shovel extending, smashing the far end of the wall he had built, stone by stone, over the course of several summers, from the Red House mailbox to the old army gate.

He ran toward the machine, loppers in one hand, the saw in the other. “Stop!” he yelled. And then “Hello?” and “Stop,” again, louder, until finally the man at the wheel shut off the machine, its neck raised halfway up.

From high above, the man frowned. “Can’t hear a damn thing. Even when it’s off. My ears are shot. What’s the trouble here?”

“I, this . . . It’s just—” Charlie shielded his eyes from the sun. “This is private property. I live here. . . . My grandparents, my grandmother, owns this land. Margery Porter. Charles and Margery Porter? I built it, this wall. You can’t just knock it down.”

The man shrugged. “They’re widening and paving the road, pushing it out to the end. They tell me where to dig, I dig.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“Mr. Wilson.”

“Dick Wilson? Why?”

“I reckon so the deal can go through with Cording.”

“Who’s Cording?”

“Cording and Sons, from New Bedford, you know? Bill Cording, the developer? They cleared it with the planning board. It took long enough to get the go-ahead—it was even in the papers. Kind of a shame, if you ask me. I fish out here from time to time—Mr. Wilson knows. But what’s done is done. They’ll put up some nice houses with amenities, and
heat
. Imagine that. It might give you folks ideas.”

“This isn’t Dick’s land, not this piece, this is ours—” Charlie’s voice was high now, girlish, begging. Did the shoulder of the road belong to the Point Association, or to his family? Might it be protected by some ancient right-of-way law like the one that still allowed the descendants of the Cooks and Cornells, the families that used to farm Ashaunt, to gather kelp to fertilize their inland fields? “I’ll call my grandmother,” he said. “There must be some mistake. Could you please wait?”

The man wiped his brow. “I’ve got to get the dozer on to another site.”

As he spoke, he looked down at the wall, and Charlie saw it through his eyes: the stones of varying shapes and size, no mortar, just beach rocks tucked and wedged. Building a stone wall had turned out to be harder than he’d expected, the project starting as a whim, a rock in each hand on the beach. How he had labored, day after day, the summer he was seventeen. No one had made him, just as no one, except maybe Percy and Holly, had been at all impressed when he was done. His parents were fighting a lot that summer, on the weekends when his father was around. His mother was considering abandoning her dissertation, but in the most tortured, voluble way. There was the adviser, a renowned historian at Columbia whom she both worshiped and detested; there was the bag of books she carted about, complaining of the weight. She was a caged bird bashing, fluttering, though to Charlie the door had seemed more or less open, if she’d nudged. His wall had grown up topsy-turvy; you couldn’t sit or climb on it or it would fall. Still, it had been tolerated, allowed to sprawl across the Red House lawn, unremarked upon, mostly, or the subject of an occasional joke.

He moved around the other side of the machine so that he wasn’t staring into the sun. “I can call right now, sir. I’ll talk to Dick—Mr. Wilson. He’s an old family friend, I’ve known him all my life. We own half of the end of the Point with him. I’ll be quick. Anyway”—he looked up, met the man’s eyes—“it’s my land you’re bulldozing, not his.”

“Your grandmother’s land. That’s what you said, kid. Don’t go changing it around on me.”

“It’s complicated,” said Charlie cagily. “If you can wait just a minute, I’d appreciate it—”

The man peered down at him. “What’s your name?”

“Me? Charlie.”

“Porter?”

“Benoit.”

“Benwah? What kind of a name is that?”

“Swiss. French-Swiss. My mother’s a Porter. Helen?”

The man nodded. “I knew her brother. Nice guy, knew how to have a good time. We shipped off the same year, but I came home. You named after him?”

Charlie nodded.

“I’ll give you five minutes, Charlie Jr., four more than you asked for. Go.”

GAGA WASN’T HOME WHEN CHARLIE
called Grace Park from the phone in the Big House kitchen, nor was she at the Lowell Hotel when he tried there. He phoned his parents, got no answer, then Holly, no answer, then Jane, who said she thought Gaga was in Newark, and no, she hadn’t heard about the road being widened. She wasn’t surprised, but still, it was a shame.

“Can’t we make him stop?” Charlie asked. “My wall is on our land. He’s trespassing.”

“I’m sure he’s acting on orders from the town planning board. Hold on . . .” The shrieking of children in the background grew louder. “Go to Rosa, doll. Okay, I know it’s upsetting, Charlie, but whether your wall stays up or not, the land is changing hands. You can rebuild the wall a little closer to the house. My boys will help.
I’ll
help. That fellow must be digging on the public right-of-way, or he wouldn’t be there.”

“He can’t take down my wall without permission.”

“The sides are public, sort of—for electricity or . . . gas lines—I don’t know. Dick wouldn’t have someone go in if it were illegal. He has a law degree, remember, and I’m sure he has a lawyer handling this. He’s scrupulous about this kind of thing.”

“Scrupulous! Why is he doing this? He doesn’t need the money.”

“We don’t know that. He must have his reasons.”

“Will you try to find Gaga? Please?”

“Charlie, try to put it in perspective. Can’t you? It’s a
wall
.”

Charlie slammed his hand on the counter. “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this? I would’ve gone to the town meetings. I’d have
done
something.”

“You were in Ohio. And no one wanted to upset you.”

“You all just give in,” he said. “It’s not the wall, it’s the whole thing. You all just roll over and let it happen. It’s pathetic, actually, more than anything.”

“The Wilsons let it happen,” Jane said, “for reasons of their own. None of us are happy about it, but it’s not the first time things have changed—remember, there was no Red House or Portable when I was little. This isn’t the wilderness, Charlie. It never has been, or not for a very long time. It’s easy to romanticize the past here. My mother always said so. For a long time I didn’t understand what she meant.”

“I’m talking about the present—three new houses, and it will go downhill from there. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s about what’s happening now.”

Jane hesitated. “Listen, Charlie, keep this between us—Paul and I tried to buy it. We got outbid. Mummy was going to help. A few people know, but not many. We wanted to put a conservation easement on it. Paul came up for all the meetings. He didn’t miss a single one. He was as upset as you are. So was I.”

“Really, you bid? That’s great. But why didn’t Gaga just bid to win? She can afford it.”

“She’s old, Charlie. And there’ve been financial setbacks with the company, and this all happened right after Grampa died. You know how he always warned us about becoming land poor. After he went, we were all just . . . in such shock, we—”

“Grampa would have bought it.”

“No,” Jane said. “I don’t think so. In fact, I know he wouldn’t. He was too cautious. He wanted Mummy—all of us—to have enough after he was gone. Gaga didn’t even have her dock put in this year, the expense was too much—”

“This family is
rich
.”

“Not like you think. Not anymore.”

“I’d spend my own money,” he said, though it was not enough—some $50,000 that Gaga and Grampa had gifted him over the years—and he couldn’t get his hands on it until he was twenty-five. It was tied up, tucked away, managed by people he’d never met, who sent occasional reports in creamy envelopes. Later he would learn it was in a “spendthrift trust,” the name right out of a WASP joke.

“Charlie,” Jane said. “I have to go, dearie. It’s too late. It’s under agreement. The sale will be final by next month.”

“Then they can leave my wall up for now. I don’t care if it seems petty—I’m calling Wilson.”

“Please don’t. It will only upset you more, and it won’t change anything. You need to get your balance.”

“Calling Wilson will
get
me my balance.” His mind was, in fact, feeling better than it had in days—focused, steady, needle sharp.

“Write to him,” Jane said. “Writing always works better. Gaga taught me that. The ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ letter. Hold on . . . . Here. Richard Wilson, 125 East End Ave., 02456. Have you got a pen? 125 East End—”

“I’m
calling
.” He scrawled the address on the phone list taped to the wall. “The bulldozer’s outside.”

EVEN BEFORE HE HUNG UP,
his resolve had weakened. He picked up the phone, put it down. It was a Tuesday; he was likely to get Wilson’s second wife, a bleached-out, jittery woman dwarfed by her husband and dried out from too much sun and booze. He left the Big House, walked back to the Red House. The bulldozer was parked, the driver not there. Charlie left a note on the dozer—
Please wait!
Thanks!
—and weighed it down with a rock. Back at the Big House, where his grandmother kept a typewriter in her bedroom, he found a sheet of her onionskin paper wither her initials at the top. As he slid the paper in, turned the crank and watched the shaft turn from black to white, something shifted in his thinking, as if the typewriter were itself a sort of brain. It wasn’t the wall that mattered, was it? What was a wall but a man-made barricade, and if they knocked it down, he’d return the rocks to the beach, where they would, with time and tide, resettle among their kind. It wasn’t the wall, but the land.

Dear Sir . . . . As old family friends and neighbors . . . preserving even some small piece of the land for wildlife and future generations . . . hoping it’s not too late . . . anything I can do . . . know you care . . . help raise funds, contribute all I have, Yours Respectfully . . .

On a separate page, he typed:
fuckyoubigdickfuckyoufuccccckkkkkkyyyou
.

He went out again to find the bulldozer still parked across the road from the Red House, its shovel in midair. Charlie rolled up the second letter, tucked it into a crack in the wall and rode his bike toward town. The road was potholed; the Point Association kept it that way to slow down cars. The developers would repave the road, take away the bumps. He bicycled past the low-slung ash tree, past the foxhole and blackberry thicket, along the curve where a few weeks earlier he’d seen a mother skunk followed so closely by her kits that they’d formed one undulating line of black and white.

At the Packet, he mailed letter number one to Dick Wilson, then headed home, stopping for ice cream on the way. As he sat on the picnic bench at Salvie’s licking a maple walnut ice cream cone, he pictured the war landing on Ashaunt—land mines and napalm killing off the people, Agent Orange stripping down the land. He would hide in the old radar tower, or lift up the lid of the manhole at the top of Hollow Hill and climb in. What would be left? And who was the enemy, and who the natives, and what were they fighting for? Freedom? The landed gentry’s right to keep its holdings? The birds, the bees, the sycamore trees? A wall?

For close to an hour he sat there, eating the ice cream, nibbling down the sugar cone, a boy in a nineteen-year-old’s body, playing war. Around him, people came and went. He filled the radar tower, fired off shots. He led the charge, herded the wild animals into the underground casemate where they waited, trembling and restless, until he could return for them. The grass grew back out of the moonscape. The trees grew up. The Point House rose again, but smaller now, dollhouse-size, and around it, bayberry bushes, cedar trees, his paths. His mother’s brother Charlie came back, just showed up one day—a clerical error, a mistake in processing. The first Baby Elinor came back, the age of Jane’s youngest daughter, wheeled in on Grampa’s living lap. Charlie’s former self returned and set about its days. He set the animals free.
One two three four, we don’t want your fucking war
. His mother was young, she held his hand, they named the flowers. I’m glad it’s over now, she said.