The Good House: A Novel (23 page)

The cabin of Manny’s current boat, like most lobster boats, was designed for the captain and crew to stand, but there were a couple of tall, swiveling captain’s chairs. A roof and a windshield offered some protection from bad weather, but the back of the cabin was open to the aft section of the boat, which was designed to hold dozens of lobster traps. Most of Manny’s traps were already set, so there were only a few tied to the sides of the vast aft deck, to replace any damaged traps we might find.

Manny’s boat was certainly not as high-tech as some of the newer lobster boats you see in and around Wendover harbor nowadays. But it did have all sorts of gadgets he’d never had on his old boats, and Manny proudly pointed them out to me. There was a GPS system, satellite radio, ship-to-shore phone, which you’d think would be obsolete now that we all have cell phones, but Manny said that the cell service gets sketchy once you leave the harbor.

Manny started up the engine, and the still morning was suddenly filled with the engine’s thick, earnest chugging. The smell of dead fish and gasoline and salt was all around. Manny and Frank poured buckets of dead fish into the massive, reeking bait tanks and started scooping them into tiny mesh bait bags. Frank jumped out onto the dock, untied the lines, then jumped back on board, and we were off.

It occurred to me as we cruised through the near-empty harbor that I had never been out on the water in the winter. Well, there was the winter in the early sixties when the harbor froze over and we all skated from the landing to Lighthouse Point, but I had not been out on a boat after October, ever. It was freezing. Frank had been right. Manny offered me one of the chairs in the cabin, but even there, the wind burned the tops of my ears and I was sprayed with surf from the side of the boat.

“Manny, where do ya keep all ya extra gear?” Frank hollered when he saw me covering my ears with my gloved hands.

“There’s a big old plastic bin down below. Go have a look, Hildy. Otherwise, you’re gonna get soaked,” shouted Manny.

Shouting and hollering are the only ways to communicate on a commercial lobster boat; the engine is so loud. The men tend to say little to one another while out on the water, which may help explain why they say so much, so noisily, while seated at Barney’s, a local bar, in the afternoons.

I opened the hatch to the little cabin beneath the bow and found the bin, and soon I was wearing my own pair of fish gut–stained coveralls, though mine were dark gray, and a matching gray raincoat, about five sizes too large. The hat selection was grim. There were two knit hats, both of which were filthy and encrusted with who knew what. I sort of shook out the least offensive and pulled it over my head, and then I slunk to the stern of the boat and pretended I was admiring the view of the disappearing harbor. I didn’t have to pretend for long. I looked at the long jetty leading out to Lighthouse Point and recalled leaping across those rocks with my brother and sister when we were kids. We used to fish off the jetty. My brother caught a sand shark there once.

At the mouth of the harbor is old Peg Sweeney’s Rock, which is said to be haunted by the ghost of a young Wendover woman who was raped and murdered by a band of pirates there two hundred years ago. Supposedly, at night, you can still hear poor Peg Sweeney’s screams as you pass that rock. Generations of kids have motored, paddled, and sailed past the rocky ledge on summer nights and have scared one another half out of their minds with their own gasping and screaming. We motored out toward Singer’s Island. When I heard the engine lull, I turned to watch Frank take a long hook and snag up one of Manny’s black-and-gold buoys from the water. He pulled the buoy up, and Manny grabbed it and threw it over a cinch. Then he pushed a button and the cinch reeled in the line itself. When we were kids, Manny and his crew’d had to work the cinch by hand.

Manny saw me grinning at the impressive mechanics of the thing and he hollered, “Hydraulic cinch. Nice, huh, Hildy?”

“Wicked nice, Manny,” I said, and then I scrambled over to see what he had pulled in. Three keepers, a couple of crabs, and a cull. Frankie reached his hand into the wooden trap and tossed the crabs back into the water. He held a measuring gauge to the cull—it did look like it might be on the short side—but it was good, so he threw it into a holding tank with the others. Then he threw a bait bag into the trap, and I instinctively stepped back. Frankie hitched the lobster pot back to the casting line, which, as we drove off, would yank the trap back along the deck and into the water from the boat’s open stern. One of the reasons Lindsey and I used to perch on the bow is because of the danger of standing on the aft deck of a boat. Your foot can get caught up by the rope and you’d be pulled over in an instant, when the traps are being set. Manny always worried about us unless we were up on the bow.

Manny was driving on to the next buoy and Frank was busy banding the claws of the captured lobsters to prevent them from culling each other.

“Give me some gloves, Frankie,” I said. “I’ll band ’em.”

Frank managed to find me a pair of the thick neoprene gloves and I started snapping bands around the flailing, clacking claws of the lobsters. I’d forgotten how beautiful fresh-caught lobsters are in all their dappled hardness, before their mottled scalloped armor of semiprecious hues—sapphire, topaz, and emerald—fades into a general muddy green. The lobster loses its luster in a tank. You should really see one when it’s first pulled from the sea, when it still defiantly grips a piece of seaweed in its claw and tries to flip you off with its tail.

Frank snagged the next buoy and we settled into a little routine of catching pots, banding, then baiting and setting the pots back in the sea. The sun was well up above the horizon now and we had all removed a layer or two. The work warmed us up. Finally, we were approaching Grey’s Point.

“Drive ’er on a little closer to the point, Manny,” Frankie called when he saw me squinting off at it.

Manny steered the boat toward shore and then I saw it: a big, beautiful Nantucket-style home with a sprawling porch. It faced the end of the point, and yes, it had views from all sides. It was going to be stunning. I noted the cedar shingles on the roof, counted the chimneys, got a glimpse of a three-bay detached carriage house.

“Whatta ya think it’ll go for, Hildy?” Manny asked.

“They’ll ask ten and they’ll get eight,” I said.

I was already designing the brochure in my head. I’d have an aerial photo taken, and one from the water, too. I’d put an ad in
Boston
magazine and
The
New York Times Magazine.
The Santorelli brothers would be crazy not to list it with me.

Manny and Frank hooted. It was an outrageous sum. I knew I could get it, if only I could get them to list it with me.

“Okay, I’ve seen enough,” I said. Then I remembered the coffee.

“Anybody want coffee or a muffin?”

“Hell YEAH,” said Manny. I passed out the muffins and, lacking cups, we all took turns sipping the coffee from the thermos. It was still good and hot. We chugged out to the next lobster pot.

It was late morning when we had set the last trap, and Frankie and I leaned against the side of the boat on the way back to the harbor. I was smiling. I hadn’t had so much fun in years. Out on the water with two old friends. An exciting real-estate prospect. We were heading into the wind on the way back and we all put our layers back on. It had been a good haul. Thirty-eight keepers.

“Any of that coffee left, Hildy?” Manny called back.

“Yeah, here,” I said, passing him the thermos.

“Hey, Frankie, go in the hold. There’s a bottle of Jameson in there. We’ll make us some Irish coffee.”

Now that just made me smile. An Irish coffee sounded like just the thing.

Frankie looked at me uncertainly.

“What?” I asked. “Go ahead.”

“Okay.” He smiled. “I thought I heard that you quit drinkin’ or somethin’.”

“Well, I quit drinking too much is all,” I said, which seemed to please him, and he clambered off into the hold and returned with the bottle of Irish whiskey. He poured a healthy amount into the thermos, and then he poured in a little more. He handed it to me first. I took a sip and smiled at its delightful wallop and passed it on to Manny and Frankie.

It was a half hour’s ride back to the landing, but we took our time. I felt the sun on my face, and when I closed my eyes, it was no longer winter, but many long-gone summers all at once, beaming down on me with such a golden brilliance that I couldn’t see for a moment when I opened my eyes and I had to blink until the blurred shapes of Manny and Frank took their familiar forms against the horizon again. We cruised past the seemingly endless stretch of beach in front of the Hart estate and then we passed the strip of private beach in front of the Newbolds’ house. We all gazed silently at a small woman in a parka with a fur-lined hood who stood on that narrow strip of sand. A German shepherd was leaping in front of her. She threw a large piece of driftwood for the dog and he streaked across the beach after it, then carried it triumphantly back to her. How lonely she looked, from where I stood then, shoulder-to-shoulder with a couple of Wendover’s own; three old townies with carefully preserved memories of one another, memories of the way we looked and felt in the best of our youth. I imagined that Rebecca would be horrified to learn that I had spent the morning out on a lobster boat with Frankie Getchell and Manny Briggs. She knew them only as they were now, a couple of stinky old bachelors, long past their sell-by dates. I had been madly enamored of both of them when I was a girl, and now I was once again as we moved through the harbor, the hot whiskey thawing my memory. I looked at Manny, whose whiskers were gray but whose teeth, when he grinned, were still strong and white. Frankie, standing a few feet away, had the angular profile of an Anawam chief, from where I stood watching him, and when he turned and caught me looking at him, I blushed like a schoolgirl and looked back at the shore. Rebecca was wrestling the driftwood from the jaws of the dog, then she flung it once again across the beach. I pitied her then. Pitied Rebecca all alone on the beach—all alone on the private beach where she didn’t belong.

We passed Singer’s Island and Lighthouse Point and old Peg Sweeney’s Rock. We drank the Irish coffee until the morning took on a lovely semilucid calm, and when we got back to the dock, I hosed down the deck while Manny and Frankie unloaded the tanks and traps. Then Frankie took me home. He dropped me off in front of my house. He had to check on his crew. I had to take a nap.

“Why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow night?” I said.

“Dinner? Well, I dunno, what’s tomorrow?”

“Saturday. I’ll make a stew. Something simple.”

Frank seemed to have to think about this a little too long, so I shrugged and started to climb out of the truck, and then he said, “Okay, Hildy. What time?”

“Come around seven.”

I did take a little nap, and when I woke up, reeking of whiskey and bait, I took a shower and walked my dogs. Then I drove up to the office to check in with Kendall before she left for the day.

“Cassie Dwight called and said it was kind of urgent,” Kendall said when I walked in. She handed me my mail and the rest of my messages and I went into my office to call Cassie.

“Can we push back the closing date, Hildy?” asked Cassie.

The buyers had originally wanted to close by February 1, and I had pushed them back until the end of the month. They had to be out of their house by March 1.

“I don’t think so, Cassie,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

“We still haven’t found a place in Newton or anywhere near there. It’ll be really hard to get a rental with Jake.…”

“Well, it’s against the law for anyone to discriminate against you because of Jake, first of all, and second, it’s just impossible. The buyers need to be out of their house by the first of the month.”

There was a long silence. Then Cassie said, “They were holding a spot for us at the Newton school for the spring term, but the spot is gone. Now they can’t take us until the fall. If we move now, we’ll have to find an interim program. Patch will be commuting all this way for nothing. I’m just wondering what’ll happen if we … back out. Of the sale, I mean.”

I was floored. Finding a buyer for the Dwights’ house had seemed like a minor miracle. Now Cassie was hoping another miracle would happen in four months, when it suited her.

“You’ll have lost a huge opportunity, Cassie. I can’t guarantee we’ll be able to find you another buyer by next summer.”

“I know, but isn’t the summer a better time to sell? Aren’t more people looking?”

“Yes, and more houses will be listed in your price range,” I said.

And they won’t have holes in the walls and stains on the floors
is what I didn’t say.

“Patch thinks we should pull out of the sale,” Cassie said quietly.

“Okay, listen, Cassie. It’s Friday afternoon. I want you guys to think about this over the weekend. Maybe I can find something for you to rent around here. But I really think you should sell now.”

“But if we spend all that money on a Wendover rental, we’ll be spending down our income from the house.”

“Just think about it,” I said.

fourteen

“
Hi, Mom. I want to come home. I have a friend who’s driving to Boston Sunday morning and then I thought I’d take the train out and stay until Christmas. I had a fight with Adam and this whole roommate situation sucks. I need to get out of the city for a while.”

This was Emily’s message on my voice mail Saturday morning. Christmas was a week from the coming Tuesday. I had spent the morning out shopping because I had invited Frankie for dinner. Now I was regretting the invitation. It had seemed like a grand idea when we were all chummy in the back of Manny’s boat, but really, what did Frankie and I have in common? What would we talk about? Frankie didn’t like to talk at all.

I wasn’t surprised at Emily’s message. I knew that she had had a falling-out with one of her roommates and now the other was siding against her. They were three artists in their mid-twenties. They needed to grow up. Emily worked as a temp and was free to come and go as she pleased. She spent months at artists’ colonies. Last year, she had spent the whole summer on the Vineyard, teaching art. Now she wanted to come home, and I’m ashamed to admit that I was less than thrilled. I had gotten into a little routine with my nightly wine. But now I wouldn’t be able to, with Emily there.