Текст книги "Beach Strip"

Автор книги: John Lawrence Reynolds

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3.

Glass, glass, glass. Stay away from broken glass. Don’t run with a glass in your hand. Never take glass containers to the beach. Glass in the sand beneath bare feet. I am a child on the beach. No, I am a woman on a sofa.

Glass, glass, glass. My arm ached. I wanted to throw up.

Oh, glass. And a man’s voice: “I think she’s awake.”

Open your eyes, I told myself. I did not want to.

Not glass. Lass. “Lass, lass, lass.” A voice like porridge. Warm, rich, soft. My neighbour Maude Blair was speaking to me. Fifty years out of Glasgow and she still wore her soft highland burr like a tartan, like a brooch in the shape of a thistle. Maude and her husband, Jock, are two of the few friends I have on the beach strip. Not “How are ya?” friends you pass on a walk or in the supermarket. I have many of those. I mean friends who know and care about you. They’re more difficult to find. The beach strip is made up of individuals who prefer to remain that way.

Maude was stroking my head, and when I opened my eyes she smiled at me but spoke to someone else, out of my view. “Aye, she’s fine now,” Maude said. “She’s awake. You’re awake and all right, aren’t you, lass?”

Two medical attendants entered from the kitchen. They looked purposeful, the way professionals do when they’re allowed to demonstrate their training and use their tools. They took my blood pressure, shone lights into my eyes, gave me a pill and some water, asked if I needed a blanket, and left, satisfied that they had practised on a living person.

I rose from the sofa, helped by Maude Blair. I stumbled into the kitchen and sat slumped in a chair, drained in the manner you have when your body’s supply of tears is exhausted. Nothing ached, but everything pained me.

“Should I be staying with you?” Maude asked. Her hands were touching my head, my shoulders, my arms, as though she wanted to assure herself or me that I wasn’t falling apart physically as much as I appeared to be mentally.

I hugged her to me, burying my face against the printed pattern of her dress, and permitted myself to wail while Maude patted the back of my head gently, saying, “There, there.”

When I sat back, I saw Jock, Maude’s husband, peering around Mel and two uniformed officers, all three making notes on small paper pads.

“We need to question Mrs. Marshall,” Mel said to Maude, then added “privately,” and Maude nodded and stood, looking from me to Jock and back again, dabbing at her eyes with a small lace-trimmed handkerchief. Jock raised a hand to me, then took Maude’s arm and walked toward the back door, into the garden.

Mel followed them, returned to speak to the two uniformed cops, who nodded and left, and sat facing me.

“Who did it?” I asked him.

Someone had brought coffee in paper cups and set several on the kitchen table. Mel placed one in front of me.

“He did. Gabe shot himself.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Josie—”

“My husband did not shoot himself in the head. My husband did not tell me to meet him out there just so I could find him dead. My husband was not that mean or that selfish. I spoke to him, he called me on the telephone, he was fine, he was Gabe …”

“When did he call you?”

“An hour ago. Maybe more.”

“Where were you?”

“With Mother. Just down …” My throat tightened. “You know where she is.” I shook my head. My words emerged between sobs. “Gabe did not kill himself. Where was the gun? Why wasn’t it in his hand? How could he shoot himself without a gun in his hand?”

“The gun was there. He was kneeling when he shot himself. He fell to his left, his arm … when he died, all the muscles relaxed, Josie. That’s what happens. The arm drops, the gun is released. It was there on the blanket. The weapon does not always remain in the hands of a suicide, Josie. I’ve seen it a dozen times. The recoil, the kick of the gun—”

I didn’t want to hear about it. “You’ve seen it a dozen times. Good for you. I’ve seen it once and I hate it. I hate it and I don’t understand it. I don’t believe it, either.”

Mel rose from his chair and walked outside, leaving me listening to sounds I had rarely heard on other evenings: traffic on the twin high bridges, feet shuffling along the boardwalk, muffled noises from factories along the bay. When he returned he said, “There’s an open bottle of wine with him.”

I told him I knew that. I knew all about it. Merlot. Rich, red, chewy Merlot. That’s what we drank.

Walter Freeman entered the kitchen with authority and without knocking. “Josie,” Walter said, “I need a statement.”

“About what?”

“About Gabe calling you tonight.”

“Who told you that?”

“I did,” Mel said. “Somebody has to put the facts down.”

“Then put down the fact that my husband did not commit suicide.” I was crying again. Tears must be inexhaustible.

Walter gestured to Mel, who rose from the chair and walked outside. Walter took his place at the table, watching me as he set his wire-bound notebook in front of him. He reached for a pen in the pocket of his cheap shirt. Walter always wore cheap clothes. Walter had no class. “Walter Freeman is a man,” Gabe said to me once, “who is confident enough in himself to be an ass and not care about it. You have to admire him for that.” I did not admire Walter for anything.

“You see this?” Walter said. He took a small page of lined paper from inside his notebook. Two pieces of sticky tape extended on either side, like coiled transparent wings. On the note was, I’m in the bushes. Get naked! It looked like Gabe’s writing. It was Gabe’s writing.

I shook my head.

“It was stuck to the door, the back door,” Walter said. “Look like Gabe’s writing to you?”

I nodded.

Walter inserted the note between the pages of his notebook. “What did Gabe say when he called you tonight?”

“He asked me to come home. You saw the note. He wanted me to go with him into the bushes.”

“Why?”

I looked at Walter, who was staring at me with the same expression he wore, I suspected, while reading a telephone directory. I did not want to speak to Walter, and I wanted him to know it, so I replaced my despair with anger. It made a good substitute. “Why the hell do you think?”

Walter blinked. “We didn’t find his clothes. It appears he left the house naked, wrapped in the blanket. Once you’re inside those bushes at night, nobody can see you.”

“Do you suppose that’s why he wanted to make love there?”

Walter wrote something in his notebook, and as he wrote he said, “Tell me what time your husband called you. At a retirement home, was it?”

“Trafalgar Towers. My mother lives there. I work there twice a week. You already know that. It was around nine.”

Walter’s eyebrows moved up his forehead and stayed there. “It’s past eleven now. You haven’t been here for, what? Half an hour? What took you so long?”

“I walked.”

“Which way? Along the highway?”

“Along the lake to the bridge.”

“Any reason you came down the lake tonight, didn’t walk along the road?”

I shrugged.

“Coming back along the road should have taken you twenty minutes. Half an hour at the most. You took over an hour to get here. Why so long?”

“I was not aware that a wife needs to drop everything and run home just because her husband wants to screw her in the moonlight.”

I watched Walter’s eyebrows descend slowly into place. “What was the state of your marriage?” he asked. He was making notes again.

“The state of our marriage? What the hell kind of question is that?” I looked away, then back again. “The state of our marriage? I don’t know. Michigan? No, Florida. Gabe liked Florida. How’s that for a state of marriage? If Florida is a state of marriage, is Nevada a state of divorce?”

“Josie—”

“Call me Mrs. Marshall. That’s my name. My husband is dead, so I’m the widow Marshall now, but it’s still my name, and you damn well better use it.”

It was a tantrum, but I thought I deserved to throw one and Walter Freeman deserved to catch it. He drew a deep breath and started to speak, but I wasn’t finished. “Did Gabe leave a note? Where’s his note?”

“There is no note.” Walter nodded at his own words as though confirming something. He looked up at me. “Was your marriage happy, Mrs. Marshall?”

“Delirious.”

“Are you certain?”

“I know when I’m happy.”

“Did your husband give you any gifts?”

“Of course he gave me gifts. And I gave him gifts.”

“Expensive ones? Recently?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Were there conflicts in your marriage?”

“Conflicts? Like arguments? Sure there were. We were married.”

“I was thinking of other partners. I was thinking of that kind of conflict.”

I shook my head. “Think about something else.”

“Neither of you was having an affair?”

“No.”

Whenever I lie, I’m convinced something happens to inform the other person that I am not being truthful. I blush, I look away, I stutter, my mouth gets dry, maybe my nose grows longer, I don’t know. Walter Freeman knew I was lying, and he sat looking at me, saying nothing, which made me so uncomfortable that I spoke first. “Who found Gabe’s body?”

Walter pushed both lips forward like a man playing a trumpet, a habit he had when thinking deeply, or as deeply as Walter’s intelligence could take him. “Couple of kids. Down on the beach. They heard the shot and thought it came from your house. One of them called us on his cell phone, and a bunch of them came up here, looking around. They found the opening into the bushes. Stomped all over the place. Screwed up a lot of things, but …” Walter shrugged.

“If I heard a gunshot, I’d run the other way.”

“So would most people over the age of twenty.” He stood up just as Mel entered the room again.

“They’re ready to take Gabe away,” Mel said. “Is there anything I can do, Josie? Somebody I can call?”

I could only shake my head. I could think of nobody I wanted to speak to. Only Gabe. “I want to go with him,” I said. “I want to see him and hug him.”

“I’ll arrange something,” Walter said. “You can follow the coroner’s vehicle in a cruiser. It’ll be out front. The officer will call you.” He walked out of the kitchen through the back door, and Mel took his place in the chair facing me.

“I know it’s hard to accept.” Mel looked back over his shoulder to confirm we were alone, then reached for my hand and held it as he spoke. “It always is. Gabe did it. He had reason to. We both know that. God, I feel terrible. Gabe was …” He dropped my hand and turned away.

“He wanted to make love to me.” I was crying again. Damn it, damn it.

“He carried his gun out there with him, Josie.” Mel turned back to me. “Maybe he planned to do something else.”

“Like what?”

He wiped his eyes and looked at me.

“Bullshit,” I said. “That’s bullshit, Mel. He wouldn’t do that. Gabe loved me.”

“He knew things.”

“He suspected them. Unless you told him. Did you tell him, Mel? Jesus, did you tell him?”

Mel shook his head. “How could I? Why would I?” He knelt to look directly at me. “It’s his weapon, Josie. They’ll retrieve the bullet, and when they match it to his gun, what else can they think?”

I walked to the cupboard next to the refrigerator and opened the top drawer. Then I walked to the pantry and looked behind the sugar. Gabe always followed the same routine with his weapon when he was off duty, removing the ammunition clip and placing it in the drawer near the refrigerator, and keeping the gun itself in the pantry behind the sugar. All the cops had their own way of dealing with their guns. Gabe told me they joked with each other about it. One put his ammunition clip inside an empty cereal box. Another hid his behind his wife’s box of tampons.

Neither piece of Gabe’s gun was where he would hide it. I leaned against the kitchen counter, staring into the sink.

“It’s his gun, Josie.” Mel was watching me, his head tilted to one side.

“He wouldn’t take it with him,” I said. “Not to meet me. He knows I hate guns.”

Someone called Mel’s name from the door to the garden, and he left me alone for the first time since I arrived home. Gabe disliked carrying a gun, and he disliked police officers who expressed a desire to use their weapon. “If I didn’t have to carry one, I wouldn’t,” he told me once. “Anybody who collects weapons or loves to fire them or says he loves them—I’ve heard guys say that—well, they’re sick.” Gabe was always late for his tests at the firing range, and he always dismantled his gun as soon as he arrived home because he knew I hated the sight of it. He would not have taken it with him to the caragana bushes for that reason. Not to meet me. Not to use it on me. He loved me that much. I knew he did.

When Mel returned, he closed the door behind him. “The coroner wants to move the … to move Gabe,” he said. “The officer in the cruiser out front is ready to take you to the morgue. You’re sure you want to do this?”

I nodded.

“You could ride with me, but …”

Riding with Mel was the last thing I wanted to do. No, seeing Gabe on a slab in the morgue was the last thing I wanted to do. I could avoid one, but not the other. I wanted no one to accompany me to see Gabe. I wanted to speak with no one. I didn’t even want to look at anyone. I buried myself in myself. I didn’t want to do that, either, but I had no choice.

4.

I don’t know how long it took the officer to drive me to the morgue, or the route he took to get there, or even what he looked like. I just made myself as small as possible against the corner of the back seat of the cruiser and kept my eyes closed, wishing at times that someone was with me and wishing at other times that I would see no one for days.

The car pulled to a stop and the officer driving it said, “We’re here.” Through the windshield I saw a small, frosted door with morgue stencilled across the glass, and I followed the cop inside.

We entered a room that looked like the reception area of my dentist’s office. Clean, antiseptic and grey. Chrome and vinyl chairs. Dated magazines spread across a low table. I steadied myself against a wall while the officer disappeared through a metal door and emerged a few minutes later with a woman dressed in a green top and trousers who said I should wait for a few minutes and that she could bring me coffee or water. I think I said, “Just bring me my husband,” and sat alone on one of the vinyl chairs.

I waited ten minutes. I know because I looked at a clock on the wall and was surprised to find it was three minutes after midnight. At thirteen minutes after midnight the woman returned and asked me to follow her, please, and I did, down a corridor and into a room that was all stainless steel, like the inside of a dishwasher, and there was Gabe, on a stainless steel table. Someone had laid a white towel across his groin. Another towel covered his head above his eyebrows, where the wound would show. His hands were wrapped in plastic bags. A man in a white coat stood with his back to me, preparing something on a counter, and the woman in green took my arm and held it, and I think she said she was sorry as we walked to the table.

I took Gabe’s arm in my hands, and it was my turn to say I was sorry, over and over again, telling Gabe while the woman stood at my elbow watching and the man in the white coat fussed over his instruments, his tools of dissection.

I have no idea how long I stood speaking to Gabe. I know I looked up to see the man in the white coat, an older, sweet-faced man who looked as though he mourned for every person he encountered on the slabs, watching me over the top of his glasses. I saw him flick his eyes from mine to the woman beside me and felt a slight tug on my arm. It was time to go. I pulled away from her long enough to lean over Gabe and kiss him lightly on the lips, whispered goodbye, and walked away.

The officer who had driven me to the morgue was waiting in the reception area, talking with Mel Holiday, and as I emerged from the morgue the two men separated. Mel asked me to sit down, took a chair beside me, and asked if he could get me anything. All I could do was stare at the floor and shake my head.

“Walter wants to get things started,” Mel said, “do the tests as soon as possible, get the autopsy results, get a report issued, and wrap everything up.” When I said nothing, he added as though I had asked why there was such a rush, “When this happens to an officer, people speculate, they talk, the media makes it a big deal, you know that. The longer it takes to settle things, to get the official word out, the more they talk.”

I remained silent.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked, bending to look at me.

“No,” I said. “I’m not okay. But I will be eventually. I hope.”

“You shouldn’t be alone tonight,” he said. “Who can you stay with?”

I shook my head. Wherever I was, I would not sleep.

“The woman who was talking to you, she and her husband,” Mel said. “Your neighbours, next door. They say you can stay with them, or the woman, she’ll come in and stay with you. It’s late, but we could call her. She’s waiting for us to call her.”

“The Blairs. Tell them no. Tell them thanks, but no.”

“You can’t stay alone. I can have a female officer sent over.”

I had been the emotionally crippled victim long enough. I no longer felt emotionally crippled. I began to feel anger at what had been done to Gabe, what had been done to me, what had been done to us. “Lovely,” I said to Mel. “We’ll sit and do embroidery together.”

“Damn it, Josie!” Mel snapped. He looked around. The uniformed officer had left to wait for me in the police cruiser, and the woman in green had returned to be with Gabe and the sweet old man with the knives and saws. “Gabe’s dead. I’ll miss him too. We worked together nearly a year. You know how close we were. And all you can do is come up with smart-ass comments?”

“No!” I shouted loud enough for anyone to hear. “No, I can’t keep playing the broken-hearted widow, because I don’t know how, Mel. Do you have something that will tell me how to behave? Is it in the police procedures manual? Do I dress in black and wear prayer beads? The hell I will. Take all your compassion and crap about sending female cops to sit with the grieving wife and shove it. I don’t need them. I need Gabe.”

I sat with my head in my hands and felt my rage dissolve. I heard Mel walk outside and speak to someone. When he returned, he stood in the middle of the room and said, “There will be two officers at your house all night, keeping things secure.”

I looked up to see him standing with his hands in his pockets, his eyes avoiding mine.

“We’ll have more forensics people there in the morning, when the light’s better,” he added. “If you need something, just ask the officers.”

“Tell them to stay outside,” I said. “Tell them I don’t want them knocking on my door, checking up on me or wanting to use the john.”

“The constable outside will take you home. You should stay with somebody tonight, but it’s your choice. I’ll be back at my place in a couple of hours.” Mel walked to the door and stood with his hand on the knob. “Call, just to talk or whatever, all right?”

“Mel?”

He looked back.

“Why did Walter Freeman want to know if Gabe had bought me any expensive gifts recently?”

Mel looked puzzled. “He asked you that?”

“Yes.”

“He must have something on his mind. I’ll find out.” Mel glanced out the window in the back door, then walked toward me. “Did he, Josie?”

“Did he what?”

“Buy you something expensive lately? Between you and me, so that when Walter explains why he asked you …”

I shook my head.

“Okay.” Mel told me to call whenever I wanted. He did not tell me his telephone number. He didn’t need to.

THE OFFICER DROVE ME HOME in the same silence as before. A handful of police and forensics people milled about the caragana bushes under intense lights. I permitted the constable to walk me to the door, thanked him, and entered the house, where I sat alone in the darkness, on a living-room chair, facing the window that looked west, away from the lake and toward the bay.

I watched the sky to the west, above the steel companies along the shore of the bay, begin to glow with the colour of peaches that changed to a redness like roses or perhaps of blood, and I began to relax at the sight, familiar from my childhood.

Those explosions of light had appeared in the night sky above my parents’ house, the one my father would pay for with his life, when I was a child. Their radiance would flood the room I shared with my sister, making the walls blush with a strange, roiling redness. I had no word for that colour, but I thought it might be the same shade of red as blood on the floor of an abattoir.

My grandfather had worked in an abattoir. For thirty-three years, five days a week, he slit the throats of cattle and hogs, calves and lambs and suckling pigs, sometimes a hundred or more each day. What does that do to a person? What does it say about his view of life. Or, more important, of death?

My grandfather did not die in the manner that the animals died. He died asleep on New Year’s Eve. In his own bed, totally sober. On the morning of the first day of 1967, my grandmother awoke and my grandfather didn’t. There was no slitting of throats, no rope of red blood shooting from the carotid arteries, no gasping realization. Just a dream that ended with his death.

Dad showed me his father’s killing knife, which represented most of my father’s inheritance. I remember the scimitar blade, worn with years of honing and stained with blood, like rust. It was all I knew of my grandfather, that knife and the job he held for all those years. Did he not want another job? Was he not qualified to do something besides killing? This bothers me. It did not bother my father, my mother, or my sister. But it bothers me, and I will never know the answer.

When I see the glow blossoming into the night sky from my house on the beach strip, the sight is comforting in the way that snapshots of old friends and lovers can be comforting. The friends have changed with time, and so has the light. It appears less frequently now, and is weaker. Like the people in the snapshots.

My father told me the red light in the sky was caused by molten slag pouring from the blast furnaces of the steel companies along the shore of the bay. Slag, he explained, was liquid stone as hot as the sun. The glow of the molten rock reflected off clouds of steam billowing from the coke ovens nearby. “Hot as lava, the slag is,” he said, “pouring from the blast furnaces like water when you open the tap in the bathtub. Melted limestone and other stuff they don’t want in the steel, all running into pits where it cools. And right next door are the coke ovens, where coal is heated to a thousand, two thousand degrees in sealed ovens, and it turns into coke. That’s what they use to fire the blast furnaces. Sometimes they open the coke ovens at the same time as they tap the slag, and they spray the hot coke with water … see, there it goes now.”

It was a cold day, and I was ten years old, I suppose. Not much older, because my father died on my twelfth birthday. As he spoke, a white cloud ascended into a faded blue sky to the north of our house, along the shore of the bay.

“They spray water on the hot coke so that it won’t burn up when it hits the air, y’see.” He was pointing at a rising white cloud that seemed to be powered from within, rolling as it climbed into the air. “That’s what makes the steam, the water they spray on the coke. That cloud’ll go up maybe a thousand, two thousand feet, and when it gets high like that at night, and they tap the slag in the blast furnace at the same time, it’s the firelight from the hot slag that bounces off the cloud and lights up this whole end of town.” He nodded his head and placed a cigarette in his mouth, watching the cloud of steam. “That’s what wakes you up at night sometimes. That’s the light that shines through your window, all right?” He looked down at me, patting his pockets, searching for his lighter. “All right? So there’s no reason to be scared when you see that light.”

He was wrong. The light never frightened me. It frightened my sister, Tina, but merely annoyed me because it reminded me of where we lived, amid the soot and the noise of the furnaces and mills that made the steel for the factories that were our neighbours. The crimson colour that shone in the night sky fascinated me because when he was a boy my father had visited the killing floor where my grandfather worked each day, standing ankle-deep in blood and water. My father had seen the liquid floor and described it to me, saying it was red, but not as red as blood itself because so much else was mixed with it from the animals that hung by their hind legs and writhed while dying. The image of the writhing, dying animals frightened me. My grandfather’s killing knife frightened me too. But not the hellish glow in the night sky above our house.

Few things frighten me today.

Which is not to say I am brave.

So maybe I’m a coward.

Men fear being labelled cowards in the same way they fear growing impotent, and I suppose Sigmund Freud would say “Precisely!” as though it should be obvious. It has never been obvious to me.

Women escape that particular silliness. Call me a redhead or call me a coward, what does it matter? So it is not difficult for me to use the word, and I felt no shame at my cowardice.

I had not wanted to meet Gabe on the blanket within the shrubs, the ones growing between the water’s edge and the boardwalk behind our home, because I feared what I had promised myself I would do that evening.

I had promised I would confess to Gabe that I had made love to Mel Holiday. That I could count the times and identify the locations and describe the positions, if that was what he wished to hear. That I had been more than foolish, I had been stupid and selfish. That I was sorry, more sorry than I could ever explain. That I promised I would never do it again because I loved Gabe and I would always love him, and I had never stopped loving him. That I wanted to tell him because I could no longer stand the guilt I felt each time we made love, or the fear I felt when Gabe looked at me in a certain way, as though he suspected the truth. I had told myself to deny, deny, deny if he asked, but every denial, I knew, would be another betrayal. Lately, every day that passed without telling him felt like a betrayal.

The truth is, I was still being selfish. I couldn’t stand the pain of guilt anymore, so I would pass it on to Gabe by confessing.

I would never have said it in that manner, in those words. I would have confessed through tears. I would also have confirmed suspicions that I feared Gabe already harboured. He had wanted, I knew, to dissolve those suspicions in the adolescent act of making love in the summer night air, smothering our giggles to avoid alerting passersby, drinking wine, and watching the moonlight and our hands pass over each other’s skin.

Would I have told him as soon as I arrived, there among the shrubs, me in my pants and T-shirt and him naked? It was unthinkable; it would have been unbearable. I wanted him dressed and sitting with me in our living room. I wanted him to see my face and understand how sorry I was, and how much I needed his forgiveness. I wanted to tell him that I would understand if he left me, but I did not want him to leave me. I never wanted him to leave me. So I had delayed returning, hoping he would decide I wasn’t coming to meet him on the blanket and he would wrap himself within it and return to the house and get dressed, and I would arrive home to tell him.

I believed Gabe would forgive me, and I had almost looked forward to the anger, the tears, the shouts, and the cleansing of confession.

But what if, I wondered, and this was why I needed to spend hours alone in the darkness of the house we shared: What if Gabe’s anger knew no bounds? What if his suspicion and rage were stronger than I knew? What if he had taken his gun with him to the blanket, not to kill himself but to kill me? And why did Walter Freeman ask if Gabe had given me any expensive gifts lately? Because he had, of course. And if anyone but Walter had asked, I might have admitted it.

I thought of all these things and more as the steam above the mills dissipated in the evening air, the glow of the slag vanishing with it, leaving the beach strip in its familiar darkness.

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, when immigrants were arriving from Italy and Croatia and Ireland and Poland to work in the steel plants and the factories along the bay, the wealthy families who owned the mills and the factories built summer residences on the beach strip. The strand was clean and uncluttered, the bay and the lake were teeming with fish, and air conditioning was an impossible dream. The August breezes that swept off the water and into the windowed towers of the cottages, each several times larger than the crowded homes of the immigrant factory workers who lived in the city, provided natural cooling, and this was where the wealthy families spent each summer. The rich factory owners sailed dinghies on the lake, their privileged children flew kites on the strand, and their pampered wives gossiped beneath parasols in their gardens. Irishwomen cleaned the rooms and laundered the linen, Scotswomen made the cucumber sandwiches and sliced the ham, and Welshmen tended the gardens. God bless the Empire.

They moved to the beach strip, these rich families, every June with their children and servants and steamer trunks, and remained until September. The husbands were here only on weekends. As I grew older and learned about the beach strip and about men, I wondered if the absence of the husbands from their families during the week permitted them to spend time with their mistresses back in the city, or spend money on the girls who worked the side streets near the factories. I suspected the men would tolerate the city air, heavy with smoke and heat and humidity, in return for the freedom to entertain young girls alone in their mansions.

About a dozen of the original Victorian cottages remain on the beach. These gingerbread-trimmed fire traps, restored and winterized, sit crowded between houses like the one Gabe and I purchased, a frame bungalow with a lawn in front and a garden in back. Our house shares nothing with the summer mansions of the Victorians except location. It is dull in design, square in shape, predictable in layout. “Amorphous,” Mother called it when she first saw it, back when she could speak. Mother’s vocabulary was always elaborate and surprising, and the nature of the hell she finds herself in now can be defined by that fact. She used that term herself when she wrote, on the small blackboard, I live in an unspeakable hell!!! When she handed it to me, she smiled at the pun.