Page 114 of The Treasure House

Jake and I went into the parlor. Hazel saw Jake and went into paroxysms of joy, wriggling and lurching on her leash. Jake went and collected her. She exploded with happiness, licking his neck madly.

“Do all adults have this many secrets?” Flo asked as she headed up the stairs to bed.

“Not all of them.” I sighed. “Just the ones in this house.”

Twenty-Six

OXEYE, MAINE, 1960

It took twenty-two porcelain cats before Marly decided she could see Freddie de Marche in person again. He’d sent her postcards and packages regularly over the past few years. She tacked each postcard to her corkboard, so she could see them from her bed.

For the cat lady, the card had read, when the first cat had arrived. From your friend F.

She’d snorted. He was such a smart-ass. She wasn’t actually going to be a cat lady because he didn’t love her. In fact, she’d started dating Terry Davis the spring after Sylvie’s wedding, when he’d asked her to the prom. And he’d pinned her by New Year’s. He was no Freddie, but he was sweet and funny and a really good kisser. And he made her last years of high school less lonely, especially with everything that was happening with her mother.

There had been rounds and rounds of doctors’ appointments and then the bewildering diagnosis of senility. Although the doctors argued a lot. Some called it “pre-senility” because Mom wasn’t that old. In the end, the diagnosis didn’t really matter as there was nothing that could be done. By the time Marly was halfway into senior year, Mom had to be hospitalized, because she’d started to wander. And once she’d nearly burned the house down trying to heat soup. She walked the house at night, talking, hallucinating people who weren’t there. She often called out to the boys, thinking they were still young children, ordering them to drink their milk or pack up their toys. Once she scared Marly badly by standing over her, singing a lullaby, thinking Marly was a baby who couldn’t sleep.

The hospital always made Marly cry. It was a bleak and sterile place that smelled of antiseptic. Mom shared a room with a couple of other women, both a lot older than her, and all of them had to be sedated. They sat in their chairs, or in their beds, placated by chemicals, their eyes vacant.

Marly had chosen to go to Wellesley when the time came for college, because it was close to home and Mom was only a thirty-minute bus ride away. She went regularly and sat there for the full visiting hours, even when her mother didn’t seem to know who she was.

Her romance with Terry didn’t survive their move to college. He’d chosen Stanford and neither of them were interested in a long-distance relationship. That hadn’t been love, anyway, she’d thought after she’d wept a few tears and picked herself up again. For a while she dated a friend of her brother Virge’s. His name was Acton, which she never quite accepted. Acton wasn’t a name that inspired passion. And neither was Acton the man, who preferred football games and frat parties to romance.

As she got older, Marly developed some sympathy for Freddie de Marche, and she often felt that maybe she owed him an apology for not responding to a single letter. And for that scene on the beach. Acton had a seventeen-year-old brother and he seemed very young. If he upped and declared his love for her, Marly wouldn’t know what to say. He was a child. She tried to imagine that day on the beach from Freddie’s perspective. Honestly, he’d been quite kind.

Sometimes she shuddered to think what might have happened to her, if she’d propositioned a guy other than Freddie de Marche. Now that she’d been to college and learned a thing or two about men, she had a pretty good idea of the kinds of things that could have happened to her, alone on a beach, telling an adult man she loved him.

But Freddie had always been a stand-up guy.

Even now, he was a stand-up guy. As soon as he’d learned about her mother from Elton and Sylvie, he’d shifted from postcards to writing Marly long, distracting, chummy letters, telling her about his leave in foreign countries. It turned out that Freddie de Marche loved the army.

You know, short stuff, I think this was exactly what I needed. The structure, the comradeship, the adventure. It sure beats contract law.

Marly often felt a pang as she read his letters or received another exotic postcard. Her own life felt narrow and constrained, hemmed in by that thirty-minute bus ride to her mother. Aunt Betty and Sylvie were good about visiting Mom, and Dad went twice a week on Wednesday evenings and Sunday afternoons, but still the thought of Mom there all alone haunted Marly. The thought of Dad home alone haunted her too. He ate TV dinners on a tray in front of the TV at night. It made her sad.

Sometimes, in the dead of night, when she lay awake in her dorm room, staring at the collection of little cats on the windowsill or the postcards on the corkboard, she thought maybe it would be best if Mom would just slip away. But Mom was young, and her body was healthy. It was only her mind that was wasting away.

“Your mother would be so proud of you,” Aunt Betty said at Marly’s college graduation. She’d come along with Dad and had wept the whole time. Not really because she was proud of Marly, more because of the Mom-shaped hole in their lives. After the ceremony, they’d taken Marly out to lunch at a fancy restaurant and Uncle Don and Paul had joined them. Bobby had been away at graduate school in Connecticut, while Virgil was in Pensacola meeting his girlfriend’s parents. They’d both sent her telegrams to congratulate her, and Paul brought her a bunch of chrysanthemums from all three of them when he arrived at the restaurant. Her brothers were ginger with her these days, as though she might break like Mom had.

“We’re all proud of you,” Dad rumbled, covering Marly’s hand with his briefly and squeezing it. He didn’t meet her eye. Then he blindsided her with a gift so ridiculous she didn’t know what to say.

It was the house in Oxeye.

“Sylvie and Elton bought the place next door,” Aunt Betty said, “and Templeton has a summer place in Camden, so Cilla will have a place there too, after the wedding.” She cleared her throat. “But I don’t have the heart to go back there,” she said, her face locking up as she tried not to cry.

“What about the boys?” Marly said helplessly, looking at Paul.

“We don’t want it, Marls,” Paul told her.

“I’ll leave them the city house,” Dad said gruffly. “You can have this.”

“We want you to have it now,” Aunt Betty said, “so you can enjoy it…”

While you can. The unfinished words hung in the air. Because, it turned out, Mom wasn’t the only person in the family to have suffered early senility. Marly’s granny’s mother had too, and so had two of her brothers and one of her sisters.

It’s like Russian roulette, she wrote to Freddie de Marche when she finally gathered the courage to write him back. You don’t know whose chamber has the bullet and whose doesn’t. The way they all looked at me made me think they were sure it’s going to be me. Maybe because I look like Mom? And they might be right. Sometimes I think I might have signs of it, when I lose my keys, or can’t think of the right word. Anyway, Daddy told me to go and take the summer at the house, that he and Aunty Bet can keep an eye on Mom. He says he’ll visit her every second day. But I don’t know. When I think of it, I’m crushed with guilt. There’s so much guilt, Freddie. When I think of how snappy I used to be with her. Oh, I wish I could have the time back to do it again. I’d be so much nicer. But then I think I should be nice to everyone now because I might be thinking this about them tomorrow. Yet when I try it, I run into the same old problem. Ordinary life just gets in the way of being nice to people. Sometimes you just do the best you can and you’re still snappy. Well, I am. So, the long and the short of it is I’m running away to Oxeye for the summer, to my own little summer house. I’m sure I’ll be desperately lonely.

Marly arrived at Oxeye in late June, driving in during a sun shower, when thick bars of hazy light fell like streamers from the clouds to the ocean. She hadn’t been back to the summer place since Mom had been hospitalized and she felt a rising tide of nostalgia as she slid past the spit and the white shimmer of Saint-Cyr in the woods.