Much of that winter I spent kicking through the wreckage. Snowfall was unusually heavy that season and, trekking up the long driveway, I sometimes sank hip-deep into drifts, stumbling and lurching until, at the end of a curve, the remains of what had been my father’s house came into view.
The chimneys were now blackened. The shell of the place was gone. The interior was left open to the elements. Wallpaper seared off the walls in ice-glazed scrolls. With nothing visible to support it, a section of the second floor cantilevered into thin air.
People often say houses burn to the ground. In truth it doesn’t work that way. Fire is a hungry and alive thing, devouring what it wants and brushing past what it can’t be bothered to consume. Seeking fuel, the flames licked across a floor and up a stair leading to my little sister’s room and then stopped. Everything around it was torched, yet her bedroom remained as though nothing had occurred. Her canopy bed was covered with a favorite patchwork star quilt, rumpled as if she’d just left it. Hanging above it was a lithograph of a red fox crouched atop a mossy hummock, lying in wait for two rabbits huddled below.
At the three windows overlooking what had been a dense hedge of yew bushes, curtains still hung from their rods, rigid ice flutes frozen in place. The view from those windows took in the trampled mounds of the bushes, which opened onto the broad rear yard, itself backed onto a hedge separating our property from that of an adjacent estate. The yews now resembled filthy bread loaves, blanketed in ash.
Part of the roof remained intact so, tenuous as it was, it provided me with some kind of cover as I prowled through the gutted remains. Here were the charred dining room chairs, their sleek modernist splats burnt to spearpoints; here, in the pantry, the homely Pfaltzgraff everyday dishes—relics of an earthy sixties phase of my mother’s—stood molten together by heat in a lopsided accordion; here, an Italian modernist dining table my parents shipped home from Rome, its figured rosewood surface dulled with frost, legless and flat to the floor, bedded in a heap of soot.
What exactly I was looking for was not altogether clear. Much was destroyed or had been stolen. Vanished were the contents of a silver cabinet in the pantry that curiously remained otherwise intact. Its locked door had been pried and the contents of the shelves, with their linings of felted fawn Pacific cloth, cleaned out thoroughly. I looked further to see what, if anything, was left behind from among those fancy, useless objects we possessed: the deep walnut box containing a seldom-used set of Gorham silverware in the King Edward pattern, presented to my parents on their engagement along with objects like a filigreed sterling Georgian cake basket; twelve stemmed silver goblets suggestive of a future in which, for a newly married couple barely in their twenties, sterling champagne coupes would be thought essential. Such were the things we had, and now there was nothing. Whatever the fire spared was carried off by firemen, who helped themselves to our stuff once the flames were out.
It surprised me at first to think that firemen steal. Later I would learn that it is not so unusual for things to walk away with the heroes in high boots. Some of what was taken had never amounted to much more than props suggestive of a life and class not ours to claim in the first place. Some of it may even have been “borrowed” from its original owners by the givers, though I could not know that then. Standing amid what was left of all that, I realized it no longer mattered.
Yet what weighed on me as I surveyed the scene was a sense of greater inevitability, as if the fire were a natural progression in a chain of disasters that occurred during a year of my life that stretched and compressed like a bellows, culminating in December 1975 with our house ablaze. So odd would these events seem in the retelling that I seldom mentioned them. In truth, I had begun to take for granted that a house that burns in the middle of a winter night was the sort of thing that happened to us.
The cause was straightforward. An ice storm striking the East Coast had taken out electricity in a string of bay towns along the North Shore of Long Island. Manhattan, where I lived, had been unaffected. Sometime during the night power had flashed on and then abruptly gone dead, the surge strong enough to short old wires in a wall and, as they began to smolder and burn, to set the house alight. Its layout accounted, in a sense, for why certain parts of the structure burned while others were left unscathed. A low rambling structure built in the twenties as the gardener’s cottage of a Gold Coast estate, the house had gradually expanded and been added to through the decades until it spread across three levels, a shingled up-and-down place, with additions that eventually stretched it to twenty rooms—more if you counted a large garden shed and a caretaker’s apartment above a garage converted from a carriage barn.
On the train from the city and then in a cab from the station I had already begun to feel as if made of lead. It was not sadness about the fire itself that weighed me down so much as a sense that, different from the placid lives I fantasized others having, in ours the conventional progression of familial milestones had been replaced by a parade of calamities.
What I had come looking for that day was a suitcase. Pebbled caramel leather with a rigid frame, saddle-stitched handles, and stiff leather bumpers at the corners, it had accompanied my mother for a brief stint at college and, when that dream was shelved in favor of marriage and motherhood, repurposed as photograph storage. Even empty the thing weighed a ton, and from its heft alone you could infer the existence of a world in which redcaps, bellmen, and porters were always on hand to carry your stuff.
Over a succession of weekends I had come looking for the case, trudging through the snow and then up the long driveway to what had been our red-painted door. My feet numbed quickly and, immediately upon entry, the acrid smoke smell caught in my nostrils. Ash stuck to the bottoms of my rubber-soled duck boots, and frozen vertical ridges formed in the seams of my jeans. While my sense of what the suitcase held was blurry, I recalled clearly a black-and-white snapshot of my mother carrying that very same suitcase to her all-girls Franciscan college in Joliet, Illinois. First in a graduated lineup of bright young women posed for a campus photographer, each with a valise at her feet, she was exceptionally and brightly pretty and more full-cheeked than she would ever again permit herself to be. In the style of a period when young women could not put girlhood behind them fast enough, she looked forty at eighteen.
They all did. Shiny-faced and with Lauren Bacall pageboys, wearing dark lipstick and an air of precocious maturity, her classmates in the photographs were lovely and somehow interchangeable. There had been plenty of pictures of my mother from those days and also from high school, a happy time for her, documented in dewy portrait poses and snapshots from the convent school she attended in Manhattan, images that confirmed what she was always too modest to mention, that she had been valedictorian of her class, captain of the drama and debate clubs, and the star of her swimming team.
That she was a beautiful swimmer was one fact impossible for her to downplay. Anatomically, she was built for the sport; at five feet eleven she was tall for her age—or for any woman in the 1940s—and with a broad, natural wingspan. She had learned to swim in early girlhood from her older brother, Bud—if you can call it learning to be dragged into the Atlantic off the Maidstone Club beach in East Hampton and dumped into the surf.
“Anyway, it taught me not to drown,” she once said, laughing and dragging on a Pall Mall. Yet what did she know of safety, she who had been raised without it, who had at the best of times known herself to be provisional, at least since that day when, age five or so, she and her older brother had been sent temporarily by their unemployed parents to a charity institution in the Midwest—not an orphanage, because she was no orphan, but a “home” that can never have felt to her like any such thing. I can recall only once her mentioning that time as an abandonment that marked her for life.
Eventually my mother, the former Lucille Carole Foster, would pass along to me and my three siblings what she could of swimming, focusing on form and the long, easy strokes that, though natural to her, I could never master. Because we mostly swam in the Atlantic Ocean off Fire Island she also instructed us how to survive a riptide, repeating the common wisdom about disciplining yourself to suppress the instinct to fight. Relax and release. Let the current carry you, no matter how far. Eventually, she explained, the force of the current will dissipate and weaken. Then you can make for shore.
I did learn to swim well enough, although I would not entirely lose my fear of the ocean, not in childhood or ever. My mother’s fearlessness in the water passed me by, and I sometimes think perhaps she was less brave than indifferent to danger—as, in a way, both my parents were. Children raising children, they taught us few enough practical lessons, favoring instead a sense of boldness through action. While their timid friends bodysurfed the inshore waves, they would plow through head-high rollers and swim straight out as though headed for Portugal.
They had met when he was a young lifeguard at a City Island yacht and beach club where her school swim team sometimes went to practice. The Long Island Sound surf there was pathetic, they agreed, so in a borrowed car they sometimes drove to the ocean looking for whitecaps, slapping water on their flanks to adjust core temperature, high-stepping through the mush and diving beneath the first wave in a big set, then bobbing up to wait until another came along, one that, by unspoken signal, they agreed was worth riding.
Photos from their early years together show them almost always at beaches, in swimsuits, as though they hardly owned street clothes, tanned, and in my eyes burnished by a glamour that took a surprisingly long time to erode. Without question they were handsome people—she in the luscious manner of the brunette second-lead in an MGM movie, he a Mediterranean-indeterminate type like Victor Mature. Good looks were so important in their lives and in those of their friends and referred to so often I mistook them for a value, as though to be less than attractive was a flaw of character. Only my mother’s best friend from girls’ school was exempted, based on her superior intelligence and a generalized sympathy for her as a Child of Divorce.
They posed an awful lot for the camera in those days with those friends. They posed on the coarse sand beach by a fieldstone wall erected where the baize-green clubhouse lawn abruptly stopped. The girls in their suits stuck to the blankets, posed coyly, hugged their knees. The boys struck manly Charles Atlas poses with the Sound as their backdrop. They built human pyramids or stood silhouetted against the whitewashed walls of the changing cabanas, those long rows of booths with narrow aisles between them, their plank doors stenciled with anchors or sailing burgees; their interiors containing the inevitable bench and rows of wooden clothes pegs slung with damp suits, bathing caps decorated with appliqué daises; and all the accumulated junk of beach summers, webbed folding chairs, deflated inner tubes, all of it imbued with the benzene smell of rubber overlaid with the musk and tang of salt-wet bodies.
All through early childhood we spent summers at the club, changing in cabana 41, which our family took year after year. Sometimes I would linger in that space after my parents had changed and hauled our towels and the beach chairs and a heavy, ice-filled plaid metal cooler down to the water. My sister, Laura—there were just two of us then, Irish twins, followed almost a decade later by another brother and sister—had nimbly swapped her street clothes for a stretchy swimsuit and run screaming for the water. In no hurry to shed my shorts and T-shirt, I sat quietly in the dim airless cabin, sunlight filtering through its planks, lost in thought until Laura came screaming up the boardwalk for me to join her in the water.
Unlike Laura, I never saw the beach as a place of pleasure. No matter how cold or rough the water, she threw herself in, dog-paddling to the diving float, well away from the lines and the buoy balls, unconcerned about the prehistoric horseshoe crabs lurking at the bottom with their rapier tails. The dogfish that came through seasonally, moving like swift and barely visible shadows beneath the surface, didn’t bother her either. If she spotted a dorsal fin in the water, she sat awhile on the float until the shark swam away.
I, on the other hand, preferred to survey things from the beach—preferred, as it turned out in most things, to observe. I can recollect what a precocious reader I was, learning by sitting alongside my mother on our nubby 1950s living room sofa, nestled against her warmth, drinking in her blended smells of cigarettes and Ice-Blue Secret overlaid, if suppertime was near, with the Shalimar she dabbed on before my dad got home.
There, with the crisp pages of the Hay-Wingo phonics textbook opened between us, I thrilled to the sounds of letters taking shape as words, and in that memory I detected the origins of something obvious to me now, although for a long time was difficult to see—that words became figures in patterns I arranged, that a word placed after a word and then another gave me power, an ability to make sentences and stories as a way of reconciling the divergence between the conventional and apparently placid surface of our family life, and realities I was not equipped to understand.
By now, in the burnt-out house, my feet were ice blocks, yet I was determined to stick it out until I found the trunk. Distractedly shuffling along the edge of what had been the kitchen pantry, I came close to plunging through a gap between floorboards and joists, pulling back before I plunged into the blackened void of the basement. Another foot and I’d have dropped fifteen feet, and who then would have thought to look for me there? Embarrassed by my weird quest, I hadn’t told anybody about these weekly trips. My archaeological mission having produced nothing, I suddenly felt deeply tired. Cold and exhausted and paranoid about falling, I inched slowly backward, hugging what had been a bedroom wall, when suddenly my bootheel struck something weighty. Instinctively I knew what it was. The trunk had been there all along, of course, concealed by rubble from a collapsed chimney. Blistered and blackened, the surface looked broiled, yet the hasps were intact and, as I bent to open the thing on the snow-covered floor, the potential danger of this entire enterprise suddenly stopped me short.
Cautiously then, I humped the trunk over the foundation as though dragging a body. I took it into a potting shed attached to a barn that had escaped the fire, hoisting it onto a thick wooden counter beneath a double-hung window overlooking a field.
This was a view I’d always loved, so undisturbed and placid, the panes of the window framing an old oak tree and a holly hedge now dusted with a confectionary coating of snow. It occurred to me then that I had made no provision for getting the suitcase home if I found it. It was too heavy to carry on a train and it stank of smoke. It was obvious I’d have to come back with a car, so I lifted aside a stack of mossed clay pots on a shelf beneath the ledge, shoving the suitcase as far back as I could manage, and shoved pots in front of the trunk to hide it from view. Then I trudged back out the driveway and down Vineyard Road to the crest of Cove Road, hugging the verge on switchbacks that snaked down to Halesite harbor. Cars tended to spin out here in icy conditions; getting flattened was not part of my plan.
The harbor was thick with ice, and dry-docked boats along the shoreline sat high in their wooden cradles. Shutting the door on the cabin of a boatyard’s solitary pay phone, I tugged a glove off my frozen fingers, fishing around in my parka for a dime to call a taxi. Suddenly, as I wiped condensate from the phone-booth windows, I ached to be gone from here, to be seated on a hard leather bench seat on the Long Island Rail Road, feet thawing, headed home to my small studio apartment. Yet when I did board the train, sitting by a window dully marking a familiar litany of station stops—Cold Spring Harbor, Syosset, Hicksville, and then a series of anonymous bedroom towns in Nassau County—I felt myself pulled in a different direction, back and back to a past whose inhabitants, my own people, somehow felt to me like aliens.
It was springtime before I could fully recover the photos, months after I’d driven out and hauled the trunk back to the city. While the fire had spared the pictures, the firemen’s hoses hadn’t; soaked and fused, the prints were mostly sodden clumps. Eventually, through trial and error, I figured out how to peel them apart using water-filled plastic dishpans, giving each a first rinse and then another in sequence, being careful to extract them from the water as soon as they floated free of one another, before they could disintegrate. No matter how often I changed the water, each retained the stench of smoke, a smell that permeated everything, clung to my skin, becoming so much a part of me that people in stores began to shoot me weird looks. I kept at it, though, bathing and gently prying apart the fused pictures, blotting them with paper towels before sliding each between the pages of books weighted with rocks.
A memory recurs, from this time, of a small black-and-white snapshot—an image I studied minutely before figuring out that what it depicted was my uncle Reginald’s DeSoto. By squinting I could make out a figure behind the wheel; it was my mother. She was wearing oversize sunglasses and a striped terry-cloth beach shift and gesturing animatedly to someone unseen. I love this photo and I loved that car, probably best of all those we had in the money years, back when my father’s business was booming, before a business partner swindled the company out from under him, when we could still fool ourselves into imagining the money would be there forever. There was a Cadillac Coupe de Ville for my father, the model with modified shark-fin taillights, a black leather interior, a light-up console in custom rosewood. There was a red convertible MG with a fold-down vinyl roof; and another Cadillac, which model I can’t recall; and a Jaguar XK-E slung so low my father had to shoehorn himself behind the wheel. There was a six-seater white Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon with a bump-out roof and clerestory windows, a feature of no obvious practical purpose in a vehicle with almost as much glass as steel.
Copyright © 2024 by Guy Trebay. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
