Osprey Island (2 page)

When Bud’s eyes lit on Suzy, seated at a nearby picnic table, he stuck out a hand in his daughter’s direction. Suzy lifted an arm slightly, the gesture of a gesture, and half smiled, her eyebrows raised to the crowd as she tried to share with them, silently, a mutual understanding of her father’s absurdity. She was thirty-six years old and had put up with introductions like this for more of her life than she could bear to think about.

“And let’s see . . .” Bud Chizek looked around again. “Who am I forgetting?” He paused, searching faces, different each summer yet so much the same: the college boys, the Irish girls, the Island hangers-on.

One person Bud
had
neglected to introduce was both a new and an old face to Osprey Island, but he was standing in the shadow of the deck’s overhang against the stone wall of the basement, hoping that Bud wouldn’t notice him there. Roddy Jacobs would have preferred to hide in that shadow until the sun had set and he could slip away in darkness than be forced to wave jubilantly at the crowd and endure some patronizingly tactful speech about how glad they all were to have Roddy Jacobs back on the island after so long—
God, Roddy,
what’s it been? Twenty years?
—while old-timers and people who knew enough back then whispered to their neighbors about
just what
had
Roddy Jacobs been doing with himself for the last twenty years? And wasn’t it
charitable
of Bud Chizek to hire him on to work grounds and maintenance at the Lodge with his old high school buddy Lance Squire during the busy summer season ahead?
Didn’t
even come back in time for the funeral,
they said.
That boy waited till
his father’s body was cold in the ground before he was going to set
foot on this island again.

Roderick Jacobs Sr. had passed on toward the end of the winter. Heart attack. Boom. Gone. Wherever in the world Roddy had been keeping himself, he’d apparently been keeping up with obits in the
Island Times,
waiting for the one death that conditioned his return. A few weeks later he’d shown up on his mother’s doorstep. Eden still lived in the same house, a clapboard box on the scrubby side of the island up by Lovetsky’s Auto. She had offered Roddy the guest room, his old bedroom, but he preferred the cottage out back. If you could even call it that: forty square feet, maybe, more like a small shed. Roddy outfitted it with a bed, a sink, and a woodstove, and split enough firewood to last the next winter and beyond. And when Bud Chizek hired Roddy on at the Lodge, people figured he was back for good.

There were
people who said it was a recipe for disaster—after all, Roddy’d left under such a pall of indiscretion. Most Islanders had found it in their hearts after twenty years to pardon him—they blamed his youth, his mother—but some still felt that having Roddy Jacobs back on-island was just asking for trouble.

It was a tremendous relief to Roddy when Bud adjourned the barbecue and sent people dispersing in all directions—the girls scuttling up the hill toward the staff barracks, waiters scraggling up the beach toward Morey’s Dinghy, where they could get started on the drunks they’d work diligently to maintain until Labor Day. Squee and Mia eagerly resumed their Ping-Pong, so excited to be reunited after another school year apart that they couldn’t keep the ball on the table. Roddy watched as Suzy Chizek made her way across the lawn and ducked under the deck to ruffle her daughter’s hair and kiss her forehead. “I’ll be in the room, Miss Mia-Mi,” she said. “Squee, you look after her, OK?”

Squee grinned—he was two years older than Mia and relished the notion of watching over her—and Suzy crossed to give him a fluff and a kiss as well. He stood for it, if not happily then at least with patience. “It’s good to see you, kid,” Suzy told him.

Squee nodded vigorously.

Suzy gave the Ping-Pong table an affectionate smack as she passed, and as she disappeared up the stairs and into the Lodge above them, Roddy breathed another sigh of relief at being granted a little more time to figure out how the hell to say hello to Suzy Chizek for the first time in twenty years.

Two

WHERE THE OSPREY MAKES ITS NEST

The first Europeans on Osprey Island were a British sugar baron and
his family who “purchased” the lovely (and profitably wooded) island
from the Manhanset Indians who had, until then, called it home. The
baron christened the place “Osprey Island,” and dubbed himself the
first “civilized” settler of the five-mile dollop of dense forest, downy
marsh and pebbled beach. The Manhansets were summarily evicted
and an exciting era in the entrepreneurial exploitation of Osprey
Island had begun.

—CHERYL OLINKEWITZ, “The Rape and Exploitation of Indigenous New England Populations: Osprey Island, A Case Study,” an unpublished undergraduate thesis

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN LORNA—and if not Lorna, then Lance— who took the housekeepers on a tour of the Lodge and grounds the following morning, showed them the supply closets, oriented them to the vacuum cleaners and the stubborn faucets and the tricks it took to try and make a down-at-the-heels resort appear rustic and not ratty. But as mornings had it, the Squires were “indisposed,” a state of being more commonly associated with aging screen idols than hired hands.

Mia had woken up early, as six-year-olds are wont, and had gone knocking her way down the hall in her nightgown to introduce herself to other guests and make friends. Half asleep, Suzy tried to explain that there were no guests yet. Mia didn’t get it. A hotel was supposed to be a big place with people in every room, the way the sky was a big place with lots of stars, there even when you can’t see them. Mia put on clothes and went out scouting. Suzy rolled over and went back to sleep.

An hour later, Suzy got up and put on a bathrobe. She stepped into the hall to see where Mia might have gotten to and was greeted by a throng of peaches-and-creamy, brogue-throated girls, all dolled up for housekeeping, leaning awkwardly against the walls like stood-up prom dates.

“Good morning,” they seemed to sing in unison.

“Hi,” Suzy said, peering past them down the hall for Mia.

“Hi, Ma!” Mia squawked. She was seated in the cross-legged lap of an Irish girl, her hair done up in a chambermaid’s babushka with Suzy’s blue bandanna.

“Hi, Suzy!” Squee was perched on a wicker loveseat, gnawing his way through a Snickers bar.

“
There’s
a nutritious breakfast.” Suzy tightened her terrycloth belt.

Squee grinned. Covered in caramel-peanut goo, his two new front teeth were about the size of his ears.

“So”—Suzy leaned on the door frame—“just . . . hangin’ out in the hallway?”

Brigid spoke up. The lavender top she had on made her skin glow orange as a jack-o’-lantern. “Mr. . . .” she began, “Mr. Ciz . . . Mr. . . .”

“Bud,” Suzy told her.

The girl sighed her relief. “Bud,” she said. “He . . . We’d been told to gather for an orientation at half-seven, though we’ve seen no one but the children.” She looked entreatingly to Suzy, taking little pains to conceal her annoyance with the situation.

It was nearly eight-fifteen. Suzy looked to Squee. “Where’re your folks?”

Squee shrugged, pouted out his lower lip—
search me
—and continued his breakfast.

Suzy wandered out to the lobby and onto the deck. She found Roddy up on a ladder, cleaning rotted leaves and muck out of the dining porch rain gutter. “Excuse me,” she called from the sliding door, “do you know anything about the housekeeping orientation this morning? We’ve a slew of maids and no matron to be found.” One exchange and she was sounding like the Irish already. Suzy was convinced that she went back to New York with a brogue every August.

Roddy did not look at her. “You don’t remember me, do you?” he said, eyes trained on the gutter.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re Suzy, right?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you work here at the Lodge last summer? I’ve got a terrible memory for faces, for people at all, really, actually, about everything . . .”

“I’m Roddy Jacobs.” He tossed down a clot of slimy twigs. “I was friends with your brother. I High. Class of ’sixty-eight.”

“Oh,” Suzy said. Chas. Chas as he was at I High: cocky, young, crossing the football field with his friends, heading out to the woods beyond school grounds to get high. Chas’s friends: Lance Squire, Jimmy Waters—decent guys, not the brightest, but neither was Chas. “Roddy
Jacobs
?” Suzy repeated.

He nodded.

“Sure,” Suzy said, “sure. You were friends with Chas.”

Roddy nodded solemnly. Chas had died in Vietnam not long after graduation.

Suzy said, “So, you know anything about this housekeeping thing the girls are waiting on?”

Roddy climbed down from his ladder.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I just wondered if . . .”

Roddy nodded. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, and passed her, pulling the glass door shut behind him. Suzy remembered Roddy somewhat. A quiet friend of Chas’s. With Chas and Lance, it would have been hard to exist as anything else. Roddy had hovered in the background of high school, and of Chas and his gang. It was a long time ago. Almost twenty years since Chas’s death, and Suzy tried to think about that time as little as she could. She’d managed to hardly remember Roddy at all.

“HE WAS ALWAYS a nice child,” Nancy said, her tone circumspect. She and Suzy were drinking coffee on the porch of Bud and Nancy’s house, up the hill from the Lodge, overlooking Sand Bay. The house Suzy’d grown up in. Nancy nibbled disinterestedly on a muffin Suzy’d brought from the city, pinching up cranberries with her fingertips, divesting them of crumbs, and then dropping the fruit back to the plate like nits picked from a stray cat. “He was the one who always went around cleaning up after Chas and Lance,” she said. “Not that he wasn’t into their mischief too, but he was the one with the conscience about it. They’d break someone’s lawn ornament or a driveway lantern playing ball, and it was Roddy who’d wind up apologizing . . .”

“He get drafted right out of high school too?” Suzy asked.

Nancy swallowed a sip of coffee, shook her head. “Well, sure, but . . .”

Suzy waited for more.

“You
honestly
don’t remember, Suzy?”

“Kind of . . .” She didn’t, really. Suzy had inherited her mother’s selective memory. Pieces of history came back when they were useful to her but otherwise remained in a hazy wash of “the past.” It drove Suzy’s friends and boyfriends nuts, but she thought it a fortuitous affliction, herself; the inability to recall things you didn’t want to recall seemed a pleasant way to live one’s life. “There was a big something, wasn’t there? Something . . . ?” Suzy tried.

Nancy’s voice when she spoke was prim and snippish. “He didn’t go.” She stiffened dramatically. “Just didn’t go. Said no. Burned his draft card, or whatever those people did.”

“Hmm.” Suzy knew this sort of conversation led to nothing productive.

“All
Eden’s
doing,” Nancy went on. “
Roderick
told the boy if he wasn’t going to fight for his country then he certainly wasn’t welcome in
his
house.”

Suzy smiled facetiously. “Well, I’m surprised you and Dad conceded to hire such a lowlife—I mean, it’s only been, what? Twenty years? Shouldn’t he be banished a little longer?”

Nancy shot her a look. The conversation was over. “You
know
I don’t like talking about this, Suzy.
Please.
” Nancy took a gulp of coffee, washing away the topic like an unpleasant taste. There were certain things you didn’t talk about, pretended not to notice, learned tactically to ignore. It was what had kept Nancy Chizek from losing her mind completely when her son came home from Vietnam in a casket. She’d fallen apart at the news, then patched herself together into a rigid, near-catatonic state of mourning for the funeral. Once he was in the ground, Nancy spoke of Chas only with great honor. Her boy had died for his country. In pride she had found some sort of comfort.

RODDY LED THE TROOP of housekeepers on a rudimentary if not particularly scenic tour of the Lodge—showed them a few different rooms in the main building, the kitchen, and dining room, and the lobby that opened out to the large deck overlooking Sand Beach Bay. He took them through the office and reception areas and pointed through a set of glass doors to Reesa Delamico’s Osprey Lodge Beauty Salon and Gift Shop. Out the back kitchen door and up the hill, Roddy showed them the guest cottages, the weedy clay tennis courts, and the swimming pool that looked more like a swamp. “We’re going to have to dump a hell of a lot of chlorine in that thing to get it swimmable by July Fourth,” Roddy said. The girls nodded skeptically, following behind Roddy in a tight huddle like cold and wary immigrants. At the laundry shack, which sat between the staff barracks and Lance and Lorna Squire’s cabin, Roddy held open the door and let the girls file past and peek their heads in one by one. They squinted into the darkness, just able to discern the outlines of looming washing machines and dryers. Drying racks and plywood shelving blocked the few small windows. There was a ratty couch and an old minifridge, and the place just seemed to be crammed crevice to crevice, floor to ceiling, with piles of mildewed newspapers, rusted aerosol cans, water-stained and disintegrating cardboard boxes spilling soda cans and carpentry tools and sewing kits and paper napkins and crusted shampoo bottles. The air was cigarette-stale and uncomfortably close. Brigid took a step inside the shack. On the splintery wooden floor, in the shaft of light from the open door lay an old sponge the color of spoiled meat. She made a gagging noise in her throat and ducked back outside. “I’ll for one be spending as little time in
that
place as I can manage, I’d say,” she announced.

Her roommate, Peg, passed all of three seconds in the doorway and turned away, disgusted. “It’s like a fire trap, eh?” she said to Roddy. He let the door swing closed, shoved his hands back into his pockets, and shrugged at the girl, nodding slowly, his mouth an unreadable line.

They stood outside the laundry shack, scuffing their shoes in the dirt amid patches of sad, dead grass. “Um,” Roddy began, and the girls looked at him eagerly. “If you all wanted I could take you around, show you the island some, if you want . . . ?”

The girls conferred wordlessly, shrugging, nodding. Like their spokeswoman, Peg turned back to Roddy. “That’d be grand, Mister . . .”

“Just Roddy’s good.”

“Thank you, yes, that’s grand, if it’s not like a bother to you?”

He drove them in a Lodge van down Sand Beach, that mile of crescent moon that never waxed or waned. Near the Lodge a few large homes sat on the bluffs overlooking the water, salt-stained old mansions whose grand lawns sprawled above the bay. They took the long route around the island, through town, and he showed them Ferry Street, Bayshore Drug, the Luncheonette, Tubby’s Fishhouse, all of which had been there when Roddy left Osprey twenty years before and were still there now, the prices higher, but otherwise pretty much the same.

At the ferry dock Roddy parked the van and climbed out. He slid open the side door and watched as the bevy of redheads and brunettes tumbled out onto the asphalt, chirping and twittering among themselves like a clutch of nestlings.

“This is just where we arrived yesterday, isn’t it?” said a tall, pigeon-toed girl with lank brown hair.

“Only way on-island,” Roddy said.

“Ever read that novel—Agatha Christie, was it? Where they’re stuck on the island, being murdered one by one?” the girl said, taunting a shorter, plumper girl beside her.

“For fuck’s sake—as if I needed reminding of it!” the girl cried.

“And Then There Were None . . .”
warbled the instigator.

“Shut your hole,” scolded the other.

Roddy turned away, out toward the water. It was hardly more than a mile across the bay to Menhadenport on the mainland. Still, it was an important mile. It spanned more than distance.

At the edge of the beach stood an improbably tall pole with a platform affixed to its top on which an osprey had built its ramshackle nest, streamers of dried seaweed hanging down like decayed party decorations. It was a quirky twist of things that had an entire island of people standing in awe and reverence to a bird who built a nest like something out of Dr. Seuss. To judge from its nest, you’d imagine the osprey would be a motley-looking bird, tattered and discombobulated, with maybe a few absurdly placed, unnaturally colored bouffant feathers froofing it up like a show poodle. In reality, the bird’s elegance more than made up for its slovenly home. The osprey was a gorgeous creature—the majestic stretch of its wings, partly skeletal, like something prehistoric, but then plumed in contrasting black and white, alternating patterns like the ruffling skirts of a flamenco dancer. The white head with its black bandit’s mask seemed to make perfect sense when you looked at the osprey’s talons: four hooked claws on each foot, deadly as a dragon’s. With such weapons permanently affixed to its body, the osprey seemed smart to wear a mask. It was unquestionably a fearsome and magnificent creature, but perhaps even more so to the people of Osprey Island, who could not help but feel a sense of eminence as the chosen ones, the ones the osprey watched over, the ones who had named their home in the bird’s honor.