The High Season(48)
Mike was a terrible correspondent. Ruthie sent Laurel a Christmas card every year with a note enclosed, and had sent a photo of Jem when she was born. Laurel responded with a silver rattle from Tiffany’s and a copy of Frog and Toad.
The truth was that they rarely thought about Laurel until they got a call that she’d died. Heart attack, on the porch. A neighbor had found her, had said that from the road, she appeared to be looking approvingly at her dahlias.
They drove and drove on that gray December day on an empty road lined with bare trees, wet black branches creaking ominously in a rustling, steady wind. The tiny village seemed forlorn and time-warped, waiting for summer. On the main street, everything was closed. Houses with brown lawns looked unoccupied. One lone person walked a frisky dog. They hailed him (later they would know him as a neighbor, Clark Fund, an eccentric who made an almost-living as an auction picker) and asked for Laurel’s house. “Ah, Laurel,” he’d said. “So you’re the nephew with the good wife.”
The first view of the house was not auspicious. It was weathered gray siding, paint peeling on the trim, a lopsided house with a second-story addition jutting up and out, an elbow in the side, your uncle the comedian making sure you got the joke. That cold day they stood in the front yard, holding each other and the baby. The wind slapped their faces like a wet mitten, but it was fresh and tangy. The clouds scudded away, and the sun suddenly shone on their faces. When they walked, their footsteps stirred only mud, not ash. They rounded the corner of the house and caught their breath at the expanse of sea and bountiful sky.
“I don’t care about the inside, we can fix it,” Mike said. “Let’s do it.”
Ruthie would have set the words to music if someone hadn’t gotten there first.
“It’s perfect,” she said. “As far as you can go without drowning.”
* * *
—
THAT FIRST WINTER Ruthie and Mike had truly gotten to know the house, every rotted sill, every piece of wiring, every creak and every draft, and had known that years of struggle lay ahead. The taxes might ruin them. They lay in bed dismayed, clutching each other and dreaming of decent takeout. They had left a rent-stabilized loft in New York. They knew they could never afford to go back.
Ruthie was the one to figure it out, on the first perfect summer weekend. She sat on the porch at the market on Village Lane with a cup of coffee and watched as the renters arrived, toting bikes and kayaks and coolers. All that summer she investigated fees, snooped, pondered, bought Elena, the local realtor, a cup of coffee.
They had the bones. They had the cedar shingles, the oak floors, the fireplace. They had the view, the classic Orient view of bay and sky and thin golden ribbons of sand across the water. They had everything, but it was falling down. They bought steel-toed boots and went to work.
By the next summer they were able to rent out the house for weekly periods in July and August, enough to pay taxes for the year, plus hire an electrician for an overhaul of the wiring. No more glass fuses! They bundled up Jem and rented a studio apartment in Greenport.
Year after year the renters came, and as the North Fork adjusted to the spillover from the more chic Hamptons, as more potato fields were turned into wineries, as the fifties motels became retro rather than dingy, Ruthie had a vision. It wasn’t enough to rent—they had to rent big. They had to, over time, make their house into the kind of place that could command a fee substantial enough not only to cover taxes but to do real improvements as well. They would build up to the big money—fifteen thousand for the summer, twenty thousand…the sky was the limit for the right kind of property. That would give them income, enough to live comfortably, have a savings account, save for Jem’s college. It was the only way to lift them out of the bohemian poverty they lived in, two art majors scraping by. By then she was director of the Belfry, a job that didn’t pay much but required all her time and energy. They were barely making it. A second mortgage plus summer rentals would make all the difference.
All they needed were the correct basics—the farmhouse sink, European appliances, closet systems—and they could fill in carefully with vintage items so that the place wouldn’t skew too flea-market-y. They were artists; they knew what color and texture could do, how to cull from house sales and Craigslist. They found out about billionaires buying renovated twenty-million-dollar homes in the Hamptons who invariably hired a designer who decreed that everything must be completely redone, and that’s when they pounced. They’d picked up Italian cabinets and double ovens for peanuts or for free. Mike entered the genial core of workers who renovated houses all over the North Fork, and made friends and did favors and called them in, and floors were sanded, kitchen counters were installed, closets expanded, bit by painful bit.
Now it was the house that people photographed, that was gestured to from passing sailboats, the house with the cornflower-blue French doors opening out to a slate patio. In summer, roses tumbled, bright pink and yellow against the seagrass, and it was all topped off with a briskly flapping American flag.
Everything had gone exactly as Ruthie had envisioned on that freezing day so long ago. Except for the ending.
The thing was, when he said he wanted to leave, she thought he only needed room to turn around and come back. And if an occasional rageful thought of how he had seemed to leave her so casually (just because of a lack of happiness, really?) came over her, she was determined to wait it out.