Bittersweet (6 page)

But on the fifth day, after Ev tromped in from her morning walk and declared, “I’ve decided that I’m much better as an early bird than a night owl, so from now on, I shall go to bed at ten o’clock sharp” (which we both knew was a lie but which we nodded at together in fiendish denial), she further announced, “And I’m going to scrape
the porch on my own today, so you’re free, free, free!” I realized that what she was saying in her Ev way was that she wanted the cottage to herself, and, although I took the news somewhat grudgingly, I had known all along that I’d have to leave Bittersweet someday. It was Friday morning. If Ev was right about Galway only coming up on weekends, then he wasn’t at Winloch yet. A stroll through the woods wouldn’t do me any harm, and I’d get to finally explore the place I’d been dreaming of and, yes, researching, for months.

Although Vermont is frigid in the winter, its summertime shimmers. That’s stating the obvious to anyone who knows New England, but it was my brave new world. The mud season that begins in March and lasts well through May buffers one’s mind from winter’s ravages, so that, by the glorious day when neon-green leaf buds first appear on every tree, one can barely remember the bitter February winds streaming off the lake in great, frigid sloughs. Every year, the lake freezes solid around the shoreline, groaning and cracking under the push of the shifting wind, but, in the century-long life of Winloch, the winter had been heard only by the workingmen, men called in to plow the roads, or plumb frozen pipes, men who had the north country in their blood and the dried-up curl of French Canadian on their tongues. Winloch was a summer place, built of pine and screen and not much else, and the Winslows its only, rarefied, inhabitants.

It had been that way for over a century. Ev’s great-great-grandfather Samson Winslow, 1850–1931, paterfamilias—captured in black-and-white photographs, arms akimbo, on the deck of a sloop, in front of a bank, beside his blushing bride—looked at once a dinosaur and a modern man. Only the clothes set him back. The shape of his face—high cheekbones, wry smile—was full of twentieth-century vigor. His mother was Scottish, his father a Brit, and his was iron money, invested in coal money, invested in oil money. Once Samson had made himself a good fortune, he moved his young family to a grand manse in Burlington proper, washed the coal dust and sticky oil from
his hands in the limpid lake, and bought himself a tract of farmland that stretched beside its waters. The lake, laid out at the foot of the Green Mountains that gave Vermont its name, reminded him of the lochs of his mother’s homeland. He married that name with his own, and called his paradise Winloch.

Even though the tract Samson obtained was only fifteen miles from town—practically next door, in our car-choked era—in his day, getting there required a migration. White winters were passed in the banks of Burlington and Boston, tranquil summers on sailboats that skimmed the depths. And in between, a twice-yearly trek, first in buggies, then in Model Ts, of wives, sons, daughters, dogs, dresses, chairs, apples, potatoes, novels, tennis rackets. And a twice-weekly delivery of groceries.

Samson envisaged a village peopled with Winslows in the land he named Winloch. He had hundreds of meadowed and forested acres to work with, and set out to build the Dining Hall with his own two hands (he was helped by those same workingmen who braved the roofline and replaced burst pipes, but to mention them was to lessen the Winloch mythology). The cottages sprouted up, in turn, around the great hall, like the plants they were named for—Trillium and Queen Anne’s Lace and Bittersweet and Goldenrod and Chicory—and were soon peopled with Samson’s descendants and their companions: a parade of loyal, soggy Labradors, Newfoundlands, Jack Russells, and a few memorably morose basset hounds, ears permanently sodden from their daily wades.

Soon, dinghies littered the low-lying sandstone outcroppings and the rocky beaches of the shoreline. As more land became available, Winloch acquired it, so that, by the time Samson’s great-great-great-grandchildren were learning how to swim off the docks that stretched like fingers from the thirty-some-odd cottages into the water, the compound occupied two miles of the shore of Lake Champlain in
sheltered Winslow Bay, a favorite of the mooring yachts down from Canada.

I had gathered a few of these snippets from Ev and her nonchalant boarding school friends who’d visited us during the spring, but those conversations had mostly centered on which of Ev’s cousins was cutest or the nearest place you could drive for underage booze. Once I felt sure Ev’s invitation was airtight, I conducted my own research, a stealthy interlibrary loan with the help of my friend Janice the librarian, and
Samson Winslow: The Man, the Dream, the Vision
and
The Burlington Winslows
both found their ways from northern libraries into my hands. I’d spent one damp March weekend in the gothic Reserve Room of the college library, poring over photographs of Winloch in the early part of the twentieth century, as rain lashed the windows in a satisfying thrum. Samson had been aptly named—his hair was so positively mane-like toward the end of his life that one couldn’t help wonder if his idyll would have crumbled had his locks been cut. He seemed to my imagination to be the sort of man who’d loom large in family stories, but the few times I dared prompt Ev for a really great Samson tale she’d rolled her eyes and muttered a “You’re so weird.”

It had stopped raining, but I slipped on Ev’s muddy rubber boots at the back door and made my way down the narrow path that led to Bittersweet Cove, our private bit of lake. It was a small cove, hugged on three sides by wooded, rocky land. A stairway cut down to the small beach directly below the kitchen, or one could take a more precarious route—continuing along the left arm of the hug on slippery pine needles (and, after a rainstorm, diminutive mudslides) and, finally, out onto a low, flat rock just above the waterline that offered one a magnificent view of the outer bay. That was my intended destination, but, as I slid and cursed, the rubber boots offering no
traction, I was startled at the sight of a slender, magnificent creature skimming along the surface of the larger lake, then alighting, soundlessly, upon the very spot I’d been aiming for.

The bird stood perfectly still. A great blue heron. We’d had them at the river back in Oregon, but they’d always looked so scrappy. This one belonged here. Long lines, calm face, elegant—a Winslow. The heron regarded me coldly, reminding me of how Ev had merely tolerated my presence in the early months we’d shared a room, before Jackson’s death had brought us close. I watched until the bird’s long wingspan silently lifted it away. I dug my muddy toes in and climbed back up the embankment, backsliding with nearly every step.

I resolved to climb down again when the land was dry. As soon as the wind was warmer, and didn’t send me goose bumps off the surface of the water, I would swim off the heron’s rock. Even though it seemed hard to imagine it would ever be hot enough to want to swim—the summer was still newly born—I’d liked the running Ev and I had done in New York, and the new strength in my legs. I needed a bathing suit, and the confidence to pull it over flesh that had never known the sun, because this was the kind of place where one swam boldly, daily, and made a body one had never had.

I set out back up the dirt road John had driven us down that first night. It curved more sharply than I remembered, so that soon Bittersweet was out of sight, and all I could see were maples, pine, and sky. The fresh leaves shook down drops of water in little bursts, and crows cawed at each other somewhere atop the trees—a jarring, comical sound, too common for this beautiful place. I had worn the cashmere, but soon it was tied around my waist. The rain had washed the world clean. Rafts of freshly cut grass began to filter down the road, followed by the sound of a lawn mower.

As I caught sight of the Dining Hall—which I now knew was the great white structure looming at the intersection of the Bittersweet driveway and the main Winloch road—I saw a phalanx of
workingmen sweeping the tennis courts, cinching the nets, mowing the lawn, and hammering at loose nails on the wide wooden steps leading up to the building. Two compact white pickups were parked along the side of the road, their flatbeds filled with tools and gathered branches, matching insignias painted on their doors: a yellow dragon, with the talons of an eagle, grasping a set of arrows. The coat of arms matched the flag that one of the men was now hoisting up the Dining Hall pole. I stood in the middle of the road and watched him pull it into place.

I was just deciding whether I wanted to cut back into the woods beyond the Dining Hall when three dachshunds, yapping sharply, appeared from the undergrowth on the other side of the road. They surrounded me, their assault ridiculous. At first. But every time I tried to step away, they growled and shifted to form a new circle of containment. They were small, and I wasn’t afraid, but there was nowhere to go.

“Come back, assholes!” Soon, from out of the forest, burst a tall, sharp woman, Ev in another life. A good fifty years older, the woman was not as striking as Ev, and she wore a god-awful hand-crocheted poncho that Ev wouldn’t have been caught dead in, but they were unmistakably related.

“Oh dear god,” she barked, marching toward me full steam, bending down and yanking the ringleader by the collar. “Fritz, leave the goddamn girl alone,” she commanded, and Fritz ceased yapping at once, which quieted the other two dogs. Soon they were snuffling through the newly mown grass as though I didn’t exist at all.

She started laughing, big and raucous. “That must’ve scared the shit out of you.”

“I didn’t think anyone else was here.”

“Drove up last night,” she confided, taking my arm in hers. “Come to tea.”

E
v’s aunt Linden—who introduced herself as Indo—lived to the right and over a hill, in a part of Winloch I didn’t know existed, a long, well-trimmed meadow where the oldest cottages sat, four in a row. At the farthest end of the meadow was the largest house I’d seen at Winloch; white, with multiple stories and a porch that stretched around its four ample sides. I recognized it from the picture that had hung in our dorm room. The other three cottages were siblings of Bittersweet, each small and block-like, one story high. Transplanted white pines tastefully disguised the poles carrying electricity to each home.

It wasn’t hard to guess which house was Indo’s. Cherry red, with a moss-covered roof, the first little cottage leaned to the left upon its foundation. A bathtub planted with impatiens occupied its small front lawn, mowed from the meadow. According to the faded, hand-painted sign pasted in the window of the door, it was called Clover.

“Leave your shoes,” Indo indicated as she let me into a kitchen smelling of sandalwood and cayenne. Fritz and his compatriots trotted right past me, faithful in their owner’s assessment of my trustworthiness. I pulled Ev’s boots off, balancing them upon a tangle of clogs in the corner.

From the peaked roof above me hung a dozen baskets covered
in thick dust. A glass-fronted cabinet, propped up on one side with a stack of shims, overflowed with china. Clipped atop it was the room’s sole light, a bulb set inside an aluminum funnel, with which a construction crew might have illumined a work site. The kitchen itself seemed haphazardly collected, as though Indo had gone into a handful of homes with a hacksaw and helped herself to an Edwardian porcelain sink here, a particleboard shelving unit there. And where the impulse, under someone else’s directive, would have been to use the cutout above the sink to pass food between the kitchen and living room, in Clover, it served as a repository for more stuff—two dozen wooden spoons, a precariously stacked collection of teal earthenware, and a great green tin of Bag Balm.

I followed the older woman into the living room, watching her long gray braid snake across her back. “It’s not much,” she prattled, “but it’s all I have. Must sound melodramatic to a pretty young thing like you. But I’m afraid it’s true, this eyesore is everything to me. And who knows how long it’ll be before it’s taken from me too. What’s that saying? ‘It’s not whether you get screwed but if you have fun while it’s happening.’ Something like that, but pithier.”

She spoke as though we had known each other forever, and I hid my discomfort with such unearned intimacies by taking in the rest of her home. Clover’s walls, like Bittersweet’s, were made of bead board, but whereas Ev’s cottage was painted a silty white, Indo had embraced color: scarlet paint on the walls; an indigo, batiked cloth tossed over a sofa whose fourth leg was a stack of water-rippled paperbacks; a chair upholstered in seventies tangerine floral. Through two sets of French doors along the second and third of the living room’s adjoining walls, the screen porch looked out over the lake.

“But listen to me, going on about myself. It’s you I want to hear about. You look sparky. I like that about you. Do you need to pee? No, that’s fine. Right through that door on the left.”

I followed her directions into a short hallway that led to two
small bedrooms. I peeked into both of them in search of the toilet, and was surprised to discover that whereas the rest of Indo’s home seemed funky and youthful, her pastel bedroom looked like it had been decorated by the old woman she seemed to have avoided becoming. Mosquito netting modestly shielded the bed, which was draped with a chenille spread. Framed lithographs of local flowers hung on the pink walls.

I found the cottage’s only bathroom, painted a glossy magenta, and learned quickly it was a primitive affair, with a cracked, too-high mirror and two sinks—the working one of which was turned on by a permanently affixed set of pliers—and a decoupaged toilet that swayed dismayingly whenever weight was set upon it.

Throughout Clover, the wooden walls—no matter their color—were decorated with black-and-white pictures, either framed and askew or curled up toward the tacks that pinned them. A few of the photographs depicted landscapes (some of which I could recognize right out the window), but, for the most part, the subjects were children: blond, sinewy, strong. I scrutinized the faces, recognizing Indo herself as a young girl, and a tall, proud boy who had Birch’s eyes.