By the fifties a migration of psychiatrists, first wave from New York City, second wave from Boston and Cambridge, had changed the landscape of the Lower Cape. Inaccurate to put it that way. They adored the landscape—the puckered hills and boggy inlets and swaths of noisy, surfy beaches. What they changed was the economy. Playwrights were camped out in fish shacks in Truro, sculptors were living in garages in Wellfleet, painters were perched in the old boathouses on stilts that lined Provincetown’s inner harbor, and psychiatrists would pay—they would pay!—to rent these places for the month of August. They paid enough to get the painters and sculptors and playwrights through much of the succeeding winter, back in their fish shacks and boathouses again. Where did they go in the interim? Maybe to New York (most of them had come from there to begin with) to house-sit for the psychiatrists in their Upper West Side apartments, or maybe they went to other fish shacks in places like New Bedford, where nobody, not even psychiatrists, would want to spend the summer.
There were also real houses built by cod kings and oyster barons. Some were Victorian piles with turrets and widows’ walks plopped onto the Truro downs, where they looked odd. That kind of architecture generates a lot of outbuildings, and the Bigelows’ cottage had been a caretaker’s house. Our cottage was a fish shack. It was dark and grimy, the two bedrooms were only a bit bigger than the beds, the kitchen was an aluminum galley nailed into one corner, and the deck listed downward on creaky pilings. The bathroom was an off-the-shelf affair from the lumberyard in Orleans with a plastic shower stall and an unreliable toilet-and-sink unit. Everything was a bit stinky. Old fish, whiffs from the septic tank, a hint of the propane that fed the stove, and the nose-burning mildew that loves Cape Cod the best.
Those details—I don’t actually remember all of them. But I know it was like that. That’s the way Cape Cod cottages are. Like the view, they don’t change. You’re paying for the outside not the inside, and you really could not, cannot, and never would be able to put a price on that. It’s beyond the realm of price. It doesn’t exist in the world of price, and that is its value, that constitutes its pricelessness.
To wake up on a summer morning in Wellfleet and stand on a deck, however sloped and rotting, and breathe the exhalations of the bosomy landscape, all the breasted hills between the two faces of the ocean—the serene, almost brackish bay and the crazed Atlantic—and to smell the sweet marsh hay mixed with the fecal lowtide oozes and watch a tern snip little quarter-moons out of the sky and see the bay waters gray and flat or nearly white with froth but in any weather seeming, oddly, not to move because of being contained by the long curving arm at one end and Wellfleet Harbor at the other—well, that’s something. A sort of something unlike any other thing.
The first visit: obscured by the many that followed later in my life. Except that every time was a kind of first time. Every time there was that moment on the bridge over the Cape Cod Canal when I felt the mainland sloughing off behind me and saw the last piece of American land, Provincetown, just visible from the midpoint of the span and bent toward me, drawing me on down. On the other side of the bridge the air was thin and pure, as if the Cape were a mountaintop rather than a salty spit. It was a different life down there, an alternate way to be, a way that, from the first, I wanted to be.
There are photographs of me and Roger on the beach at dusk, with the long, wiggly shadows of A.A. and my father in the distance beside the little bonfire where the hot dogs were cooking. They would make a ring of stones, fill it with eelgrass and driftwood, and place over that the grate from the rusted-out two-and-a-half-legged grill at the caretaker’s cottage, which we carried down to the beach on a string every evening for this purpose. We needed a new piece of string the next evening because the fire burned it up each night. My mother smoking in the sunset, Ingrid fussing over the buns—“You’re scorching them!”—and doling out the ketchup packets, which she kept in her beach bag along with never enough napkins. The baby making piles of clamshells and one-bucket sandcastles. The gulls hovering and yelling about how they wanted a handout. Sometimes a wiener (Roger loved to call them wieners; I thought it was a disgusting word) would fall through the grate and become a stiff, blackened tube, and Roger and I would fish it out with a stick accompanied by a lot of cautionary exclamations from the mothers: Watch out! Hey, be careful! Don’t do that! Then we’d throw it toward the tide line, where a dozen birds could fight over it.
The birds were nonchalant about humans. Even the sandpipers, who darted away when we first walked onto the beach every evening, would be back within minutes of our arrival, poking their beaks in the surf. The gulls were the best. I loved their squawks and mutters and waddles and dances, and the way they’d bend their necks down and bark at the sand. They seemed to have a real language, a vast array of comments and warnings and, mostly, bragging. In my later Cape Cod life a gull once landed on my shoulder because he wanted the blueberry muffin I was eating. I was astonished by the weight of him, three pounds at least, and his rank fish-breath, and the power of his cold, nasty foot. His wing banged into my head. It was a hard, scratchy hinge, unlike anything mammalian. His feathers made a dry noise. I dropped my muffin on the beach. He was off me and on top of it in a moment, and stood with his big foot covering it, bragging, Rrrrrrra, rrrrrrra, to the summer sky.
On sultry days we went to the ocean, where there was always a breeze. This was a long journey, twenty minutes by car instead of the ten-minute walk from our smelly cottage to the bay. Many provisions and precautions were needed. Lunch in a padded plastic hamper, two coolers of iced tea, backup bathing suits, umbrella, white zinc in a crackled tube, a sweater for the chills after body surfing. A.A. had a little transistor in case there was a good concert; Ingrid brought knitting. Without Frederika, my mother was mostly occupied with watching over the baby and making sure she didn’t wander into the water, but when she got a chance, she was reading Anthony Powell’s latest volume, The Acceptance World. My father thought the whole Powell enterprise was middlebrow. “You’re wrong,” my mother said. “Anyhow, it’s getting better and better with each book.” Then she said, “I don’t see how you can say that when you’re not reading it. And look what you’re reading!” He was reading Rex Stout. He’d brought six Nero Wolfes from Cambridge. “I’m on vacation,” he said. “I’m on vacation too,” she said. “Right,” said my father. “Proving my point.”
For Roger and me the ocean beach was heaven. There was nothing we could break or bang into, there was nothing sharp (the bay supported an enormous colony of razor clams, and their pointy corpses, hidden in the sand, really hurt when you stepped on them), however far away we went the parents could see us because the coast was quite straight (the bay had lots of curves and inlets), and, most important to me, there was almost never seaweed. I had a horror of seaweed. The worst was the big brownish fingers with bubbles on the end, but it was all terrible. The beautiful, frilled bright-green lettuce leaves were nearly as bad, and the stringy stuff, some green, some brown, which dried to a crispy dark nothingness the moment it washed up on the beach, was creepy because it got entangled in my legs like a spiderweb. But there wasn’t any. If we wanted to pee we could do it right away where we stood in the water and the pee would just zip out toward Europe. At the bay we had the feeling that we were swimming in our pee for quite a while. We could even poop in the ocean. It was the ocean. What could one little poop do to it?
The wonderful noise, a monotony that was active and calming simultaneously. It was the same thing over and over again. A wave coming with a big roar and making a dark water stain on the slope of the sand, clearing away every mark Roger and I had put there. Then the wave sucking out, leaving air pockets that sizzled like pancake batter cooking. The moment between breaths, when the ocean sat there not doing anything; maybe five seconds of that? Then it gathered itself up again and bang, onto the sand. Water stain. Air pockets sizzling. Stasis. Bang. We could watch it for hours. We did. We stood knee-deep in the surf until we turned blue and ou
r feet were scoured smooth by tumbling sand. Another good thing was to sit at the point where the tide hit the beach. Part of what made this good was that point kept changing. You could get two or three iterations of bang, water stain, sizzling, stasis, and bang before the tide shifted enough so your bottom detected it, by being either much wetter or dry. Also a good peeing position. The hot pee drilling a hole in the cold sand and all the evidence erased within moments by the next bang, stain, and sizzle.
Sometimes an analyst strolled over to chat with A.A. They called him Archie. I thought they were idiots. They didn’t even know his name! Ingrid was the only woman analyst, and most of them seemed scared of her. I didn’t blame them for that. If they came with wives, the wives tried to engage me and Roger in conversation, usually about where we went to school. Roger was friendly; I ignored them. My mother would scowl and growl at me to be polite, but I refused. I felt the beach was exempt from ordinary rules of behavior. After all, we were barely wearing clothes and we got to go to the bathroom whenever we felt like it. It wasn’t regular life. And I wasn’t going to waste my time with nervous wives.
The days went by, every day the same day, varied only by the morning decision: ocean or bay? We always finished up on the bay, with our bonfire and our wieners, because, as my father informed us every night, it was the only place on the Eastern Seaboard (with the exception of the Florida Keys) where you could see the sun setting into the sea. And therefore, we mustn’t miss it, ever. After the hot dogs, the parents packed us into the car with books and blankets and took us to the Lighthouse in Wellfleet or the Lobster Hut in Truro or the Portuguese place on Commercial Street in Provincetown where they had the best kale soup and ate their own dinner. Once or twice, A.A. had tried adding four filets of sole to the grill on the beach, but they got stuck and then fell into the embers in the process of being removed. More for the gulls.
Skin cancer didn’t matter. The inadvisability of a diet of hot dogs didn’t matter. Dragging children around in a car way past their bedtime, letting them run wild on a beach fraternizing with seabirds and mollusks, didn’t matter. Nobody worried about any of it. If you got a cut from those pesky razor clams, just put your foot in the ocean. The ocean cures everything. If it rained, play Monopoly and be quiet—the grownups are reading.
It was easy, being a child back then.
All of a sudden, summer was over. We woke up to see the quiet, murky, predictable bay banging itself against the shore in a fairly good imitation of the ocean. When we went to the real ocean the wind blew the sand all over us and into our ears and hair, stinging like sleet in January. We curled up under the umbrellas and wrapped ourselves in towels and tried to enjoy it, but in less than an hour we’d given up. “I guess that’s it,” said A.A. as we climbed up the dune to the parking lot.
There was a showy burst of heat for Labor Day, but it was untrustworthy. The sun was low and the sand wasn’t hot. It had been almost too hot to walk on at the start of August. The top sand was still warm, but when I dug around with my toe, the sand underneath was cool and moist and a bit sticky. It clumped together, as if it were snow.
The gulls stood in a line looking out over the waves, guarding the water from our approach. It was their beach and they were reclaiming it right under our noses. Wind pushed their feathers out at odd angles. They looked messy and threatening. Tumble-weedy balls of eelgrass rolled around on the stiff, wind-starched sand. It wasn’t inviting out there anymore. It wasn’t ours.
On the last day, while the mothers were organizing and packing, A.A. took Roger and me to the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown. We walked up a hundred pee-smelling stairs to the crenellated tower top. The whole Cape stretched out below us, looking more like a map of itself than a real place, looking small and perfectly colored, as if by hand: pale green with scallopy white edges floating in a blue-tending-toward-black sea.
“It really is an arm,” Roger said.
“There’s Hyannis at the elbow,” A.A. told us.
“No, no, Papa, that’s Chatham.”
“Hmm,” said A.A. “You could be right.”
A.A. was so nice. Why was he so nice? Suddenly, I felt sad. Now it was all over, now we had to leave. We had to drive all the way up that arm and go back to the city.
As we walked down the hundred stairs I thought about how I didn’t like life. Life was always something new. I didn’t like something new. I liked the same thing over and over. Even at that moment, I could see there was a logical flaw in this version of myself, since until I’d been on the Cape and had the bay-and-ocean thing over and over, it had been something new. That is, something I didn’t like. And I thought as well of how England had been the same thing over and over, but I hadn’t liked that.
“You know, I’m really looking forward to fourth grade,” Roger said.
The Greeks
Miss Evie Ward looked like a wren. She was plump in the breast and had a tidy russet head that was stripey, like a wren’s. Her hair was a mix of auburn and brown, thick, straight, and tucked neatly behind her ears. She was leaning against her desk, surveying us. “Let’s rearrange the classroom,” she said.
We all got up, clattering.
“Let’s make a circle,” she said. “I’ll stay here near the blackboard, and you be all around me.”
With more clattering, we made a horseshoe out of our desks and dragged our chairs into place.
“That’s better,” she said. “Now we’re all together and I can see everyone and everyone can see me.” She smiled. She had small teeth.
“This is the year of the Greeks,” she said. “This is the year you’re going to begin to understand the world, because everything that matters, the Greeks started it.”
Roger put his hand up. “Miss Ward, what about the Chinese?”
“Aha!” she said. “What about them? And you can call me Miss Evie.”
“Didn’t they invent lots of important things? Didn’t they invent paper and pottery and gunpowder?”
“Gunpowder,” said Miss Evie. “They certainly invented that. And you might be right about paper. But I’m sure they didn’t invent pottery. People all over the world invented pottery. I don’t think the Chinese can take credit.”
“Miss Evie!” Roger was wiggling his hand again.
She looked at her class list. “Are you Roger?” she asked.
Roger nodded. “But what I want to know is, didn’t they invent pottery, really?”
Miss Evie tilted her head at Roger. “I bet you like to read the encyclopedia,” she said.
“I do!” Roger was pleased.
“Look under Sumerians,” she said. “That’s S-U-M-”
“I know about the Sumerians,” Roger interrupted.
“Okay. Then see what the encyclopedia has to say about Sumerian pottery. Then look under India—”
“So you’re saying the Chinese didn’t invent pottery?”
Miss Evie looked as if she’d gotten irritated and had then decided not to be irritated. That took a minute.
“Roger, how about this,” she said. “You could look up pottery, and see when the Chinese started making it and when the Sumerians started making it, and the Indians and the Egyptians. You could make what’s called a timeline and bring that in to class. Would you like to do that?”
Roger was, I could tell, weighing the hours it would take to do that against the hours he’d planned to spend in the basement with his model airplanes. The Chinese won, for the moment. “Yes,” he said. “I can do that.”
“That will be good for all of us,” Miss Evie said. “Greek civilization didn’t just come out of nowhere, and this will show us about that. But the Greeks were especially devoted to beauty, and they thought hard about the best and the most beautiful way to do all the things everyone around them was doing, like making pottery and writing poems and building temples. They had a special affinity for balance and perfection.”
“Why?” I asked. It popped out. I hadn’t planned to say anything.
“It’s a mystery,” said Miss Evie. “Now and then there are big upheavals and changes, and nobody really knows why. These days, some historians think it had to do with food. There were plenty of farmers growing lots of food, so people in the cities could stop worrying about getting enough to eat. And that gave them the time and energy to think—to think hard.” She pointed at us. “So, if you want to be like the Greeks and think beautiful thoughts, eat a good breakfast, right?”
“Yes, Miss Evie,” the class intoned.
During the neither-this-nor-that week between our return from the Cape and the start of school, A.A. had taken me and Roger to the Museum of Fine Arts. He’d pitched the outing to Roger as a visit to some Bigelows—and there were several ancestral landscapes hanging in a dim corridor between Colonial furniture and Colonial silver. I thought A.A. and Ingrid had better ones. They had a picture of the big Venetian piazza and a picture of Mount Etna and a nice big waterfall somewhere in the West. The museum ones were just a bunch of lakes and woods in upstate New York. Then we headed to the Egyptians, where Roger and I liked to scare ourselves in the replica of a tomb, a narrow, stony universe whose walls were covered with thousands of tiny hawks and tiny cows and tiny people all walking in the same direction. There was a special Egyptian-tomb smell in there that added to the scare; it smelled like dead stone. Roger invariably extended his hands in a zombie way and said, I am a mummy and I curse you, and that always gave me the shivers even though I knew he was going to do it.
But we took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in the Far East.
“Gosh,” said A.A., “I haven’t been here in ages.”
“Papa, the tomb,” Roger objected.
“Well, let’s just see,” A.A. said, ambling down the hallway. “Look, that’s pretty good.” He stopped in front of a stone dragon on a pedestal. It was all curly, including its tongue, which was sticking out at us.