Site created: 12/97. Last update: 02/11 |
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The thing to understand first about Nancy is that she lives in a rambling Cape Cod cottage located in a place that time forgot -- Osterville, Mass., a tiny town seemingly locked in place in the early 1960s. The only thoroughly modern convenience is the ATM machine at the local bank, and whenever I am there, I still half expect Jackie to walk out the Designer's Walk store with a pillbox hat box under an arm. Nancy is my friend Linda's mom, someone maneuvering through her late 60s and still carrying with her the style of a bygone era that in the late 90s really is gone. (She's been mistaken on more than one occasion while shopping at the local A&P for Joan Kennedy, something that usually irritates Nance, given Joan's past problems with alcohol.) I prefer to think of her more in terms of her past, as someone who can still truthfully talk about growing up outside New York in the 1940s, a woman who, whenever she walked into the Stork Club, the band would break into one of her favorite Cole Porter songs. I first met Nancy back in 1984, when Linda and I were just getting to know each other and she invited me out for a Fourth Of July celebration. Times were good then. Nancy was on solid financial ground, living a life of seeming ease in Osterville. Summer weekends were spent traipsing down to the Wianno Club beach, where Ramon would come by and bring drinks and all of us sat around smoking and reading the Sunday New York Times and worrying about what Ronald Reagan was doing to the country. (Of course, most of the people who showed up at club had probably voted for him, but we tried not to let that bother us indolent interlopers.) Ever since that first visit, I have been returning to the Cape, to Nancy's house, for countless Thanksgiving dinners, birthday parties, summer weekends and wintertime getaways. So I go there for the peace -- and for the latest telling of Nancy's stories. For she is a story teller extraordinaire, and I always know when she launches into another tale that I am in for a treat -- especially when she tells those of us gathered around the table that she "just can't get into it right now,'' and then always does. Her stories are too many to repeat, and besides I could never do them justice. Nancy can recount social events at which Ted Kennedy was a bit player, loves to remind us of the time hookers set up shop in the huge house across the street, and even manages to laugh again over her industrial accidents. (She once stopped a furniture delivery truck that was rolling down a driveway by clambering inside and hitting the brake, somehow suffering a broken hip in the chase). More recently, the focus of conversation has been the man down the street who torched his house and then wandered around town free for more than a year -- even though everyone in Osterville just knew he did it. It was the same house where the strange old woman used to feed the wild raccoons and possum and squirrels that live in this graceful wooded setting. She fed them even after death, as Nancy tells the story, inadvertently leaving open a window on the night she passed away. The little critters came right in and made themselves at home, feasting one last time. It was several days before she was found. Nancy's stories, as you might imagine, are filled with traces of black humor, a mixture of pathos and outrage that seems all the funnier after a few drinks by the fire. We can never be sure if they are wholly true, or even partly so, but it does not seem to matter. The fun is in the telling and in the laughter.
The house is troubled as well, with septic systems that go awry, pipes that burst in the winter, paint that seems forever to be peeling, wallpaper now curling away from the walls. The House of Usher, Linda sighs, describing the latest problems. She notes, with irony, that she has been approached now by both Sotheby's and Christie's in New York, auction houses interested in rare real estate in rarified communities. How has it come to this, we all wonder, that with the family money gone and Nancy on a budget and looking for work, Sotheby's comes calling? Maybe it's finally time to sell, Linda says.Nancy has troubles of her own. She has given up her beloved Marlboro Lights for frequent walks around town, and for the longest time had even quit taking her Scotch. (She has since relented enough to enjoy an occasional dose while watching "Larry King Alive," as she calls the show, eating her little steak dinner and her peas in front of the color TV Linda and Tom gave her at Christmas.) Even if Nancy is successful, though, Linda has warned that this may be her mom's last year in the house her parents built. Nance, to her credit, has even begun a desultory look for a condo -- somewhere in town, of course -- where she can settle in and enjoy the next decade or two without worrying about neighbors, and septic tanks and paint that peels. It will be hard for her, we know. It will be hard for us, too, who have shared so many moments in the house on East Bay Road. But as best we can tell, it is now just a matter of time. Postscript 2003: She moved! Check out her hew home here!
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It is a quiet house, an unchanging refuge from the world where a weekend away seems like a week and a week seems like a month. This, I have decided, is due in large part to that same sense of time frozen that pervades the village. Pictures on the wall in the kitchen have been there, unmoved, for 40 years. I know this because I have seen photos of Linda as a young girl in the late 1950s, and the same pictures are on the wall behind her. It is a timeless place, too, because of Nancy's efforts to resist change. Until just last year, she insisted on watching a black and white TV, using a rotary dial phone, and using her dishwasher only as a place to store dishes, not wash them. She does not now, nor will she ever, have a microwave. And as for the answering machine Linda gave her at Christmas, well, as best we can tell, Nancy never checks her messages. It is doubtful she knows how, and she doesn't really want to learn.
Despite Nancy's best efforts, time never remains still, even on old Cape Cod. So it is natural that her tales of late have turned more toward personal woe. I, Linda, Craig -- all of us who have frequented Nancy's house over the years -- have detected an inexorable, if reluctant, giving way to change. The Wianno Club membership was the first to go. Why spend all that money to hobnob with snobs. Then there were the evil rich people living next door, who sold off the back part of their land to a young couple. In a fortnight, it seemed, they promptly chopped down the trees that had kept Nancy's backyard private for more than 40 years, just so they could build a large modern house. Nancy was heartsick. and we urged a court fight -- reminding her of the time she successfully beat back plans to turn the nearby East Bay Lodge into condos. This time, Nancy opted for diplomacy, and wound up with a thin row of shrubs that will never match the towering pines that were cut down. Gone are the days when Linda could say the backyard, unkempt as it was, resembled something from "Gorillas in the Mist."
The doctors tell her that she has a weak heart, which, of course, none of us believes -- having seen Nancy in action on Thanksgiving night, somehow always pulling together a meal fit for kings for those of us who have relatives far away and nowhere else to go. She's already vowed to find another job and seems only mildly perturbed at being laid off as a salesperson at Macy's.