Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [90]
Our Victorian chimney was so decrepit that we could simply pluck bricks out of it by hand, a situation which called for immediate attention; Bobby drove down to help for a weekend, and the three of us, starting up on the roof, in bright March sun, took the narrow stack of bricks down from its very tip through two floors, all the way down into the sandy dune on which the house rested, where pale beach grass had been sitting in just the same spot, untouched, how long? A hundred and fifty years?
We were finding new reserves of energy, intent as we were on the making of home, and pleased with this luxury, the opportunity to work on a house we didn’t have to live in yet. With the coming of spring, I turned to the new garden; here the old roses I’d wanted in Vermont but couldn’t grow because of the cold would thrive. The climate of our coastal zone is astonishingly kind to roses. We feel the Atlantic winds as brutally raw and damp, but the roses seem not only not to mind but to be entirely happy. I ordered lush climbers, to deck the clapboards (newly white, replacing a pale but undeniably hideous lavender) in heavily lidded pink blossoms.
And we built a fine picket fence, stopping to take walks together to study local styles of gates and posts, cutting every picket ourselves, adjusting and readjusting the angles to encompass the curve of the front garden in just the right way. There were plenty of things in the house that could have used our attention—the kitchen remained a funky zone of 1960s knotty pine, the bathroom a grim extravaganza of blue Formica—but there was something essential about getting that garden right, achieving the proper spirit for the entry to the house. And we did get it right; even that first summer the roses grew huge, twining around the windows with their black shutters, reaching for the roof with their fragrant pink clouds of petals, so that coming home always was coming home, an event and celebration.
With April and May also came the reopening of the town, and as the garden was a source of focus and pleasure for me, so work reappeared as a place for Wally to center his energies, a locus of activity and a source of new people and absorptions. He worked in a clothing store, selling at first, enjoying the opportunities to play and to flirt with the gay tourists who were shopping for new bathing suits, bright new clothes to wear on their holiday, and soon he was doing windows again as well. It made him happy, to go to work. Though I could tell it tired him more than it ever had, too, especially when things didn’t go well; he was ready only for the couch, at the end of a long day. But wasn’t it just ordinary fatigue?
That summer, 1991, seems a chain of images, familiar and loved objects: our green and brown bicycles, old Raleighs for getting around town and on the seashore trails. My garden trowel and spade, stacks of paintbrushes for shop-window props, Wally’s handsome bow ties, the leather portfolio in which he’d carry sketches or lunch to work. His new black motorcycle jacket, stiff and fragrant. The mantel newly painted a licheny gray-green in a softly lustrous eggshell finish. Lovely rough antique hardware—hand-forged latches and bolts—and a clutch of raised panel doors bought from Ted, a salvage dealer just down the street. (Ted’s dead now, too.) A heavy glass vase full of pink and white cosmos, which bloomed and bloomed. A jar of paste wax, for the old oak dining table, so that when I laid out my mother’s blue and white china the reflections of the plates would gleam in the scarred, handsome wood.
It was autumn before there’d be another moment of demarcation, another moment of descent. We hadn’t heard from Bobby for months, which was very much out of character. Usually he’d call once a week at least to chat, and come every month or so for a visit. But the last