MAMEY DOESN’T SHARE Mother’s fear of dirt. What’s the worst that can happen if dust collects in the corners or we leave dishes in the sink? Her favorite things are timeworn: the old Glenwood range, the rocking chair by the window with the fraying cane seat, the handsaw with a broken handle in a corner of the kitchen. Each one of them, she says, with its own story to tell.
Mamey runs her fingers along the shells on the mantelpiece in the Shell Room like an archaeologist uncovering a ruin that springs to life with all the knowledge she holds about it. The shells she discovered in her son Alvaro’s sea chest have pride of place here, alongside her black travel-battered bible. Pastel-colored shells of all shapes and sizes line the edges of the floor and the window ledges. Shell-encrusted vases, statues, tintypes, valentines, book covers; miniature views of the family homestead on scallop shells, painted by a long-ago relative; even a shell-framed engraving of President Lincoln.
She hands me her prized shell, the one she found near a coral reef on a beach in Madagascar. It’s surprisingly heavy, about eight inches long, silky smooth, with a rust-and-white zebra stripe on top that melts into a creamy white bottom. “It’s called a chambered nautilus,” she says. “‘Nautilus’ is Greek for ‘sailor.’” She tells me about a poem in which a man finds a broken shell like this one on the shore. Noticing the spiral chambers enlarging in size, he imagines the mollusk inside getting larger and larger, outgrowing one space and moving on to the next.
“‘Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul / As the swift seasons roll!’” Mamey recites, spreading her hands in the air. “’Till thou at length art free, / Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea.’ It’s about human nature, you see. You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it’ll become too small.”
“Then what?” I ask.
“Well, then you’ll have to find a larger shell to live in.”
I consider this for a moment. “What if it’s too small but you still want to live there?”
She sighs. “Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you’ll either have to be brave and find a new home or you’ll have to live inside a broken shell.”
Mamey shows me how to decorate book covers and vases with tiny shells, overlapping them so they cascade down in a precise flat line. As we glue the shells she reminisces about my grandfather’s bravery and adventurousness, how he outsmarted pirates and survived tidal waves and shipwrecks. She tells me again about the flag she made out of strips of cloth when all hope was lost, and the miraculous sight of that faraway freighter that came to their rescue.
“Don’t fill the girl’s head with those tall tales,” Mother scolds, overhearing us from the pantry.
“They’re not tall tales, they’re real life. You know, you were there.”
Mother comes to the door. “You make it all sound grand, when you know it was miserable most of the time.”
“It was grand,” Mamey says. “This girl may never go anywhere. She should at least know that adventure is in her bones.”
When Mother leaves the room, shutting the door behind her, Mamey sighs. She says she can’t believe she raised a child who traveled all over the world but has been content ever since to let the world come to her. She says Mother would’ve been a spinster if Papa hadn’t walked up the hill and given her an alternative.
I know some of the story. That my mother was the only surviving child and that she clung close to home. After my grandfather retired from the sea, he and Mamey decided to turn their house into a summertime inn for the income, the distraction from grief. They added a third floor with dormers, creating four more bedrooms in the now sixteen-room house, and placed ads in newspapers all along the eastern seaboard. Drawn by word of mouth about the charming inn and its postcard view, visitors streamed north. In the 1880s a whole family could lodge at Hathorn House for $12 a week, including meals.
The inn was a lot of work, more than any of them anticipated, and my mother was needed to help run it. As the years passed, the few eligible bachelors in Cushing married or moved away. By the time she was in her mid-thirties she was well past the point, she thought—everyone thought—of meeting a man and falling in love. She would live in this house and take care of her parents until they were buried in the family plot between the house and the sea.
“There’s an old expression,” Mamey tells me. “‘Daughtering out.’ Do you know what it means?”
I shake my head.
“It means no male heirs survived to carry on the family name. Your mother is the last of the Cushing Hathorns. When she dies, the Hathorn name will die with her.”
“There’s still Hathorn Point.”
“Yes, that’s true. But this is no longer Hathorn House, is it? Now it’s the Olson House. Named for a Swedish sailor six years younger than your mother.”
My mind is reeling. “Wait—Papa is younger than Mother?”
“You didn’t know that?” When I shake my head again, Mamey laughs. “There’s a lot you don’t know, child. Johan Olauson was his name then.” I mouth the strange words: Yo-han Oh-laow-sun. “Barely spoke a word of English. He was a deckhand on a schooner captained by John Maloney, who lives in that little house down yonder with his wife,” she says, gesturing toward the window. “You know who I’m talking about?”
I nod. The captain is a friendly man with a bushy gray mustache and yellow-corn teeth and his wife is a ruddy, broad-faced woman with a bosom that seems of a piece with her middle. I’ve seen his boat in the cove: The Silver Spray.
“Well, it was February. Eighteen ninety—a bad winter. Endless. They were on their way to Thomaston from New York, delivering fuel wood and coal to lime kilns up there. But when they reached Muscongus Bay and dropped anchor, a storm swept in. It was so cold that ice grew around the ship in the night. There was nothing they could do; they were stranded. After a few days, when the ice was thick enough, they got out and walked across it to shore. This shore. Your father had nowhere to go, so he stayed with Maloney and his wife until the thaw.”
“How long was that?”
“Oh, months.”
“And the boat was just out there in the ice the whole time?”
“All winter long,” she says. “You could see it from this window.” She lifts her chin toward the pantry. I can faintly hear the clatter of dishes on the other side of the door. “Well, there he was, in that little cottage all winter, down near the cove, with a clear view of this house up the hill. He must’ve been bored to death. But he’d learned how to knit in Sweden. He made that blue wool blanket in the parlor while he was staying with them, did you know that?”