How can he explain the Hydes? Their pockmarked DNA, aged like blue cheese, traditions browning like the edges of a sliced pear? They’re more than a family—they’re an institution, a culture, a regime. And he, technically, is a high-ranking member.
The women are smart and lanky—a few exist on Ritz crackers and gin—no one sees them consume much else. The men range from chieftains, eminent rulers—like Bats and Uncle J. P.—to their henchmen, like Alex. The family has legendary parties—whiskey juleps at the Kentucky Derby, summer croquet in East Hampton, and holiday caroling from house to house in Newport. They have backgammon tournaments, and the guests wear herringbone slacks, sipping Glenlivet outside in the cool autumn twilight.
The old cat, Ducky, is pictured here in a grove of peonies, and he represents another facet of the Hydes. He fought a one-cat war with raccoons all his life, his face rearranged after bloody, moonlit altercations, and one yellow eye blinked on top of his head, and his tongue hung out the side of his mouth. He died on a Thanksgiving night, heaved and gurgled at the top of the stairs as the family ate turkey and potatoes dauphinoise. The Hydes didn’t move—they admired his self-sufficient courage, and they admired themselves for being unsentimental. The children helped dig his grave under a holly tree the next morning.
After looking at the photos, they eat cookies in the kitchen, play “Chopsticks” on the piano, and see the view from the third floor—a long dark gleaming glitter of ocean. There are more staircases and hallways and closets and rooms than seems scientifically possible from outside.
This isn’t new to her, being new in a house that isn’t hers. Elise checked off many addresses on her journey. She saw herself in medicine-cabinet mirrors, she slept on couches covered in dog hair and took the dimes and pennies from under the cushions, she nipped a slug of orange juice before she left, she stepped out of buildings and looked left then right and simply moved in a direction so it looked like she had a destination. The lightning fork on the city rooftop gleamed with dirty light as she set out, again and again, newly put forth after getting through a night, rising like a bird into the world.
“I want to see the beach!” she says around midnight.
“Now?” he asks. “You’re insane.”
They grab a blanket and walk, blanket over shoulders, down a path that in summer is hedged by hydrangea blooms. Tonight the plants are sticks.
On the beach she pulls away and tears to the ocean, runs to the surf’s edge, wets her boots at their tips.
Jamey drops the blanket and they race in circles. The moon clarifies the sand’s ripples and the half-buried driftwood and the frilly edge of the Atlantic.
When they stop, she coughs, bending over.
“God is telling you to quit smoking,” he says.
“Yeah, that’s gonna happen,” she scoffs, but she collects his statement of concern like a seashell in her pocket, another souvenir of their future together.
They lie on the blanket and roll into it. He puts his hand under her shirt, she yelps—her torso is blazing. So slim, and so much heat! She slips her icy hands in his sweater, and finds it’s hot there too.
They barely move and yet the sand stirs audibly, minerals turning, squeaking.
Her face painted by the stars. The light sanctifying each curve and lash. He thinks about how human bodies are made from time and space: meteors and blood, lava and brain, plankton and bones.
“Let’s sleep here,” she says.
“It’s way too cold,” he says.
And she could almost sleep in the dunes. It’s about being hardy as well as disobeying conventions like homes and buildings, rooms and beds, addresses, belongings. She left them; she unbraided those things from her identity. She signed off.
“I’m too cold,” he admits.
“You’re a baby,” she teases, and they lie there for a while before standing up, brushing off sand, folding the blanket, and walking back.
He wakes up in the dark, confused—the rooms divide memories into compartments. His father and Cecily in this bed, hungover after their engagement party ten years ago, reading the paper all morning and drinking bloody marys Jamey delivered. In the sitting room, an argument between his uncles over a card game. An afternoon of buttery light in the kitchen, cigarette smoke, a couple visiting from Saudi Arabia—who were they? Someone’s dog cowering in the hedge, in shock after being hit by a car.
He wants to get rid of most of what he remembers, comb through it, toss it, but he feels guilty. His head is packed with tie pins, soda caps, pressed violets. Girls’ things, or things collected like a girl collects things. There’s a feminine side to him, an almost indolent, timid part of his soul. He’s affected so easily. Once in a while, he can feel everything shift one way, and he lurches to the left, seasick on recollection and devotion. An object like a metal spatula—he sees his dad in madras shorts and no shirt at the grill—shimmers now in the far distance like a friendly warning.
The next day, he has to shit but he can’t do it with her around. When they’re in New Haven, he goes to his own house because he can’t at her apartment.
Now he sneaks to the cold, unheated servants’ wing. He yips as he sits on the freezing seat.
And suddenly she’s calling his name through the house. Why? Why now? He’s mortified, and holds his breath. He wipes his ass, quietly stands—She’s near!
He lights a match from a Le Cirque matchbook in the French ceramic dish on the back of the toilet. But he doesn’t want her to hear him flush.
Her voice recedes. He waits and waits, flushes, tiptoes up a back staircase so he can come down the front stairs like he was just out of earshot. His heart is pounding.
They’re reading Smithsonian magazine and drinking beer when Elise hears a noise upstairs.
“This place is haunted!” she says.
This house is haunted, he explains—by a charismatic, manic redhead named Henrietta, who loved gardenia perfume, mystery novels, caramel candies, and her employer: Aaron Balthazar Hyde, Jamey’s great-grandfather. Loved him too much, loved him the wrong way, loved him over and over. Everyone thought her bloated nose and pink eyes were because she missed Ireland, but the worldlier girls saw the slight weight gain, almost imperceptible, just a shifting of the body’s priorities. And one day the girl was found hanging in the bedroom she shared with two maids, her tongue ice-blue.
“To be honest, I’ve heard so many versions over the years, it’s probably not true.”
“But she was real?”
“As far as I know. And he was certainly real.”
“And they had an affair?”
“That’s hard to confirm. She could have said he was the father but it was actually the driver, you know?”
“Or your great-granddad could’ve raped her.”
“Yes,” Jamey says slowly, not sure if he should be defensive.
“Or maybe she was like delusional. Was she definitely having a baby?”
“That could be rumor.”