George Howe Colt - The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home

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Copyright 2003 by George Howe Colt

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First Scribner trade paperback edition 2004

S CRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

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Text set in Janson Text

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Colt, George Howe.

The big house: a century in the life of an American summer home/George Howe Colt.

p. cm.

1. Historic buildingsMassachusettsCape Cod. 2. Vacation homesMassachusettsCape Cod. 3. Cape Cod (Mass.)Social life and customs. 4. Colt, George Howe. 5. Cape Cod (Mass.)Biography. 6. Colt family. I. Title.

F72.C3 C57 2003

974.4'92043'092dc21

[B]

2002191138

ISBN 0-684-84517-2

ISBN 0-7432-4964-X (Pbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-4391-2491-8 (ebook)

For my father and mother

A LSO BY G EORGE H OWE C OLT

The Enigma of Suicide

Brothers Excerpt

WINTER

T HE DOORS that are always open have been closed and locked. The windows are shut tight. The shades are drawn. No water runs from the faucets. The toasterwhich in the best of times works only if its handle is pinned under the weight of a second, even less functional toasteris unplugged. The kitchen cupboards are empty except for a stack of napkins, a box of sugar cubes, and eight cans of beer. The porch furnituresix white plastic chairs, two green wooden tableshas been stacked in the dining room. The croquet set, the badminton equipment, the tennis net, and the flag are behind closet doors. The dinghy is turtled on sawhorses in the barn, the oars angled against the wall. The roasted-salt scent of August has given way to the stale smell of mothballs, ashes, mildew.

Here and there are traces of last summer: a striped beach towel tossed on the washing machine, a half-empty shampoo bottle wedged in the wooden slats of the outdoor shower, a fishing lure on the living room mantel, a half-burned log in the fireplace, a sprinkling of sand behind the kitchen door. Dead hornets litter the windowsills. A drowned mouse floats in the lower-bedroom toilet. The most recent entry in the guest book was made five months ago. The top newspaper in the kindling pile is dated September 29. The ships clock in the front hall has stopped at 2:45, but whether that was A.M. or P.M. no one can tell.

After gorging on summer for three months, the house has gone into hibernation. They call it the off-season, as if there were a switch in the cellar, next to the circuit breakers, that one flipped to plunge the house from brimming to empty, warm to cold, noisy to silent, light to dark. Outside, too, the world has changed color, from blues, yellows, and greens to grays and browns. The tangle of honeysuckle, Rosa rugosa, and poison ivy that lapped at the porch is a skein of bare branches and vines. The lawn is hard as tundra, brown as burlap. The Benedicts house next door, hidden from view when I was last here, is visible through the leafless trees. The woods give up their secrets: old tennis balls, an errant Frisbee, a lost tube of sunblock, a badminton birdie. Out in the bay, the water is the color of steel and spattered with whitecaps; without the presence of boats to lend perspective, the waves look ominously large. On the stony beach, the boardwalka set of narrow planks we use to enter the water without spraining our ankles on the algae-slicked rockshas been piled above the tide line, beyond the reach, we hope, of storms.

A summer house in winter is a forlorn thing. In its proper season, every door is unlocked, every window wide open. People, too, are more open in summer, moving through the house and each others lives as freely as the wind. Their schools and offices are distant, their guard is down, their feet are bare. Now as I walk from room to room, shivering in my parka, I have the feeling Im trespassing, as if Ive sneaked into a museum at night. Without people to fill it, the house takes on a life of its own. Family photographs seem to breathe, their subjects vivid and laughing and suspended at the most beautiful moments of their youths: my father in his army uniform, about to go off to World War II; my aunt in an evening gown, in a shot taken for a society benefit not long before her death at twenty-eight; my grandfather as a Harvard freshman, poised to win an ice hockey game; my cousins in the summer of 1963, gathered on the sunny lawn. I am older than all of them, even though many are now dead.

In this still house, where is the summer hiding? Perhaps in the mice whose droppings pepper the couch, the bats that brood in the attic eaves, the squirrels that nest in the stairwell walls. They are silent now, but we will hear and see themand the offspring to which they will soon give birthin a few months. For if the house is full of memory, it is equally full of anticipation. Dormant life lies everywhere, waiting to be picked up where it left off, like an old friendship after a long absence: that towel ready to be slung over a sweaty shoulder, that tennis ball to be thrown into the air, those chairs to be set out on the porch, that fishing lure to be cast into the bay, that guest book to be inscribed with a day in June. Even on the coldest winter morning, this house holds within it, like a voluptuous flower within a hard seed, the promise of summer.

S OMEWHERE north of Wareham, the land began to flatten. Maple and birch gave way to scrub oak and pitch pine, and the air tickled with salt. In the backseat of our overstuffed and overheated Ford station wagon, my younger brother Ned and I stopped playing got-you-last and sat up, alert as bloodhounds. My older brother, Harry, looked up from his Hardy Boys book. We shouted as we spotted each familiar milestone: the first cranberry bog; the first seagull, floating incongruously over an inland ocean of green pine; the first glimpse of salt water, a brackish inlet rimmed with rickety-looking docks, which led, we knew, to a tidal creek, which flowed to the bay, which, at some distant point, emptied into the ocean.

Four decades later, the subtle change in landscape still effects a physical change in me as surely as if I had taken a drug. I breathe faster, my legs go weak, and excitement rises within me like a tide. It is a sweltering August day, but I turn off the air conditioner in our rented red Toyota and roll down the windows. My sweat feels good. In the backseat, six-year-old Susannah, who has been reading Little House on the Prairie and occasionally bursting into Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall (if Anne and I keep our objections to ourselves, she usually peters out at sixty or seventy), sits up and looks out the window.

Are we in Cape Cod?