Lucky for me, summer camp last year included lifeguard certification and cold-water rescue safety.
The frigid water shocked my system at first—especially since I half-expected it to be as warm as the cove. I felt my chest go numb and my heart race, but I knew it was key to stay calm and catch my breath. I really resented that dog, even though I found her quickly. She was panicked and did not want to be rescued. I held tight to her as she kicked against me, scratching my chest. I surfaced quickly, gasping for air as she dug her hind claws into my thighs. Cheddar threw me a life preserver, and then he and Pike pulled us toward the boat.
“Woo-hoo! Way to go, Flipper!” Uncle Chet yelled. Cheddar reached over and lifted up the dog, who wriggled and yipped until she was placed on the deck. Pike pulled me onto the boat, and Uncle Chet wrapped a towel around me.
“Atta girl!” he shouted.
“Way to go, Flipper!” Pepper yelled, wrapping her arm around me.
“Flipper to the rescue!” Pixie shouted. I wondered if that was going to be my nickname. They all had them. If you had a nickname, you were in.
I shivered so hard my teeth chattered. Jumping into that cold water was a really dumb thing to do. But that little dog! The whole episode lasted only minutes, but they fussed over me like I had been pulled from the wreckage of the Titanic.
“Get her down below,” Uncle Chet said. “Pepper, find her something dry to wear. Some sweats or something. Pix, make her a cup of tea, warm but not hot, decaf. Pike, you’ve got the helm. Take us home,” Uncle Chet cranked out orders, and his crew scurried.
“Don’t look so smug,” Meredith hissed into my ear as I walked by her. Smug? I was sure I looked like a drowned rat. “You don’t get a nickname that fast.”
Pepper escorted me down below and wrapped me in a wool blanket. Pretty soon, I was in dry clothes—baggy sweats from some Connecticut prep school. They were probably Cheddar’s based on the size of them. Pixie handed me a mug of chamomile. Pepper wrung out my soggy clothes in the “head,” another new nautical term for the day.
They coddled me all the way to Hazard Point. I was still swaddled in blankets when I returned to deck as we approached the Point. It was even more impressive from the sea than it was from shore. I watched as their private dock came into view. The path that led to the main house zigzagged up along the dark rocks and beach roses, interrupted here and there at the steepest points with a handrail or a cluster of stone steps. Over that, a bright green lawn rose up in terraces like a green wedding cake, topped with the cluster of clapboard mansions.
As soon as we docked, Uncle Chet barked out new orders.
“I’ll drive you home, kiddo,” he said to me. “Ched, Pike, you’ve got Plunger duty. Pix, Pep, clean the salt off that dog before your grandmother sees her. Meredith, Meredith?—what happened to your friend, Pike? Jeepus Crackers—we didn’t lose her in the drink again?!”
“Nope, she’s still with us. She ran up to the house to use the bathroom. She won’t use the head on the Plunger,” Pepper finked.
“Won’t use the head on the Plunger? That’s the funniest damn thing I’ve ever heard,” Uncle Chet said.
Uncle Chet ushered me through the biggest house, in through the sliding glass at the back, through an airy living room with no TV, and out a wooden screen door to the driveway. I tried to look around because I knew I would have to give a full report to Flo.
“Let’s take this one; it heats up fast,” he said, pointing to one of the three American behemoths parked in the driveway. They had the license plates: pipes 1, pipes 2, and pipes 3. The ancient blue station wagon, replete with wooden paneling, shone like it had just been waxed. We got in, and he flipped the visor down, and the keys fell into his lap.
“Are you still at the old Hart homestead?” he asked as we started out on Hazard Point Road.
“Yes, it’s in the same place, but the old house is gone,” I said.
My mother despised that little house. Letting her raze it was my father’s last attempt to keep her in Keech. I don’t remember much about it. I do remember it had a beehive oven and pumpkin pine floorboards, which, I guess, are special if you like old houses.
“That’s a shame. I think that was the oldest house in Keech. I am sorry to hear it had to come down. Change comes whether we like it or not,” he said, which sounded incredibly important and insightful. But that’s because he had one of these deep voices that made everything sound that way.
But change didn’t have to come to the little Hart house. My mother just didn’t like it. In its place, she built a modern glass and cedar box that stuck out like a sore thumb. She found the plans in a magazine called Rocky Mountain Vacation Homes. It was on the cover. She had the issue framed, and it still hung in the front entry. Come to think of it, maybe we should take that down some day.
When the new house was finally finished, she found out that it wasn’t the house she hated; it was Keech. Or maybe it was us. So she took off. And then Grandma died, and Dad and I were left with a house that was way too big for just two of us—four bedrooms, eight rooms in all. Our “great room” had a fieldstone fireplace and distant ocean views. It was the fanciest house in Keech Town. But it wasn’t nearly like anything on the Toohey scale. Especially since it was our only house. And the Tooheys had a whole other neighborhood of mansions down by the toilet factory.
When we came down the driveway, Flo was up on a ladder, washing the big picture windows in the front. Dad would freak if he knew she was up there all alone with no one to hold the ladder. But Flo had a fixation on keeping those windows clean, like all of Keech would judge her if our windows were dirty. That ladder came out as soon as she saw a bird thinking about pooping. She turned to see who was coming down the drive, and I saw her expression cloud over when she read the telltale license plate.
She got down from the ladder, came down all the steps from the front deck, and approached us at the bottom of the driveway.
I didn’t know what to introduce her as, so I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to say “housekeeper.” Turns out they already knew each other, greeting each other with curt grunts.
Uncle Chet explained what happened as Flo’s reaction turned from mild annoyance at the sight of him to near panic when she realized I was wearing someone else’s clothes and carrying mine in a plastic bag that had once held hamburger buns. She escorted me to the house, walking away while Uncle Chet was still talking. She pushed me up the stairs and straight into bed even though I felt fine.
After a whispered phone call, Ebbie arrived on her scooter with a pot of soup secured to its milk-crate basket with duct tape and bungee cords. Flo pinned me under layers of blankets. Ebbie came upstairs with a bowl of hot soup, took my temperature, and held my hand.
“She’s perfectly fine, Flo,” Ebbie said. I started to get up.
“Stay put,” Flo ordered. I lay back down. I watched them say goodbye in the hallway. They had been together since before I was born.
I hope I find something that lasts like that, I thought, then I slept until Dad got home and woke me up.
“You went sailing on the Plunger? Are you pulling my leg?” he asked. He sat on the side of my bed, eating Chinese food leftovers.
“She nearly got killed on the Plunger!” Flo said. I tried to answer but sneezed three times instead.
“See that!” Flo clearly loved this evidence. “Now she’s sick. You are lucky you didn’t get hypo-pneumonia,” Flo said, having a hard time deciding which disease the Tooheys had tried to kill me with. She gathered my dirty dishes and went downstairs.
I told my dad the story, and of course, he was thrilled. But I left out certain details, like the beer and the smell of booze on Uncle Chet.
“Chet and the older Pike and I spent a summer as pickers out on the blueberry barrens,” Dad said.
It was like a bedtime story. I wished he had begun it with “Once upon a time on the blueberry barrens.” I had heard these stories dozens, maybe hundreds of times. I had heard them so often I could tell them—all the versions of them. Sometimes it felt like he was just talking about one long summer day, and sometimes, it sounded like they picked blueberries for months and months, year after year.
There was the time they surprised a sleeping bear. There was the time some old movie star stopped and asked for directions. And now that I knew some of the players, I wanted to hear them all again.
“It was a great way to earn a few bucks in summer. Sometimes we’d get a ride. Sometimes we’d hitchhike. Don’t you ever do that now; it was a different day and age then. Half the time, we knew everyone on the road, at least on the road out of Keech.
“It was hard work, but we had fun. We raked the low bush plants for those tiny little berries. You got sick of eating them pretty fast. And you complain about folding T-shirts. Try picking blueberries all day up in the hot sun. That’s one thing about those Tooheys. Those kids were never afraid of hard work.” He paused because I interrupted him.
“Yeah, Dad, that reminds me, Chet said your generation worked hard so our generation wouldn’t have to.” I immediately regretted it.
“See! That’s why I gave you the summer off! It’s all come full circle. Now Chet and Old Pike would be grandsons to Old Joe, the first Toohey. Not the first Toohey ever. They were probably in Ireland for generations, but you know what I mean. He had a good job—a good job for an illiterate Irish immigrant back in those days, that is—digging ditches. One day, he was digging some kind of ditch near a millowner’s house, and he really had to take a crap. A big crap!”
“Gross! Dad!” I said, but he had surprised me with this. This was a new story.
“Well, it’s critical to the story. If it was a regular one, he would have just gone in the woods. So he went up to the big house and asked, bold as brass, if maybe they had an outhouse. The millowner was out, but there was a parlor maid from Ireland who must have felt sorry for him or maybe she liked the look of him or something. Anyway, she let this dirty ditchdigger right into the front door of the fancy house and sent him up the front stairs to let him use the fancy bathroom. I don’t know why she did that, but that’s probably a whole other story.
“Now, Old Joe had never used an inside bathroom before. Like a lot of people in those days, his family had an outhouse. And bath time was a big bucket in front of the stove on a Saturday night. And sitting there, on a flush toilet with a view of the beautiful porcelain claw-foot tub, a shelf of perfumed soaps, and a basket of soft paper for him to wipe his ass on … mind you, people used to use the Sears catalog or even corncobs, which I don’t imagine are very comfortable—”
“Dad! Again, gross!”
“Anyway, he had an epiphany sitting there—the epiphany that started it all. What the Tooheys like to call a ‘come-to-John’ moment.
“He saw a day when every home—not just new ones, not just the fancy ones—would have an indoor bathroom. Row after row of houses, tenements, apartments—all with toilets, sinks, and bathtubs on the inside. It was like he was floating up above New England, and he could see into every home, every millhouse, every tenement, and every farm. Toilets flushing and filling, water swirling, sinking, then rising again. Sinks running. Baths filling. Showers cascading. Shining porcelain; gleaming, curving pipes. He decided right then and there that he was the one who was going to make all those fixtures. That his fortune, his future, was toilets.”
“Dad! Are you making this up?”
“Of course not. You already know how the story ends. I am just filling in the details. So he quits that ditchdigging job right then and there. His parents thought he was crazy. They were the last of the ‘Old Tooheys.’ Quit a good job like that! But he had grand vision, or a vision, anyway.
“He started smuggling booze into Keech Harbor with Freddie Alden, the black sheep of the Alden family.
“Maine had been dry long before Prohibition, and smuggling was everywhere around here. Smuggling’s like a birthright to some people around here—”
“Our family?”
“No, we just counted it for other people,” Dad joked, and we had a good laugh. And then he continued.
“At first, it was just booze from ships waiting a few miles offshore. Freddie had a fast little boat, and they raced out to the ships in that. They kept it and the booze hidden out on Alden Island—and they would row it in later. That’s how they never got caught. Old Joe had massively powerful arms from digging all those ditches. Old Joe could row a boat like Paul Bunyan.”
“Paul Bunyan was a lumberjack, Dad.”
“Well, yes, and I am sure if Paul Bunyan had to row a boat, he would have been very good at that, too … well, like some guy in a folktale anyway. Like in that Jeanette Frisé folk song. I almost met her once. I saw her in a coffee shop in Montreal, but I was too shy to say hello. She looked just like she did on her album cover.”
“Dad! Old Joe,” I reminded him. Can’t have him going off on a Jeanette Frisé tangent.
“Oh where was I? Rum-runnin’—” Ugh! I hated when he dropped a final “g.”
“Freddie. Oh yes. He knew Keech because the Aldens had the Big House here, and it was empty most of the year.”
I knew all about the Aldens. They built the first house on Hazard Point—the mansion that Grannie Toohey lived in now, the one everyone calls the Big House. The Aldens were really old money—like whaling money or the China trade or something like that. The Tooheys married into the Aldens, and slowly, the Aldens disappeared, overtaken by the bigger tribe, until the only things left were Alden Island and a dirt road called Alden Road, which was abandoned by the town and eventually became a footpath. Nobody but old townies like Flo remembered that it once was a real road that had a name.
“Then, boom!” Dad went on. “Prohibition passes, and now there’s more money than ever in smuggling, and they already have a system in place. They get their hands on a schooner; they start making the run up to St. Pierre on their own.”
“Who is St. Pierre?”
“St. Pierre is an island. A French island.”
“They sailed all the way to France?”
“No, St. Pierre’s a tiny island off the coast of Canada that France kept its claws on, and it was like Booze ‘R’ Us during Prohibition.”
“Near Campobello?”
“What? No. Off Newfoundland. Did you flunk geography, Valedictorian?”
“They didn’t teach it.”
“Where’s your atlas?”
“Never mind the island. The story, Dad!”
“So they ran the stuff right down to Alden Island, then moved it right up into the basement of the Big House. The story goes that there was a tunnel—maybe it’s still there. I wouldn’t want something like that under my house. It would give me nightmares. I would keep thinking one of Flo’s imaginary monsters sneaking in—”
“Dad! The story!”
“Then, one day, Old Joe moved back down the coast and opened a small plumbing supply store. Just before the Feds swept in and arrested a whole bunch of rum-runners.”
“And what happened to Freddie?”
“He married Mary Toohey, Old Joe’s sister. That’s how come he’s the black sheep.”
“It wasn’t the smuggling?”
“Please. Smuggling. Importing. Exporting. Who knows what the Aldens got up to, the triangle trade?”
“Dad! The Aldens were abolitionists! Maybe they used that tunnel in the Underground Railroad!”
“That would be nice, but it was marrying Catholic Mary Toohey that put Freddie in the doghouse … but I digress. The Tooheys started manufacturing plumbing supplies shortly after that. When we got into World War II, they got government contracts that put their toilets in military bases all up and down the east coast. So boom! The Tooheys made a fortune during the war.
“They are the best, you know. You can flush anything down a Toohey. It can take a whole cloth diaper.” He paused while he scraped the last of the beef and broccoli in special sauce from the paper carton, first with a fork, then with his finger.
“Of course, when all those GIs came home after the war, they all wanted Toohey toilets in their new homes. Do you want any of this fried rice?” he asked, picking up another carton. I shook my head, and Dad started in on the rice.
“And now, they are the number one toilet in offices in the US of A because of the patented Silent Tinkle bowl design.”
“Dad! Are they paying you to say this stuff?”
“If only! I’d gladly take a nickel every time someone’s grateful for the Silent Tinkle. You’ve never lived in a house without a Toohey toilet. You have no idea how loud it is to pee in a toilet without the Silent Tinkle. And then there’s their patented FlusSSH!—it’s so quiet when you—”
“I get it, Dad; now every time I pee quietly, I will thank the Tooheys. I will be sure to mention it next time I run into them.”
“Maybe you’ll get to go to the compound!”
“I was there today.”
“Holy smokes!” he said and spit fried rice on the floor. “Shoot, Flo’s gonna kill me,” he said, wiping it up with a napkin, trying but failing to get every grain of greasy rice off my pink carpet.
“Who knows what tomorrow will bring! You have a good excuse to go back. You’ll have to return those clothes.”
I had forgotten I was still wearing somebody’s sweats. But they had already told me just to keep them. There would be no going back.
“Dad, really. I just want to stay home and get some organizing done.” But the truth was I was afraid to go down to the village. I didn’t want to deal with the disappointment of there not being a next time. I didn’t want to sit there alone on a bench or the beach or at the library while the Tooheys whooped it up and my classmates all looked on. What would have been mildly boring would now be unbearable.
My summer had peaked. And it had barely started. And now, I didn’t even want a job because that might mean waiting on the Tooheys, and that would be just too humiliating at this point.
The next morning, I pulled everything out of my closet to organize it by garment type and then by color—ROY G. BIV. But once I got it all out, I didn’t feel like putting it all back in. I wondered what the Tooheys were up to today. Instead, I crawled in among the piles of clothes on my bed and took a nap; I didn’t wake up until I heard Flo come in the house around lunch.
I know it sounds a little “Toohey” to have a housekeeper, but she was more of a necessity when I was little. After Mom left and Grandma died, Flo really kept things going, watching me after school and cooking dinners for us, too. Before I was old enough for sleepaway camp, it was Flo who drove me to and from all those enrichment day camps. I never even asked what she did while I was there. Did she go all the way home? Sit in the car and read? Run errands? All I knew was she was never late to get me.
“Hi sunshine!” she called up to me. “I brought in the mail.”
“Okay.”
“There’s something for you.”
“Okay.”
“It looks … interesting.”
Interesting to her, that’s what she meant.
I just lay there, knowing she’d eventually bring it upstairs to me out of curiosity.
“What’s this project?” she said. “Are we organizing by color again?” She handed me the mail and started collecting red items and putting them in the left side of my closet.
Folded amid the Keech Town Crier was a flyer from a Boston dress shop addressed to my mother, a messy pile of coupons, and an envelope of fine stationery—the aforementioned interesting item. I looked at it last to prolong her torture. It was addressed to me and engraved with the return address of Toohey, Hazard Point, Keech Harbor, Maine.