Reprinted from THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Volume 69. Number 3. Summer 2000
Copyright © 2000 by the Phi Beta Kappa Society

JOURNAL
~
Provincetown

David Michaelis

Two weeks ago, I heard my phone twittering in the dusk. It was Alec Wilkinson, calling from Truro to ask if I would introduce him at his reading at the Provincetown Art Association on August 8. I told him I wanted a night to think it over, but I could already feel the gritty sand-scored floorboards of the Art Association under my feet. This is what I thought: It's time I went back to P-town.

In Boston, 5:30 A.M. The gulls shrieking over Boston Harbor. Before leaving A Street, I read my grandfather Ordway Tead's essay about Provincetown, "'Remembrance of Things Past." His father, the Reverend Edward Sampson Tead, a Congregational minister from Somerville, Mass., had taken the family each July to Provincetown, where my great-grandfather served as the summer preacher in the local parish. Each year on July 1, my grandfather and his brother Phillips would be up at 5:30 in the morning, shivering with excitement about taking the steamer from Boston to the Cape.

Big blue dome over Boston, sun rising behind the steeples of Southie. Down the Southeast Expressway. At the bottom of Quincy comes the big fork: Go right for Route 95, Providence, and NYC. Go left for Pilgrim's Highway; Cape Cod, and the Islands. The road to New York brings back the whole sense of exile I've lived with ever since we sold the house in Provincetown to pay Mom's estate taxes—that whole epoch in the eighties when it seemed as if we had been banished. But now, for a moment, the old pattern of life seems once more vouchsafed for me: I turn with a great rush of feeling onto Pilgrim's Highway. I'm going home. I'm driving down to the Cape.

I don't know why I feel so guilty about having lost the house in P-town. I never seem able to forgive myself because I always know that, in fact, Choate, Hall and Stewart's distress sale was avoidable. We had a choice. My mother's house in Cambridge could have been sold, though in cash value the loss would have been greater had we sold 19 Berkeley Street in the pits of the real estate market of 1982. I remember it every time I drive through Boston: the way my brother and I sat up there in the cool, collected conference room at the law firm, agreeing with everyone that it was a luxury for a couple of guys in their early twenties to own beach-front property on Cape Cod. And so we sold the thing we loved more deeply than any other.

Now here I am sailing across the Sagamore Bridge to Cape Cod and Provincetown. The word by itself, the length of it on the green roadside sign, the many jumbled letters, gives me a sudden glimpse of the whole town. It's the first glimpse I've really allowed myself. I really see it: Provincetown, lying flat on the harbor, surrounded by the vast plains of the Atlantic, the Pilgrim monument silhouetted against the equally vast sky. "'The long, slender, dearly beloved town," as my grandfather called it in his memoir.

I stop for coffee and a bran muffin at a new Friendly's beside the bridge rotary. Even before getting out of the car, I can smell the salty air, the whiff of bayberry. I wipe my eyes. It's 8:30 in the morning, and I am already welling up. It is going to be a long day.

At Orleans, I swing around the rotary and head north on Route 6. This is the last leg. After the Wellfleet Drive-In, the road is dense with the sites and sights of my childhood. There's the Wellfleet A&P, the parking lot where, one rainy day, at age seven, I got hit by a car and cut by its silver hood ornament at the corner of my (right) eye. The A&P is now the IGA, and I have to check the car mirror to see which eye it was. There's the turnoff for Wellfleet Center and for Gull Pond Road—the Sluiceway! And here is Truro, already. My God, it's all here, it's all the same, but it's not. The Package Store is still the Package Store, but Schoonie's isn't Schoonie's and Gilbert Seldes isn't lying abed in a small white-clapboard house and I am not being taken in to say hello to the great man at his smelly bedside. And yet here is the sign for Corn Hill, which therefore must still exist, and for Highland Light, whose flashing sequence I used to count from mv bunk window in Provincetown.

I start feeling queasy. Not exactly carsick, but somehow ill, not quite myself. The road is hilly in this part of North Truro, but it's not the rolling motion of the car that's making me uneasy. It's not so much what's here as what is not here. I keep expecting to see certain vistas open up across the tops of the scrub pine. They are not places you'd find on the map. They are those scenes that, because of annual pilgrimage, become even more affirming of place than the shrines marked by big green reflective signs. I am looking for The Land That Grandma and Grandpa Owned. I am looking for The Bluff Over the Bay With the Edward Hopper House. And for The Field Where We Stopped When the Dog Had to Upchuck. It all seems to have vanished. But then, when I come to a certain point in the road, which we thought of as The Place Where Mom Always Says Whee!, I realize what's happened. Mom always said Whee! because that was the point in the road where we could first see P-town after a year's absence. The reason I can't see P-town from this point in the road is that the trees have grown, they're no longer scrubby.

At the crest of Pilgrim Heights, I come apart a little. I begin sobbing the minute I see it—Provincetown, low and long and clear, a world afloat between sky and sea. To my right is Pilgrim Lake and behind it the dunes, stretching out across the narrow spine of land. To my left, dotting the shore road and the bay, strands of matching cottages, tiny, clapboard necklaces looping from North Truro around to P-town, This is the very last piece of northbound road, before you turn west, I'm driving and blubbering and blubbering and driving. I'm making sounds I haven't heard me make since the time of Mom's death, ten years ago in December. My skull hurts. I can't find the ENTERING PROVINCETOWN sign—the one that always got my brother and me into a fight (like Ordway and Phillips before us), a contest to see who could get his foot deepest into the car's heating duct and claim to have been first into P-town.

Now I know why my grandfather stopped his lovely memoir at the point of arrival. It's just too much. I feel as if I'm dying, or dead already. I pass the water tower, then the roadside dunes— the shrunken Sahara of my childhood. I slow down to make the left-hand turn onto Snail Road, which goes south two or three tenths of a mile before it rejoins Route 6A at the water's edge. I turn, cross the highway, and start down Snail Road. I wish I were a snail, so I could duck back into my shell—back into the life I've improvised since my mother's death. None of my life since 1982 has been real—I feel that suddenly now on Snail Road. I feel completely naked. About halfway down the road, I think: Maybe I really should just turn back, forget it, go back to Wellfleet. But in another second I see the water. This was always the moment when Mom took her hands off the steering wheel and clapped them together. Often she wept.

Provincetown forms a bowl around the sea. The East End, where I'm making landfall, and town center and the West End and all the sandy way around to Long Point form a slender rim. The seaward horizon and the bayside of Wellfleet and Truro complete the rim. If you go out on the water here, or, when the tide is out, if you walk out onto the flats, you feel as if you are in the exact center of creation, suspended in a sphere of light between the dome of sky and the bowl of sea. The land is a line on the horizon, not much more. You can feel the roundness of the planet and the continuousness of the cosmos. The light is the light of miracles. The water is clear and blue and green, so full of salt and shellfish that when you smell its smell you don't think so much of the seaside as of life itself. When, after ten years away, I drive back up to the edge of this bowl of light and water, I instantly dissolve back into it, like powdered remains, white bone fragments, tossed onto water.

I park the car at HoJo's, which is now called Basil's. A can of root beer takes some of the dread out of my stomach. I walk over to the waterside, back at the beginning of the East End, before the tightly spaced houses begin their long march down Commercial Street. It is a glorious day, cloudless, high summer. The water has a sparkle on it. I stand on a sandy spot above the shorefront, and the sea comes up to meet me. The sound of it, the smell of it—it fills me up instantly. I don't know why, but the sea here is so much more completely the sea than almost anywhere else I have ever been. P-town, I keep thinking, this is P-town. I feel myself coming to life, as if a dead limb had been sewn back onto my body and pumped full of fresh salty blood.

I take a deep breath and start down Commercial. I walk in the street, as always, and I pass by the Zinbergs', which has a big FOR SALE sign out front: Dorothy selling after Norman's death? I pass by the Florsheims', also dead. I pass by the Romanos', where I first kissed a girl, Jill Kearney, in a spin-the-bottle game. At the Kearneys', a flock of bumper-sculpture animals materializes in my memory, like extinct creatures in a child's pop-up book. At the Motherwells', the name of the house—a name I have neither heard nor thought of for ten years—offers itself as if it were still part of my everyday mental furniture: Sea Barn. It's all shut up now, following Robert Motherwell's death last month, and the memorial service on the flats, which I read about in the Times. After Sea Barn comes Harmony, Lily Harmon's house. And then the Friedmans' unnamed house, now the Mailers', with a big black BMW parked out front. Then comes Bissell's and Huber's Hut, and the Packards', and across on the back side of Commercial, facing the water across its parking lot and beach, the White Dory Inn, which is now condominiums. Beside the White Dory stands the Atkins Cottage, where my grandparents spent their honeymoon seventy-six years ago this July.

I can't bring myself to look at the next house on the water. It's crazy, but I feel that if I see this most unimaginable sight—my house, our house, inhabited by us in another time—then I will know what it is like to be dead, or never to have lived at all. And the strangest part is that here, under this sun, and with the wind blowing the sea into my brains, I have always felt completely alive, a fully sentient being restored to my original (which may also be my final) state.

After Mom died, I had recurring dreams for the first time in my life. There were several. The fish dreams. Also the dream of amputation. And the dream where Mom would turn to stone when I kissed her. About once a year for ten years I have had a dream that takes place in our house in Provincetown. There are variations, but the dream always starts the same way. Mom and I are at the window next to the bathroom, and Mom is agitated because she looks out and sees cars parked on our lawn. Then, when she sees that in fact the lawn has been turned into a parking lot, covered in gray spalls, she gets furious and demands to know what has happened. Sometimes she asks what those people think they are doing or why there is a car out there with a Pittsburgh license plate, black with white letters. In any event, she's mad, and I'm the one who's got to tell her that we don't own the house anymore.

Sometimes she receives this news philosophically. When I first had these dreams, right after we sold the house in '82, Mom got very angry. She was baffled, outraged, shaking with fury: "What do you mean, WE DON'T OWN THE HOUSE? Of course we do, Dave! It's our house, Grandma and Grandpa's house, and now it's your house. Don't be silly," She would get so carried away, there was only one thing to do to defuse her: Tell her she was dead. In real life, when Mom was in the hospital, dying of cancer, no one broke this news to her. No one ever said: Diana, you're dying. You are going to be dead soon. Is your will in order (it was not), have you taken all the necessary steps? We all acted as if strong-willed Mom would survive, In my recurring dream, when I told her the news that she was dead, Mom would always take it with a smile and a wave, just as she had taken her disease in life. Then she would turn from me, turn away from the window, and start up the stairs. And I always knew that she was going back to the dead because her feet weren't touching the stairs and I could see her heels floating upward.

The side of the house looks exactly the same. The shingles are gray and weathered. Not a single window on the east end of the house looks altered. The seaside deck has the same railing and the same bulkhead. This sounds like a pretty sober description—as if I'm standing there on Commercial Street, looking at my old house with a cool, dry eye. In fact, all I really give the house is a glance— before suddenly noticing that the lawn and privet hedges facing the street are gone, replaced by a parking lot with gravel spalls. Several cars are parked in this mini-lot, although none with Pittsburgh license plates. The house has also been christened by its new owners. To us it had always been simply "619." But now it has a name; and there it is in purple letters: LEVITATION. Just as I am turning away, a woman walks out the front door onto the porch. I turn fast.

Completely undone, I float on down Commercial. David Mayo has built a big house beside ours, filling in what was always a vacant seaside lot. Someone else has squeezed an awful house—big and boxy, with a flat-topped roof—between Mayo's and the old Mervyn Jules place: two houses where before there was none. Up the street, a fancy hotel with pink umbrellas and white tables has replaced Rosy, the raffish '70s hangout where we met for nightcaps. I pass the small white gate that led through the rosehip-fragrant path to the Tennis Club. And Howie Schneider's house, and Susan Sinaiko's. And the Ship's Bell sign, and the glass telephone booth that used to be in front of the sign. And here is Number One Conway Street—Anna Lewis's house.

I walk up to the gate and stand there without deciding to do anything. The lawn chairs under the trees in the front yard look cool and welcoming. There's some laundry hanging on the line. Flowers border the white picket fence. Inside the small, shingled house, the TV chatters. I can hear Anna eating lunch alone in front of the television. I'm not sure what to do, whether to continue on into town, or whether to seek refuge here. I've actually never set foot inside Anna's house. All our conversations took place at 619 Commercial or at the gate where I am standing now.

The front door is open, the screen door secure. I call out Anna's name in a small, choked voice. "Yes?" she replies, and I would know that rough, mannish voice anywhere. But when she comes to the door, she does not know me. Her flashing gaze looks right through me. "Anna," I say, "it's David." In a low, nearly inaudible voice, she says, "Oh my gawd." Then, without hesitation, "Come in, come in, dear,"

There are four chairs in Anna Lewis's living room, and they tell the story of her life. Her mother, Wilhelmina Enos, sat in one. Her husband, Manuel J. "Mannie" Lewis, sat in another. Anna sat in a third. The fourth was her father's. He died when Anna was twelve, and now that chair is for company. We cover a lot of ground quickly, starting with the changes at 619 Commercial. As Anna talks her eyes seem always to stray to the horizon, sweeping back and forth. But in fact you can't see the sea from Anna's living room. I guess if you've lived in P-town all your life, as Anna has, that line of sea and sky is probably imprinted on your brain. Anna remembers what the East End was like when Eugene O'Neill and John Dos Passos were her neighbors. When she worked on the old Hilliard's wharf. When she used to open the house for the Sternes and the Teads. And when she closed it up for Mom, for the last time, that last October. After she spoke with Mom on the phone and heard the sound in her voice, she went home and cried and said, "Oh, Diana, this is it." After a while, we come back to the present. "Well," she says. "if you're going to see town, you'd better go now, or you may never get there."

Back on Commercial Street. It's like having some hallucinogen reactivated in my brain. This again—Provincetown, ten years later. Oh my God, there's the Cape Codder sign. And the Silvas, which is for sale. Tillie's is all boarded up. The icehouse has become ICE HOUSE CONDOMIUMS. But Long Point Gallery still looks the same, as does the Patrician Shop, and the playground outside it, where, once, as a six- or seven-year-old boy, I thought I'd lost Mom, and so, quite solemnly, lay down in the sand to die, and cried and cried in deepest despair, until Mom returned from wherever she'd gone, and picked me up in disbelief.

Involuntarily, I keep looking for the town that was here when I first knew P-town—the tough, tolerant, blue-collar P-town. It seems finally to have sold out to the tourist trade. Arnold of Arnold's TV and appliance store gets a better return on his property by renting it out to a T-shirt merchant; same for Duarte's Motors and a dozen other old businesses in town center. The Fo'c'sle, the joint I always thought of as the darkest, meanest bar in the world—hangout for local toughs, burnouts, fishermen, and visiting Hell's Angels—has become a tame tourist bar, all watered-down. Then again, there was always a layering of P-towns—the P-town of the day-trippers and tourists, of the gays and cross-dressers, of the artists and writers, of the summering shrinks, of the hippies and conservationists, of the year-round Off-Cape transplants and drifters, and of the dancing policeman, who still leaps and pirouettes, choreographing traffic at the heart of town. The P-town I'm looking for, the dark, smiling P-town of the Portuguese, was always a little hidden by clannishness anyway.

On the front side of the "front street," as my grandfather called Commercial, Lands End Marine, the great nautical and fishing tackle emporium of my boyhood, is still open for business, and I am glad to see it. In the heat of the sidewalk, I pass by the screen doors, inhaling the cool sweet perfume of vulcanized rubber, hemp, tar, creosote, varnishes. The uncanny sensation comes over me once more: I feel as if I were discontinued, like a car that's still on the road but for which there are no longer parts. I feel as if my soul never left, but my mind and body no longer belong. My brain is telling me that I'm here, I'm back. It's me again—back in P-town! And yet it's not me exactly, neither the prelapsarian me nor the me I've become in exile. In flashes, it's so easy, so seductive, to see myself here again. If I had a son, a boy at my side, I'm sure I would project all my feelings onto him. It would be the natural thing. The boy would become the boy I no longer am. He would ensure the continuity of these seaside summers. I could give up all this guilt I feel about losing the house, breaking the chain. But I don't have children. I am neither son nor father. I am a freak of nature, a pilgrim, a time-traveler.

I turn toward MacMillan Wharf, skirting the lines, the swirling midday crowds, and start out onto the pier. Suddenly I'm glad that I've made my pilgrimage on a dazzling day in high summer. My head is spinning in the bright clean air, the salty smell of the sea, and the mingling aromas of frankfurters, deep-fried clams, warmed-up asphalt, and fudge. The tide is high. The deep green water fills in under the tall barnacled pilings. The Boston boat has just tied up and the day-trippers are streaming landward off the pier. I continue seaward, insanely relieved to find that there are still boys diving for money—the immemorial racket of challenging tourists to "chuck a nickel ov-ah!" They are not the boys (including the harbormaster's son) who swamped Jackson's dinghy and flung it off the end of the wharf the summer we tried to poach coins in these Portuguese diving waters. But the tide is high, the harbor is deep, the Boston boat is in, and it's the same racket and they are the same boys. Huddling in their wet cutoff trunks on the pier's wooden lip, shivering, hair slicked back, brown bodies glistening, they peer through the sun-sparkle, studying the green water for the silvery lie of coins in the sandy bottom. The debate is still the same: whether that's a quarter down there in the sand, or just a dime. And they still complain when someone tosses pennies; and they still stand authoritatively, like little pirates, on the cleats and fastened lines of the boats; and they still answer the eternal tourist's question—"How deep is it down there?"—with the eternal boy's deep-voiced answer: "Deep."

The fish-packing warehouse is gone from the end of the pier, and what was once a world of shadows and ice-filled wooden crates and wet, cool, fish-smelling passageways is now ablaze with sunshine. I stand there, astounded. For ten years I have been walking past fish markets in New York, Halifax, Vineyard Haven, County Cork, Porto Ercole, Sag Harbor. Once, outside the Rosedale Fish Market on Lexington Avenue, as I ran to catch the crosstown bus on 79th Street, I stopped dead in my tracks. From the open door came the cold, clean market smell, and I solemnly told myself: Yes, that's P-town. That's what the wharf smelled like, back behind the harbormaster's office, back where my brother and I, no more than seven or eight years old, with Mom standing by, fished for tinker mackerel with hand lines and silver jigs. For ten years I have comforted myself with the lie that other places are this place. But now I smell it, the real thing, and there is nothing like it. There is no place like this in the world. and I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go next.

I get as far as the post office, then turn back toward the East End. I feel as if I'm dying again. I'm either going crazy or just exciting my overexcitable appetite for loss. No wonder I was so moved by visiting the Etruscan tombs in Tarquinia, Maybe next summer I should visit Sioux burial grounds.

I'm dumb with hunger. I haven't eaten since the bran muffin at the bridge, hours ago. But when I come upon the Penny Patch, the candy store of my childhood, I think I'm ready to be gratified. Electric fans are blowing a warm, fudgy aroma out onto Commercial Street. I enter the shop and take a basket. It feels wonderfully inviting and familiar in my ungainly hand, this little wicker basket for penny candies. And I have money—boy, do I have a lot of pocket money. What an allowance. I move forward into the velvety warm Wonka world of candy, The floor-to-ceiling shelves are a riot of fireballs, root beer barrels. jawbreakers, licorice twists, jelly beans, Boston Baked Beans, chocolate babies, anise drops, Tootsie Rolls, Bits-O-Honey, Mary lanes, white rock candy. Everything looks excitingly the same. Everything is the same: the same squares of fudge, the same dumb boxes of saltwatery taffy, the same trompe l'oeil "beach pebbles" Grandma sent me in camp, Suddenly I don't want to eat any of it, I'm ragingly, foamingly hungry. I haven't a clue what I'm doing in here. I can't eat fudge for lunch. I'm thirty-three years old.
What am I thinking? Atomic Fire Balls? Rainbow Jaw Breakers? I've got to get back to 1991. Nauseous, sick of myself, I put down my empty basket and walk out of the Penny Patch.

The craziest thing is that I'm all memoried out and I have not yet even set foot on the beach or in the bay. On my way back from town, I cut across the Episcopal church parking lot opposite vanished Tillie's, I sit down on the break wall, take off my sneakers and socks, and leap to the sand. I take a step. My god, I say aloud, it's the sand, The sand. What I mean is: I never knew before that even the sand here has a particular texture, a springiness, which, for me, is sand. All these years away on other beaches I've been misled, I bend over and peer at the smooth, coarse, yellow, orange, brown, blonde, and black particles under my toes. So much of memory is invention, but this I know: this is sand.

The tide is going out. I walk in the shallow, receding water, floored by the sense of recognition. The water is so clear and lovely. Every crab seems known to me, every waving shank of sea grass, even the rufous color of certain spots on the beach, such as the stretch outside Gary Silva's old house and over by the Rossmores'. I keep thinking I must be going out of my mind.

The closer I get to the beach side of 619, the weirder I feel, All along this home stretch, people are sitting on their decks, sunning, reading. I can hear the rattle of a spray-paint can; someone is stenciling a chest of drawers. The decks and houses are as familiar as my toenails, but the sunbathers are strangers, This is the summer community I grew up in, and this is a summer day, and the only person I recognize is Norman Mailer, whom anyone would recognize. I've never felt more alien anywhere in all my life. The tide is sloughing out under my knees, so I walk further out, past the jetties, further and further away from shore. I notice that the Big Rock, the tall chunk' slab of granite at the end of our jetty, about which 1 have literally dozens of memories, all keyed to the different heights of the tides, has fallen onto its side, The Big Rock is where we scattered our old dog's ashes in 1980, my mother and brother and I. Each of us took some peppery white dust from the strange small container, Pooey's death was the practice death; his ashes, practice throws. Grandma went next. Then Mom.

Ironically, after gorging myself on every fish hook and sinker in town, I now can't bring myself to look directly at any of the details around 619. The overall shapes—rock, jetty, beach, house—are all I can manage. It's like being at a party when an old lover walks in the room. The more intimate you've been with the object of your desire, the greater its power, ultimately, to alienate. Now that I am here, all I know is I need to get into the water. I don't even need to swim. I just want to lie in the outgoing water. I've worn my bathing suit under my shorts, so changing isn't a problem. Even so, I've got to find somewhere to leave my shorts and shirt and sneakers. And just as I'm puzzling this over, wondering if I have the guts to leave my stuff up on the beach (Mom's voice in my ear: Can't those day-trippers read the sign: PRIVATE BEACH/NO TRESPASSING?"), I see Susan Packard. She's directly ahead, in the same stretch of thigh-deep water where I'm sloshing around. It's Susan, all right. She looks exactly the same. The girl next door. She's wearing a two-piece bathing suit, and she's running out into the receding water. Her whole body is pitched forward, her hair in flight, and I have an urge to rush up, throw my arms around her, and thank her. As with the sand, the water, the jetties, the crabs, I'm astonished to the point of gratitude to rediscover my knowledge of this particular girl's particular way of running out of her house and into the water. It locates me.

I approach Susan, both of us knee-deep in the water, and I can see that she remembers me but does not quite know who I am. To identify myself, I point to my house. I don't know why I don't speak first or say my name—I just point like a six-year-old at my house. Susan shrieks a little when she understands. She jumps up in the water. Her gleaming brown hair tosses around her shoulders, her eyes burst with light. Then something intrudes a little on her openness. Maybe I'm not what I seem to be. Maybe I'm—who knows, an apparition, a monster? Anyway, there is this moment of suspense. It's hard to describe, but for a moment we are held on a point of time that seems to contain the possibility of all other points of time. Suspended there, together, our feet in the blue water, our heads in the blue sky, there seems an infinity of potential. Love, pity, sorrow—anything might happen now between Susan Packard and me.

Susan, it turns out, is a schoolteacher in California. She's back visiting her mother, and she seems as struck all over again by P-town as I am. Her memories, which she discusses freely, are all sensuous memories. She invites me up onto the Packard deck, back into the life beside the sea. Her mother, Anne, weathered, warm, smiling, welcomes me instantly. Anne is a painter whose work my mother used to collect. Susan's older sister, Cynthia, a painter as well, introduces me to her husband, and their older child, a small, naked boy about the age I was when my brother and I made a fort in the pilings under this house in the summer of '62. Also: the same age and color as my mother in the many sepia-toned pictures showing little nude Diana sitting on the pilings below this deck in the summers of '32 and '33.

We sit on the raw-wood deck, and it's a little awkward at first because my enthusiasm is drawn and sustained by things the Packards hardly notice. I exclaim over the Big Rock at the end of the jetty, and they look at this landmark, whose fallen state they now take wholly for granted, and Susan says, "Oh, yeah, that must have happened gradually." From Anne I learn that the two men to whom Choate, Hall and Stewart sold our house in 1982 were an S&M couple who kept the shades at 619 drawn all day, emerging only at night to display the hardware of domination: heavy leather, whips, and, once, even a leash and studded collar. The newest members of 619, according to Anne, are friendly, neighborly people, the Leavitts— hence LEVITATION.

It's hard not to let my eye stray over to the house. Unwillingly, I suspend disbelief, allow myself to look. I'm fascinated by the changes. The outdoor shower, moved from the front to the side of the house: the voluminous new bay windows; the new kitchen. Mainly, I can't get over the studio: originally Maurice Sterne's paint-daubed studio, later my brother's and my bedroom, which my grandfather, in coat and tie, used as his daytime study, and in which I later wrote my first two books. When I finally allow myself a good look at the boxy studio, cantilevered out over the deck, I'm aghast to find it exactly the same. Even the window frames appear untouched. Through the large asymmetrical bay window on the side, I can see into my room. My God, there is the wall above my bed, the match board wall, the tongue-and-groove boards. It's like coming out of surgery and seeing your own skin. No matter what they've done to it, you must now live with it. For the first time, this indispensable thing, this vital substance, which is you, is no longer in your custody.

The more I look, the more accustomed I get to this unaccustomed state of being outside, looking in. The trick, of course, is to be willing to see things as they are—to recognize this house for what it is—not to picture it as I would have it be. At any moment I could take a breath and feel my way back inside the old dead skin. I could be in there, looking out. I could be sleeping in that room tonight, breathing in the sea and the salt on the damp night air. I could hear high water lapping on the sand. I could get up to take a leak and see the moon path on the incoming tide. I can tell you everything about night in that room.

While I am sitting with the Packards, Mrs. Leavitt of 619 Commercial walks from her beach, climbs the stairs to her deck, and steps into a basin of water, removing the sand from her feet before entering the house. Mrs. Leavitt does not resemble my mother, yet she looks so much like Diana doing this—this small orthodox ablution, so characteristic of summer and of the religion my mother and her parents made of summers in that house—that it sets me spiraling again. Even the basin of water is set on the holy altar at the head of the stairs.

I watch Mrs. Leavitt walk into the house in her bathing suit, and I think, How did I lose Diana Tead Michaelis? I mean, really, how? At the end of life there is the mystery of death. This keeps the undertakers in business and the survivors occupied for a couple of months or a couple of years or even a lifetime. Professional mourner is not a bad job when you consider some of the alternatives. But then comes a day, like this one, when you ask the question: Why isn't she here? And the answer, for a change, is not just: death. For once you don't just settle for the mystery of it, or the appalling pain of it, or even the fact of it, expressed in the sad and simple statement, "She died." On a day like this it feels as though some other force must be at work— not cancer, not stupidity, not evil—some other power, but my vision is not yet developed enough to see it. How else, on this eye-watering day in high summer, can I account for my dead mother, the lost house by the sea, the lost summers? How can I account for my grief, which ten years later is the only thing in my life that could be called permanent? You hear widows and widowers say: I thought about him/her every day for the rest of my life. But wait a minute: I'm a son, not a widower.

I leave my things at the Packards' and walk out onto the flats, looped on light. I walk out to where the tide has disappeared into greenblack grasses and sandy pools with washboard bottoms. The farther out I go, the more I feel that I am approaching the center of things. Under my feet, the small cradling world of the tide pools. Above my head, a wide world, a sphere of light, that seems to give back knowledge of ourselves. My eye fixes on a lone sail, suspended out near the horizon. The sail hardly seems to move. It seems trimmed to the great serenity outside of things, skirting space and time, these dimensions I am stuck in to the end of my life. This has haunted me for ten years, this spot in the center of things, this loss of center. Now that I am here, I am not so much restored to sight as given new eyes. My childhood was presided over by ailing, alcoholic grandparents, obsolete careerists who, before it slipped from their grasp, opened for my brother and me their useful world, their trustworthy heaven. Ordway and Clara's Emersonian message, bequeathed to us through Mom, was: "The world is yours....Every spirit builds itself a house: and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do."

The world was mine. Now I stand in the shallow pools, under the deep sky. I lie down in the water. Immediately I cry, I howl, I rage. I think I see. It's no good asking God why this was taken away from us, this paradise. Or scheming to get it back. It's no good living in banishment, in the small exilic world of bitterness and resentment and self-hatred. This is the unhealable place. No house, no home, no Boston law firm can repair this one. This is the place of no flesh, of white dust dissolving in the green water. This is the place where I at last go free.