The Ocean House. Mary-Beth Hughes

      The Ocean House

      They were tiny girls lying on their bellies by the wide windows of the playroom, spying on their mother far below. She tiptoed along the seawall, holding steady on puddled dips and sharp edges of the black jetty. Waves burst and sprayed at her feet. The girls pressed in close, touching clouds and crabs etched in the glass along the lower rims. Their fingers worked into the grooves as they watched their mother—so light-footed, her bathing suit beneath a sundress—climb over the fence between the neighboring beach club property and their own. She’s a fish! their father liked to declare, but she didn’t like to be inside the ocean. She preferred salt water in a swimming pool where she could see the beginning and end.

      Midmorning, Mrs. Hoving, despite her bad hip, walked all the way down the back stairs to retrieve milk and peaches. Their playroom was a round attic room on the turret end. But directly below, the grandest room of the house was empty. In the master bedroom a plinth raised the bed so high that, waking, their mother might see the waves first thing. Above the bed, a built-in carved canopy of shells and rosebuds lifted by four columns all painted white. The vista windows had ribbons of more rosebuds in pale-pink stained glass; the thorns were blunt and blue. A sleeping place for a sea queen. But their mother didn’t care for it. Thought it corny, trite. The window shade manufacturer’s silly dream for a wife who left him anyway. Then he went bankrupt. Why would she want to sleep there?

      Their mother was content in a regular rectangular bedroom with cross breezes. Besides, the grand circular bedroom with the plinth, the canopy, the flat pink glass roses and stubby thorns was haunted by a small boy who swung by his feet and made slurping noises nibbling at the sleeper’s nose. Their mother said he liked to be left alone.

      Of course they wanted to know how old he was, but she couldn’t say, which was frustrating because age was crucial to them at the time. Courtney was five, nearly five. Paige was three. Their mother was twenty-seven, so an old woman she said. Their father twenty-eight. But they were a year and a half apart, like Courtney and Paige. Mrs. Hoving claimed to be 103.

      On the turret side of the house, below the haunted bedroom, was the circular dining room. Lower still, a cellar of sand and rock, entirely off-limits. But in the bright round dining room, where they were free to come and go, their mother hung a new wallpaper. She’d imported the white herons standing in the lime-colored reeds from Japan. The house made me do it, she said. And that made sense because it looked, when she was finished, as if it had been here from the start. Something to appease the fleeing wife, the broken husband, the hungry boy. All of them.

      Don’t be flip, said their father, as if she’d said something cruel. Mrs. Hoving didn’t allow cruelty. Nor did their mother. Their father could be changeable on this point.

      The year was 1962. The house except for the newly arrived Japanese herons—and their bending inquiring white necks—was ninety years old at the time but seemed much older. It was the last of the great oceanfront houses left in Long Branch.

      Built in the same exuberant era, the Beach Club aimed for grandeur, too, with its herringbone boardwalk and a vast saltwater pool, the cunning trellised card room, the vaulted seaside dining terrace, the clubhouse itself, like a vast white Victorian wedding cake. A cliché, said their mother. It was meant to seduce those living in the houses who had plenty to keep them at home. But later, with the towers, business improved.

      The Beach Club stood directly north of their house. Its property continued for about an eighth of a mile until it petered out—their mother shrugged—at the tennis courts, then the high jagged jetty wall picked up again and continued along the Ocean Avenue for a while before crossing the town line into Sea Bright, which was filled with newer