SUMMER LOSSES

6 4 Y S U M M E R L O S S E S P A U L A F O X Half a century ago I and my husband of those years, Richard, built a house on the ocean shore of Cape Cod, a few miles from the town of Wellfleet. A quarter century before that, in the 1920s, my father, Paul, and Elsie, his Spanish wife, had bought a cottage on Commercial Street in Provincetown, a few minutes’ walk from the theater of a small acting group, the Provincetown Players, to which my father belonged. Elsie was my mother. I never lived with them except for three days when I was three; and then when I was fifteen, after they were divorced, for three weeks with my father on a Canadian island in the Atlantic Ocean. One late autumn day while they were in New York staying in a hotel, an arsonist in Provincetown burned their small cottage to the ground. On a summer’s afternoon during my father’s only visit to the Cape and to see us in the two years that Richard and I lived there, I drove Daddy to Provincetown. As we moved slowly along the carchoked street, passing a long gray wharf that seemed to be stumbling out over the bay waters, my father said, ‘‘I remember Eugene O’Neill standing out there, leaning against a post, wearing an old blue sweater, smoking a cigarette.’’ 6 5 R A moment later he pointed out where a bootlegger of those Prohibition days had lived in a small house on machine-gunprotected land. He spoke of seeing from his bedroom window Isadora Duncan’s young brother striding along Commercial Street dressed in a white toga and wearing sandals on his long narrow feet. ‘‘Extreme,’’ he said, ‘‘even for those wild days.’’ We spoke of the death of Susan, a young actress in the theater group. As she lay dying of an illness he didn’t name, in a rented room of the large yellow-painted house we were then passing, her last request had been to be cremated and have her ashes flung into the sea from a blu√ a few miles from Provincetown. When she died, after a short ceremony following the cremation, two of her women friends from the theater group drove to the blu√. They parked a few yards from the edge. There was a bald spot on the sandy earth where people stood to look out to sea or to stare down at the narrow beach far below with its snake-thin streams of dark water that washed about large gray boulders. The women didn’t speak as the one who drove got out of the car and the other reached over the back of the seat to pick up the urn. The two, still not speaking, stood on the cli√’s edge. Then one said ‘‘Now!’’ and the other opened the urn after a moment’s di≈culty , and holding it at arm’s length began to shake it. A sudden gust of wind blew up the side of the cli√ and struck, scattering Susan’s ashes in their faces. I drove the few miles to Wellfleet one late weekday morning to pick up a friend who worked in a real estate o≈ce. I was to drive her to Provincetown – I don’t remember why – and on our way we passed one of the freshwater ponds well known to local people and regular summer visitors. ‘‘That’s Grandfather’s pond,’’ my passenger remarked as we passed it. ‘‘Is that how it’s called, its name?’’ I asked. ‘‘No,’’ she replied. ‘‘It belonged to my grandfather, Admiral Nimitz.’’ The populations of Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown changed from year to year, constantly. Summer people mingled with local people for the two or three months of each season. Those with two 6 6 F O X Y or three weeks o√ from their jobs squeezed into narrow rooms of motels from whose stale air they would escape each day, even into falling rain, for the glory of the seawater – then return to the suburbs and big cities where...

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