Widow’s Walk
by Caroline Morris
Published in Cultural Memory Studies, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024 

September was fading. The tourists had gone.  From our windows, the beach stretched empty east and west, broken only by the lighthouse high on the bluff and the channel that tied the sea to Sesachacha Pond.  Daisy could race on the beach without a leash.   The waves, after months of calm, resumed their pounding.  Newspaper delivery stopped and the beach houses, save ours, were shuttered against the chill.  Like the expanse of sand and saltwater, the days belonged to Daisy and me entirely, free, uninterrupted, desolate. 

Amid the quiet, renters moved into the Hummingbird House.  The cottage is the only one on the pond, sheltered from the gales of the open beach.  An enviable spot, maybe the best on all Nantucket, and always a rental.  We tried to buy it once, before Brendan retired, for the girls to use when they had their own families.  But the girls stopped coming and the house is now owned by a Manhattan mercenary who fills it with tourists who pronounce the pond’s name, Sesachacha, the way it’s spelled.  People who know better, locals and us old time summer people, say Sackacha, with a heavy emphasis on the sack.

On our evening walk, as I shooed Daisy from a decaying seagull in the path, masked by sea grass, I watched a young couple shoulder pregnant duffle bags and laden hangers inside.  Though my eyes were no longer sharp enough to make out their features, I could see their silhouettes move from window to window as they stowed their gear.

They were Brendan and me decades ago at the beginning of the season, unpacking with nautical precision before he allowed us to relax into a cocktail and the sound of the ocean.  I remember the corn-blond hair on the backs of his bowed calves, and the boyish sag in his shorts.  He would spend a weekend getting the girls and I settled and provisioned, like we were shipping out for months, before he returned to D.C. on regular rotations for work with the rest of the men who commuted all summer. The Navy man in Brendan would have judged the couple harshly for their packing: a weathered football, rainbows of books, and fishing gear were strewn like jetsam along the road. 

I retreated.  The ocean roiled white in the dusk, and the lights from the rental cottage glowed like talismans against the flat chill.  Daisy dashed up our deck stairs, her toenails castanets against the aging wood.  She still trusted Brendan to be there each day when we returned from our walk, his face to the water, eyes narrow against the wind. Before the planks had buckled and grayed, Brendan taught the girls to dance on this deck. I watched from the doorframe, conscious of the shape of my body, the weight of my hair.  “You’ll always be my girls,” he said to us. He chanted the pond name, mispronouncing it with abandon.  “Se- sa- cha- cha- cha,” as he backed Gigi around the wicker furniture.  “1,2, 1-2-3…Se-sa- cha-cha-cha.” He heaved her over his shoulder, keeping the rhythm, hips swaying as he grabbed my waist. We all chanted in unison, “Se-sa-cha-cha-cha.”

No such commotion remained.  Not even the structured busyness of the last few years.  We came here for privacy, so Brendan could fail out of view of his fellow officers, only me as witness.  Taking care of him, or the husk of him, was like having young children again, but without the small victories in which mothers take pride.  The same rigid adherence to routine—meals, bedtimes and the brushing of teeth. 

The help, a rigging of competent women who smelled of talcum and rubber gloves, kept us aloft.  I was ready for him to go when he did. The tedium of his slow retreat had rubbed me smooth as sea glass. I lost him each time he smiled as politely at me as he did at the nurse, with no more recognition or affection. As the warp and weft of our years together morphed from canvas to cheesecloth to a spidery skein like Miss Havisham’s veil, I lost him, thread by thread: when he couldn’t recall that, to us, Ike wasn’t Eisenhower, but a reminder of the annual fights we had about my using a name for what he called “a miscarriage, not a baby”, when he didn’t know we’d been grade school sweethearts in Charlottesville, married in Annapolis or honeymooned in Naxos for only four days before his first deployment.

At the end, there were no abrasions of grief, simply formalities, untying of lines, undoing of knots.  A drifting away.  He and the help left overnight and all at once, allowing me to go slack, to stay in my bathrobe until three, or walk and walk and walk the beach, in all hours and all weathers, as if someone had ordered me to do so. 

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The day after the renters arrived, the phone woke me before ten.  My shoes, still on my feet, had left a swath of sand across the sheets.  Unable to sleep, I’d walked under the thumbnail moon until I could feel nothing but an ache in my hips.  Daisy, who blended in with the beige carpet, lifted her head, ears perked at the phone’s repetitive toll. Gigi, my eldest, called every morning on her way to court. If I didn’t pick up, she’d keep calling or, worse, summon the authorities to check on me. She’d given me a watch that tracked and shared my step count, heart rate and sleep patterns with the family. I claimed to have been unable to get it to work, which because I’m getting old, everyone believed.

“I’m alive,” I said, “which I consider a victory at my age.” My voice sounded rusty.

“77 is not that old.” I heard her get in the car, and her words grew muffled. As the responsible daughter, she scheduled this call daily on her way to the office, 8am Los Angeles time. Claire, who was born when we were stationed in Naples and now ran a restaurant in Rome, was more Italian in her approach to communication and, well, everything else.

“What are you up to today?” Gigi asked.

“Not much to report. Daisy and I keep ourselves busy.”

“Are you eating?”

“Lobster and chocolate cake for every meal.” These were her favorites.

“I sent you a link to a tai chi class in town at noon.” She always emailed me suggestions for how to make my life look more like hers. Trips to Tanzania, the grandchildren’s school plays, cooking classes, grief groups. “You know this is your time to do anything you want.” The charitable part of me recognized the worry in her voice, her guilt at being busy and far away, but every time she said this I felt the pressure of the dream we all have about showing up for an exam in a class you haven’t been attending.

I asked about Zeke and the children and, of course, they were all fine. Zeke was busy on a big trial and there was a controversy about a third-grade teacher. Gigi talked faster as the demands on her time increased. I was one more thing to juggle. Our fifteen minutes were almost up and I signed off cheerily, assuring her that I too was fine. And of course, I was. I had enough money, enough food, adequate shelter. My brain and body still worked.

Daisy, next to the bed, nosed the crook of my elbow, relentless in her demand to be walked. Outside, the sky was utterly blue, no hint of white. Daisy sprinted up and down the beach, wary of the ocean, but tempted by its slow hammock sway.  I lagged behind, not spilling my coffee.  There was a strong easterly breeze, the sort that Brendan would’ve routed us out early for, banging on the upstairs walls, shouting, “Heave out and trice up, all hands on deck.”  As we rounded the spit to the pond, the sunfish halyards clanged sharp and metallic against their masts.  The sun stung my eyes and exposed the deep channels separating the veins of my hands. 

The Hummingbird House couple were at the edge of the pond, holding mugs, kicking at the lapping water.  His laughter reached us long before hers and echoed back across the water. He stood with the unearned confidence of large men.  He dwarfed her, but kept their faces level by standing in an S shape, his shoulders rounded, his stomach concave, knees half-bent.  She was slight and struck me as the kind of person who found eye contact vital.  In contrast to his slouch, her shoulders were back and neck straight as if she might carry one of their books around the pond on her head.  The girl saw me, and when we were within the range where politeness required a greeting, she reached her hand out to Daisy, who nuzzled it and murmured a well-trained “Good morning,” the kind reserved for old ladies who have come to resemble their dogs.  In the glare off the water, the couple shimmered like a mirage.  Their teeth were so white, their eyes so blue, I had to turn away, disoriented, as if I had stared too long at the sun.  I fled past them, toward the uninhabited beach, toward home.

In front of our house, fishermen kept driftwood racks for their poles and nets. The gnarled gray limbs tied with fraying line looked like ancient totems.  Brendan told the girls that witches made them long ago to warn children from going into the sea at night. Daisy walked right past them to water, right to the point where waves threatened to swallow her paws.  Three months before, while I was inside freshening my drink, Brendan left a final footprint in the sand at that precise spot, before he surrendered and let his lungs balloon with seawater.  Daisy now stood guard at the water’s edge, waiting for him to bound out of the breakers, his rounded chest ruddy.  She barked at length from her sentry post, either in anger or in salutation.  The benign lapping of the water chafed like the bright sun, rubbing me raw.  I turned my back on Daisy’s watch and retreated to the cool chintz of our living room, hoping for bills to pay.

The Navy buried him with full honors. The service was in the Naval Academy’s domed, marble chapel where we’d married. At 20, as we’d walked into our lives under a canopy of crossed swords, I’d felt anointed by the grandeur of the building and the Navy’s rites, like the nation’s ancient mariners were blessing our union. But as the I sat in the soft summer air, flanked by my daughters and their daughters, as Brendan was lowered into the ground, as I endured the 19-gun salute, the triangle of flag in my lap, all the epaulets and medals, the pageantry turned my gut to lava. Where had they been when he fell apart piece by piece? For years, I’d been with him all alone and now, here they all were again. Looking at all the younger officers, the ones who were already grey and chomping at the bit for a promotion, and the ones who still had pimples and shimmering mirages for futures, I wanted to yell. It was easy for the Navy to hallow its men, who served with such devotion and diligently climbed the ladder built long ago, reaping rewards at each rung. I wanted to shriek at them that there would come a day when they could no longer rise. I wanted to warn them: institutions cannot love you back.

When we were stationed in Turkey, the third of fourteen posts during his career, which he referred to as ours, we’d left the girls, little then, with their bakcisi and spent the day at the mud baths at Dalyan. He’d piloted the small boat upriver while I’d lain in the sun. There, he solemnly striped my cheeks and the bridge of my nose like war paint. I caked his face and hair gray so that he looked like a marble bust, as eternal as Agamemnon who, according to legend, had his bath house on the site. Why remember this as I watched the uniformed, white gloved men bury my husband? Why keep dreaming of what I’d have preferred: to smear his ashes on my naked body, walk the beach all night with my hair wild, swim naked in the waves at dawn, one last intimate moment together? I want to scream at the Navy men, who I’d once believed were family, that he was mine, but it wasn’t true. His tombstone had his name, the dates, and one understated word: sailor. Maybe he was always the Navy’s first and mine second. To whom then did I belong?

The next afternoon it was raining, a cold, persistent drizzle punctuated by heavy gusts. Daisy proved a reluctant walker and soon sat, wet dog in wet sand, and waited for me to turn towards home. On the deck, the wind had upended one of the chairs and when I went to open the door, I found it locked, though I hadn’t used the key in months. I tried the back door. I tried the front door. I tried the reachable windows and the car. All were locked. I hadn’t brought a phone. I considered smashing a pane with a rock, but I pictured the broken glass, the potential injury, the explaining to Gigi that I’d brought neither key nor phone. Gigi wanted me to come live in California so things like this wouldn’t happen.

I walked towards the rental. The downstairs lights were on. The car was in the driveway. A sinew of smoke came from the chimney. I was drenched to the bone and Daisy was worse. I knocked. The girl came to the door and smiled while I explained myself, wiping the water from my face.

“Of course,” she said. “Come in. Let me get you a towel.” No invitation was forthcoming for Daisy, so I left her, forlorn, on the front stoop.

The man was on the couch in front of the fire, reading. Two pairs of wet socks hung on the fire screen. He stood up and shook my hand. “I’m Sam,” he said. “Happy to try and get the door open for you.”

“I’ve tried everything but breaking windows. If I could just call the locksmith, please.”

He looked up the number and showed me to the kitchen phone. The round breakfast table was littered with large black and white photographs of roof walks, or widow’s walks, as Brendan and most people preferred to call them. Two cameras, a laptop and a large printer occupied the bookshelves.

On the phone, I explained to the locksmith in town what had happened, feeling like an old fool who hadn’t taken proper precautions. The girl came back with towels and put a kettle on.

“Have some tea while you wait,” she said when I’d hung up. “I won’t have you out in this weather.”

“This is Julia, by the way,” Sam said.

She laughed. “I’ve forgotten your name, sorry.”

“Me too,” I said, but then realized they thought I was senile rather than joking. “I’m Charlotte Burke. We live around the spit.”

“Does someone else have a key?” Sam asked. Gigi had suggested some system or other, but there were no year-round neighbors and I’d failed to ask anyone in town.

“No, it’s just me.”

They took my coat and poured me tea and once the logistics were settled, I asked about the photographs.

“I’m doing a book on Widow’s Walks,” Sam said. He worked for some magazine or other.

“They call them roof walks here, honey,” Julia said.

“So everyone keeps telling me. Takes all the romance right out of it.” He crossed his arms and sighed.

“Sam likes the idea of sea captain’s wives standing up there at all hours pining for their men.” She rolled her eyes playfully and winked at me. “Like we don’t have better things to do, right?”

Something about this felt like a papercut, not a real wound, but a sharp, unexpected pain from a benign source. I wondered if I had, mostly, spent my time, if not pining for Brendan, at least orbiting around him like he was the center of the world.

“I was a Captain’s wife, actually, well, first a lieutenant’s wife, and then so on and so on. My husband spent his career in the Navy. He was away a lot but there was always plenty to do, with children and so on. And we moved around.” These were things I used to be able to say to strangers and rely on their being broadly accepted, even admired, but Julia looked at me with that same polite pity my daughters often did. “I’m a relic, I know.”

“It must’ve been a fascinating life,” Sam said.

“It was.” My voice was small enough to be swallowed by the wind outside.

Julia looked at the photographs and pointed at one of a whaler’s house in town near the ferry terminal. “Actually, most houses, even way inland, had these for the very practical purpose of putting out grease fires when people still cooked on the hearth. You could climb up there and dump buckets of sand down and save the day. Originally, they were known as scuttles.”

 “No one, however, will buy a book called The Scuttles of New England.” Sam laughed and rested his hand on her knee. “Surely, some woman, somewhere went up to the roof to await her love’s return.”

“Or to escape her children,” Julia said. “Or her husband while he was at home.” 

They flirted merrily as we all watched the road for the locksmith’s headlights in the gloom. When I left, they were holding hands.

The last time Brendan and I made love was a warm spring night not long after we’d moved to the island. We still hadn’t needed the help the way we would in the years that followed. The only things he’d lost back then were car keys and directions and the names of important places: Tonkin, Dhekelia, Hormuz. On a sunset walk, Brendan stripped naked in the dusk. I wondered if it was the disease, but no one was around and we’d swum naked in every place we’d ever lived.

“Dare you.” He winked at me like had had the first time we’d done this at 18 in the Severn River after a Naval Academy dance. As I stripped, aware of the scar on my left breast from long ago surgery and the crepe of my stomach, he stared openly. “A proper girl like you!”

            We raced as well as our seven decades allowed into the cold water and lay, bellies up, to the racing clouds that pulled inexorably toward Sankaty Head. On the beach, he wrapped me in a towel. On a blanket, we had the slow, gentle sex we’d become accustomed to. After, he took my cheeks in his chilly hands and looked me squarely in the eye. “This isn’t how all our adventures were supposed to end.” He looked out at the water, where the departed sun streaked the towering clouds red. “It might drag on and on. I closed my eyes, kissed his forehead, and concentrated very hard on not releasing the sob I felt building over the humiliations that awaited him. He pounded the sand once with a closed fist. “I’d so much rather have walked the plank,” he whispered.

The next day when Daisy demanded her afternoon walk, the weather had shifted. The wind was gone, fog had set in. The air was warm and soggy like exhaled breath, recalling the stranding of the Ancient Mariner. The only noise was the flap and raspy squawk from the hordes of seabirds clustered on the narrow spit where the ocean funneled into the pond.  The guano stank without a current to bear it seaward. The decaying seagull from the path was at the peak of its rotting.  The fog deadened the lap of the waves, and made gravity seem touchable, doubled in force. It disappeared the houses and the horizon.

I trudged one step at a time. The fog made of the beach an immense terrarium, cut off from the rest of the world, like the glass bubble those scientists lived in to mimic life on Mars. Daisy appeared and disappeared, always checking on me. Like all good dogs, when I slept, she was at the foot of the bed, when I swam, she was at the edge of the water, when I ran errands, she waited at the door. I had been like that, alert and loyal, a trained companion. Good wives, like good dogs, attend. I’d never thought to ask who Daisy might be without me. Maybe she’d survive just as well, or better, on the rotting gulls I denied her. Or maybe, she could actually survive on what she could kill. Maybe there’s some coy dog or pack that awaits her.

I suppose these marooned days should be an opportunity. I suppose I should take up the piano, or learn another language, or knit a blanket, or try the tai chi, or do anything other than walk and eat and sleep. But I don’t. I was trained to take care of others and I still did that. Thank God for Daisy or I wouldn’t belong to anything or anyone else. Once I had the Navy, once I had a family, but maybe it wasn’t just the Navy that couldn’t love us back. Maybe no one was capable of returning to me the full measure of the love I’d meted out in meals cooked, wounds bandaged, carpools driven, boxes packed, clothes mended, cakes baked, centipedes disposed of. My daughters told me this, occasionally in patronizing conversations, but mostly in their own choices, in the way they talk about “stay at home moms”. 

Through the fog, Daisy and I were heartened by a spot of red on the pond’s edge.  Daisy raced toward it.  A neat square of towel lay in front of the Hummingbird House.  I looked for one of the renters swimming, but the fog obscured the water’s surface, even blotting out the lighthouse far down the beach.  Their front yard already had a cluttered, used look.  The chairs were covered in limp towels and books whose pages curled in the humidity.

 I lingered among the old boats beached on the pond shore while Daisy ran circles in the softest part of the sand, furthest from the waterline.  Julia appeared on the deck covered only in pink and white bath towels, one covering her intimate areas and the other twisted into a tall turban.  She picked up a watch from the small weathered table between the sun chairs, and squinted into the impenetrable veil of white that covered the water.  She noticed me then, for I was only a few feet away from their deck. I saw her face flush in embarrassment.  She waved and started to turn to go inside, but then stood her ground, tightened the towel above her breasts, and yelled, “Sam, twenty minutes,” in a singsong, “honey, I’m home” tone that surprised me. 

She stood still and waited for an answer. In front of her, Daisy snuffled at sand gnats.

“Sam?” Julia called again, this time in the more authoritative tone I had sensed from her carriage.  As she stepped off the deck and onto the sand, her towel opened to expose a pale triangle of her thigh and I wondered if they’d spent the morning in bed. She walked halfway to the pond and, cupping her hands tight enough to carry water, she repeated, “Sam. Time’s up.”  So as not to intrude, I stayed behind the sailboats whose halyards now hung immobile and magnified the quiet.  She waited.  I walked as slowly as I could without seeming to linger.  

Without greeting me, she said, “Have you seen him? He was swimming. In the pond. He swims every day. I time him.”  She did not look at me as she spoke, but kept her eyes fixed on the point where the lighthouse should have been.  Daisy planted herself in front of the towel.  “He should be in the water,” the girl said.  She did not even notice Daisy. She stared past us with the hollow focus of a shark stalking prey.

“It’s impossible to see a thing,” I said.  My voice was more dismissive than I'd intended.  I tried to make amends, to appear at least curious, “Was he…?”  But Julia had vanished.  The cottage door slapped shut.  Daisy froze and looked to me for reassurance. 

The door smacked again and she was back, wearing an orange bikini.  She called his name again.

 “Sam?”

I held tight to Daisy’s collar. 

“Sam?”  With each repetition, she strode away from us, past the sailboats, around the curve of the pond, towards the seagulls.  She stopped on the far side and stared into the fog, no doubt hoping that she would spot his muscular arm arc up in a powerful stroke, nothing but a strong, vigorous swimmer unable to hear her for the splashing. 

 I picked up the towel, which smelled now of wet dog, and brushed the sand from it.  Brendan hated a sandy towel.  I used to carry his in a plastic bag down to the water, so it would be fresh when he got out.  The girl called again, “Sam.” She sounded uncertain and younger than before.  I watched the water, held my breath at a movement off-shore, and was angered when a black-capped loon swam toward us.

Julia ran towards the spit, tried to hurdle the broad stream of water to reach the beach, stumbled and fell on all fours with a splash. She scrambled, and was up again on the other side.  The seagulls, at first blasé, scattered in all directions, and shrieked as she charged through their huddle.  She stopped at the high point where the beach dropped away and the channel cut through. Her head swept left and right like the missing lighthouse beacon and then she ran down the far slope of the dune and out of sight.

I watched the pond, got as close as I could to the water without wetting my shoes and tried to distinguish shapes in the impenetrable fog. I held my breath so I could listen more closely, but all I could hear was the steady thump of my own heart.

Julia came back up over the dune, her wet hair spiking around her head.  The gulls that had resettled hopped out of the way, less disturbed by her return.  She shrieked “Sam," this time angry and raw and ran along the pond’s edge. After twenty yards, she turned back towards the beach for a few steps, then stood still. She stared at the blank white and nodded her head in either argument or prayer. “Sam? Sam?” she called.  Then she knelt.  

While her panic had convinced me she was overreacting, her stillness left me to flashes of the last time. For all my mental playbacks of what I could have done, for all the scenes in my uneasy sleep of diving into the waves to save him, here I was frozen again, a spectator.  Brendan and I had been standing at the water, watching fierce spring waves batter the coast.  It was almost as if he were fine, as if he still knew our children or how to tie his shoes.  Soothed by the sense of normalcy, I turned and stroked the hair from his forehead, and put my cheek against his rough wool sweater.  He turned to me, without recognition, and stared at my flat chest.  He patted my hand and said, “No thanks, darlin’. You’re not my type. I’ve always been a boob man,” and went back to staring at the ocean. The wind clawed at my hair. I had to walk away so he would not see my tears.  Sometimes when I cried, he seemed to know it was something he said.  I went inside to freshen my drink. When I looked back from the dune path, he was sitting with his arm around Daisy, mesmerized by the waves. 

Julia ran again, faster than before and efficiently.  For a long moment I thought she was heading towards me, and I cringed to think I might be expected to do something.  But she ran past us to a row of kayaks on the shore.  In a flurry of sand, she tore at the boats stacked tight like penny candy. She found a paddle, hurled it into a kayak and dragged both into the water.  She paddled a few harried strokes. I lost her to the fog’s belly, which had already taken the lighthouse and the husband.  I knew she was still there only because she repeated Sam, Sam, over and over. 

Lulled by the cadence of her voice, I stared into the white, Daisy tense beside me.  He’s gone.  They’ll have to dredge the pond to find him.  Julia kept calling his name, her voice an unnatural loop like a skipping record.  Her chant comforted me with absolution.  There was no blame.  Strong men die.  There is solace in pattern, and I wept, finally, hot tears of inevitability.

Then, from behind me on the road, with all the glory of the wind that saves stranded ships at sea, a male voice echoed across the pond, “Julia?”  Daisy’s wagging and rolling expressed all the joy I should have felt at the sight of him resurrected.  He was slick with sweat. His face fell as he heard the terror in her voice and the blank repetition of his name.  She was silent.  Then from the fog came a racking wail, the kind we widows do not allow ourselves.