The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 44: August 4

Today I trespassed at twilight. Twilight is the ideal time for pretending you live somewhere you don’t. The sky guard is changing, security is relaxed, and everyone’s just had a cocktail. In the gloaming, there is slippage. In this particular gloaming, I pretended to live in a Maine summer colony that’s in my town. Maine has many summer colonies, most of them built at the turn of the last century, most of which resemble adult camps. Each house has a decrepit porch with hard wooden chairs in which relaxation is meant to occur. The words that spring to mind when I look at these cottages are “backgammon” and “wife-swapping” and “gin.” Families have been swapping wives over backgammon and gin for generations. They are heritage families, I suppose. I know some of these heritage families. Heritage families tend to fray, and fight, and go spectacularly broke. They fail to fix rotting sills or replace window screens. This adds to the charming unattainability of such properties. You cannot purchase a century of hostility and neglect; you cannot purchase houses in which first editions of 1984 and old family letters are left unprotected, even when the houses are rented to strangers, as many are, in order to fund the most urgent repairs and the paying of taxes. To care so little for history raises the value immeasurably.

My friends are renting one of these houses; ergo we’d established a trespassing foothold. Just before the moon rose, we decided to walk to a nearby cottage we’d heard was for sale. My friends called it the Boston Marriage cottage because it was once owned by two women of independent means. We walked down the dirt lane carrying wineglasses so that we could pass as well as trespass. Open container strolls marked us as natives. We wondered about the origin of the term “Boston marriage.” Even though we had iPhones in our pockets, we preferred to hazard guesses. It would not be passing of us to Google a term we’d presumably used so many times without knowing what it meant that we no longer harbored any curiosity about its origin.

The Boston Marriage cottage was located on Mandalay Lane. Mandalay! Colonialism was so predictable. Manderley, the name of the house in du Maurier’s Rebecca, seemed the shrewder and more literary fit, with its haunting of the new generation by the old, also its themes of passing and identity concealment. We were all the second Mrs. de Winter that night.

There was no “For Sale” shingle in front of the Boston Marriage cottage, which made us wonder if it had been sold, or if it had never been for sale in the first place. My friend, who hails from a multigenerational family of landowners in a historic area outside of Philadelphia, assured us that a sign would be gauche, or an indication of financial vulnerability. Their neighbors in the colony would gossip condemningly. Who would bother selling such a worthless thing? Only the desperately desperate.

We walked around the Boston Marriage cottage and peered into the windows. We sat on its deck and enjoyed the view. We guessed at the problems given its age and location. A complicated septic situation. Rot, infestation, unbearable neighbors. These seemed minor disincentives given the price, which we’d heard was reasonable. We guessed at the future problems that might mar this cottage were my friends to buy it. Men who never wanted to come and weren’t handy. Close-quartered children who quarreled when the fog parked in the harbor for days. My friends — both are women, best friends since girlhood — began scheming to buy this cottage together. They both had husbands. But they had yet to replace one another. Who ever replaces their friends with a lover? These two women took nearly all of their vacations together. Their individual families coexisted as a larger, extended family, headed by two matriarchs. We finished our drinks on the porch. My two friends reasoned that they were the cottage’s heirs apparent. “We basically have a Boston Marriage,” they said.