“Maine Attraction,” by Marina Rust, was originally published in the June 2006 issue of Vogue.
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The gutters need replacing, the wallpaper is peeling, and how many are coming for dinner tonight? How is this an “escape”?
My great-great-grandmother Mrs. George Bird loved American history and modeled the house after Mount Vernon. Bird Cottage, as it is known, is perhaps not so much an escape as a return; I feel less its owner than its curator. The former female owners each watch from a different wall of the living room, their portraits in chronological order: Mrs. Bird from the 1890s; her daughter as a Gibson girl; Granny in thirties chic; my aunt, haute 71.
My husband calls the island a matriarchy. It has known its share of strong women, many of whom still make their presences felt. Traditionally, with summer places, women and children are the ones spending the season, husbands appearing on weekends. It would have been brutish to expect a bride to convert to a man s summer place when she had one of her own. We re preserving family history, I told myself when I took on the gutters. It s for the girls. They are sixth generation.
My own early-childhood memories were farther up island, where my mother and I would visit Granny in the house she and Grandfather bought as newlyweds. I d climb the rocks along the dock, arranging marine life in tide pools. I didn t know there were other children on the island; I realize now my mother was avoiding their parents.
In the seventies, summer houses like this were considered white elephants. Families were fragmented, the houses weren t winterized, and to spend all that money to repaint and maintain those salt-worn facades would have been unseemly. After Granny s mother died in the fifties, Bird Cottage sat empty. Whether Granny held on to it out of optimism for the future or attachment to the past, I do not know; perhaps both.
Generations ebb and flow, and in 1976 the house got a family. My aunt moved back from Europe with her three children. At eleven, I remember a long climb with my mother down the rocky beaches to Bird Cottage, where her sister was supervising the digging of a very unMaine-like heated swimming pool. After that summer, I stayed at my aunt s. My cousins became like my brother and sisters; that is what a family house does.
Peaceful as the setting looks, it was not always so. In the eighties, my cousin threw a great party with a rockabilly band and huge speakers in the front hall. There were smaller blowouts, too, spontaneous late-night dance parties featuring the Dirty Dancing sound track and Madonna s first album, the latter of which was played so often that a friend eventually stole it, had it framed, and presented it back with a plaque reading 1983–1996, RIP. In 1999, my cousin threw a more formal hundredth-birthday party for the house, complete with an attached tent for dancing and a big band. The invitation read BLACK TIE, NO BLACK DRESSES. The dance floor did double duty; three weeks later my husband and I used it for our wedding. “If Ian is married here, he ll always feel a part of it,” said my cousin, who d tired of repairs. We bought the house soon after, and expect the next generation s dance parties in a decade or so.
How to maintain things for the next generation? Often, to guests, I point out a photo in the front hall. It is of Mr. and Mrs. Bird standing in the same hall, circa 1900. The damask-covered benches appear then just as they are now, except that then they did not need reupholstering.
That is a problem taking on a family house. When to replace the threadbare runner? To me, the faded damask and the worn runner simply look right. We did repaint the staff quarters, which were just too authentically dreary. We added colorful rugs from Madeline Weinrib but left the white-painted furniture as is. The bureau drawers don t pull smoothly, but I haven t the heart to replace them with Pottery Barn. We speak of renovating the attic, but the prospect seems daunting: 106 years worth of cast-off furniture, old lamps, framed prints of dogs and battlefields, probably a ghost or two.
Oh, yes, that. Days or weeks of fog can roll in; there is a reason the wallpaper peels. The island s hermetic atmosphere is said to trap ghosts. Compared with other houses, ours is only nominally haunted. At one, something is said to have flipped a cassette tape, he/she apparently not liking reggae. Year-round residents take their schoolhouse ghost in stride, and a reputable couple both saw a translucent man in nineteenth-century sailor s gear walking the main road. Our house, for all I knew, had never had a ghost; then there was a flurry of activity after the girls were born. The unexplained happenings culminated in the sight of a silk-mutton-sleeved Gibson girl standing over my sleeping spouse. I saw her for a full 20 seconds. It was, as Oprah would say, an “Aha! moment.” Aha! This is why we got the house. We don t see ghosts in Manhattan.
Questions arose I d never considered. As a ghost, how do you appear? In the clothes that were fashionable when you died but with the figure you had in your youth? Our ghost appeared slender. In photos from 1906, Great-Great-Grandmother was, well, not. “Well, of course,” said my cousin facetiously. “She hasn t eaten in a hundred years.”
While not believing in ghosts, my cousin was concerned that speaking of my sighting might affect resale value.
But we re not selling the house, I groused.
“He meant your resale value,” replied my husband.
I read up on ghosts. One book suggested replastering as one way to get rid of them, though it might simply push them into unrenovated quarters. Indeed, the ghostly occurrences ended when we took down the original flowered wallpaper in the master bedroom. We painted the room in Benjamin s Moore s “Silver Cloud,” which seemed appropriate.
Ghosts or no, escape or return, Maine is contrapuntal, especially for the girls. Manhattan is an island, too, but noise and light pollution dominate. In Maine, night skies are inky black and shot with stars. My four-year-old can find the Milky Way, and she talks about the time we freed a bat from a bell jar and coaxed him out of the house. In Manhattan, lettuce comes in a bag, flowers come from the deli. We don t have a car, so we don t listen to the radio. In Maine, I drive and the girls hear country and classic rock. Recently, in a Manhattan taxicab, Caroline heard “Thunder Road,” looked at me, and said, “Bruce?” She has a good memory. She says she can t wait to go back to Maine and swim in the ocean. The ocean? Really? This bodes well, evincing character. Between her and her sister, the house is in good hands.
My husband tells me we need to have my portrait painted. Of all the things that need doing at the house, this seems the least pressing. But when I do, it will be with the girls. After all, we re running low on wall space. As for the paper, there s always glue.
