Osprey Island

The Lodge at Osprey Island that stands on the site today is not quite so illustrious as the original. There have been fires, hurricanes, wars, a Great Depression, and the resort has been built and rebuilt, knocked down and made over again. The Lodge in its present incarnation opened in 1940 under the ownership of a man named Chizek, a wealthy Texan whose oil money the Depression seemed to have passed right by. It’s more of a family place now, hardly as grand and photogenic as it once was, but it’s a nice place to bring the kids on holiday—a couple of hours from New York City by train, then a short ferry ride across the bay. Really, a perfect place to bring the family.

Here’s a popular postcard scene: a man and a boy standing on a dock—the Lodge’s boat dock, which still has some of the old charm that the Lodge itself now lacks—with the water and the shoreline and the world washed in golden sunset glow. The man and boy might be father and son—they aren’t, but they might be. For the sake of the postcard: a man and his son washed in gold and peachy light at the end of a jutting, dilapidated pier. A man and his son, nearly silhouetted against the horizon, gazing across the water toward an outcropping of land where a post rises from the shoreline scrub brush. The post is as tall as a telephone pole, and sturdy. Atop the post, a tremendous nest. Atop the nest, a tremendous bird. The bird—it’s about to take off—spreads its wings, ready to rise like a phoenix. The boy lifts his hand—An osprey!—and the man’s gaze follows. They are not hotel guests, these two; both were raised on this island. There were hardly any ospreys when the man was a child, but now things are different: DDT banned, the food chain back on track. See? There’s the proof, up in that nest: an osprey, one of many returned to the island that bears their name. See the boy on the dock—it’s for him that the osprey has come home.

One

THE LODGE AT OSPREY ISLAND

Vacation this summer at the Osprey Lodge—open Fourth of July Weekend through Labor Day— Boating—Tennis—Beachfront—Swimming pool—Full-service dining room with local reknowned [sic] chef— Cocktail bar with outdoor patio seating—On the shore of beautiful Osprey Island—The Lodge at Osprey Island—A Family Place!

—promotional brochure, 1988

IT WASN’T UNTIL LANCE AND LORNA SQUIRE showed up to the barbecue—forty-five minutes late, and drunk, hair combed back wet from the shower—that anyone got dessert. The Osprey Lodge’s head cook, Jock, was chain-smoking beside a table full of watermelon he’d hacked into slices with such samurai ferocity that no one would venture near it for fear of losing a limb. But Lance Squire strolled up, surprised Jock with a clap on the back that made him drop his cigarette in the pooling watermelon juice, and took over. “Come on now, don’t be shy!” Lance barked across the lawn. A few brave souls crept tentatively forth for watermelon. Jock glowered from the sidelines.

Jock’s name was actually Jacques, but that didn’t sound any different from Jock to anyone around there. Jock looked less like a Frenchman than a truck-stop short-order fry cook, and he took great pleasure in presenting himself as such. He hardly spoke except to swear at his waitstaff in vulgar Franglais. The Lodge’s kitchen help spoke mostly Spanish. Each summer Tito and Juan brought in a crew of their friends and relatives who worked for cash under the table and, for reasons that seemed not merely obvious, but enviable, talked only to one another. It was the waitstaff who caught the brunt and gist of Jock’s rampages. The boys laughed—“Steady there, Jocko!”— and went about their business, filling water pitchers and folding permanent-press napkins while Jock hurled epithets around the kitchen. Waitresses always had a bit more trouble: it was hard to keep count of your dinner salads or remember how many steaks and how many filets when Jock was flinging them on the grill, hollering, “What you say? How many you say? How many fucking shit steak slabs you say, gorgeous? We go outside, I fuck you so hard you speak up then, yeah? Fucking how many you say?”

Lance Squire handed out watermelon slices with the artificial magnanimity of a Good Humor man. A mildew- stained plastic banner was tacked to the front of the table, its faded red lettering giving a conciliatory WELCOME STAFF TO THE LODGE AT OSPREY ISLAND. Lance himself hardly needed welcoming; he and his wife, Lorna, had been at the Lodge for more than two decades. They lived year-round in one of the cabins up the hill and served— mostly euphemistically— as caretakers. When she was sober enough to walk, Lorna was the chief housekeeper. Lance was head of maintenance and claimed, loudly and often, that he didn’t touch a drop. He was officially in charge of everything from preseason repairs to upkeep of the Lodge’s small stable of vehicles to, say, rolling the clay tennis courts every summer morning for the early-bird enthusiasts who got up to practice their backhands before breakfast. Most often, though, Lance was too drunk to lay a straight baseline, or dig a posthole, or pick his nose, for that matter, and the Lodge was known for its “rustic disarray,” which, fortunately, guests seemed to find quaint.

Lance Squire Jr.—Squee—was Lance and Lorna’s only child. Eight years old that summer, hyperactive as ever, Squee skipped around the watermelon table, hovering behind his dad, as high on sugar and people and occasion as his folks were on whiskey. Squee waited all year for this Friday in June when everybody—all the college-kid waiters and Irish housekeeping girls—arrived on the island again to prepare for the busy summer season ahead. The kid had a tendency to get himself underfoot, everywhere, always, except at home: Squee was in the kitchen at five a.m. with Jock and Tito and Juan; he trailed the housekeeping girls room to room, telling jokes and stories and bringing them sodas from the bar and peanut butter cookies from the pantry; he sat on a barstool during happy hour at the Dinghy and played cards with Morey until someone else needed the seat; and he hung out at night on the side porch with the waiters until the last beers had been drunk, the last cigarettes stubbed out, and the last staffers straggled up the hill to a lonely camp-cot sleep.

Lance lifted the watermelon knife. “Squid,” he said to the boy, “go get your ma a chair to sit down in.” He jerked his chin toward a tower of plastic lawn chairs stacked against a wall under the deck. The Lodge held a piece of prime Osprey Island real estate on Sand Beach and the hill that rose sharply from its shores, and the hundred- room hotel had been designed to maximize the view. The basement was cut into the slope, exposed in front and buried in back, and a large deck on the main level overhung a stone patio that extended from the basement and bled onto a great lawn, where such momentous annual events as the staff barbecue were held.

Squee darted toward the chairs, the stack of which teetered a good yard above his head. He stared at the tower, reached out and gave it a nudge, then swept his eyes over the crowd on the lawn. He saw no empty chairs.

There was one person in the crowd who was neither sitting, nor eating, nor interacting with anyone at all, and it was this person who noticed Squee’s dilemma. He was one of the newly arrived waiters, a lanky, brooding boy named Gavin who’d just finished his freshman year at Stanford University far away in California, and he stood alone, smoking, as he leaned against a pillar under the deck of the Osprey Lodge.

Gavin ground out his cigarette, sauntered over, and stepped between the boy and the tower of chairs. With a shake he disentangled the top one from the others and set it down before Squee like Superman plucking Lois Lane from the Empire State Building. Then Gavin gave Squee a polite and obliging nod, like a Japanese bow, turned and walked away without a word.

For a moment Squee just stared at the chair. Then he snapped to, turned, and sprinted back toward his parents, grabbing hold of the chair with one hand almost as an afterthought and letting it bump across the patio behind him as he ran.