Chowda
Jen Wieczner
Dedicated to Kenny Shaughnessy,
a Cape Cod legend. May he rest in peace.
“Hello, Jimmy Hennessy. Thank you for showing me Cape Cod,” she whispered, quiet and silky, to no one but the land at the end of the bridge she crossed. Then she looked at me, her daughter sitting next to her, and realized that I heard. The gilded sunlight of another waning summer day filtered across the canal and through the wires of the bridge onto our faces. “Every time I cross the bridge, I say it,” she explained. “I have to. I think of him, and I have to. He grew up there. He never left. He knew places no one else knew. He loved it here,” she said, “there” becoming “here” as we landed on the other side. “There’s my secret, now you know it. It’s just something I do every time I cross the bridge.”
I sat next to her in the silent reverence that follows a secret revealed. It was like finding in the bottom of her dresser drawer all the teeth I’d lost years ago. I knew her secret.
I dangled my hand out the open window on the passenger side of our rented car and looked around as we drove down Route 6. The breeze smelled sweeter and felt cooler than at home. It was Fourth of July weekend, and we had gone on a road trip. I had never been to the Cape before. There is one picture of me, though, on our mantle at home. I am sitting in the blue plastic bucket seats of the roof deck of a whale watch expedition out of Boston, in view of the Cape Cod shoreline. My mom says that it was taken right after Dad left, that she had to get away, so she took me and we went to see the ocean. I was too young to remember. In the picture, my skin looks milky and soft, but I’m not smiling. Rather, my mouth is shaped like a small “o,” and my hand, pinching a bit of salt water taffy, is paused in mid-air, halfway to my open mouth. My eyes are wide and very blue, staring at the camera as though it caught me red-handed, but still I look it in the face and do not smile. My mom would see me looking at that picture, point out the sparkle in my eye, and say that was my mischievous look. “You would always get that twinkle in your eye when you were up to something,” she would say. Then she would say that the twinkle reminded her of someone. Then she would tell me the story. And every time someone mentioned Cape Cod, or I got that twinkle in my eye, she would tell me about Jimmy.
So that day, as we drove toward the ocean, she told me the story again, the story I thought I knew by heart.
Thirty years ago, in 1973, she had walked into a post office. She was fresh out of college, staying on the Cape in the summer, and owed a slightly homesick letter to her parents. She was out of stamps. The bell above the door clinked as she rustled inside among a short queue of people carrying care packages.
He was standing near the front of the room with his elbow on the counter, and as the bell chimed he glanced up mid-smile, white teeth blazing from a sun-soaked, salt-caked, straight-off-the-boat complexion. He had what she would call the “Kennedy mystique”: tan and weathered. He was twice her age. The thought struck her like a line from a classic clichéd romance: this was no ordinary man.
She turned to the wall rack holding tide charts, schedules for the local drive-in movie theatre, and different brochures for kayak tours, surf lessons, and whale watches.
“Looking for anything in particular?” he asked, suddenly at her shoulder as the line moved forward.
“Mmm…what? Oh, I was just looking for some ferry information. I’ve been wanting to take a trip to the islands offshore.”
“Where are you from?”
“Boston. I’m just here for a little while…exploring.” Her eyes met his.
“James Hennessy,” he ventured, hand outstretched. She took his hand delicately; he held on a few seconds longer after her hand had relaxed, after she expected the handshake to be over. “What’s your name?”
She was a perennial summer visitor; he was a native.
“You know,” he said. “I was thinking of taking my boat to the island tomorrow morning, too. Why don’t you come? I’ve been told I give the best tours. And it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than a ferry.” The boat was so obviously a part of his life she could practically see the reflection of the water in his bright blue eyes. There was an invitation in his smile.
She shook her head, embarrassed slightly. “No, no, I can’t. Thanks anyway. Do you work here?”
“Naw, I built this thing though,” he said. He glanced up at the rafters. “Like to come visit once in a while.” He gave the counter a pat.
He walked her to the door and caught it as it jingled when she stepped out. She looked back over her shoulder with a smile and a nod. He saluted as she walked away, the flowery flaps of her sundress fluttering as she hurried.
It was Sully’s Happy Hour that night, and she waltzed into the bar with the memory of that gorgeous man still dancing in her mind. She felt like she was on the edge, but safer than ever. When she looked up and saw a smiling tan face and a man clad in clean white polos amidst a cluster of women, she did a doubletake wondering if she was just wishing for another meeting with a man whose whole manner thrilled her.
“Twice in one day I’ve seen you, ay? Coincidence?” He smiled as he approached. “So what about that island tour tomorrow?”
She shrugged it off again.
He pleaded. “How can you ever become chowda if you don’t see Cape Cod from my boat? Whaddaya say?” He stepped back and looked at her.
“Chowda?”
“Oh, you know, chowda! Chowda? Ay, Sully, you chowda?”
“I’ll be damned if I’m not,” said the man behind the bar.
“Cheers, baby,” Jimmy said, as he raised his glass to Sully and sipped. “We’re all chowda here. It means Cape Codder, born and raised.”
She laughed. Become chowda! “It’s going to rain tomorrow.”
“No, it isn’t.”
She stammered something about the fog that had already socked them in and the weatherman on TV.
“It never rains here,” he said matter-of-factly.
Her skepticism lingered in her squinted eyes as she continued to shake her head slowly.
“Ever seen the bay in the rain?” He melted all her excuses with his velvety charm.
For some reason, he did not seem a stranger anymore.
“So did you go?” I rolled the window up a little so I could hear her better.
She didn’t answer my question directly. “I was planning on leaving after two weeks. I never did.” I knew she used to live on the Cape, but I didn’t know she hadn’t planned to.
“Why not? Because of Jimmy?”
“Well, Jimmy started it and…one thing led to another, and I stayed.”
“Didn’t grandma and grandpa care?”
“Oh, yeah, they were so worried. They called every day. I think they just pictured me running wild or something. It was the first summer I ever came to the Cape without them. But I mean, I was out of college then.”
I looked at her, startled by this seeming role reversal. “Well, but Mom, you would never let me stay here by myself. You won’t even let me stay home alone for a weekend!”
“That’s because it isn’t safe.”
“Oh, and you were?”
“Things were safer then,” she said.
“Yeah, right. I feel pretty safe right now.” The highway was smooth and only one lane wide. Signs at the side of the road had bicycle symbols and read, Cape Cod Rail Trail, signaling entrances to the bike trail that ran the length of the Cape.
We watched the license plates in front of us; it was a game we played when we were on the road together. We scouted for the cars from the farthest away, and tried to spell the alphabet with letters from the plates. We were avid Scrabble players.
“Oh, hey, look!” we both said in synch, noticing at the same time the car’s license plate in front of us: CAPECD. We giggled.
“I guess we’re really here,” she said.
Afternoon the next day, she sat on the Hyannisport dock waiting. She hated waiting. Especially for a man. She wondered what she was doing here, waiting for this man. He was older—maybe a couple of decades older—old enough to be her...she didn’t want to think of it. And, in truth, she had just met him. What would her parents think? She would have liked to be the one to make him wait, in any case. Be the rude one. Be the I’m-too-cool-to-care one. Be the heartbreaker. She longed to ditch goody-goody nicknames.
Then he roared in, his 1964 Woody flying an Irish flag. He was late. What she didn’t know was that Jimmy Hennessy was always late, as if being on time didn’t matter for people like him. “Hop in,” he welcomed. “It’s my baby. Kind of a project I took up at the shop.”
“Shop?”
“Yeah, the body shop. I work there. It’s kind of a pastime.”
They rolled up next to a lighthouse on the water, with a small weathered-wood cabin attached to it. The place was called The Point because it was a narrow strip of land jutting out into the bay. The lighthouse perched on a rock overhang, and the waves sloshed against it as the tide came in. “It’s a replica,” he explained. “I built it.”
They set sail, but as the lighthouse grew smaller and smaller the rain began to fall. The wind whipped sopping strands of hair across her face and twirled them out of control. She let it have sovereignty and laughed as Jimmy pointed out personal favorite spots all across the shore.
“There’s where I caught my first fish,” he said, pointing out into the water with one hand, working the tiller with the other. “There’s where Johnny and I capsized once. We had taken out his dad’s sunfish. Neither of us had ever capsized before.” He chuckled, reminiscing.
“Johnny?”
“You know, John. John Fitzgerald. I was about ten then.”
She nodded. She was too entranced to question anything he said, and he seemed too sincere not to believe.
“And that’s one of my buildings. It’s a gallery now. Man’s a goldsmith. He has some great pieces. Maybe I’ll take you there sometime.” He winked.
She smiled, not sure what to say. Before she had time to say anything, he went on.
“And there’s where my wife lives now.” He pointed to a spot a long way up the elbow of the Cape.
She didn’t ask. They were silent for a moment, just enjoying getting wet. “I’m drenched!” she yelled over the howling air, leaning out with her head back as she hooked her bare feet under the hiking straps.
“This...is chowda!” He bellowed into the wind.
As hurricane clouds rolled in, they looked to the lighthouse and headed back. He leaped overboard in the shallows and swam the boat to shore. As the boat beached, they dashed for his store of sand bags. He showed her how to set them against the walls to secure the structure from sliding into the gulp of the ocean during a Nor’easter. Together they slung the supports at the foot of the lighthouse.
She took refuge in his hut while he finished up the storm preparations. Tiptoeing through the few dim rooms, her eyes fell on handmade workbenches littered with tools and dusty picture frames peppering the few pieces of furniture around the house. Hollow blue eyes gazed bleakly at her from different corners of the room. In all of them, he was surrounded by crowds of people, most of them significantly younger than he. In all of them, he was at some local spot. She supposed if he had ever been to the mainland, it had been seldom. In one picture, an anomalous twinkle shone through the gaze of a much younger face. Next to him stood a pretty woman of about the same age. She stared at this picture the longest, oddly stirred by the mesmerizing faces. In the whole house she noticed only a single hastily made cot.
He fetched her when he was satisfied, and they ran for the Woody. Rain fell in sheets as they sped around the corner away from the house, and the first crack of thunder rolled.
“Where are we going?” she cried, laughing at this man who was taking her somewhere in a roofless car in a hurricane.
They pulled up next to white gates and a man in a suit holding a black umbrella. “What are we doing here?’ she hissed, wide-eyed.
“How are ya, baby,” Jimmy said to the man.
She saw the man smile, nod, then roll his eyes as he watched them drive in, in the pouring rain.
“Chowda.” Jimmy winked suavely.
“This is the Kennedy Compound, a place where generations of people all related by one famous—or infamous—surname come back every year,” he recited. “I’ve never seen such loyalty.” He drew out the syllables as though he were telling a joke, but he didn’t laugh and neither did she.
“I was one of them once,” he said, suddenly sober and quiet. “John was like a brother to me, may he rest in peace. We had our hands in the same pots, you could say.” He paused for a moment. “I could have been just like them,” he said. “The difference is they go back to their rich downtown apartments and suburban mansions at the end of the summer, and I stay here.”
Thunder echoed along the quiet cottage roads. Her eyes were closed. She felt the warm rain seeping into her skin, and wondered if he thought of her as just another rich tourist. She hummed a song they had heard on the radio earlier; he heard her.
They cruised by the Dragonlite on Main Street and picked up some cartons of Chinese food before heading back to The Point. There they parked facing the bay and sat between the wood panels in the backseat eating lo mein with their fingers and watching the raindrops bombard the windshield. At The Point, they were alone, surrounded on three sides by crashing waves. The lighthouse was black against the gray-lit storm sky.
Later that summer, he invited her to his auto shop and surprised her with the Woody, manicured to perfection and wrapped in a big red bow. She had been searching for a car all summer. He had a knack for finding spare parts like a crow drawn to shiny bits of metal. He picked them up and fit them like puzzle pieces into whatever project consumed him, giving odds and ends a fresh new face.
“No, no, I can’t,” she said.
With a hug and a promise to write and return the following summer, she ebbed out of the shop’s lot on the tide of Labor Day traffic going home. He stood next to the Woody as she left, watching her drive out of sight.
“What? He offered you his car? And you didn’t take it? Are you kidding?” I was on the verge of getting my driver’s license, and cars were a novelty, veritable gold. We didn’t really need one in the city.
“No, I couldn’t,” she said. “Everyone knew the Woody. All his friends loved it. I couldn’t take it away. I didn’t want to be the girl who came and took Jimmy Hennessy’s prized possession as a souvenir.”
“And I thought you said you never left?”
“Well, yeah. I guess I did…leave. But I had to. I couldn’t have stayed.”
“Oh, Mom, are you serious? It was a car,” I sputtered.
“It wasn’t the car,” she said. She shook her head, but went on anyway. “It was what the car meant. He didn’t actually mean for me to take the car. He wanted me to stay. Stay with him, share the car. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t stay. I wasn’t from there.”
I couldn’t believe how much of this version of the story I’d never heard before. Suddenly Jimmy took on new dimensions, his life coloring my mother’s past.
The car door slammed as she stepped out onto the steaming pavement. Under the glaring sun in front of the auto body shop, she paused and looked at her reflection in the car window. She smoothed her hair and smacked her lips together, rubbing them back and forth. Then she looked down, nudged her sleeves up a little more, and raised her head, determinedly.
“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” she said to me. “I’m finally here! I haven’t seen him in so long! Oh God, I’m nervous. Do I look okay? Do I have anything…”
“Yeah, Mom, you look fine.” Her jitters seemed weird and silly, and I was eager for her to come back to motherhood.
“I could have married that guy,” she breathed, staring at the shop. I felt my stomach drop as I contemplated that alternate reality, and my head spun with “What if’s” of other realms.
“Oh, look!” she had said as we turned onto Main Street in Hyannisport. “The Dragonlite is still here. God, that thing’s over thirty years old. Same yellow sign, too. Wow, that’s been here forever.”
But as we pulled up to the shop she was quiet as though she didn’t recognize it. “Wow, he must have rebuilt this, look!” she said finally. Hennessy Auto was printed in big letters above the awning.
We had finally arrived at our destination. I had been craving an escape from the same old thing, a chance to be something new this summer; I guess she had been looking for a return to the old, revisiting someone she used to be, revisiting Jimmy. “I used to know this place so well,” she had said. “It’s all different.”
I held the door for her as she went into the shop, immersing myself in the brochure selection on the wall as she approached the counter, wondering what adventures I could have here that I could tell my friends about when I got home.
It was a hell-hot summer, and that day was another scorcher, but inside the shop was dark and cool.
The desk was near the front. She walked up smiling and straight-backed. “Hi, is Jimmy around?”
The man at the counter stared at her, then looked at his hands.
“Jimmy?” he asked hollowly.
“Yeah, he built this thing? Signed his name above the door?” She laughed. “I guess he did that since I was here last. It used to be called Cape Cod Motors.”
“Honey, I’m sorry. Jimmy didn’t build this, and he didn’t name it. It’s named in his memory.”
She turned and walked out of the shop, shielding her eyes from the shock of light. I watched her sink onto the curb before I rushed to her. She took her hand away; her eyes shone as they swelled. But she did not cry. She always cried, from Disney movies to the cotton commercial; I always made fun of her for being so sentimental about everything. Now, of all times, I didn’t know why she wouldn’t cry.
“Jimmy Hennessy died.” Her voice was eerily unfazed. She raised her head and looked at me with big red, bewildered eyes, like a child.
“I know,” I said.
It was the kind of moment that breaches all familiarity, the moment when you notice the stain on the carpet and the crack in the wall. Suddenly, my favorite sneakers looked worn out.
The man at the counter appeared at my side.
“How?” I asked him. There I was, ever insensitive, asking the practical, objective question.
“Fire. The shop burned down, and he was inside,” the man said. “A few years ago.”
“Years ago,” she echoed. “I didn’t even know.”
“Jim went down with the ship,” said the man. “We wanted to honor him when we rebuilt her.”
“Jimmy would have liked it. Another successful project.”
“Jim would have liked it.”
“He was so young,” said my mom.
I placed him in time with the few things I knew about him. He was not that young, then realized that phrase was something grown-ups probably said about the deaths of their heroes.
We stood in silence, lingering around the curb.
“So, Jimmy was a good guy, huh?” I asked the man, getting to my feet. I was feeling awkward, not sure if I should sit with my mom or stand like the man, and I tried to fill in the silence.
“Yeah, he was.” The man was still gazing down blankly at my mother on the curb, as if remembering the good times with Jimmy. Then he turned back to me, shattering his hypnosis. “Here, let me show you something.”
He led us to the backroom. In a frame on the wall was a clipped feature from a local magazine, and next to it was the cover on which Jimmy was pictured. The caption read, “The Boy Who Never Grew Up.”
“See those eyes?” the man said.
Jimmy’s eyes were big and clear in the picture. They were blue, and twinkled mischievously.
“Even if he hadn’t died early, he still would never have grown up,” the man said.
My mom and I slowly walked back to the car. The sun felt weird on my skin. It tingled as if I had walked into a steaming dry sauna soaking wet. The sun tried to penetrate the chill that had fallen with the news.
“Ma’am?” It was the man from the shop. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Lynette. Winters.”
He considered for a moment, looking past her, mouthing the words. He wagged his finger in the air slightly, then faster, pivoted, and walked quickly back into the shop.
We waited where we were, confused. In a moment, he returned. “Lynette? Your plates are in.”
“Plates? What plates?” she said in a hoarse, tired voice, awakened from a mournful stupor.
He lifted the envelope. The packaging was dusty and browning as if it had been filed away somewhere for a while. She took it, glanced at him quickly, then ripped it open. She pulled one out and caught her breath. CHOWDA, they read, printed in splendid green letters. License plates. She sobbed through an incredulous smile, pulling the paperwork from the envelope. On the line at the bottom, where her name was signed, was not her signature. “So this is what that devil was up to,” she said.
A small note with scribbles on it fell out of the envelope. She stooped down and picked it up: I told you, you could one day. Love, Jimmy.
“You know,” the man said, “I think there’s one more thing here you might want to see. We walked to another garage behind the shop that looked as if it hadn’t been opened in a while. “The Fourth of July parade is tomorrow,” he said as he bent down and rolled the garage door up with a creak. Inside was the Woody—I knew what it was without ever having seen it before—still shiny, as if Jimmy had just parked it there the night before. “Anyone who has a classic is invited to drive in it,” the man continued. “Jim used to drive this every year. Since he’s been gone, I’ve been thinking about taking it out, but it never feels right. He left it to this mystery woman in his will, and we never knew what to make of it. She never showed up. You said your name’s Lynette Winters, right?”
She nodded.
“Well, Ms. Winters, she’s all yours.”
We got back to the shop the next evening a little while before the parade began. “So you’re really going to drive it now?” I teased.
“Nope,” she said, and she handed me the keys. I didn’t even have my license yet.
The parade started and we rolled in line, tracing the road past the docks and up the coast. I loved the way my hands felt on the leather-covered wheel. People honked and waved and yelled, “I like the plates!” Everything I saw was gilded like aging black-and-white photographs from a generation before.
“There!” she said suddenly, as a view of the bay opened up by the road. She pointed at the same lighthouse she had pointed to a thousand times in paintings and pictures. It was a landmark here, famous for its residence on The Point and its unique architecture, Jimmy’s trademark. “It was right there where we ate Chinese food and watched the storm rise. There’s where he kissed me.”
I looked at her like I did the time she confessed to being the Tooth Fairy. I noticed the crow’s feet next to her eyes.
“I had to know,” she said softly. “I just had to see…what was still here.”
I drove in silent understanding. “No regrets?” I asked her. It was this thing we did. She always made me promise that no matter what, I wouldn’t hesitate to do what felt right in the moment, so I could always look back with pride and pleasure.
“No regrets,” she agreed.
When the water alongside of us mirrored the rising full moon, she suddenly said, “Wait! Turn here.” We turned off the parade route for her detour. Then we drove in silent respect toward the white gates, no longer patrolled, and onward slowly, winding around the smooth dark roads between the gargantuan pastel cottages. In the gaps between the houses, I could see the lighthouse at The Point, silhouetted against a twilight sky.
“Well, now we have a place to come back to next summer,” she said, touching the second key on the ring that hung from the ignition.
And then the fireworks burst in the black sky over the bay, suddenly illuminating the lighthouse in red and yellow.
The next morning, with salty air heavy in our lungs, we drove home. But my mom cried like it was home she was leaving. As our Woody bumped over the bridge, she whispered, “Goodbye, Cape Cod,” but I knew what she meant. Off the Cape, whenever we stopped, CHOWDA inspired questions; for example, do we own Legal Seafood? I guess fewer people there know the whole story. Jimmy smiled when we drove away, an inside joke with a man I’d never met, a promise to come back.
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