Edgewater Inn 1979
She rises and falls with the sea waves over the river where old sailors wives use to wait for the ships to come home, the wide mouth taking them in day after day, week after week, until weeks turned to months and then years, young women turning old as they stared out into the mist for the least hint of canvas, each waiting out the low tide until the promise that high tight might bring them in, always searching the dim horizon in sunlight or moonshine for any sign of sail.
In 1854, the first fire gutted the inn, killing 62
unsuspecting sleepers, wives and the children of wives, who presumed they might
be safe on land when their husbands and the fathers of children risked their
lives on the sea.
It took another hundred years for her to burn again, only by
this time, the tall ships had shrunken to sail boats and the once grand dame
had turned brown from disuse, little boys playing with matches in the cobweb-filled
attic set her ablaze, laughing even as the flames consumed them, melting arms
and legs like wax.
Then, someone turned her into a resort, a cool, shady 1950s
hotel with porch swings and bathing ramp and a long covered dock where the ladies
waited in the shade, watching their husbands and sons, the way the old sailor’s
wives used to do, not on ships, but on row boats, not seeking great whales, but
fishing for crabs or carp, something catching geese.
Old black and white photographs in people’s seasonal albums
captured these special moments for twenty-five years or so before the dust
settled in and renovation made it a soft night spot for the Nouveau
riche, yachts full of champaign laughs and slowly dwindling
investments.
My uncle watched this magic occur, the old maid turned into
a bridesmaid for the super wealthy, although he did not know for whom the owner
rebuilt the old hotel for. Day after Day, my uncle made the trek from his brother’s
house at the other end of Toms River to an area dignified with the title of “island”
though it really was not, making his assessment of the progress, taking it all
in as if by faith that some of what had been there before would still be there
when the renovations concluded, my uncle, recalling having seen this place many
years earlier, when he was a boy, when his father, my grandfather, droved the
family here in his brand new 1946 Hudson to look at the place where the river kissed
the bay, nobody looking for sailors or sails, just sunlight and clear air lacking
in the city where they still lived at the time. Day after day my uncle came,
standing to one side as the workmen did their best to bring back the blossom in
the old lady’s cheeks, my uncle nodding his approval as if the workers managed
to get bits of his memory right.
The days fading into weeks and months, then a pause for
winter, to begin again in spring, my uncle there to bear witness of the
rebirth, and then the grand reopening to which he and his blue collar
upbringing would not get him invited, his button down work shit, his work pants
with cuffs, his finger nails too dirty from labor to ever fit in with the crowd
that filled the old inn, proud nonetheless, like a father is proud, watching
from near the dock, grinning at me, as if I was supposed to be proud, too.
Then later, when it all went bust, when we heard the sirens,
he rushed here to watch her burn again, one floor at a time, thick with the
pungent scent of petrol and the anxious owner wringing his hands, mumbling how
he knew this would happen someday, and fortunate that nobody died.
My uncle cried when the bulldozers came to clear the rubble
that had once been a dream.
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