Stephen Fisher, Harris Family’s Albany neighbor growing up writes from Prague: “I remember that painting well. It hung on the wall in our living room, over the TV. It depicts the boat house next to Mainland Cottage in Cautaumet on Squeteague Harbor, where we annually spent the last two weeks of June.
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Mainland Cottage,
by Andrew Fisher III
My family rented the house (behind the painter) for the last two weeks in June every year from 1957 through 1977, so if it wasn’t early ’60s when you visited, it was late ’50s. The house and boathouse were located in Cataumet — part of the Town of Bourne — near the Falmouth town line. The water was to the west, which kept it pleasant most of the time.
Family legend holds that when Dad was a baby, he had begun to lose weight. The doctor wasn’t sure what was wrong, but he was sure that Dad was not going to make it, and he told Grandpop to find a place outside of sweltering Boston for the baby to be comfortable in his last days. Someone recommended Cape Cod, and Grandpop and Grandfanny rented a room in Gray Gables, just across the Cape Cod Canal from Buzzards Bay.
Once at the Cape, Dad started to thrive, and Grandpop the M.I.T.-trained scientist was immediately sold on Cape Cod. Until he was well into his 80s, Dad managed to go to the Cape for at least a short period of time every year.
The Fishers moved through a succession of summer accommodations in the following years, staying at least once in Monument Beach and once in Pocasset, and settling on Cataumet, at the south end of the town of Bourne, as their favorite. One place they rented was called Grant’s Camp, little more than a one-car garage the Grants apparently didn’t need any more. Grandpop would spend most of the week at his chemical business in Boston and take the Old Colony train down to the Cape on Fridays. The railroad had thoughtfully built a station in Cataumet, within easy walking distance of Grant’s Camp.
The summer homes ebbed and flowed with Grandpop’s fortunes; one summer, he even made a daily commute of it. In the summers of 1930 and 1931, they stayed in a wonderful waterfront house on an estate developed by a shoe manufacturer from Brockton named Baxendale.
The Baxendales had built a summer community on a spit of land near the town line between Bourne and Falmouth, near where a spring-fed estuary called Squeteague Pond emptied into Megansett Harbor. They dug through an isthmus and created what they called Amrita Island. To enhance the island effect, they built an elaborate bridge, and on the island, they built several large Victorian houses, the biggest of them their own at the tip of the island, looking out across Megansett Harbor and Buzzards Bay.
On the mainland, they built a boathouse to shelter a large launch. Either they decided not to keep the launch, or never had one in the first place, because by the time the Fishers got there, the boat house had dry land beneath it, and it was just a house. And by the time the Fishers got there, the childless Baxendales had passed away, willing the entire community to Harvard University.
What a house it was! The main floor, having been the area where the launch was to have been stored, was one enormous room, with a cooking stove at the back. Upstairs, there were five bedrooms, growing progressively smaller from front to back. A grand porch circled the house.
We grew up hearing the stories of the summers at the Cape. There was the year Dad sold Grandfanny’s beach-plum jelly at the foot of the driveway leading up to Grant’s Camp, and one of his young customers turned out to be his lifelong friend, Polly Blodgett. There was the summer Grandpop bought Dad a sailboat, dropping it on a rock as it was unloaded from the roof of the car and punching a hole in the hull so that even after it had been patched, it never really sailed right.
There were lots of stories about the car trip to and from the Cape, which now takes about an hour, but in the 1920s took the better part of a day. Grandfanny always drove; Grandpop never had a driver’s license, but he would demand that they ignore the main road, Route 28, and go by way of Route 58, a narrow, deserted road through pine woods and cranberry bogs that Grandpop insisted was shorter (and Dad insisted took another couple of hours). Once, on the way home from the Cape, the car broke down in Stoughton, and Grandpop just went up the street to the Ford dealer and bought a new Model T. There were always several flat tires, and a long wait at the Cape Cod Canal, which was then much narrower and was crossed by a drawbridge that frequently got stuck.
One of Grandpop’s stories involved the old boathouse; in the notorious September hurricane of 1938, the building had been lifted from its footings, turned sideways and dropped in the marsh next door. But Harvard had coughed up the money to have it restored.
At Dad’s 50th high-school reunion at the Roxbury Latin School, many of his classmates remembered the 1931 class picnic at the house, during which it rained all day, but everyone had fun anyway. Dad loved the Cape so much he spent more summers there as a young man; one year he worked as the box-office manager at the Mary Young Theater in Centerville, over near Hyannis, but his heart belonged to Cataumet, and my earliest memories include rides down the road past the entrances to the old boathouse and Grant’s Camp.
The earliest stays at the Cape I can remember were spent at the Melvene, a pair of large cottages that Helen Melvin, a woman from Watertown, had turned into an inn. Mom and Dad would rave about the cooking, but I wasn’t crazy about the place, since it didn’t serve Howard Johnson’s clam rolls or my few other favorites. But today, whenever I taste cantaloupe, I think of Mrs. Melvin’s and the promise of a sunny day at Old Silver Beach, Dad’s favorite beach a few miles down the shore of Buzzards Bay in West Falmouth.
Occasionally, we would visit Amrita Island, where the stately Victorian houses looked out across the harbor and the bay. I especially remember one unusually warm day in December when my aunt Edith and my cousins Ibby and Graham and I walked out to the end of the island. The Baxendales (and their dog) were memorialized in a stone tomb at the very tip. Over its iron doors was the inscription, “Love is eternal.” On the roof of the tomb was a statue of the dog. The place looked rather forlorn, as I recall: The gardens overgrown, the houses badly in need of maintenance.
For a while, we lived in Massachusetts, in Watertown, Worcester and Auburn, places near enough to the Cape to make Old Silver Beach a day trip, but after we moved to Albany in 1956, even before the Massachusetts Turnpike was opened, it was just too far. During a weekend trip to Boston that summer, we took a ride to the Cape. Curious about the old house, Dad drove into the driveway and spoke with a distinguished-looking man who seemed to have a proprietary interest in the place.
He was Carlton E. Buttrick, president of the Animal Rescue League of Boston which, as it turned out, had been given the estate by Harvard. Under Mr. Buttrick’s astute leadership, the League had sold off all the big houses but the one at the tip, which he had kept for himself as a summer place. The League had also kept the mainland portion of the land, and the boathouse was now used as a summer day camp, where Cape kids could learn pet care and related wisdom. Mr. Buttrick said the house was usually opened for the summer on Memorial Day weekend, although the day camp didn’t begin until around the Fourth of July. Dad asked if he could rent the place for the last two weeks of June 1957, and for the next 21 years, that was our family’s summer vacation.
A few changes had been made in the house since 1931. A kitchen wing had been added to the ground floor, containing a full bathroom as well as an eat-in kitchen. The smallest of the five bedrooms upstairs was now a bathroom, with a hook and eye screwed into the door frame to ensure privacy. And, we learned, the house was now called “Mainland Cottage.”
Along about February every year, when Dad had time for an idle thought, it would always be about Mainland Cottage. In the morning, as the sun came up over Loudonville, Dad would talk wistfully about the sunrise over Squeteague, and how in so many months, depending on the timing of the tide, he would be getting ready to row out to the exposed clam flats for a morning’s quahogging. The quahog (pronounced CO-hog) is a meaty, hard-shelled clam, it thrives in the tidal waters of places like Squeteague, and it is delicious. Eventually, Dad’s wistfulness got so intense that we could all taste the things long before we were anywhere near Squeteague.
Then, in the middle of June, usually on Father’s Day weekend, we’d pack up, close up the house in Albany, and drive the two hundred miles or so to Cataumet. As we arrived on Saturday, Dad would stop by the town hall in Buzzards Bay for a clamming license even before we reached Mainland Cottage.
One of the house’s many attractions was its relative remoteness. It was located on a road off the old main road, which was, of course, off the new main road. We would drive under the railroad bridge, past the station with its adjacent post office and playground (the site of a wonderful set of swings), then down the last hundred yards or so to the long-awaited driveway. And the place always looked the same: the dark-red shakes, freshly-painted white-trimmed windows and porch, the yard where grass and sand eternally battled each other for control, the clothesline running out from the kitchen door, and the dock, where two wooden rowboats bobbed on the tide, just waiting for us.
If it was a sunny day, and it usually was, one or two or all three of us would run immediately to the dock, ignoring my mother’s request for help unloading the car. In the first years at the Cape, we had a 1956 Plymouth Suburban, a station wagon; then Dad, who worked for International Harvester, sold himself an immense International Travelall, a forerunner of today’s larger sport-utility vehicles. If you folded down the third seat, you could load the thing with two weeks of vacation supplies and still have plenty of room to seat the whole family. In 1958, there was an extra member of the family: Duke, a collie-shepherd puppy. Riding in the car made Duke sick, so he had to be sedated before the drive to Cataumet, and, sadly and ironically, shortly after the return from the Cape that summer, he was struck and killed by a car in front of our house in Albany. He was replaced in 1960 by Kim, part collie, part poodle, all black, who looked like a flat-coated retriever. By contrast, she loved riding in the car, and would jump and bark whenever the word “car” was mentioned. Kim rode in elegance atop the supplies behind the second seat of the Travelall (the third seat, when it was set up, was her domain anyway).
The first year we were in Cataumet, someone else had booked the house for the first week, and we were accommodated in a classroom building the League had built up the hill from Mainland Cottage and called “Baxendale Hall.” The second week, Grandfanny was our guest, and occupied the second-largest of the four bedrooms. Steve, 18 months old, stayed in the master bedroom, and I took Bedroom #3, a dark room with only one window. By default, Alan got the remaining room, the sunny southeast-corner room with the wood-stove chimney running through it. Each room had twin beds, so we could and did bring friends along from year to year. The second year, I moved into Bedroom #2, which was an improvement in that it was bigger (room for my typewriter) and had two windows, making it markedly brighter.
The huge downstairs room was furnished with a large collection of what must have been castoff furniture from the big Victorian houses on the island. There were a few pathetically-weak lamps that, if they were in exactly the right place, could provide enough light for a healthy pair of eyes to read by. In the northwest corner of the room stood a suit of armor, complete except for the helmet. In the helmet’s place there was a huge maroon cardboard megaphone. Was it used by teachers at the animal-husbandry school to keep control of their pupils? Where was the helmet? These questions may go unanswered forever. There was also a big dining-room table, something that, not having a dining room, we did not have in Albany; the table was big enough for a large family to sit around and play games. There was a rocking chair, a piece of furniture as essential to my mother as a refrigerator, and there was an old cast-iron wood stove.
There was NOT a telephone. If anyone wanted to reach us, there were two options: Come to the house or write to us at “General Delivery, Cataumet, Mass.” Dad also drew the line against television, and Al suffered from its absence, but one year I came home from college with an FM radio that I let Al put in his room. If you tune an FM radio down below the lowest frequency, you can receive the sound from TV Channel 6, so Al was able to – at least – get the sound of his favorite ABC shows from Channel 6 in New Bedford. It was years before either of us confessed that to Dad.
The porch ran around three sides of the house, and thunderous footsteps were always one of the characteristic sounds of Mainland Cottage. There were chairs and benches on the porch and a matchless view of the sunset across Squeteague Pond. Although I have been a non-smoker for years, I have never objected to the smell of cigar smoke. Dad, being in the automobile business, and Grandpop, whose family owned a cigar store, were both cigar smokers, and one of my most cherished memories is of Dad and Grandpop sitting on the porch after dinner, puffing on cigars and watching that gorgeous sunset across the water.
We would not have been in Mainland Cottage for more than an hour before Al or Steve would agitate for a trip to Lawrence Island. Lawrence Island was a sandy, uninhabited spit of land between Squeteague and Megansett Harbor, with a wonderful beach. It was splendid for walking and exploring, and yielded a treasure trove of sea shells. It was accessible to us only by boat. Kim would quickly realize that something was afoot, and would run to the dock, barking as though the word “car” had been mentioned. There would be no room for her as the boat sailed away from the dock, and she would pace along the shore, crying pitifully. Now and then, she would overcome her hatred of the water and swim out behind the boat all the way to Lawrence Island. As a reward, on the way back, one member of the family would be dropped off on Amrita Island, and Kim would swim across the channel and be walked the rest of the way home.
We almost always enjoyed two weeks of magnificent weather, but some days that eventually turned out sunny began in a thick fog, so thick you could barely see the end of the dock, and it seemed as though Mainland Cottage was right on the oceanfront, since Amrita Island had vanished in the fog. There was something mysterious and magical about the fog, but eventually the sun would warm the air and the fog would clear away quickly. If there had been a morning shower – Grandpop would call it a “clearing-up shower” – everyone would watch for the blue skies to break through. Grandpop’s adage was that “if there’s enough blue to make a Dutchman a pair of pants, it’s going to be a fine day.” I wondered if the man who had contributed so much to the development of American dyestuffs ever figured out precisely how much blue was needed to make those pants.
If it didn’t clear up, or, worse, kept raining all day, we sometimes packed everybody into the car and drove to New Bedford, a trip of about 30 miles that required us to leave the Cape. The main attraction for us in New Bedford was the Whaling Museum, an excellent collection of memorabilia from the city’s days as one of the nation’s great whaling ports, as immortalized in Moby-Dick. And the prime attraction at the Whaling Museum was a half-scale replica of a whaling ship, small enough to make a little boy feel like a grown-up sailor as he walked its decks.
One of Al and Steve’s favorite side trips was to Hyannis, a much more commercialized Cape community, with a main street full of stores and a really fine miniature golf course that had to be played at least once per vacation. My mother liked the stores and walking along the main street; Dad would tolerate Hyannis for a while, then start lobbying to return to Cataumet and Squeteague and Mainland Cottage. Since he was the only driver, we had to stretch his schedule in order to get more time in the relative excitement of Hyannis. The trip to and from Hyannis was very dull, across a long stretch of empty countryside.
To the south, past Old Silver Beach, was Falmouth, with a main street of its own, but not as enjoyably tacky as Hyannis. It was pretty and cool, though, with big trees, manicured lawns, and large houses that didn’t seem to belong on the Cape. If you went down a back street, past the beach, you could see Martha’s Vineyard across the Sound, and soon you would go by Nobska Lighthouse, a major attraction because you could drive so close to it. Another mile or so, and you were in Woods Hole, where Grandpop’s college friend Prince Crowell lived.
He wasn’t a real prince; that was a family name, but Grandpop considered him a sort of royalty anyway. He owned a house – and a boathouse – on the water, and one of his jobs was sailing the mail boat out to the Elizabeth Islands, a chain that extended southwest from Woods Hole and ended with the exotically-named Cuttyhunk. When Grandpop was with us at the Cape, there would always be at least one visit to Prince Crowell in Woods Hole. The most enduring Prince Crowell story involves the day he took us out in his boat for a sail around Woods Hole harbor. Random rocks and intersecting currents and tides make the harbor an especially hazardous place to sail, so hazardous that although Mr. Crowell was a superb sailor, he used the boat’s auxiliary engine. As we made our way among the hazards, my mechanically-minded eight- or nine-year-old brother’s curiosity got the better of him, and he reached over and switched off the engine. There was a brief flurry of excitement, but Mr. Crowell was able to re-start it before we were rocked or whirlpooled.
Around the corner from his house was the famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and during our early years at Mainland Cottage, the WHOI opened an aquarium, providing still another required trip for us each year. The highlight of the aquarium was the dogfish tank, where what looked like miniature sharks swam around menacingly. There was also a lobster restaurant on the pier at Woods Hole, where you could at least get the impression of eating a lobster “right off the boat.” The lobsters were always good enough to convince me; steamed lobster drenched in melted butter is a favorite treat of mine.
If we didn’t take the Nobska Light route to Woods Hole, we would go down the road past the rose garden in Quisset, a favorite stop of Grandpop and Grandfanny’s. It was a private garden that a wealthy family had opened to the public, and a visit was never a casual event: the kids always had to be scrubbed and dressed up before we went there, which of course took some of the fun out of it. I wasn’t much for roses, anyway, but because it was pretty and cool and a relief from a hot day, I sort of enjoyed it.
After dinner, and maybe after a short ride somewhere, we would settle in for some sort of evening entertainment, almost always a card or board game. It usually didn’t last very long, because we were invariably tired from rowing or swimming or walking around Hyannis or Falmouth, but it was quite intense. The first card game craze in the family was Hearts. For details about Hearts, I defer to brother Steve and his brilliant and hilarious essay, “How to Play Hearts.”
Under the lone lamp that hovered above the dining table, there was a sense that all of existence was centered in that pool of light. In all directions, there was darkness, a very different feeling from the house in Albany, where lights usually burned in every room of the house, with at least five different activities simultaneously under way. Cards had a curious effect on the family; as we also discovered, croquet and other games did, too. As the intensity of the games increased, some real hostility would emerge, often driving one or more players away from the table. And as Hearts gave way to “Oh, Hell,” with its higher skill level and a correspondingly higher level of hostility, I drifted away from the table, out of the pool of light, and, eventually, away from Mainland Cottage for good.
It was called adolescence, and it provided an interesting contrast among the ways Steve, Al and I experienced the place. For Steve, Mainland Cottage was an annual event for virtually all his life, until the year he turned 22. For Al, it began the year he was six and ended the year he was 26. After college, both Al and Steve went back to the Cape (actually, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket) to live and work. For me, the estrangement began early. In 1960, I had a summer job in the Catskills that began in the middle of June; by 1963, I had been seduced and adopted by New York City; after that came the Army and deployment to Germany, and then marriage and vacations of our own.
But the memories of Mainland Cottage are happy ones, and there was little that brought Dad more pure joy than those two glorious weeks at the end of June. They brought him closer to his own father, a precious gift.
In 1977, Dad’s job kept him away from much of those two weeks; Al and Steve were off on their own; and the dog had died during the previous winter. The family vacation had become harder and harder to keep intact. Mom was in Mainland Cottage by herself, unable to sleep. She turned on the radio, tuned to WNEW in New York, and heard me say, “I’m Andy Fisher, WNEW News.” “And then,” she would recall, “I went right to sleep.” I would say, “Well, it doesn’t say much for me, that my voice put my own mother to sleep!” And she would blush, and say, “You know that’s not what I meant!” And she would laugh. At the end of the game, the player with the lowest score wins, and the other players all feel like crap. Again, weirdly, the winner is usually Mom, who is normally such a sweet person but is a cold, merciless bitch when it comes to playing hearts.
If the youngest child somehow manages to win, he will be incredibly happy, even though the oldest child will most likely beat the shit out of him when the game is finished. If the oldest child wins, no one will really mind, including the youngest child, who somehow still loves the oldest one despite the fact that he constantly beats the shit out of him.
Finally, if Dad wins – which isn’t likely, God knows, but miracles do happen – he might just splurge and buy that big flat-screen TV that everyone wants. So, just consider that long and hard before you even think about giving him the queen of spades.
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