The sale of a family home, in this case one full of summer memories, stirs powerful emotions, writes Molly McCloskey
The point of arrival is never the house itself but the moment when I feel the faint lift of the car as it leaves the roundabout and turns on to the Somers Point bridge, which takes us to the island. The moment coincides with the first whiff of sea and the first sight of it, appearing underneath us. It's always evening by the time I get here; on the far side of the bay, lights shine along the boardwalk. After a seven-hour flight from Ireland, and a three-hour bus ride from the Port Authority terminal, in New York, I'm within minutes of my mother's house.
This was the summer I wasn't going to come to Ocean City. None of us kids were. We'd agreed to skip our annual reunion here because we're convening in Oregon, where my brother is getting married in a vineyard. But in mid July my mother and her husband sold their Ocean City home. After two days' deliberation, during which it sank in that I would probably never again be more than a visitor to this island, on which my family has owned a series of homes over an unbroken period of nearly 70 years, I changed my flight so that I could stop over for a week and pay my respects.
The island of Ocean City, New Jersey, is eight miles long and one mile wide. The houses we've owned have all been within blocks of each other. The first was my grandparents' summer home, bought in 1939, which was succeeded in 1962 by an eight-unit rooming house. They ran that until 1964, then purchased a turn-of-the-century home on Central Avenue, the upper floor of which my family would occupy for two weeks every summer.
When my grandparents became dangerously forgetful, in the 1980s, my mother moved from Oregon to the Central Avenue house, to look after them. My grandfather died there in 1987. The following year, my mother and her new husband bought a place on the beach, five blocks away. My grandmother, whom they'd brought from Central Avenue to live with them, would wander around, mumbling: "Where is my house? I used to have a house . . ." She died later that year.
My mother, reluctant to sell her parents' home - with its faded shovelboard court; its kitchen, where my grandmother smoked Salems and pretended to tell our fortunes; its front porch, where we'd sit in the evenings playing a game called Colours - began renting it out. She had a knack for finding troubled tenants, one of whom threatened to "blow his brains out" one afternoon before his daughter and my mother and the police talked him out of it. All of us kids tried to work out how we could keep the house in the family, although it seemed to be becoming less ours with each passing year.
Finally, in 1997, my mother sold it. It was immediately torn down, replaced by some large insipid-looking thing with vinyl siding. Even now, when I ride past on my bike, the new house appears to be merely temporarily concealing what is actually there, as though it were nothing more than hoarding behind which my grandparents' house still stood. Memory can be admirably conservative.
But is ownership what matters here? In a letter from 1976, my eldest brother, then 26 years old, and having recently been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, wrote to my grandparents: "I asked Mom if ever we could make a wish about where we would live, it would be in Ocean City."
It isn't really about ownership. I know what Ocean City means to my brother. It means a time before illness, before fear, when he donned his crisp uniform and headed off to his first summer job, as a 16-year-old bellboy at the Port-O-Call, on 15th Street. When, in his wildest imaginings, he couldn't have guessed the way his life would cave in. It is why, I think, he turned up here in his early 20s, on my grandparents' doorstep on Central Avenue, already seriously adrift. They took him in, although they had no idea what to make of this long-haired, acid-addled first grandson of theirs.
What it means to him is, in an exaggerated and unfortunate form, what it means to all of us. Not only the happiest days of childhood but also continuity and wholeness. It is the only place I can remember our all being together, four generations, under one roof. It is where I got married, where my sister got married and where my brother had his honeymoon and christened his first child. It is where my mother was introduced to my father, just after he'd returned from the war. This island is the given in our history; anywhere else we've gathered has felt arbitrary by comparison.
My mother and her husband are moving to Florida, which she refers to not as the Sunshine State but as God's waitingroom. Their condo will be smaller than this house, so in the next few weeks they have to shed a lot of stuff. In each room, there are spaces on the walls where things used to hang; already, I can't remember what.
Similarly, I will quickly forget the idiosyncrasies of this house. Insignificant things: the way the screen door stutters on its runners; how the tiny flowers on the wallpaper look like slightly scary faces; the sound of the blinds banging in the wind. If I ever re-enter it, it will no doubt seem inexplicably smaller than I'd remembered.
Among the piles to be got through are several three-ringed binders full of letters. They are all the letters my grandmother saved, written to her by my mother and by the six of us children. My mother is retiring as the keeper of these archives, and so, this week, I went through the letters, extracting them from the chronological order in which my grandmother arranged them and sorting them instead according to authorship. Next week, when we're all in one place to celebrate my brother's wedding, I'll hand everyone a manila envelope full of his or her own writings.
There is, not surprisingly, a feeling of rewind to this dispersal (the old home movies we used to love to watch just as much in reverse), a feeling that has its own particular comforts, as though we aren't so much leaving here as getting to start all over again.
Molly McCloskey's latest novel, Protection, is published by Penguin, £10.99