When my great-grandfather died in 1914, he left each of his children several thousand dollars. Some say it was three thousand, others say, five, but either sum would have been a windfall to my grandmother. She had five children then, ranging from age 3 to age 15, and a soft-hearted husband whose future at the Bank of Tidewater, in Portsmouth, was limited by the fact he couldn’t bear to foreclose mortgages. Instead, he’d try to find a friend, or even dig into his own almost empty pockets, to come up with the money to solve the mortgage's immediate crisis.

So what did Grandma do with her inheritance? The only significant amount of cash that would ever come her way? She invested it, of course. Immediately. In a summer cottage on Willoughby Spit at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

Her father’s dying words to her had been: “Try to keep the family together.” By that he meant not only her five children, but also her older sister, and the four younger brothers she had helped him
raise. And, of course, their children, and their children’s children.

One of her brothers bought the only other cottage on that block — if you can call two acres of sand and sea grass and splintered boardwalk stretching to the streetcar tracks a “block.” And back and forth between those two cottages and around their two porches at least three generations of Marshall cousins ran.

By the time I got there, the cottages had, just barely, survived the Hurricane of ’33 — which I experienced in utero and re-experienced each summer as my uncles and aunts sat rocking on one porch or the other, nursing their highballs and adding new details to the story of that night. How the wild waters from the Chesapeake rose up to the street car tracks, while my grandfather insisted it was just a bad Northeaster, and how the family finally had to be evacuated, in three row boats and a paddy wagon.

Most summers we would drive down from Richmond in mid-June and stay through Labor Day, since my mother was her mother’s chief assistant. And each year I’d be surprised, all over again, by the sudden salty taste in the air when my father rolled his window down at the Old Point Comfort ferry.

The first night, lying in my cot, I would listen intently to the waves lapping on the sand, just beyond the open windows, and stay awake to watch the long finger of light from the Thimble Shoal lighthouse slide around the bare walls of the girls’ bedroom. My biggest worry always was: What kind of sheet have I been given? An old one and a thin one, that’s certain. But is it one of those that has a tiny hole which your toe will catch in middle of the night and wake you to the dreadful sound of ripping cloth? You draw your legs up tight, to avoid further damage, but your body soon forgets and straightens out. And then the awful ripping sound wakes you again.

By the time the sky beyond the screen turns rosy pink and a flat red sun pops out of the water, you find that one whole leg is exposed, while long pieces of the sheet are lying on either side of it.  Grandma tries to be a good sport when you hand the strips of sheet to her. “We’ll get some good dust rags out of this,” she says. But you’ve seen the calendar in the kitchen with the Chessie cat
sleeping on a soft white pillow and the names of all the aunts, uncles and cousins scrawled across the dates on which they’ll be arriving. And you know she must be thinking, “Will the supply of sheets make it through the summer?”

Towels were a problem, too. And screen doors which we younger ones kept busting through in our eagerness to catch up with the older cousins who were always running off to do something so extremely adult and exotic that they didn’t want the younger cousins horning in on it. If a screen could not be patched, we were allowed to tear it apart, strand by strand, then twist the strands into a single wire, which — when a Dixie cup was attached at either end — became a private telephone from the girls’ room to the boys.’

At that stage of my life, I didn’t know much about boys. The first one I had ever seen in his naked entirety was a 4-year-old cousin, screaming bloody murder at the top of the steps, while Grandma and my mother stripped his sandy bathing suit off and slapped handfuls of baking soda on the bright red blotches where a stinging nettle got him.

Grandma’s porch had a swing with dark green slats. Three or four cousins could sit there and sing all of the songs they’d ever learned. But when the whole crowd got together, we used Uncle Richard’s porch next door, with its huge metal glider and wicker chairs.

Best of all was the beach. Sometimes the grownups would scoop out a pit there and build a fire for a marshmallow roast. The trick was to pierce the white blob firmly in the center with the tip of your untwisted coat hanger, then hold it at exactly the right distance from the flame, so that it would turn gently brown, not black, on the outside and still run soft and gooey at the center.

We roasted hot dogs, too, or “wienies” as we called them, and ears of corn, still in their husks, and the fresh fish — spot or croaker — that our uncles had caught from the wooden row boat we helped them drag down to the water early in the morning and summoned back for lunch by ringing a brass bell and waving dish towels on the porch.

As the summer progressed, the bottoms of our feet grew tough enough to take us a full mile down the road to a store that sold jawbreakers and licorice sticks and orange popsicles which we would we break in half and race to finish eating before they melted down our arms.

Once a summer we’d be taken all the way to Ocean View to buy pink clouds of cotton candy and watch the bolder cousins ride the rickety white latticed roller coaster, which everybody I knew called the “leap de dips.”

The saddest end of summer I remember was 1939, when at the breakfast table, one mild September morning, my almost always jolly grandfather turned suddenly, terrifyingly solemn as the radio began to tell about German soldiers marching into some fairy-tale sounding country I’d never heard about before.

Through most of World War II, our summers at Willoughby continued almost as they had been before, though I think even the youngest children sensed that we were playing at the edge of some disaster. Ugly submarine nets had been strung out into the bay only five or six jetties up the beach from us. Mother’s favorite first cousin’s husband spent most of his vacation on the porch, with binoculars focused on the water for the tell-tale periscope that would indicate a U-Boat. One afternoon he actually saw one and leapt up from his rocking chair and ran into the house to telephone the Navy. And everybody, on both porches, saw the British destroyer gliding into
Hampton Roads with thick black smoke pouring from it turrets. One day we even caught a glimpse of FDR himself, in the back seat of an open car, riding in a motorcade from the ferry to the naval base. And he waved at me — I still maintain it was at me — as I sat watching from the back steps of our cottage with my older sister and seven of my cousins.

A week before VE Day, Grandma Marshall died. And nobody in the family had the heart, or maybe it was energy, or simply inclination, to open up the cottage at Willoughby without her. And so, eventually, my grandfather sold it. And I went off to summer camp in the Allegheny Mountains.

Now and then I think about my grandmother’s inheritance. Suppose she had invested those 1914 dollars differently? In U.S. Steel, perhaps, or Coca-Cola stock. If so, this much I know: We, her descendants, would not be where we find ourselves today, among the very rich in
kissing kin and summer memories.
ŠAnne Hobson Freeman

"Anne Hobson Freeman has published numerous short stories and two
books of biographies, The Style of a Law Firm: Eight Gentlemen from Virginia
(Algonquin: 1989, 1992) and A Hand Well Played; the Life of Jim Wheat, Jr.
(Cadmus: 1993)

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