Osprey Island

Charles’s wife, Dolly, was a fussy, irritable, and perniciously charming southern belle who placed herself in command of all matters pertaining to decor, cuisine, and social life, and ruled the Lodge at Osprey Island like a dictatorial cruise director. As a parent, she was no warmer than Charles, who was himself about as genial as a prawn. The couple’s three sons were neither nice nor interesting, nor pleased by their parents’ decision to uproot them from sunny Texas and plunk them down on this mildewed penitentiary of an island. They’d have preferred Alcatraz. The two elder boys were put out enough to make sure they were among the first volunteers to head for Europe when the next war broke out. When it came to pass that they were also among the first to die, it was as if they’d done so purely out of spite.

Bud, the youngest son, was somewhat less spiteful than his dead brothers, and he remained alive to help his grieving (yet prospering!) parents run the hotel. Bud was not a man of great energy or ambition and seemed generally to accept the island and the Lodge as his lot in life. Young and healthy, he may have wanted for more intimate companionship than the occasional romp with the capitulating daughter of a hotel guest, or even a seductive chambermaid, but it was not in his nature to seek anything other than that which was set in front of him.

In 1948, when Bud was twenty, the Bright family came to Osprey Island from Indianapolis to open—with common and foolish optimism—a women’s apparel shop, and by the time the store, like so many others, failed two years later (there were three months of business a year on Osprey, and when the summer folk left each Labor Day they took the economy with them) Bud had already managed to impregnate and marry the Brights’ daughter, Nancy. Her parents folded up their ruined business and moved back to Indiana. By the next year, Bud’s father was dead from cancer and Bud and Nancy Chizek took over proprietorship of the Lodge at Osprey Island.

They feared the worst two years later when Hurricane Carol raged up the eastern seaboard and swooped down on Osprey Island as if she’d set her mind to stripping it entirely. The Lodge faced west, somewhat protected by the hill, and fared far better than the rest of the island. Bud lost his dock, half the hotel’s front deck, most of the shore-view windows in the Lodge, an aluminum swing set that was lifted and dropped thirty feet downwind, where it lay splayed like an unfurled paper clip until it was removed, and one of the cabins, which was irreparably damaged when a two-hundred-year-old oak uprooted beside it and jacked the structure up as if to catapult it into the bay.

In 1970, a candle left burning in the staff barracks incinerated it to ashes within hours, thankfully without casualties. Nine years later a grease fire in the kitchen closed the restaurant for the last month of the season: unfortunate, and mildly financially crippling, but the fire hadn’t spread and the Lodge recovered quickly enough. Though the cabins on the hill had been constructed with every fire-retardant material invented in 1939, Bud feared some stupid renter leaving a clothes iron plugged in and sending the place up in flames, but after fifty years and countless renovations, such a calamity had not yet come to pass.

When Hurricane Gloria threatened the island in 1985 they braced for the worst and were rewarded with clemency: a number of trees lost, but no major damages.

Still, the island had surely known its share of tragedy. Most summers saw a drowning, a boating accident, some careless kid diving into the shallow end of a pool and snapping his neck. There had been the car crash on Ferry Hill that took George Quincy’s wife and baby, and a few fishing boat accidents over the years. Your occasional electrocution or fatal tumble down a flight of steep cellar stairs. There were house fires—more in the days of woodstoves and kitchen cooking hearths, though even in modern times houses still went up in flames— with babies and old folks, the pre- and postambulatory, trapped inside, succumbing to smoke. But on that June night in 1988, when Lorna Squire died inside the laundry shack as it burned to the ground around her, it was the first documented human death by fire in the Osprey Lodge’s 114-year history.