Free Osprey Island by Thisbe Nissen Page A

hard against tears that he succeeded in stopping them from coming at all.

Six
    AS FODDER BLAZES STORED ABOVE THE BYRE
    On November 18, 1926, a fire swept through the massive Osprey
Lodge and burned the three-hundred-room hotel to the ground. No
one was injured, as the Lodge was closed for the season. Reconstruction began optimistically in 1928, but was halted by the stock market
crash of 1929. A skeleton of the new hotel stood in half-erected ruin
until the great hurricane of ’38 wiped it off the map entirely.
    —FRANK PERCIVAL, A History of Osprey Island
    IN 1939, WHEN BUDDY CHIZEK was eleven years old, his father, a tightfisted yet entrepreneurial Texan, happened upon Osprey in the course of some business dealings and saw right away the opportunity to be had. He bought up the site of the old Lodge, the waterfront, beach, and hillside, and built a hundred-room hotel, more modest than its predecessors. Just up the hill, by the tennis courts and swimming pool, Charles Chizek commissioned the construction of a fleet of family cabins, nestled among the oaks and pines. The Depression was over, and he foresaw an America of renewed hope, familial dedication, and newfound appreciation for the simpler things in life: badminton with the children, five o’clock cocktails on the terrace, morning coffee percolating in your very own kitchenette.
    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