St. John Family Cottage
Black Water (Joyce Carol Oates Edition)St. John Family Cottage, at 17 Derry Road on Grayling Island, is the family’s five-bedroom Cape Cod home and the site of the Fourth of July party where Kelly Kelleher first meets The Senator. Hosted by her closest friend, Buffy St. John, the house is at once a familiar summer refuge and the point of departure for the journey that ends in a crash on Old Ferry Road. Its domestic rooms and festive gathering give the encounter a setting that seems safe, even ordinary, before the marsh road turns that promise inside out.
Setting and Ownership
The cottage belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Edgar St. John of Old Lyme, Connecticut, who are away when Buffy hosts the gathering. Buffy, Kelly’s former Brown University roommate and closest friend, has welcomed Kelly there many times. The house is not merely a party venue: its rooms carry the familiarity of repeated visits, and its place on Derry Road ties the private hospitality of the St. John family to the public island landscape around them.
The house is presented as a five-bedroom Cape Cod with a southeast-corner room known in the household as the little-sister’s room. Buffy gives that room to Kelly. Inside, a white organdy bed, spare Shaker-inspired furniture, braided rugs, and strawberry-colored floral wallpaper make a notably chaste, carefully furnished space. The room’s color and old-fashioned comfort remind Kelly of Grandma Ross’s favorite room in the large old house in Greenwich. Its resemblance gives Kelly a private point of recognition within the unfamiliar social energy of the party.
The Party and First Meeting
The Fourth of July gathering at the cottage brings Kelly and The Senator together by chance. The two are new acquaintances, having met that afternoon, and their first encounter occurs amid Buffy’s guests rather than through an established relationship. The Senator arrives as an older, prominent visitor among a younger crowd; he and Ray Annick are the two older men at the party. Before joining the gathering fully, The Senator draws Ray aside to confer, then asks Buffy to use Ray’s shaving kit because he has not shaved since early morning in Washington. He changes from a formal white shirt into a navy polo, making the house a place where his public arrival gives way to a more casual party presentation.
The cottage’s hospitality is also part of how the evening is arranged. Kelly has a room where she can wash her sun-warmed face, rinse her eyes, and brush her hair before confronting the possibility that something unexpected may happen. Her small preparations, made in a private bathroom and mirror, sit against the scale of the older man’s attention and the lively gathering outside. The house thus holds two registers at once: a young woman’s familiar domestic refuge and the setting for an encounter whose meaning she cannot yet know.
Departure and the Road Beyond
Kelly and The Senator leave the party at about 7:55 p.m., intending to catch the 8:20 ferry to Boothbay Harbor. Their departure disappoints Buffy, and Kelly packs in haste while Buffy asks why she cannot leave later. The cottage is therefore the last settled place before the pair enter the night drive. The timing matters: they have enough time if they drive quickly and take the correct route, but the Senator has already delayed the evening by having another drink or two.
The Senator turns onto Old Ferry Road, a badly rutted sandy track whose old sign has been absent for years. The road is no longer maintained by Grayling Township and should have been officially closed; a new paved Ferry Road has replaced it, with the turn for the old route three-quarters of a mile beyond the proper turn. The narrative distinguishes the mistaken turn from being lost in the strict sense: the Senator is headed toward Brockden’s Landing, but along a road no one uses. The contrast between the cottage’s ordered rooms and the unmaintained road beyond it makes the departure feel like a passage from protected domestic space into a landscape where familiar safeguards have failed.
Images, Memory, and Consequence
At the party, Buffy arranges guests for Polaroid photographs. In one image, The Senator poses beside a picnic table with a foot on the bench and an elbow on his seersucker-clad knee; Kelly stands close beside him, laughing toward the camera. His smile is guarded, already seeming to register the possibility that a festive Fourth of July picture might become a news image circulated far beyond the island. The photographs make the cottage’s party both a social occasion and a space where public identity can be staged and scrutinized.
After the crash, the cottage returns to the story through The Senator’s effort to reach Ray. Having escaped the submerged car and fled across the marsh, he reaches a telephone booth near Post Beer & Wine and calls the St. John residence, asking for Ray Annick. He initially identifies himself as Gerald Ferguson, then tells Ray that it is he and that there has been an accident. When he says the girl is dead and fears that he will be accused of manslaughter, Ray tells him not to explain over the phone and offers to come get him. The party voices and laughter audible in the background sharpen the separation between the lively house and the emergency unfolding beyond it.
For Kelly, the cottage remains part of the day’s remembered safety: the guest room, the preparations before leaving, and the party from which she departed. For the Senator, it becomes a telephone contact and a possible route back to assistance after the crash. That divergence gives the house its narrative weight. It is the ordinary social home from which the fatal journey begins, but also the place whose celebration continues while the consequences of that journey are being disclosed by phone.
