I was poised to express my territorial indignation when she said, “Why, if it isn’t the pink pineapples.”
I had definitely seen this woman before, but then, all these fit, generically charmed mommies had been passing by my windows for a month. I’d surely seen them all.
She said, “Do you remember me from the store? I helped you pick out this suit. I must say, it does make a positive statement.”
Oh heavens: my sartorial handmaid at The Great Outdoorsman was a mother at Elves & Fairies.
I bowed. “How kind of you to follow up on customer satisfaction. You see that I have put the garment to good use. I have definitely got my money’s worth!”
We laughed together.
“Then you’re Percival Darling,” she said.
“In the flesh. A bit too much of it on view right now.”
“I’m Sarah Straight. My son, Rico.”
I held my hand toward the boy, but he did not oblige me with his. I noticed that he did not look a thing like his mother. Where she was fair-skinned, he was quite dark, with a broad face where hers was narrow and angled.
“Well, Sarah Straight, it’s good to see that real people with real jobs and real manners are among the parents at this institution.”
Her smile stiffened. “Manners don’t seem lacking around here.”
“True enough,” I said. “On the surface.”
“That’s what manners are about, though, wouldn’t you say? A smooth surface.”
Rico tugged on his mother’s arm. “Patience, honey,” she said gently.
“Do you live in Matlock?” I said, at a loss.
“Oh hardly. We live in Packard. I was lucky to get a scholarship for Rico. Do you know the arts building, on the river?”
“The old mill.”
“I have a loft there. I do stained glass. That’s what I think of as my real job.”
“Stained glass! Intriguing. Wonderful!” I longed for an exit. Aside from feeling like a social ape, I was cold.
“Come by on a Sunday,” she said. “The studios are open, noon to five. Not just mine.”
“Yes. Yes, I’ve heard about that. We need all the local culture we can get.”
Rico saw his opening; he launched a plea of thirst and fatigue.
“Next time we meet,” I said, “may I be fully clothed.”
As I walked toward my back door, I heard her call back, “Hot pink becomes you, Percival Darling.”
“Who would have guessed?” I called in return.
After dressing, I went in search of Robert, but his car was gone. Feeling deprived, I decided to inspect what he had accomplished. The lower part of the beech tree looked as if it had been cunningly entrapped, yet as I circled the tree and examined the handiwork, I could not find a single nail that penetrated the trunk or branches. All the boards were nailed to one another. Nor could I find evidence of a single amputation. I wondered what Trudy would say if I called her that evening to praise her son’s extracurricular talents. Not, I reminded myself, that I needed a reason to call my daughter.
“It’s such a shame that we must begin to lock our cars and our houses.”
“Must?” I scoffed. “Paranoia is certainly infectious.”
“Are you really going to take such chances, Percy?” said Laurel Connaughton, Mistress Lorelei to a tee. “I’ve just spent a fortune to alarm the house, but I won’t bat a lash if it lets me sleep soundly.”
“If some jokester wants to stuff my dishwasher with regimental neckties or my underwear drawer with brussels sprouts, well boolah-boolah to him.”
“Or her. You know, the police haven’t been able to pin down a bit of evidence. This person is clearly sophisticated and wily.”
“Or our police department is out of its depth.”
“Percy, dear, it’s not just Matlock. Ledgely just had an incident.”
I helped myself to a fifth cucumber sandwich from a platter perched on a leather ottoman between us. Cucumber sandwiches are a weakness of mine, even if Laurel did not make them as well as Poppy had (with garlic and anchovy rather than dill). The promised salmon had not appeared, but I was holding a Tanqueray tonic in my free hand. I was not exactly suffering.
My hostess pulled her skirt down over her knees and laughed shrilly. She was, as always, meticulously dressed, though I noticed—sitting this close to her for the first time since our showdown over the bats—that she was beginning to look her sixtyish age. A bit heavier through the hips (though who was I to smirk?), and she’d pulled her bottle-blond hair back tightly enough to create the same effect as plastic surgery. At least she hadn’t overdone the makeup. I tried to expunge the unpleasant memory of her red mouth, a small, garish sea anemone looming toward my face as I knelt by my bedroom fireplace.…
“Well, Laurel,” I said briskly, “if you’re inviting me to join a vigilante group, the answer is no thank you.”
“Now there’s a bold idea,” she said brightly. “But no, no. What I invited you over to discuss is the possibility of a Christmas house tour to benefit the Forum. Do you realize, Percy, that our houses—yours and mine—turn two hundred and fifty years old this year? The Fisk brothers hired a housewright who knew what he was doing. I was thinking of throwing a birthday bash for my house and then I said to myself, ‘Use it, Laurel!’ One of our younger members—of whom we have far too few—has a terrific idea to fund a series of historical field trips for local public schools. As Barack Obama is showing us all these days, it’s time to inspire patriotism in our youngest citizens! And why not start with local history? Right around the corner, we have the Midnight Ride, the Old North Bridge, the Battle Road.… We’d love to have something ready to go by next Patriots’ Day.”
“Admirable.” I sat back and savored my drink. For once, I couldn’t disagree with anything she’d said.
“Our houses would be absolute gems to include on the tour, and if we start the ball rolling, I know I can convince others to open their doors as well. It’s always dicey until people see that it’s going to be a feather in their cap to be on a really first-rate tour.”
I certainly hadn’t expected this. I hadn’t, actually, expected much more than free smoked salmon and nicey-nicey talk that might earn me enough points with Clover to make her ease up on the subject of my cholesterol intake.
Laurel leaned forward and put a manicured hand on my naked knee.
“Well!” I said, shifting my leg. I looked around her living room: at its carefully oiled original paneling; at the exposed beams and corner posts, the skeletal timbers of the house, gnarled yet aesthetically prized; at the antiques Laurel had selected to dovetail with the architectural vintage. Periodically, a tumbleweed that passed for a cat would dart behind a doorway, pausing briefly to glare at me. Were I to inquire about this creature, I’m sure I would have heard that its particular breed had been imported to Salem via Asia during an era roughly congruent with the building of our houses. What else might justify its snub-nosed appearance and sociopathic behavior?
Our houses had been built in 1757 by Azor and Hosmer Fisk. Hosmer, “my” brother, had been the younger and poorer, the one who chose to farm while his older brother ran a flourishing cabinetry business. Though Hosmer was the one who married first—and who, with his bride, Truthful, bore so many children—his was the slightly smaller, simpler dwelling. It shared many details with this one, features that Poppy and I had restored, but Laurel’s house was the grander of the two. Though my parlor was paneled, it lacked Big Brother’s dentation along the wainscoting and the broad bolection framing the larger hearth. I had also neglected to primp and pamper such details after Poppy’s death. Much of the wood was now stained and parched; some of my floors were worn bare; and in two rooms where I could no longer cope with the horsehair plaster, dropped ceilings obscured the beams.
While my house faced the road (through trees that had colonized the fields once farmed), Laurel’s house faced mine—as if Big Brother had intended to keep a permanent eye on Junior. Wheneve
r Laurel and I were at odds, I would look out a side window and, glimpsing her house through the trees, project her face, in full-flush disapproval, across its symmetrical façade.
Now, thinking of my inferior home as a “gem” in any context, I laughed.
Laurel looked wounded. “I don’t see anything amusing about this idea.”
“Laurel, you misconstrue my mirth. What amuses me is that our houses were practically twins at birth—mine the runt, of course—yet here you are in a veritable museum, while I live in, shall we say, flagrant bachelor mayhem.”
She touched her throat as she laughed. “You mean your place is a mess.”
“A pigsty, my younger daughter calls it when she thinks I’m out of earshot.”
“Oh, hahaha,” trilled Laurel. “But Percy, my dear, I can put together an honest, eager crew of young girls who will tidy the whole place up, give it a good polish. And Tom Loud sends me this top-notch Guatemalan fellow, who I’m sure could weed-whack your front yard right into shape. You do have some rather stately hostas under all that bittersweet.… The important thing is that yours is one of the houses that remains unravaged.”
“Unlike the Harris house.”
“Exactly.” She drew the word into a groan. “That was such a tragedy.”
She took my empty glass and, without asking, went to refill it from the bottles in the Revere tray on the McIntyre sideboard. Like a cuckoo in a clock, the feline tumbleweed popped into view on the threshold nearest its mistress. It took two steps into the room and hissed at me.
“Oh, Horace,” said Laurel, leaning down to extend a hand. “Quit your drama and come on in for a snuggle.” The cat fled.
“You must be a covert cat lover, Percy. Only if you’re truly phobic will he insist on claiming your lap!”
I looked at my feet, at the hole in my right sock (having been compelled to surrender my shoes at the door, a custom I find pretentious in the extreme). Was I already drunk? How was it that I had not made my excuses to leave?
Over our second drink, she told me how the occupants of the Harris Homestead had outweaseled the Forum with a game of bait and switch on the alleged “restoration” plans—going so far as to find out when Laurel and the other members of the Forum took their August vacations in Maine and Martha’s Vineyard. That’s when the building took place.
“Technically, we have a right to put a lien on the house for violations within public view, but we’ve never done such a thing, and frankly, should they choose to meet us in court, they have more money than God—which the Forum most certainly does not.” All of a sudden, she gasped. “My goodness! I completely forgot the salmon, Percy!”
“Indeed you did.”
And thus did I find myself, over salmon on pumpernickel toast, along with microwaved quiche Lorraine from the best gourmet shop in Ledgely, drawn into planning a house tour; into making lists and pledging that I would telephone old friends I rarely saw, couples who had once come to Poppy’s wonderful parties, whose children had played with ours, who had sung “Jerusalem” beside us at local weddings. And who, of course, lived in some of Matlock’s most treasured antique houses.
Were Matlock not a town that cherished antiquity, Poppy and I would never have bought our house, since it would have been condemned long before we saw it. For fifty-some years, it had been in the hands of a family with declining fortunes and the consequent variety of listlessness that blinds one to the conditions of one’s surroundings. It had been on the market for several seasons, and Matlock’s real estate agents had given up on showing it to clients, unable to convince the seller that his price was absurd. But all this we learned much later.
We had just begun to look at houses closer to the city: in Belmont, Arlington, Watertown. These were the towns for newlyweds, we’d heard, yet their suburban monotony dismayed us. We decided to take a weekend off from our house hunt and headed to Matlock to attend what Norval had told me was the secret best book sale in the world: the town’s bohemian elite would donate tattered yet still exquisite volumes of fine art and architecture, which would sell for bargain prices to benefit the public library.
We parked on the green but found that we had arrived an hour early and decided to explore. Following a lane that descended through a tunnel of tall flourishing trees, we were charmed by the English feel of the wanton greenery—wild roses swooning over crumbled stone walls, fusillades of daylilies aquiver with bees and butterflies—and by the glimpses we had of houses built in a time when these woods had surely been open fields.
Just as we were about to turn back toward the green, Poppy pointed and laughed. “Now there’s a house we could afford.”
On first impression, set back in deep, distant shadows, it was a concise, steadfast structure, shamelessly plain in shape, its many-paned windows unshuttered, its roofline forbiddingly steep. I knew enough about architecture to see that its narrow front porch was a later addition and that its twin chimneys meant it would be the kind of house that feels bigger inside than out.
Ordinarily, houses of this era were built within a few feet of passing traffic, for easy access during the winter; this one, however, stood well off the road. “A farmhouse,” I said. Behind it, I saw the bowed summit of the barn. And then, in glittering patches through a stand of birch trees, I spotted the pond.
We exclaimed in unison.
That was also when I saw, to one side of the driveway, a stubby wooden FOR SALE sign entangled in poison ivy, as if it, too, were a relic of the past. An old man—sixty or eighty; we were so young and glib that any degree of old was simply old—sat on the front porch, reading. He must have seen us at the same moment we saw him, for almost instantly he waved. His wave looked like a beckoning. That moment—the sighting of the water, the old man, the sign, together as in a collage—is one I am certain I will carry to my deathbed.
Poppy, before I could stop her, started up the drive. “Hello!” she called out. “Hello there!”
Back in those early days, her ability, even proclivity, to strike up conversations anywhere with strangers—even though it had brought her into my life—still made me nervous. I suppose I couldn’t quite suppress the adolescent anxiety that one of these many strangers might usurp me.
“We’re in search of the book sale,” she said as she approached the porch.
“Ah,” said the man, “the library. Just up the road. Follow it left and you’ll hit the town common. Can’t miss it.”
“I see you love books, too.”
“I do.” The man raised the volume in his lap, a novel by Elizabeth Spencer.
“Oh I am crazy about her,” said Poppy. “Have you read The Voice at the Back Door? Do you know that it was denied a Pulitzer prize?”
“Never heard of her before this one,” he said. “I like to check out what’s new. That way, I don’t read the same book twice and fall into a time warp.”
With her customary ease, Poppy began to tell this elderly stranger about her favorite recent novels. She took a small pad of paper out of her purse and started making a list. I lurked on the lawn, pretending to examine what remained of a once-classic flower garden.
I looked up when I heard Poppy tear off the page and hand it to her newest friend. She was leaning back, gazing up at the face of the house (its paint puckering away from the clapboards in blisters the size of cocktail coasters). “Can I tell you,” she said, “how rare and wonderful it is to see an old house preserved like this?”
The old man’s laugh was harsh. “Poverty is a powerful preservative.”
I wanted to flee. Poppy had gone too far. I was glaring at her by then, but she kept her attention on the old man.
“My father fell in love with this place,” he said to Poppy. “Little did he know what it costs to romance the past.”
Scanning the second story, I could see that a number of the quaintly diminutive lights in the windows had been replaced with squares of cardboard. Moss grew on the shingles. A wooden gutter had cracked from end to end.
“It’s a brave thing, staying faithful to the past,” Poppy said. “I dream of caring for a house like this one day. When you take on a house this old, you’re reminded that you’re only passing through. Humbling, isn’t it?”
The old man squinted at Poppy, who had taken the liberty of stepping onto the porch and sitting in the only other chair. I couldn’t tell if he thought she was full of baloney or if he was simply trying to see her more clearly.
She told him the story of her own childhood in an antique house in Vigil Harbor, a house that had belonged to a mariner, then a sailmaker, then a cordwainer, then a teacher, and, finally, to Poppy’s professorial parents. “But they decamped to the city, to lead a life of high acadee-me-ah,” she said. “And now they’re in France, happy exiles.” She sighed. “They sold the house where I grew up, the one I used to dream I’d raise my children in. It wasn’t quite as old as this, but almost.”
I looked at my watch. The book sale would start in ten minutes; I pictured a line of shrewd bibliophiles waiting there already, our chance at the best bargains gone up in smoke. I tried to catch Poppy’s eye. Still she ignored me.
Over the next hour, we drank hideously sweet powdered iced tea (tepid to boot; no ice in the old man’s frostbound freezer), and we toured through the house: up and down its steep staircases, front and back, beneath its undulating ceilings, through its batten doors sloping this way and that, according to the will of gravity and the settling of earth over two hundred years. Most of the windows—those panes that remained intact—contained the original glazing, which bestowed a rippling, underwater texture on the world beyond, a world of fathomless greenery and avian flutterings. Upstairs, three bedrooms held up the vertiginous roof, their ceilings giddily sloped. I felt like a giant in this house, yet comfortingly so. In the kitchen, when Poppy saw the robust utilitarian hearth, so tall that she could stand inside it (and she did), she gasped.
“Would you ever sell it?” she said, her two arms stretched out to touch the rough walls of the fireplace. “We’re going to have a baby, and we’re looking for a house just like this one.”