On Friday, January 2nd, we went up to Ashford for a winter weekend, or so we thought, with new cross-country skis and long underwear, leaving the children at home to write term papers and stay out late with their friends. By the time we turned off the highway, the sun had set. It was bitterly cold. When we arrived at the house, my husband, with a suitcase in one hand and the key in the other, went at once to open the door, saying he would turn up the heat and come back for whatever I couldn’t manage. I followed with my arms full, but when I entered the shed I found him hunched over the padlock at the side door of the house, with his gloves thrown down on the floor, in the fading light. “Christ,” he said, not looking up, “the power is off.”
“The bulb,” I said, “couldn’t it just be the bulb?” Setting down my bags, I felt overhead for the string to the shed light.
“I tried it,” said Richard. “I think we’re in trouble.”
I watched him struggling with bare hands over the stiff lock. I knew he was fearing for the pipes, new pipes, all of them, which we had installed, along with the new heating system, the new wiring, the new kitchen equipment, when we redid the house as soon as we bought it two years ago. The warmth I had brought with me from the car was escaping and I stamped my feet on the uneven shed floor.
“Don’t do that,” said Richard. “You’re making everything shake.”
At last he pushed open the door. In the dark winter light the house was cold and quiet. The furnace, the pump, and the refrigerator all were silent. We walked from room to room without speaking to find the damage. There was no sound but our own footsteps. At first there was nothing to see. The house was neat and simple and didn’t look as though anything had happened to it at all. While Richard took a flashlight down to the cellar, I opened the bathroom door. Forgetting the temperature, I expected to see water leaking from the walls and spreading on the floor. There was nothing on the floor, but upon looking closely I noticed a fine crack in the toilet tank, which held, as I saw when I lifted the lid, a neat rectangle of ice. Carefully I put back the lid and wondered what Richard was finding below. I shuddered with cold and clapped my hands in their mittens.
In the kitchen, on the table near the window, a brown bowl we had been given as a housewarming present was filled with ice. I must have thrown the chrysanthemums away when we were cleaning up the last time we were here but left the water, which had frozen, and in freezing had cracked the bowl, letting a little water seep through the crack and spread on the table where, in its turn, it froze.
Richard called me to come down to the cellar.
“It’s bad,” he said, aiming the flashlight so I could see the pump. The pump head was split. He showed me the line of the break along the side and straight across the top. We were both shaking with cold. As we leaned over the pump, the beam of light lit our smoking breaths. Richard pointed the flashlight at the holding tank and I saw it was frozen solid. It was all bad, very bad. He was certain pipes were broken all over the house.
Upstairs I showed him a bottle of tonic I had found in the kitchen cupboard, with its sides splintered and a plug of frozen tonic coming out of its neck.
“Put it down,” he said. “You’ll cut yourself. That’s all we need.” He waved it away and sat down at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. “I knew I should have come up to drain the pipes,” he said. Last winter, the men who repaired the house advised us to keep the furnace on; it would be better for the new wood, they said, and for the plaster as well. They would keep an eye on the house for us, they said. This year autumn weather had lasted until just before Christmas. We had trusted the furnace and the thermostat to keep going until we got here.
Suddenly Richard picked up the broken bowl in both hands, raised it above his head, and hurled it at the wall. Pieces of pottery skidded on the floor. The chunk of ice rolled as far as the fireplace and stopped. “Sorry,” he said, as he got up to get the broom. “I just had to.” Then we both laughed a little and I patted him on the arm. I wished we could just drive away and leave it all behind.
Richard called the power company, the neighbors, the electrician, and the plumber. The plumber’s wife said he was out working on pipes. We should keep on trying to call him, she said. The neighbors were sympathetic, they knew what trouble we were in. They had not lost power but they’d seen our night light off and worried about that. The power company’s phone was busy.
It was too cold to stay in the house any longer. Holding the flashlight in one hand, I dialed Howard Johnson’s and reserved a room for the night. “But let’s not eat there,” I said. Richard agreed we didn’t have to eat there. We would eat at Herm’s, instead. As we drove down the winding road with moonlit fields and black barns on either side, I felt a guilty relief. We could do nothing about what had happened now. It was something for the electrician, for the power company, for Mr. Daisy, the plumber.
Herm’s was warm and brightly lit. The tablecloths were red and the napkins were green. We ordered whiskey sours and I stood up at once to go to the salad bar. I put cherry tomatoes on my plate, corn relish, three-bean salad, pickled beets, pimentos, and shredded carrot salad. I drank my whisky sour, and when we had finished our drinks we ordered two more. For dinner we had scrod with Newburg sauce and for dessert I had pumpkin pie. While we ate we talked about the children, about Richard’s department and some promotions due to be considered soon. We said nothing about the pipes, but as we left the restaurant and the bitter air struck my cheeks, I said, “That all was delicious.”
The wind was blowing little swirls of snow around the parking lot. The moon had set, and the sky was black, clear, and full of stars. Richard started the car.
“Everything we ate was orange,” he said. It had all come back to him. He was struck with the enormity of it: not the cost, which would of course be great, not the trouble, the inconvenience, the ruin of our weekend, but something more deeply distressing, something that evoked shame in him, and misery. I saw he felt that the cold, knowing he was not a worthy person, had wrapped itself around his house and had taken its rightful toll in cracked, twisted, and burst materials. He could hardly talk for the weight of it.
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The house had looked innocent as we drove into the yard, and unharmed. It gave no sign that anything had happened. A light snow lay on the ground, old snow, thinly glazed with ice. Black, hollow stalks of sweet cicely and the brittle stems of the rosebushes, pushed back and forth by the wind, scratched against the siding. The house, with its shingle roof, front door, four windows, everything plain and symmetrical, looked quite as usual. But the cold had pressed against it. At first, the cold had merely run around the outside, testing for an opening here, a loose pane there, seeking entrance through the ways we go in and out, like a child, or a dog trying to slip in between his master’s legs. Later, it sought cracks, like a mouse, or a bug. Finally, as the temperature fell to below freezing, and continued to fall, the cold, on which particular day we did not know, Christmas Day, perhaps, or the day after, had hugged the house to it. For by then, the cold had sunk through the air into the earth, reaching under the house with icy fingers which met in the hard subsoil beneath, and moved up to grip the house from below. When had the power gone off? When had the water in the bowl begun to freeze? The kitchen clock was stopped at eleven twenty-five. At eleven twenty-five one night, the power had gone off and with it the oil burner, and gradually the house had lost its heat and the pipes had frozen.
That this had happened in our absence, invisibly, made me think about the mystery of the great powers which exact events without our participation: the rising sun, the moon dragging behind her the tides, winter creeping down from the north, the seas spilling over the land, beaches emerging, waves of weather streaming overhead. I thought of the first days of the child in the womb and the tumor beginning to creep beyond its confines. While we were celebrating Christmas Eve or eating Christmas dinner, our house, white in the dark night, catching whatever light there was, starlight or cloudy moonlight, began to freeze and, helpless, suffered injuries whose extent we could not yet determine. Whatever was to break was broken and lay cracked and split. The damage was hidden, but when the heat came on again and the ice melted, water would seep from the pipes into the plaster walls. I entertained the hope that despite the laws of physics and country lore perhaps in our case some dispensation would have been made and either these pressures would not have been exerted or some other avenue would have been made to spare our plumbing. I did not express this thought to my husband, knowing it for a wanton thought, unworthy even as a hope, betraying me for a child.
To enter our wing of the motel, we had to open a glass door which bore a sign reading: “Your room key opens this door.” Inside, we inhaled the hot, circulated air of the hall. Richard opened the door of our room, and I felt for the light switch, which responded to my finger, but in an unsatisfying way. The lights went on, but the switch made no click; it merely retreated slightly into its holder. Quickly, I observed the two double beds, the beige bedspreads, the carpet, mirrors, lamps, the soundproofing panel in the ceiling, the closed door to the bathroom, the television.
“What a nice room,” I said.
Richard had gone straight to the telephone and was dialing the plumber.
In the house there had been a cold, dry smell, sad, vulnerable, and enduring. It was the smell of life withdrawn, life retreating into itself, not absent, but dormant and cold, the smell of cold wood. The motel room smelled invulnerable. Whatever substances had been used in the construction of its surfaces gave off a smell which was hard to breathe. Had it not been so cold out, I would have pushed open the plaid curtains with the plastic lining and opened a window. Even though we had just eaten, I picked up the menu for the restaurant. I turned on the television. I wanted to enjoy the motel, use all the plastic glasses, shine my shoes with the cloth that was just for shining shoes, bathe in the bathtub whose subsequent cleanliness was no concern of mine, dry myself under the orange rays of the ultraviolet fixture in the ceiling. Tomorrow, I thought, I will pocket the unopened little bars of soap.
“The power company says they’ll try to get someone there on Monday,” Richard said. “The girl said they have more to do than they can handle.” He looked better now that he was working on the problem, getting people on the phone, starting on the solution. I wished we could just drive away in the morning and let the pipes freeze, the cellar flood, the branches fall where they would. How could we hold winter at bay?
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Once, twenty-five years ago, on the beach at Race Point, near Province-town, we had set up a pup tent and settled in for the night. We had spread out a plastic bag whose original purpose was to shield the wearer from a gas attack, or so the man in the army-navy store had said, but for us, advised by the helpful salesman, it was a way of protecting our sleeping bag from the damp chill of the sand at night. The tent, being absolutely primitive, had no floor. It was easy to set up, but nonetheless it took us a long time. Holding a tent pole in both hands, I twisted it slowly into the sand, bearing down with all my weight. Richard got his done first and came around to help me. Then we bent down to insert at a neat angle into the sand the metal prongs, unpleasantly scabbed with rust, around which we wrapped the stiff waxy loops of the tent canvas. Although the sun had set, it was still light; evening, but not yet night. The sky was clear, a green sky over a pale ocean. The tent faced the ocean and the east, where darkness would rise; behind us, over the dune, the pinks and yellows of the fading sunset flooded the sky. We had left our car, a Model A we had bought from a man in Brooklyn, at the parking lot and had struggled down to the beach with our equipment for the night. I imagine we had eaten supper. I don’t remember carrying food, I don’t remember eating, although we had probably brought along chocolate bars, or peaches, just for the fun of eating something in the tent. When everything was ready and our sleeping bag smoothed over the plastic bag, the door flaps fastened and a square of mosquito netting swagged over the door, we knelt on the sand and crawled in to consecrate our little house.
Night fell. The sand cooled. I lay on my stomach with my chin resting on the back of my hand. With the other hand I was gently lifting sand that was still warm from the heat of the day and letting it trickle through my fingers. Richard lay next to me and we looked out the door of the tent toward the ocean. For a long time we lay with our heads near the opening, talking, with the cool damp night air on our checks, hearing the rush and fall of the waves, feeling that our lives lay coiled within us, invisible, but unique and worthy of our expectations. What were we talking about for so long? We used to talk in those days about the future and the things we wanted to do, where we would travel, how we wanted to live. We also talked about the past, about our parents and our childhoods. We took a great interest in each other’s childhoods, which were, in truth, not that long ago ended. We told one another the litany of familial injustices and those wrongs done to us by teachers and other grown-ups. We could talk for hours, for the whole night, and sometimes did, analyzing our short pasts or projecting our long future. We both had psychoanalyses and talked about them to one another, narrating our dreams when we woke up and at night reporting what our analysts had said. We had great expectations. At some time in the future, we would be “cured.” Our proper lives would then commence. At that time I would write and have children and we would have exquisite, astonishing sex.
As we murmured and drowsed in our tent, far out at sea we could see heat lightning pulsing on the horizon. It was too far away to hear any thunder. The cold air on our cheeks made the heat of the tent delicious. We slept. When I awoke, it was still dark. The lightning was a lot closer, and I could hear long, slow rumbles of thunder. A bolt of lightning lit the ocean and I saw the waves breaking on the beach. All at once a wind replaced the breeze and the tent flapped heavily like a sail. My thought that we would soon enjoy the sound of rain overhead was swept away as I realized the storm was upon us. Fat drops spattered the canvas which shook in the noisy wind. Bolts of lightning followed one upon the other and thunder banged without a pause. As each bolt struck the sand, the beach flared into sight and the air was filled with the smell of hot metal. We crawled out of the tent which was slapping and twisting in the wind.
“Get away from it,” Richard shouted. “It will draw the lightning. Run!”
I ran, but as I ran my feet sank into the sand. My legs dragged, and I could not pull my feet out of the soft sand. The rain hit my face in drops so large they hurt. Almost at once my long hair was soaked and my blue jeans and shirt were wet and heavy. I fell, got up, and stumbled again, running unevenly, squinting to see through the rain. Suddenly, I was struck with fear lest the flashlight I was holding attract lightning. Without stopping, I threw it as far away as I could. Panicky, I saw myself as a tiny creature running from the lightning as it tried to reach around me from above and strike me through the ring on my finger or the metal bits at the corners of my pants pockets. Nor did I know where Richard was in all that noise and darkness until a bolt which turned the whole beach pink and left a smell of burned matches showed him stopped ahead, looking back for me and urging me on.
“Come on!” he was shouting. “Come on! Run!”
And on I ran.
The next flash of lightning showed the break in the dunes where a white path led to the place we had left the car. As I staggered over the crest, the sharp beach grass stung my wet face. Crouching in the trough between the dunes, we ran on, knowing we were almost safe.
In the car, we gasped for breath, we kissed one another’s wet faces, we put our wet arms around one another. We were panting and laughing. Our hearts were still thumping in our chests. Water ran from our hair and clothing down the channels of the upholstery and made puddles on the floor. Secure from the lightning by virtue of the thin hard rubber tires, which, as Richard explained to me, should the car be struck, would let the lightning go straight down to the ground, we laughed out loud. We were all right. It was an adventure, that was all. When we had caught our breath, we reviewed the whole story, how we had been lying with that light flickering far away, and suddenly we were in the middle of the storm, in danger, and the lightning was everywhere, we could hardly run. Bang, bang, it was all around us. There wasn’t even a second between the thunder and the lightning, it was that close. The safety of the car was as delightful as the warmth and coziness of the tent had been earlier, but soon enough our excitement waned. Richard started the car and drove slowly through the rain, which flooded the windshield so that the wipers were scarcely able to sweep a fan-shaped clearing before the water ran around them and spilled over again.
We drove into Provincetown and banged on our friend Mary Stebbins’s door to tell her about the lightning and the wind. She let us in, but she was half asleep. She had some dry crullers and we ate them and drank some milk to wash them down. I don’t remember where we lay down to sleep, but it may have been on her floor.
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My friends and I firmly believed in love, and we believed in work. We believed that love and work were shields against failure. By failure, we meant the gradual replacement of vitality with the dismal acquisition of things, money, position, or reputation. It seemed that the adults we knew, our parents and our teachers, had all failed in life. Some had simply pursued false goals from the first; others had been deflected from their youthful ideals by one contingency or another. We detected the signs of this failure in the way they dressed and where they lived, in the cars they drove and the garages they parked them in, in the rugs they put on their floors and the pictures on their walls. We saw it as well in the lectures they gave and in the books they wrote. Richard’s friend Stavros showed him a monograph he had found in the stacks written by Walter Stearns, one of their professors, forty years before. It had been his doctoral dissertation. “Do you see,” Stavros said, raising his eyebrows and shaking his head, “do you see how clean it is? And look what happened to him.” Such a thing would never happen to us. How not? One way was by our psychoanalyses.
It was not Richard and I alone who went to psychoanalysts. Most of our friends had psychoanalyses, as well. Barbara went to Dr. Thaler on 96th Street and Marilyn went to Dr. Riskin and later to Dr. Bauer, whom she referred to as Inge Riskin and Grete Bauer. Her father was a psychoanalyst and thought she should see a woman. Richard went to Dr. Freeman on Park Avenue and I went to Dr. Henschel on 92nd Street. Richard’s sister, Anne, while she was living in New York, waiting for her husband to come back from Korea, went to Dr. Moskowitz, and Sandra, his younger sister, went to Dr. Reuben. Richard’s friend Frank went to the clinic at Bellevue, and Michael went to the Psychiatric Institute at Columbia, which we called “PI.” I went to Dr. Henschel three times a week and paid her fifteen dollars a session at first, then, later, twenty dollars. Richard went to Dr. Freeman three times a week also, but he had to pay only ten dollars a week at first until it was raised to twelve-fifty. Aaron and his girlfriend, Lisa, had been interviewed at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in hopes of being accepted at its clinic where the fee was a dollar a session, but they both were rejected. We reported to one another how our analysts conducted our sessions: who let you smoke, what happened if you didn’t come, did you have to pay even if you cancelled, who lay on the couch and who did not. Richard told the story of how Dr. Freeman once fell asleep and I used to tell about how I didn’t say anything for a whole session and Dr. Henschel said nothing either, just went right on knitting. “Knitting?” said my listeners. “She knits? Oh, I couldn’t stand that.” Dr. Tartak told Susan Gould she should not see a certain boy she was going out with, and a friend of Richard’s friend Marvin had been instructed to “refrain from sexual intercourse.” Whether that proscription was intended to apply to a short period or to the course of treatment we did not know. Courses of treatment were long. I went to Dr. Henschel from the time I was nineteen until Richard got his Ph.D. and we went to Dijon on a Fulbright for a year. Richard went to Dr. Freeman for nearly as long.
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Another way by which we planned never to fail was going to be our “work.” We used the word “work” in a special way. “No, we are working,” we might say to a friend who telephoned to ask if we wanted to go to the movies. Work to us meant studying philosophy or writing stories. But in fact I hardly wrote anything. From time to time I took out a notebook and made an entry. I described Schrafft’s where Richard worked behind the counter at night. “The woman stirred her coffee without looking down. Her hair was greasy and her fingernails afflicted with dark red polish. Behind the candy counter across the aisle a young girl scooped glowing balls of candy from the bin with a brass scoop into paper bags. She . . . etc., etc.” At other times I tried in this same notebook to begin a short story: “Everywhere he went in the city he heard the clicking of typewriters. He woke sometimes at night from dreams of terrible violence. Lying trembling in bed, he . . . etc.” But it all came to nothing. I told myself that if I wrote faithfully in my notebook, not fiction, simply descriptions, in some mysterious way my inability to write something sustained and truthful would be short-circuited. In the pages about the young man who heard typewriters clicking everywhere, I wrote: “He tells himself that if he lies still long enough, his lassitude will be accomplished,” but what I meant was if he stopped struggling he would be able to write just like all the unseen writers all over the city who were responsible for the clicking that was driving him mad with chagrin.
Nevertheless, despite the fact I had nothing to write about but not writing, I put great stock, in conversation at least, in the notion of work, and my friends and I talked a good deal about our “work.” “Are you working?” we asked one another. “I am trying to get to work,” we said. “I am having trouble working,” we said. Talking like this seemed a part of working, it was the next best thing.
We thought work should have no goal other than the doing of the thing itself. You should go to your work daily, to your desk, or your table, and put in your hours. To think about a product, a finished piece of work, was a sign of banality. Anything that developed from your hours of work, a story, an article, was incidental. To be concerned with results was the mark of an ordinary person, someone with his eyes on worldly things. We adopted Stavros’s and Elena’s expression, “shoemakers and priests.” We were priests, all four of us; Elena and I, writers, Richard and Stavros, philosophers. Shoemakers were supposed artists, supposed philosophers, who performed their sacred task as though it was an ordinary activity. Like a shoemaker who clasps a pump against his apron as he pries shank from heel, these do their work without raising their eyes to the horizon. We knew many such; we loved to classify the other graduate students, other writers, painters, and teachers, into priests and shoemakers.
There were other things that made me feel priestlike: staying up very late, preferably all night, talking; smoking a lot, and using a wooden bowl as big as a soupbowl for an ashtray, like Elena; writing telephone numbers on the wall over the phone like Stavros; like Elena, slicing scallions on the bias. We wanted to eliminate the trivial, the mild, from our lives. Elena told me Americans were trivial, were always cheerful, always smiling. I tried not to smile. I wanted to Europeanize myself.
Stavros and Elena both had serious raincoats. Elena wore hers all the time. Except for her raincoat, her clothes were all black. Once, she and I, walking somewhere south of Houston Street, turned a corner and walked straight into a little knot of teen-aged boys, who called out, “Hey, lady, how’s the spy business?” I knew they were making fun of her raincoat. She had dark brown hair knotted low at the back of her neck and a pale, oval face. Her hands were stubby and her fingers stained with tobacco. She taught me to say, in Greek, “The child plays on the seashore.” She drank scotch, neat. She loved cheese danish. She sang Turkish songs.
Elena wrote a story which opened: “The priest wore a skirt, but Iphigenia could see, if she lay on her stomach, that under the skirt he wore trousers.” She read the story out loud to us, pronouncing “skirt” “skeert,” and “stomach” “stow-mach.” I was moved to envy. She wrote another story, called “The Masked Ball,” somewhat in the style of Fielding, with long sentences not quite perfect in syntax, heavy with irony and sagging with Homeric similes. In the story, after having expended much thought and anxiety over his costume, the hero, upon arriving at the loft where the party was in progress, slips and falls backward down the stairs, injuring himself sufficiently badly as to make it impossible for him to attend the party. It made me ashamed of my own efforts. I tried to develop an armored style and to choose a subject which was objectively interesting. Like all writers, I wanted to write something serious and funny, something complex and at the same time simple, something that would win the admiration of my friends and set my anxiety about myself to rest. But it was too difficult. I went back to my notebook, describing the weather, referring obliquely to events in my psychoanalysis, and remarking to myself that writing was getting easier all the time.
As we labored to show that we were priestlike in our work, so also about sex we wanted to have a priestly attitude. Together with Elena and Stavros we talked about having what we called an orgy. Our plans, however, had more of a doctrinal than an erotic cast. We wished, I believe, to mount some sexual performance that would confer upon us all the imprimatur of the chosen. We spoke about casting off from the shores of ordinary morality and setting out without the restraints we had been brought up within, restraints necessary, no doubt, for those who did not seek to widen their understanding, but confining for the artist or the explorer. We discussed at length setting, nuance, accoutrements. At last we decided we were ready to stage the thing itself. I remember, but not too well, my husband and myself attempting to have sexual intercourse on the floor of our apartment on East 17th Street, in the half-dark, with Elena and Stavros similarly occupied a short distance away. We believed ourselves to be shattering an awesome taboo and that in so doing a great liberty would be available to us. Perhaps all my difficulties in writing stories would be swept away. The following morning, in the subway on my way to Harper & Brothers, where I was a secretary in the children’s book department, I looked around at the car full of men and women going to work, and I felt set apart.
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When we were taken to see our summer house for the first time, the house that was going to be ours, that is, it was a still, humid August afternoon. It was a good house, the agent told us, an 18th-century house, but it needed a little work. It had just come on the market, we were the first to see it. The agent was a big man, wearing a short-sleeved shirt. His tan gabardine jacket was folded over the front seat between him and Richard. As he drove smoothly through the exhausted countryside, he explained that the children of the owners had decided the house must be sold, but since they knew their father would be bound to object, a small deception would have to be practiced. We were to be looking at the house as prospective renters, he told us, and merely as possible prospective renters at that, should the old man decide to spend the winter in Florida for his health. That was the story to get us in to see the house. The children would find a way to deal with his objections if and when we showed an interest. We were to have no lines to say in this drama, we had only to stand by while the agent spun off his part.
The paved road became a dirt road, climbed a short way through hemlock woods, emerged and ran between untended fields yellow with golden-rod. We passed a maple tree with one red branch. Beside the road the sumac was already streaked with lavender. A pickup truck approached us, raising a cloud of dust. The agent pulled to the side of the road and we quickly closed the car windows. We opened them at once; the heat in the closed car was stifling.
“Alrighty,” said the agent, turning into a short drive, and stopped. We got out, blinking in the sun. The agent waited, running his handkerchief over his forehead, while we looked at the outside of the house, the sagging roof, the peeling paint, the overgrown garden. A single hollyhock, tall as a grown person, unstaked, with flowers the color of plums and leaves eaten to lace by Japanese beetles, swayed in the hot breeze.
“Oh, she had quite a garden,” said the agent. “Quite a garden. She’s English. You could bring it back. It’s not too far gone.”
He stood on the front step and knocked on the door. Turning to us standing below on the grass, he said, “She can’t hear. Won’t wear a hearing aid, but can’t hear.” He banged the door with his fist, then pushed it open. “Hello-o-o? Mrs. Bailey? Hello-o-o.” He put his head in the door. “They have the TV on, besides. Come on.”
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Inside, the house was dark. Green shades in all the windows were drawn against the sun except in the lower half of one where a square fan stirred a warm flow of air. A smell, sharp and sweet both, struck me and I had to swallow once and then again. It was medicine I smelled, medicine and talcum powder, and perhaps urine, as well. The old man was sitting in his pajamas, in a woolen plaid bathrobe, pink-skinned, with fine silvery hair, asleep. There was a bed in the room, brought from somewhere else, I thought, because it took up more than half of the space. The other furniture was crowded together at the far end of the room. Mrs. Bailey, who had been looking at television, smoking, turned her head as we entered and looked at us with no expression at all for a minute. Then she composed her features, pursed her lips, and smiled. Putting her hands on the arms of the chair she tried to stand up quickly but dropped her cigarette and reached down for it.
The agent stepped forward while we stood decorously in the doorway.
“Mrs. Bailey,” he said, “good to see you. Not too hot for you?”
“Oh, Tom,” she said, “yes, indeed. But the fan makes a glorious breeze, don’t you think?” She was deeply lined, thin, heavily rouged, with black circles under her eyes. Seeing us, she cocked her head to one side and looked up at him with an artificial, questioning expression.
“These are the people who are interested in taking a look at the house.” He introduced us and I shook her cold hand. Cigarette ashes fell down the front of her dress. She looked down and impatiently brushed them away. “Well, come on,” she said, “have a look.” She was attempting with trembling hands to light another cigarette. Tom, the agent, bent over her with his hand cupped around his lighter while she inhaled greedily.
I glanced at the old man who was moving in his armchair, waking up. He turned his head from side to side, smacking his lips, muttering.
“How are you, Mr. Bailey?” shouted the agent. “We came to see you.”
“I’m eighty-four years old,” he said to us. “Imagine that. I never thought. Hello, Tommy,” he said, recognizing the agent. “Come to see the house?” He didn’t look suspicious in the least, I thought. On the contrary, he smiled sweetly, then sighed and held his hands out in front of him, fingers extended, looked at them, and put them down in his lap. He looked straight at me. His eyes were light blue. “Go on,” he said to the agent. “Go on, show them around.”
But as we stepped into the hall on our way to the kitchen, he called us back. “It’s called ‘Green Fields.’ Did you know that, Tommy? That’s what I named it way back when. All right, go on.”
“That’s nice,” said the agent. “ ‘Green Fields.’ No, I didn’t know that. Very nice.”
In the kitchen Mrs. Bailey lifted a lid from the coal stove and threw in her cigarette.
“Let me show you,” she said, and unfolded a sheet of glossy paper which she spread out on the table. “It’s the plans for the condo.” She explained that she and her daughter, not Mr. Bailey’s daughter, but the one that was hers and not his, were going to live together in New Jersey. “That’s my daughter I had when I was married in England,” she said. “Do you see that?” she asked pointing to a framed photograph of a stone house surrounded with roses. “That’s my garden. I had everything growing there. Absolutely everything. People came from everywhere to see it.” She shook her head. “He really has to go,” she said. “I cannot manage another winter here with him. There were days in a row when no one could get up or down the road.” She turned to me and said, “It was under ten for two weeks. Under ten below, I mean to say. I can’t manage it again. It’s impossible for someone used to the climate in Devon.” She smiled at us and waved her hands in a way I understood was intended to evoke for us the gentle air of the south of England. The agent, in an effort to soften her indictment of the harshness of the winters, began to say something about cross-country skiing in a casual voice. Mrs. Bailey coughed, a long cough. She stood there, coughing, with one hand against the wall. At length, she caught her breath and tottered around with us from room to room, leaving little ridges and droppings of ash in her wake. She knew all about the behind-the-scenes plan, it seemed; clearly, she had been present at the councils.
In the bedroom, Richard and I exchanged a look which meant that despite the condition of the house we wanted it. The price was low, we should make an offer, we should buy it. We would sweep out the traces of the Baileys and everyone who had fumbled there before us. We would tear down the false moldings and plywood partitions, rip up the worn floorboards, burn the carpets with their scorches and stains. Our house would be fresh and cool in the summer. In winter, firelight would shine on the waxed floor.
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Then, by early October, the Baileys were gone. He was taken to a nursing home in Connecticut, near the daughter that was his, and she, ill, to the hospital in Springfield. The house was ours, empty, smelling of autumn mold and human effluvia. We opened all the doors and windows and walked from room to room considering what best to do. Then we turned our attention to setting in motion the plans we had decided upon in the matter of repairs and restoration, of choosing workmen, building a center chimney, installing twelve-over-twelve windows, putting down new pine floors, replacing the asphalt roof with cedar shingles, and buying the new kitchen appliances, the new tiles and faucets for the bathroom, and the new gleaming pink copper pipes to replace the plumbing in the whole house.
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