They passed a row of mailboxes. A farm stand, not yet open for the season. A sign that said “Deaf Child.”
Not a whole lot else.
The house sat on a rise at the end of a long dirt road—the kind in which a strip of grass marks the space straddled by a car’s tires. It looked out over a hillside: a few acres of open land, and beyond those, another thirty of woods, Ed told her. No streetlights, of course—they’d passed the last of those a couple of miles back. This was a place where a person could look out at the night sky with no light competing with the constellations but that of the moon, no sound but the cry of owls and, in the fall (though she would only learn this later), the gunshots of hunters. The nearest neighbors lived a good half mile away.
It was lilac season when she first laid eyes on the property, and the trees were leafing out. One in particular dominated the view: an ash that had somehow survived the famous hurricane that people in these parts still spoke of, Ed told her. The tree sat just far enough from the house so as not to block the sun, but its branches seemed to fill the sky and span the horizon.
“How’s that for a tree?” Ed said, as he pulled the car up alongside the door to the porch. “I’m guessing this one got started right around the time my great-great-great-grandfather hung out the first sign for his dry goods store. That would be more than two hundred years back. Maybe longer. I’m going to wager you’re looking at the oldest tree in town.”
A person could hang a hammock here. If she ever had the time to put her feet up, that is. With all the work a property like this required, not to mention coming up with the tax money, there might not be much time for snoozing.
Never mind that. Eleanor wasn’t looking for something easy.
She stood there out front for a while, taking it in, before stepping onto the granite slab by the front door. She made no comment, asked no questions. She could feel the beating of her heart.
5.
Where the Happy People Lived
The house was small, but she liked that. Her childhood home had been large and lonely. When she had children, she’d keep them close.
She stepped onto the porch first—a screen porch, with a trestle table. From all the stuff stored there, it looked to Eleanor as if whoever used to live here knew how to have good times together. Hung up along the back wall with the kind of care that suggested the sun shone regularly here were a croquet set and an assortment of badminton racquets, shuttlecocks, Ping-Pong paddles, baseball bats, fishing poles, horseshoes, skates and sleds in a variety of sizes. There was a hammock and a dartboard, an old pedal car.
There was a miniature cannon. Every Fourth of July, Ed explained, the family had fired off three shots. You could hear it all the way over to the Pouliots’ place.
Everywhere Eleanor looked lay evidence of a life full of good things. Gardening tools. A toboggan. There were board games and a Victrola with a stack of old 78s. (Benny Goodman. The Andrews Sisters. Bing Crosby.) The wall by the door featured pencil marks indicating the heights of various children. (Mickey, 4th of July weekend 1952 four foot six. Susan, July 1957. Bobby, five foot eight! Peter, five foot eleven. Look what happens when a boy eats his vegetables!)
It looked like a house where people who loved each other had lived.
In the kitchen, a fireplace occupied most of one wall; in another century the woman of the house might have set a loaf of bread in the baking oven. The floors were wood, counters Formica. At one end of the room was an old Coldspot refrigerator. “You’d want to replace this,” Ed told Eleanor, but she knew she wouldn’t.
Off to one side of the kitchen lay a small pantry whose shelves had been covered with red-and-green flowered contact paper, most likely laid down in the fifties. Running her hand along one of these shelves, Eleanor pictured mason jars filled with vegetables canned in the pressure cooker, sitting on a top shelf alongside cake toppers and packages of birthday candles and little yellow plastic corncob holders, with plates to match shaped like corn husks.
Out the pantry window she could see blackberry bushes. If this house were hers, she’d make jam and write the dates on the labels, line them up along the shelves. She’d grow tomatoes for a winter’s worth of sauce.
The other end of the kitchen opened to a tiny space—barely large enough for a single bed—that Ed referred to as the borning room. In the old days, this was where the woman of the house gave birth to her babies, Ed told her. Another bedroom, larger than this one, faced out to the front of the house, with another, smaller fireplace and windows opening south and east. Morning sun.
There was a small front hall, and a living room with a third fireplace and old nails on the mantel suggesting that some December long ago, children had hung stockings here. Wide pine beams spanned the ceiling of the room, as they did in the kitchen.
There was a surprising brightness to the space, thanks to the windows, looking out to a field no longer tilled, stone walls, a few old apple trees, and beyond them, woods. And that enormous tree, of course. The ash.
“The Murchisons never did much in the way of upgrading,” Ed told her. He said this as if it might be a problem, but Eleanor loved that about the house. The walls still bore decades-old wallpaper (roses in the bedroom, farmers and milkmaids chasing cows across the living room, a row of their buckets spilling milk, a row of dancing children below them). The floorboards were wide and rutted, and not even close to level, though not enough to suggest major issues with the foundation, Ed assured her, as if she might be worried about that, which she wasn’t.
Upstairs (steep risers, bowed in the middle from 150 years of use) there was a single room, divided in the middle by the massive chimney from the fireplaces below, with a window seat where a person might place herself and take in the scent of lilacs. Children should sleep here.
At this point in the tour Ed suggested that Eleanor might like to see the basement, but she was more interested in studying the dishes in the pantry (a complete set of Fiesta ware, and a Blue Willow teapot, and cast-iron frying pans and muffin pans and an old popcorn popper). In the living room cupboard were at least two dozen boxes of jigsaw puzzles, which, when completed (give or take a piece or two), might reveal the image of a covered bridge in fall, or a New England churchyard surrounded by snow, along with an ancient Monopoly game with the original pieces in lead.
He took her out into the field, to the spot where the green of young grass met the trees, so she could look up the hill toward the house. Already she thought of it as her house. When she looked down, she saw moss and a patch of lady’s slippers.
There was more: the tool shed, an old plow, a wooden wheelbarrow. “You probably wondered about the well and the septic system,” Ed said to her.
She hadn’t.
He was saying something then about what it would cost to insulate the place, and to install a new furnace (essential) and double-pane windows. The roof was old, but they built them right in those days. She’d need to install a new water heater.
She barely heard him. He had already explained that the owners were selling the place with everything in it: dishes, furniture, sheets and towels. An old hand-crank ice cream maker. The Bing Crosby 78s.
They were standing under the giant ash tree, with the front door behind them. The door was blue, but needed paint.
“Hear that?” he said. It was the sound of water. “There’s a stone arch bridge just down the road, over Hopewell Falls. This time of year, with all the rain we’ve had and the runoff from the snow, the water’s running high. If you favor trout fishing, the swimming hole below the falls is the spot for you. Nice place to cool off on a hot day.”
She had no idea how to catch a trout, and less what she’d do with one if she succeeded. But the part about the waterfall got to her.
“I’ll be buying this house,” she told him.
6.
Who Should We Call?
Eleanor was sixteen, the winter of the crash. Her parents, Martin and Vivian, had been driving home to Boston from a ski t
rip in Vermont. Nighttime black ice on a two-lane highway, tires locked, a skid into the path of an oncoming Pepsi delivery truck. Impact sufficiently violent that one of her mother’s boots had turned up fifty feet from the side of the highway. Her father would have been smoking, which explained why the windows were open, though how it was that the boot made it out of the car was one of about a hundred questions Eleanor preferred not to consider, same as she chose not to think about how—if things had been different between them—she would have been there in the back seat when they hit the truck. Some teenagers would have been with their parents on that ski trip, but Martin and Vivian were happiest when it was just the two of them.
She was halfway through her junior year at her Connecticut private school when she got the news. Sometime a little after ten that night—a Sunday—came the knock on her dorm room door.
Later she would remember the sound of showers running in the bathroom they all shared, down the hall. Simon and Garfunkel on somebody’s record player. I am a rock, I am an island. The smell of marijuana from the joint her roommate, Patty, had lit earlier, and Patty opening the window next to her bed at the sound of the knocking, the voice on the other side of the door announcing the presence of a faculty member.
“Eleanor? It’s Mr. Guttenberg. We need to talk.”
“Oh, shit,” Patty said, just before Eleanor opened the door. For a moment they had actually believed this would be the big catastrophe of the night: Patty getting put on probation or kicked out of school, even. But as it turned out, a drug violation had been the last thing on Mr. Guttenberg’s mind.
At the time Eleanor had been painting her toenails. For weeks the evidence remained. One foot with all blue nail polish. The other, three toes only.
After he told her the news—“Head-on collision,” “died instantly,” “at least they didn’t suffer”—Mr. Guttenberg patted Eleanor on the shoulder, almost as if he were petting a dog. (Somewhere in the background, Patty was wailing. Oh my God, oh my God. Eleanor made no sound.)
“Who should we call for you?” he asked her. The emergency numbers on the forms she’d filled out back in September listed her parents’ number. No point calling that one now.
“My mother had a second cousin in Illinois,” she said. Or maybe Wisconsin.
She actually slept that first night—an odd, dead kind of sleep, more like a blackout. The next morning there had been a moment when she woke up and, for a few seconds, forgot what had happened. She heard the sound of the girls along the hall and the clanging of radiator pipes. Then it came to her.
“Who can we call for you?” the headmaster’s wife asked her when she stopped by that morning with a plate of blueberry muffins. There was nobody. Her family had consisted of three people. Two of whom were now dead.
Eleanor had never asked her mother the reason why she was an only child. She had the feeling that after they had her it must have occurred to them that they really hadn’t wanted to have children after all, and the best they could do was not have any more.
She was probably no more than three years old when she made up her imaginary brother, Anthony. He was older, and very handsome. He played dress-up and later Candy Land with her—a game her mother said was boring—and when she walked to school he held her hand. Somewhere along the line he turned into a teenager who carried her on his shoulders and drove her places. By this point, she no longer talked to him in her head the way she had when she was little, but even in her Holcomb Academy days, she sometimes let herself picture what it would be like if Anthony were there. Calling her up, or driving to see her on Family Weekend and taking her bowling. She knew what kind of car he’d drive. A VW Bug.
Or maybe she would have had a little sister. “I’ll always take care of you,” she would have told her sister that she never had. She pictured herself wrapping her arms around a little girl who resembled herself, but smaller, pressing her tight against her chest and not letting go—the same exact thing she would have liked to have someone do for her.
As things were—in real life—there was nobody to talk to about what happened. The people she used to have, with whom she might have discussed losing her parents, were the parents she’d lost. But the larger truth was that she couldn’t have talked to them about it anyway. Martin and Vivian had died that night, but they had been largely absent forever.
It was just Eleanor then. One other distant relative somewhere in the Midwest that she’d met a couple of times when she was little. No grandparents.
She’d made the trip home to Newton by herself; her father’s law partner, Don, picked her up. She’d met him a few times over the years, at her parents’ annual cocktail party, where her job was passing the hors d’oeuvres, but didn’t recognize him when he came up to her at the train station and, a little awkwardly, offered what passed for a hug. From there they went straight to the funeral home.
Later that weekend she’d made her way through the rooms of their house figuring out what to do with all their stuff. Only she couldn’t figure it out. How was a not-quite-sixteen-year-old supposed to begin taking apart a house full of furniture and clothes, books, records, papers, photographs, ski equipment, tax returns? All the odd things that nobody talked about: Her father’s underwear and a collection of Playboy magazines from the sixties. Her mother’s diaphragm. The liquor cabinet containing six different bottles of whiskey, ten of vodka; the clock over the television in the family room: No drinking until 5 P.M. Every number on its face a five.
Eleanor knew people whose parents viewed their children as the center of their universe, but that was never how it was in her own small family. She had friends whose parents barely spoke to each other and never touched, might even have slept in different bedrooms, but never missed their children’s games or band concerts. In Eleanor’s world, it was nothing like that. Her parents had already been together almost twenty years when she was born, and it had always appeared to Eleanor that they never fully got over viewing her as something of an interloper in their private world.
She could remember, from earliest childhood, the cries coming from their bedroom, late at night, a strange and confusing combination of what sounded like wild joy and injury. Her father’s eyes anytime her mother walked in the room. Her mother’s eyes meeting his. Herself, off in the corner with her colored pencils, close to invisible.
Thursday nights, watching Dean Martin—the two of them with their martinis. Friday afternoons, happy hour at a bar they liked at Coolidge Corner. Sunday mornings, she understood not to disturb them in bed till after ten o’clock, and used to watch the clock, waiting. “Adult time,” they called it. This took place not only Sunday mornings, but at dinner, too, when her mother put on one of her silky lounging outfits and the two of them shared their bottle of wine, and if Eleanor was quiet, she got to listen in to their conversation. Sometimes alone in the living room, they put on Mantovani records and danced. Eleanor could have set the drapes on fire when they were dancing that way. They wouldn’t have noticed.
Other times she heard her father’s voice, loud and angry. They were crazy about each other, but sometimes, they were just plain crazy.
Somebody would throw something. Somebody threw something else. Then came the sound of breaking glass. Their voices, saying terrible things. Then—not right away—the laughter. Then their voices were quiet again. Then the sounds from the bedroom.
This was the part to the story nobody mentioned at the funeral. Nobody spoke about Martin’s drinking, or how Vivian had matched him, drink for drink. Cocktails after work every night. Bloody Marys on Sunday mornings, and other mornings, too, often. Wednesdays. Mondays. You name it.
None of the people who’d come that day—men who knew her father from Rotary, or golf, or the law firm where he practiced, women who’d done volunteer work with her mother—would have recognized this other side of the two of them that Eleanor had known. The angry dad who tore through the house one time, cursing, because he couldn’t find the TV Guide. The one who, when the liq
uor store was closed one night, drove to five different convenience stores to find a particular brand of whiskey. The one who, when she asked him if he could not have so many drinks when her friend Marcy came over, sent her to her room. After, she could hear him tearing around the kitchen, ranting to her mother. Can you believe? Our daughter thinks I’m some kind of alcoholic bum. At some point in the evening he had torn into her room and grabbed her colored pencil set, which she was always careful to keep organized by color family. He threw the open box against the wall, pencils flying in all directions.
Eleanor had a word for times like those, when one of her parents—sometimes Martin, sometimes Vivian—spun out over the edge. She called it Crazyland. They didn’t live in that place all the time, but you never knew when they might go there. It was always just around the corner.
Eleanor never told anyone about Crazyland, but the fact that she had been there—witnessed it, anyway—was why she didn’t invite Marcy or Charlene for a sleepover, ever. Knowing Crazyland was always nearby made her try to be very good all the time, to keep her parents from going there.
Looking back on the house where she grew up, it came to Eleanor—later—that she had seldom seen her parents completely sober. Her father’s drink of choice, Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. Her mother’s, a Manhattan.
The accident that killed them had been a head-on collision, and all anyone said at the time was that there must have been ice on the road. Maybe the tread on their snow tires was not the best.
But Eleanor could guess why it was that their car had crossed over into the other lane that night. They would have stopped at their favorite bar on their way home. One of their many favorite bars.
They must have loved her. That’s what parents did. But it had been their idea, not Eleanor’s, that she go to boarding school, and although they seemed sad when they dropped her off that first time, Eleanor couldn’t help but notice a sense of relief underlying their farewells. “We’ll see you at Parents’ Weekend,” they said, but they didn’t make it.
Count the Ways Page 4