The Upstairs House

by Julia Fine

  I started walking, looking for Michael. Hoping Michael wanted to be found.

  IN LATE WINTER of 1929, years before she met Margaret, Michael visited Chicago as a stop on her midwestern lecture tour. She didn’t have good things to say about the Midwest, but this wasn’t a surprise, as not many New Englanders I knew had good things to say about the Midwest. When I lived in New York, everyone complained about Chicago winters, about what they sneeringly called midwestern niceness, as if niceness was something to be pitied. The city I’d grown up in had never been nice, had been, I supposed, only nominally midwestern. “Be nice,” said my mother when my father came to pick us up and take us to the suburbs, when her boyfriends came over to pick her up for a date and Annie and I sat eating potato chips in bare feet on the couch, narrow-eyed and judging them. “Be nice” to all the little girls, the babies baring teeth.

  Michael was certainly not nice. During her visit to Chicago, she’d gone to look at the bullet-pocked doors where just months earlier two gangs had played their parts in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. She was proud of the risk she imagined she was taking, even bragged about how one of the guests at her hotel had a string of pearls robbed right off her neck while returning late at night on Lake Shore Drive.

  I thought I might find Michael at that hotel—the Lake Shore Drive Hotel. She would have a suite, of course. This was Michael’s natural habitat: a luxurious hotel suite from which she could opine, a polished antique desk with curled legs and handles made of actual gold, heavy paper, and expensive ebon ink. If Margaret’s archival display was the beagling, then Michael’s would be the trappings of the artistic elite.

  The cars here in this picture-book Chicago sported very round red wheels with blue axles. Brickwork was carefully outlined in black, and eaves were patterned in bold shadow. Every door was the same: red, with four mismatched decorative panels. No leaves on the trees. The sun a perfect ball of light.

  The desperation I’d felt for Clara was gone now. Margaret’s genuine pain when I thought the rabbit was Clara reassured me. She was happy while hunting. She wouldn’t hurt my daughter. She didn’t like children, but she did understand them. Or did she?

  Was Clara only safe if Margaret was happy? I wondered as I walked. It seemed impossible for Margaret, who needed so much from her lover, to be the Margaret she presented—elusive and laissez-faire and droll—and at the same time be happy. And it was obviously impossible for Michael to be happy, because she’d never actually become the Michael Strange that she wanted to be—powerful, universally praised. The solution of course, was to throw the two unhappinesses together so they could cancel each other out, which it seemed they sometimes did, though mostly didn’t. But maybe Margaret’s unhappiness was deeper than Michael’s, or maybe Michael’s need was shallower than Margaret’s, or maybe two negatives would not make a positive, no matter what high school chemistry teachers claimed.

  I walked past an empty-faced policeman in an ill-fitting uniform, his hand raised against traffic. I nodded to thank him. I walked past a fat red horse.

  The issue was that their love story had no true conclusion. Throughout their entire relationship, Michael pushed and pulled, and Margaret let her. This wasn’t sustainable. This wasn’t a way to live a life. Both knew, by the end, that they should separate completely, but neither seemed able to do it. And then Michael was sick. Michael was dying.

  If they’d officially parted ways before Michael died, it could have been a classic tragedy, a satisfying resolution. Or if Michael had died, adored, in Margaret’s arms, their love could be preserved as something purer than this odd amalgamation of possessiveness and fear. But Michael’s illness had forced these women’s hands, and now their history was contorted, and I couldn’t get closure until I knew how to fix them, and until I fixed them, I couldn’t fix Clara.

  Margaret had sworn she’d uphold Michael’s memory, but I thought she’d been bullied into the promise. If Michael hadn’t gotten sick, I thought Margaret would have wised up to the fact that she was being used. Based on conversations with her friends around that time, it seemed that maybe Margaret had wised up, but what could you do when your lover was dying of cancer? After Michael’s death, those friends said sotto voce that she’d seemed almost relieved.

  IT WAS MUCH easier to think about this than the snow that was now falling outside the cabin in thick sheets. I kept my eyes open. I kept walking.

  MARGARET HAD NEVER, to my knowledge, visited Chicago with Michael. She’d been up and down the eastern seaboard, been to Europe, been out west, but never here in this middle ground that I knew was Chicago, although it looked an awful lot like Margaret’s Noisy Book. In fact, the Lake Shore Drive Hotel when I arrived looked an awful lot like the empty house that Muffin the dog knew did not go squeak squeak squeak. The actual Lake Shore Drive Hotel did not have a yellow exterior, a large red door with a blue pediment, three blue windows, a blue-speckled roof. But the sign outside said Lake Shore Drive Hotel, so I walked in.

  It smelled suspiciously like dog urine.

  Inside Michael’s autobiography it was 1929, so all the ashtrays were white with curled burgundy script. Palatial, Michael had described this hotel, and palaces were often very cold. The high-ceilinged lobby was empty of guests, the elevator new and old at once—newly built but not what I was used to—and I scraped my palm while pulling the cage shut. It rose without my say-so and deposited me at one end of a long hallway lined with carved white doors. Outside each door, a gold-plated number, a side table with fresh flowers, a plush rug.

  At the far end of the hall, one of these ornate doors was open. I walked in, and there was Michael. She stood next to the drawn floor-length curtains, looking out, one hand resting on a varnished wooden desk, the other pressed against the glass of the arched window beside it. I waited.

  “Once,” Michael said to the view, “when I was very ill and depressed after leaving Jack, I was recovering at a sordid little French hotel and saw Walt Whitman sitting in the chair beside my bed.” This I already knew from her writing. Michael tended to repeat herself.

  “What does that have to do with me?” I asked.

  “I say this so you know that we look out for one another, we true artists. Our words remain and act as balms, piercing the wretched little lives we find ourselves living, promising us more.”

  She’d mixed her metaphors, but who was I to point that out?

  “I’m not an artist,” I said. “And I don’t think my life is wretched.”

  “To each his own,” said Michael and adjusted her scarf. She sat down at the writing desk, started scratching something out with her expensive gold pen. I supposed despite the promise of being my balm, she didn’t actually care much about me. She’d said what she needed to say, and I hadn’t been receptive.

  “Are you just going to hold me here, then? Just going to hold on to Clara?”

  “Why, whatever do you mean?”

  I was getting pretty tired of these mid-century women and their typical mid-century language. I was getting pretty tired of being their playing field, of housing them inside my body. I knew I was a pawn in their game—and it made me feel like myself as a child, when it wasn’t really me that mattered. It wasn’t me my parents wanted, but the satisfaction of getting full custody. When he proposed, it wasn’t me that Ben wanted, just the illusion of marriage. Even Clara just wanted my milk, wanted my warmth.

  “Is Clara here?” I asked. “Is Margaret?”

  “Through that door,” Michael said, nodding. “To the left.”

  26

  In the great green room there was my daughter, lying on a massive bed, with Margaret knitting in a rocking chair a few feet away.

  “Can it be over now?” I asked. The fire was lit in the hearth, but it was cold, getting colder. I stood in the door, on the precipice, unable to come in. Each time I tried to take a step across the threshold I was halted by a wave of cold, a soul-deep freeze, an ice wall.

  “Close your eyes,” said Margar
et.

  But I couldn’t.

  The Makings of a Classic

  Goodnight Moon was illustrated by Clement Hurd, who also drew The Runaway Bunny. In 1946 Clem was coming home from the war. On his return, Margaret knew Clem would feel lost after the trauma of the front, and so she housed him in her studio, a strange little two-story cottage called Cobble Court tucked away in Lenox Hill, a few blocks south of the Upper East Side apartments. A small white clapboard house with ivy around the door and a sunroom full of square-paned windows, the ghost of a long-dead New York hidden behind a block of commonplace apartments. Margaret told Clem and his wife Posey to stay as long as it took to get back on their feet.

  Margaret had her editor at Harper send Clem a copy of her newly finished manuscript. She requested that he draw her a “fabulous room” with a “Little Boy Bunny in bed.” The room would be big and bright, but would grow darker.

  27

  Michael couldn’t enter the room, and because of this I couldn’t enter the room. We were somehow intertwined, somehow connected. Maybe the room was afraid of Michael’s heat. Or was it because Clement Hurd, its artist, didn’t like her? Had he cast some sort of spell to keep her out? I’d had friends who didn’t approve of my choice of past romantic partners. They mostly said I never liked him, and sometimes they said Well, now I guess we’ll have to pick up the pieces again. All of my friends who met Ben had agreed he was solid.

  Clara was lying on the bed, awake, but not crying. I didn’t want to run away from her, but I also didn’t want to run toward her. This understanding didn’t temper my relief. She was whole. She was there. My little baby, being such a good girl. Being so quiet.

  The books said to put her down in her crib when she was drowsy but awake, so that she’d learn to fall asleep on her own. So that she wouldn’t need me. Well, that wasn’t really it, it was really so that I wouldn’t have to nurse her to sleep, or always rock her, or maybe so that when she half woke in the night she could soothe herself back into restfulness or REM, so she could wake up refreshed in the morning. I couldn’t remember, now, why I was supposed to try to put her down drowsy. I couldn’t remember why it was better for her not to need me, why it was better for us to be two separate people, not one.

  “I understand,” I said to Margaret, “how you can feel both more and less yourself with someone else.”

  She didn’t look at me. Neither did Clara. The room was so cold.

  And now Michael had come to stand next to me, looking in on the encapsulated night.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked her. My teeth were chattering. I’d left all the windows in the cabin slightly open. The snow was coming in and puddling on the sills, prickling my neck, wetting my fingers when I braced against the doorframe. The wind was fierce.

  IN GHOST STORIES, we generally discover what the haunting signifies. By the end of the story or the novel or the film we know who died and why they’re restless, we know that somebody disturbed some ancient orb or moved into a toxic house. But in the story of my life I couldn’t say why I was haunted, why I needed these women, in this moment, and why they needed me. There is a room, and in it are objects, and I suppose that is enough.

  A PHONE WAS ringing in the kitchen, at the cabin, and I lifted it from the wall, closing my eyes so I could answer.

  “Thank god,” said Ben from far away. “Are you okay? Is Clara?”

  I coughed, and said, “We’re fine.” Then I started to cry.

  “Can you drive?” asked Ben. “Never mind. I don’t think you should drive. I talked to Annie about your—you know, your—Anyway, the roads are bad. We’ll come to you.”

  “Okay,” I said through hiccups, “but I think maybe you shouldn’t.”

  “It’ll be okay,” said Ben. I didn’t like his forced amiability. I didn’t want him to come. I was in the middle of something, and he had interrupted.

  “I have a lot going on,” I said. I waited for Ben to respond, but all that came back now was static. “Did you hear me?” I said. “We have a lot going on.” A few more seconds of that strange, whispering buzz, and then silence. A lightness told me that the cord was no longer connected to the wall. Someone had cut the line.

  “Focus,” said Michael, “on what truly matters.”

  I opened my eyes.

  AS THERE HAD been in the upstairs house Margaret built in our condo, as there had been in Margaret’s Only House in Maine, there was, in this great green room, a door that led nowhere. A frame, and then a fifty-foot drop, whatever stairs that had once led down to the earth long since demolished. Outside there was the lake, the wind, the snow.

  “You’re always telling me I’ve killed you, and that’s what’s wrong,” Margaret was saying from her place in the rocking chair.

  Clara was propped up on a pillow, looking from one woman to the other, as aware of her surroundings as I’d ever seen her.

  “You’re being dramatic,” said Michael. “You’re hysterical.”

  I didn’t think I’d ever heard a woman tell another woman she was being hysterical. Hysteria was a term reserved for men’s use, a male explanation for the wrongs of the world that men couldn’t be bothered to remedy. Hysteria: an early-nineteenth-century medical term coined from the Greek hystera, meaning womb.

  “Technically—” I began from my place in the doorframe, my place next to Michael, and all three of them—Margaret, Michael, even Clara—shot me daggers.

  “This isn’t about you,” said Margaret, even though I was on her side. I’d been trying to stand up for her. And it was about me. They’d called me here, they’d stolen my child. Didn’t they want me to take sides? Why else would they have brought me?

  I didn’t think I’d taken the wrong side, though I supposed it was possible. I supposed I had to know which one I was, Margaret or Michael, had to know which one was Clara. Once I knew for certain, I could understand why I still didn’t know what I wanted—despite knowing I loved Clara, despite knowing what I should want, what I didn’t.

  I’d filled out all the online tests: Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, Which Sex and the City Star Are You—I knew I must be one of these women or the other. Since adolescence I’d done everything I could to find the category that would explain me to myself, the category to do the work of self-examination for me.

  A category is a name, and thus an incantation.

  “Margaret,” I whispered, wishing myself the overborne, not overbearing.

  “What?” she snapped. I had romanticized her, somewhat. In wanting to be Margaret, I had made her in my image. In casting Michael as the villain, I’d forgotten that Margaret could be cruel as well. She’d fallen out with her first publisher, Bill Scott, over payments. She would write letters in anger and then send them, and then later send short notes of self-reproach. Margaret was ashamed of her short temper, but there it was, she said, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  There was Margaret: seeing herself, disliking herself, telling herself there was nothing to be done. And then there was Michael, seeing herself a magnanimous, merciful queen.

  I didn’t say anything else, and they kept going.

  “What’s really wrong is that you’ve lost yourself in this psychoanalysis,” said Michael. “All this luxuriating in the past is your excuse not to grow up, your excuse not to make the necessary changes in your art. You are denying your own evolution, and it’s very unattractive. The whole thing is obscene.”

  “You know the psychoanalysis is only a temporary treatment,” said Margaret. “By nature, it’s a temporary practice. Once you’ve faced the desolation, you’re free of it. You meet the pain, and face it as you once were unable to face it. You feel it again, and this time you stand it.”

  “I don’t like what you’re implying,” said Michael.

  “I’m not implying anything,” Margaret said. “I’m only trying to explain why our views differ, you and me.” She was still sitting in the rocking chair, but rocking more quickly, her irritation obvious in the scuff of her f
oot on the floor. The chair made an ominous creak under the pressure.

  “You and I,” said Michael. “Not you and me.”

  Lovers Quarrels

  Margaret was still undergoing psychoanalysis, Michael still didn’t like it.1

  Margaret was still writing for children, Michael still didn’t like it.2

  Margaret thought that Michael liked to feel abandoned, which was why Michael kept pushing her away.3

  28

  At her home in Maine, Margaret hung a sign above the door to nowhere: MIND THE VIEW. She called the door the Witch’s Wink. And now the hotel Witch’s Wink was open, and now Margaret stood by it, holding Clara—opposing me and Michael as we stood in the frame of the door to the rest of the suite. A door directly across from a door. What was the word for a space between spaces? A purgatory? No, because the root word, purgatorum, meant a cleansing. A limbo? From the Latin limbus, a border or an edge. That wasn’t right either—this wasn’t an edge, it was an in-between, an other. A photonegative appearing between one life and the next, between one self and the self that would come after. A great green room. In music, a rest.

  Margaret held Clara, and they stood there at the edge of the open door, and I still couldn’t make myself go to them.

  Through that door I could see the lake, thickly frozen, the snowflakes falling fat and luscious, collecting on the surface like cream at the top of good milk. They were meandering, lazy. Every so often the wind would hurry them along with a quick, walloping roar, and Margaret’s dress and stockings would be dotted with new melt. Clara’s onesie was damp with drool and spit-up, hardening into an icy shell. She would not survive the chill; already I could hear her coughing in the chesty, wet way that raises the hackles on a mother. Here I was, wheezing in sympathy, and I still couldn’t make myself go to her.