by Anthology
“Oh God, what is this? Sight of blood turn you on or—ow! Damn it!”
I showed her the thorn, then tossed it aside. “John,” I said, “give me your handkerchief.”
I noted with a certain sense of satisfaction that he looked distressed as he drew the handkerchief from his pocket. “This is real silk, Lew. Silk.”
“So it is, John, so it is.”
“Ah, jeeze.”
“God,” Elizabeth murmured as I bound her foot, “for a guy who can’t find his own ass in the woods, you’re such a damn Boy Scout.”
She said it almost tenderly. Very surprised, I looked up at her face. She smiled fleetingly. After a moment’s hesitation, I smiled back. Removing a thorn from someone’s foot is vastly underrated as a bonding experience. I felt like Androcles.
Then her attention swung from me and her foot back to John, and she immediately took on the aspect of Mount Pelée about to blow.
“Hey,” he told her, “give me a break, okay? I did have other people to look after on this little excursion. I am sorry about losing you. But you know how it is. These little slippages happen.”
Mount Pelée exploded. “This little slippage nearly got us killed!”
“But it didn’t actually get you killed. And I did come looking for you as soon as I realized that you really weren’t around. And now I have found you, haven’t I? Well? Haven’t I?”
Elizabeth sullenly yeah-yeahed. I didn’t respond. I was dead tired. All I wanted to do was go home, and he grated on the little I had left that could be grated on. There is no one more smug than somebody who has your signed waiver stashed someplace safe.
A resounding crash of gunfire from downstream made us look around. John’s expression was mildly reproachful. “Boy,” he said, “everybody seems to have got up on the wrong side of bed this morning. But, as I was saying. Sorry it took so long to locate you. You’ve really got no idea how many time-travelers are wandering around this area right now, right at this very minute. Their trails are everywhere. I mean, everywhere. New trails and old ones, too. Who’d think so many people’d want to come watch two armed mobs chase each other around the countryside? Give me the good times, thank you.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said wearily. “The battle’s starting up again.”
He nodded, but he also said, “Where’s your spirit of adventure, Lew?”
“Same place as my sense of humor. Gone.”
“Boy, I guess so. Well, come on, the twenty-first-century express is now boarding.” He stepped closer, gave his spotless gloves a sorrowful look, held out his hands to us. I took one. Elizabeth started to take the other, then held back.
“My hands are dirty,” she told him. “Mustn’t mess up your nice clean gloves.”
She reached out and deliberately wiped her black fingers against the front of his coat.
“Much better,” she declared, and entwined her still-nasty fingers with his.
He sighed. “Lady, you are no lady.”
“Cut the crap,” she said, “and just take us home.”
There was a moment’s lightheadedness, a sensation of blacking out, and then the three of us were floating together through the treetops, unmindful of gravity and spiky branches alike. Now, as we emerged into the open sky, I saw the vast extent of the forest and caught a glimpse of a road below and ahead, and a long swarm of men.
It was only a glimpse, though. Among the trees were many opaque puffs of grayish-white smoke. Rising here and there were columns of darker stuff, some of it shot with red and orange flames. As far as the eye could see, the world lay obscured by a translucent, pungent haze.
Beside me, John said, “I even ran into some visitors from our own future. First time for me. It was some historian with a pack of grad students in tow. Fun bunch they were, too, let me tell you. They got all sniffy when I asked ’em about things up the way. Said it was against the rules. Rules? I said, and the old guy just grinned at me and cackled, There’ll be lawsone day, and cops, too. Can you imagine? Cops!”
I remembered the stranger’s smile as he talked of Yankees cooked just right, and I nodded, more to myself than to John. I could imagine cops.
Then, suddenly, we were going.
WHERE THE CLUETTS ARE
Jack Finney
We had open books and magazines lying on every flat surface in the room. They stood propped in a row along the fireplace mantel and lay face up on the seat cushions of the upholstered chairs. They hung like little tents on the chair arms and backs, were piled in layers on the big round coffee table, and lay scattered all over the carpeted floor. Every one of them was opened to a photograph, sketch, floor plan, or architect s elevation of a house. Ellie Cluett sat on the top of the ladder I used to reach the highest of the bookshelves. She was wearing a gray sweater and slacks and was slowly leafing through an Architectural Forum. Sam, her husband, sat on the floor, his back against the bookshelves, and now he held up his book for us to look at. This was the big room I worked in and I was at my drafting table watching them.
“How about something like this?” Sam said. It was a color photograph of the Taj Mahal.
Ellie said, “Great. The big dome in the center is just right for a television aerial. Okay with you, Harry?
“Sure. All I have to do is design the place. You’ll have to live in it.” I smiled at Ellie. She was about twenty-three, intelligent and likable.
Sam said, “Well, I wish you would design it and quit pestering us about it.” He grinned to show he didn’t mean it, though he did. Sam was wearing slacks and a sports shirt and was about my age—somewhere just over thirty.
Ellie said, “Yes, Harry, please. Have it built, and phone us in New York when it’s finished. Surprise us! Honestly”—she gestured at the roomful of opened books and magazines—“I know we promised to look through all this, but it’s driving me crazy.”
“I’ll have the rooms padded, then. In tasteful decorator colors.”
“Damn it, Harry, I think you’re being pointlessly stubborn,” Sam said. “There are only two things that matter to me about this house, and you know what they are.”
I nodded. Sam owned a big boatyard on the Sound. He wanted a house here in Darley, Connecticut, because it was only thirty minutes from the yard. He sold his boats by demonstration and entertainment, so he wanted an impressive house to take his prospects to.
Sam said, “That’s all I care about, and you won’t change it if you lock me up in here.”
“It isn’t as though we’d really be living here,” Ellie said gently. “We’ll keep our apartment in New York, you can be sure. Except for the boat season, we’ll hardly be in Darley.”
I didn’t want to lose this job. Just before the boat craze began, Sam Cluett started his boat works on nothing; now he was rich and offering me a free hand in designing a show place with nothing skimped. I wanted to do it and needed the money but I said, “I can’t do it alone. If this house doesn’t mean enough to you to give it some time and work and to develop some opinions and enthusiasms about it, then I don’t want to design it. Because it would never be much of a house. It wouldn’t be yours, mine, or anyone’s. It would be a house without life or soul—or, even worse, the wrong kind of soul.”
Absolutely identical looks came to their faces: brows raised in polite question, eyes alertly interested in and amused by the notion of a house with a soul.
I suspected that I was about to become an anecdote back in New York but I was going to save this job if I could and I smiled and said, “It’s true, or close to it. A house can have a life and soul of its own. There’s a house here in Darley, twelve years old and it’s had nineteen owners. No one ever lives in it long. There are houses like it in every town in the world.” I stood up and began walking around the room, hands shoved into my back pockets, picking my way through the scattered books.
Sam sat watching me from the floor, arms folded. Ellie sat on top of the ladder staring down at me, her chin on her fist. There was a faint
smile of interest on each face and they looked like a couple of sophisticated kids waiting for the rest of a story.
I said, “It’s an ordinary enough house but I prowled through it between tenants, once, and began to understand why it never kept an owner. Everywhere you look the proportions are just faintly unpleasant. There’s a feeling of harshness to the place. There’s even something wrong in the very way the light slants in through the windows. It wasn’t the designer’s fault; the house simply developed an ugly life and soul of its own. It’s filled with unpleasant associations and after you’re in it awhile it becomes downright repelling. I don’t really understand why, and I’m an architect.” I glanced at Sam, then at Ellie, smiling so as not to seem too deadly serious. Ellie’s eyes were bright with interest. I said, “There’s another house in Darley that no one has ever willingly left. Those who’ve left it, the husbands were transferred or something of that sort, and I’ve heard that each wife cried when she had to give up that house. And that a child in one family said and has continued to say that when he grows up, he’s going to buy that house back and live in it. I don’t doubt these stories because I’ve been in that house, too, and I swear it welcomes you as you step through the front door.”
I looked at the Cluetts again, and began to hope. I said, “You’ve been in that kind of house; everyone has. For no reason you can explain you feel a joy at just being in it. I almost think that kind of house knows you’re in it and puts its best foot forward. There’s a kind of felicity about it, everything in it just right. It’s something more and better than any designer could consciously plan. It’s the occasional rare and wonderful house that somehow acquires a life and soul of its own, and a fine one. Personally, I believe that kind of house comes out of the feelings and attitude and actual love for it of the people who plan it and bring it to life. And that has to be the people who are going to live in it, not just the architect. When I design a house I want it to have a chance of turning out to be that kind. But you’re not giving yours any chance at all.”
It didn’t work. For half an hour, the Cluetts were contrite and industrious, searching through my books and magazines, pointing out to me and each other houses, rooms, windows, doors, roof styles, bathrooms, and gardens they liked or said they did. I sat at my table again, listening, but I knew their interest was synthetic and I added no more notes to the pad in my clip board. I had only one: “Enormous master bdrm w. fireplace.” But every client says that; I could have it printed on my note pads. And the Cluetts had nothing more to add, they really didn’t care.
Finally, Ellie put a book back on the shelf beside her, then stood up on the ladder and began scanning the top shelf boredly. She reminded me of a child reluctantly doing homework, ready to welcome any diversion, and now she found one. Pulling out a book, she dislodged a thick wadding of paper crammed onto the shelf beside it and caught it as it fell. She unfolded it, opening it up finally to half a dozen big sheets of linen drawing paper each the size of a newspaper page. When she saw what was on the top sheet she slowly sat down on the ladder top, staring and murmuring, “For heaven’s sake.” After a moment she looked at me, saying, “Harry! What in the world is this?”
“Just what it looks like.” I heard the tired irritation in my voice and forced it out before I continued. I wasn’t going to take their job, but I liked the Cluetts just the same. “Those are drawings for a house, architectural drawings,” I said more pleasantly. “That top sheet is a perspective showing what it would look like finished. The sheets underneath are the working drawings for building it. They’ve always been up there; belonged to my grandfather. Most of the stuff on that top shelf was his. He was an architect and so was my father.”
Sam was getting to his feet, pleased with the diversion, too, and Ellie quickly turned on the ladder, hurried down it, then dropped, kneeling, to the floor and smoothed the big top sheet flat on the rug. “Look!” she said excitedly.
Sam and I went to stand beside her, staring. The edges of the paper were yellowed but the rest was bone-white still and I remembered that I’d once meant to frame this and hang it in my office downtown. It was an India-ink drawing, the lines thin, sharp, and black in the scribed and ruled precision architects once favored. It was an incredible sight—I’d almost forgotten—but there lay the clear sharp-etched architectural rendering for a house of the early 1880s just as its designer had conceived it in every gabled, turreted, dormered, bay-windowed and gingerbreaded detail.
“Imagine,” Ellie murmured, her voice incredulous and delighted. “Why, it never entered my head that these houses were actually built!”
“What do you mean?” Sam said.
She turned to look up at him, eyes shining. “Why, they’ve always been here—forever! Since long before any of us was born. They’re old, shabby, half tumbling down. It simply never occurred to me that they could ever have been new! Or not even built yet, like this one!” Quickly, she began spreading out the other sheets in a half circle.
I knew what she meant and so did Sam, and he nodded. It was strange to see at our feet the actual floor by floor plans—the framing plans and sections, full-sized profiles, every last detail, all precisely dimensioned ready for construction—of what had to seem to our eyes like an old old house. And for some moments, then, silent and bemused, we looked at the careful old drawings thinking the wordless thoughts you often think looking at a relic of other earlier lives than your own.
It seems to me that it’s usually impossible to get hold of another time. You look at a pair of high-button shoes, the leather dry and cracked, buttons missing, the cloth uppers nearly drained of color by the years, and it just isn’t possible to get into the mind of some long-gone woman who once saw them new. How could they ever have been new and shining, something a woman might actually covet?
But these old drawings lying on the floor beside us weren’t quite like any other relic of the past I’d ever before encountered. Because these were the house before it was built; old though they were, these were still the plans for a house-yet-to-be. And so at one and the same time they were quaint and old-fashioned, yet new and fresh, still untouched by the years.
And it was possible to see in them, and feel, not merely quaintness but something of the fresh beauty the architect must have seen and felt the day he finished them a lifetime ago.
Ellie was getting to her feet and I turned to look at her. Her jaw actually hung open a little and her eyes were wide and almost stunned in a kind of incredulous awe at what she’d just thought of. “Sam!” she said, and grabbed his forearm. “Let’s build it!”
“What?”
“Yes! I mean it! Let’s build it! And I’ll furnish it! In the style of those days! Why, good lord,” she murmured, turning to stare at nothing, eyes shining with excitement, “there’s not a woman I know who won’t envy me green.”
Sam is bright and used to making decisions, I suppose. His eyes narrowed and he stared at Ellie’s face as though testing or absorbing her feelings through her eyes as she stared back at him, elated. Then he stepped forward abruptly and looked down at the drawings again for half a minute. He took a few paces around the room, then turned to me. “Is it possible, Harry? Could that house be built today? Is it practical, I mean? Could we live in it and have it make any kind of sense?” Suddenly he grinned, delighted at the notion.
I shrugged and said, “Sure. Why not? If you’re willing to pay the cost. The plans are there and can be followed today as well as in the eighteen eighties.” Both started to speak but I held up a hand, cutting them off. “But to build even a contemporary house with that much floor space would be very expensive, Sam. And with this house, every foot of that space would cost twice as much, three times as much, maybe more. Who can say? You might not even get a bid on a job like that.”
“Oh? Why not?”
I touched the plans with the toe of my shoe. “Look at the lumber specifications. Half of it different from anything milled today—heavier, thicker, longer. You’d pay a f
ortune in special milling costs alone. Look at the fancy trim all over the house inside and out. When those plans were drawn I suppose it could be bought from stock. Today it doesn’t exist. All of it would have to be special order, lathed and jigsawed out and by people not used to it. Lot of errors and spoilage. What’s more, the entire construction method is different from today’s. No contractor has had any experience at it, or his men, either. He might not even bid; you’d have to pay cost plus. And the final price?” I shook my head. “It would be fantastic, and if you ever wanted to sell you’d have the world’s biggest white elephant on your hands, a brand-new antique that no bank in the world would ever lend you a dime . . .”
Sam shut me off with a hand on my arm, smiling. He said gently, “Everything you’re telling me, Harry, can be said in one word—money. Well, I’ve got the money and whatever it costs to build this house I guarantee you it’ll be worth it.” He saw I didn’t know what he meant, and said, “Harry, boats are sold just like anything else—in a variety of ways. And one of the best ways is publicity. Think of the talk, this’ll make!” He grinned tensely. “Every customer I bring into that house will go home full of it. Why, Sam Cluett’s new place will be talked about at cocktail parties, in restaurants, on boat decks, and in living rooms all over the Eastern seaboard. And who is Sam Cluett P Why, he makes boats! Harry, I could blow the place up two years after it’s finished and it’ll have paid for itself three times over.” He turned to Ellie, saying, “Baby, you’ve picked yourself a house,” then he swung back to me. “You know the contractors here. Hire one, Harry, and follow through for me, will you? Don’t even ask for a bid; just have him follow the plans and send me his bills as he gets them, adding—what? Twenty per cent? Work it out with him.” Sam glanced at his watch. “Now, let’s get out of here and go look for a site!”