“This place was different when I was growing up. Grandma Mellie was angry. She’d been angry her whole life—trying to make up for the mistake she made in marrying my father. I know I should have told you about that before too, but now that you know what sort of house I grew up in and what people knew about us, you can understand why I kept Jim from you. It wasn’t the sort of place you wanted to be. I’d made plans my whole life to get out, but then life came and I didn’t leave. I got a job clerking down at the courthouse and it was a good job. The sort where I’d meet the kind of men who had the ability to get me out of that house with my mother. I know you don’t want to hear this part, but I think it is important. You need to know how sheltered I was, how, when I decided to go to Boston with Mr. Lauderbach, I might have been twenty-four, but I felt like I was just out of high school.
“Lauderbach was a young attorney and he ended up marrying a girl he’d met in college whose father owned a small practice in Boston. They specialized in probate. He’d told me to write him if I ever wanted to leave Memphis. And I did.
“He wrote back to me to ask if I wanted to spend the summer as a nanny. His wife had just had her second child and needed help looking after the two-year-old. Something had gone wrong with the birth and she’d need to be in recovery all summer. I didn’t even tell my mother I was leaving. I wrote him back that I’d be on the next bus up there and to let me know the exact address. He was nice. I think he’d wanted a Southerner to lessen how foreign everything was up there. He had me cook for him too. Nothing special, but cornbread to go with dinner or pimento cheese sandwiches. I taught his wife how to do that when she was feeling better at the end of the summer.
“They were good to me. I had Sundays and Mondays off and mostly I spent them walking around the city. Some people thought I was crazy because it was so hot that summer, but you know how after you live in Memphis, nothing seems hot. I met your father when I was walking around. I’d broken the heel off my wedge and he rescued me. Took me to a shoe shop in the building where he worked. He told me he was in college and I said that I was also, too afraid to admit the truth. After that, we met on my days off and talked about everything except ourselves—I mean the part about who we were and where we were from. I guess now that it was because we were both lying that we didn’t talk about it. At the time it felt romantic, like we had so much in common that we didn’t need to discuss the boring stuff. It also felt impermanent, meaning I knew it wouldn’t last and that I could be my true self with him and also the person I wanted to be.”
Aunt Annie swallowed hard at this point in the story. Isobel watched her trying to work up to the part about getting pregnant. She appeared to make peace with the idea and her face softened. She finally settled into one pose, with one leg drawn up underneath her, her elbows on the table, and her head resting on her palms. Glancing at Lizzie, she saw that the story was having the opposite effect. If possible, she looked stiffer and angrier—her hands balled into fists that swung back and forth hitting her own legs.
Lizzie curled up her lips. “So you didn’t know. That’s the reason for all this deception? That you didn’t know how old he was?”
“She didn’t say that,” Elyse said in her measured voice.
Aunt Annie smiled. “It’s okay. She’s jumping ahead a bit in the story. No, I did know, or rather I found out and I told myself it didn’t matter. The relationship had become physical by then and like I’d said before, I wasn’t about to let go of spending time with someone who I trusted enough to be my true self. The summer ended and I went home, not expecting to hear from Jim again, but for the first time in my life making real plans to leave Memphis, to leave my mother. I’d planned to go to New York and get hired by one of those prestigious nanny services and then make enough money to go to night school to become an accountant.
“Of course, none of that happened. I got home and several weeks later I realized I was pregnant. I didn’t tell your father. I went back to work at the courthouse and Grandma Mellie took care of you. It turned out she was a terrific grandmother. In all the ways she’d failed me as a mother, she succeeded with you. After your father graduated from college, he tracked me down, but I was dating someone—a man I thought I’d end up marrying—and I didn’t ever call your father back. He tried again a few years later, this time showing up at Spite House and having coffee with Mellie until you returned home from school and I returned from work. I was engaged at the time to the other man, but the moment I saw your father and you sitting together, I knew I’d have to marry him.”
“That doesn’t explain why you lied to me all these years about who my father was.”
Isobel watched as her aunt got wordlessly up from the table and called up the stairs to her husband. “This is the part I need your father to explain to you.” She settled herself back at the table and they waited. She looked at the floor. “It’s such a pretty tile. I wonder why my mother ever covered it up.”
Lizzie’s father entered the kitchen with red eyes and a handkerchief clutched in his hand. Isobel remembered Uncle Jim as having laughing eyes, the sort of crinkled, good-natured look that made you want to tell the man a joke to see him laugh. She’d never seen him as old, but in the kitchen, with his back hunched, he might as well have been seventy as fifty. Annie looked more alive than he did at that moment. He exchanged a wordless look with her that appeared to convey the entirety of the conversation they’d had with their daughter.
Lizzie stood. “Whatever you have to say, I’m not sure it’ll be worth my time.”
“Let him say it,” Elyse said. “He’s your father.”
“What is it they say about the sins of the fathers?” he asked. “I didn’t want them to be yours. At the time it felt like nothing to keep it from you. I thought we could have the best of both worlds—that I could be your stepfather and never have to worry about your real father because I was that too. And I loved your mother so much that I couldn’t see making her less in your eyes. Anyway, we figured that to tell you and to admit to those around us what had happened would change how everyone looked at you.”
“Not just me,” Lizzie said. “You—both of you would be exposed.”
He hung his head and scuffed at the floor with the toe of his shoe. “We’ve tried to make it up, be the sort of people who make the world a better place.”
“You did that out of guilt. All of it—joining that church, serving the mission, all your good deeds weren’t done out of goodness, but out of obligation,” Lizzie took a step toward her mother. “Did you think you were forgiven when they dunked you under the water?”
“Lizzie, it wasn’t like that,” her mother said. “How could any of it be like that? It was the best we could do at the time.”
“And when I asked, kept asking, why didn’t you find a way to tell me?”
Lizzie’s father coughed. “You were right. It was more about us than about you. But once we’d made the decision, there never seemed to be a way out of it.”
“I saw what my mother went through having married her uncle, and I didn’t want to be that person known for the one sin I’d committed at the very beginning of my being an adult. My mother only got over it when I had you. With you, she was someone other than a sinner, a freak, and I wanted that. I kept telling myself that if we waited until you had your own family, it wouldn’t matter.”
“But I needed a father,” Lizzie said. She was inches from her mother’s face. “I needed a dad more than you needed to forget what you’d done.”
“I’m here,” Lizzie’s father said. “I’ve been here ever since I knew you existed. Can’t that be enough?”
“You want too much from us,” Lizzie’s mother said.
Lizzie drew back her hand and slapped her mother across the face. The echo of the sound silenced the entire house. Her father stepped in between them. “We were wrong,” he said. “We’re probably still doing it all wrong.”
“I want you to have the house.” Her mother rubbed at her cheek, where an
imprint of Lizzie’s hand had started to form. “After Drew called us to let us know what had happened, I realized that this house no longer belonged to me. I called a few people and found a nice place to rent starting next month out east with a big yard for the kids and closer to your father’s work.”
“I did all of this for you,” Lizzie said.
“I know.” Jim ran his hands along the countertop. “You thought you needed to make up for something. I can’t even imagine for what—”
“For failing,” Lizzie said.
“Oh, honey,” Lizzie’s mom reached out and wrapped her arms around her daughter. Isobel didn’t even realize she was crying until Elyse handed her a napkin. “You’re the best of us. Even in failure you can’t lose.”
“I don’t want the house,” Lizzie said between sobs. She pushed her mother away. “I want a normal family.”
“Then sell it,” her father said. “Use the money and start over. Make the family you want.”
Isobel moved to her cousin’s side. Elyse joined her, patting her back and making soothing noises over Lizzie’s sobbing. “If you two want to fix this, you’re going to have to come clean to everyone. Own up to what you’ve done then and now.”
Her father nodded. “I’m not afraid anymore.”
Lizzie’s mother stood up. “I’m putting the house in your name. When we move into the new house next month, it’ll be yours to do with what you want.”
Isobel sent Elyse to the car with Lizzie and then she hugged her aunt and uncle. “There’s no way to fix this right now. You need time. And you have to know that if she doesn’t want to fix this with you, then that has to be okay.”
“Someone should tell your mother the same thing,” Aunt Annie said.
New Year’s Eve was unusually warm. Isobel shucked off her jacket and stretched out on the blanket they’d laid on the bluff in the backyard of Spite House. Tom hooked his leg over hers and touched his head to hers. Behind them, she listened to the noises of Lizzie’s younger siblings as they ran through the house, gathering stray belongings in anticipation of the move to their larger and more suburban home the next day. Elyse stepped out of the kitchen and walked over to them.
“Ollie, ollie oxen free,” she said before joining them on the blanket.
“Are we base?” Tom asked. “I don’t know, but I’m tired of running.”
“She coming out?” Isobel asked.
“I think so,” Elyse grabbed for Isobel’s mink muff and shoved her hands in it. “T. J. told me he was going to pop the question out here.”
“Is she going to be okay?” Isobel asked.
Tom pulled Isobel on top of him and put his hands in her back pockets. “I think she’ll be fine. You girls are like those weighted punching bags—always bouncing back up.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Elyse said—ducking a mock punch from Tom.
“That’s true enough,” Tom said, and said more, but Isobel didn’t hear any of it over the fireworks that lit up the sky.
Lizzie stepped outside. “Hurry up,” she called to those still inside the house.
Isobel watched the explosions, thinking how much they all had to look forward to. Elyse would leave tomorrow for Boston. Her father had recently retired and had pushed her to come home. If she had to guess, she thought that he’d help her find what she wanted. She might have to put in a few more years tending bar, but she’d find her way to her dream. Isobel and Tom were flying to Missouri the next week to start filming an episode of her new show. The homeowners lived in a converted grain silo and had a list of repairs taller than the structure itself. And Lizzie. She looked behind her. Right then, T. J. was kneeling down asking her to marry him.
Behind them, Rosa May and her family clapped. The joy on their faces was brighter than the explosions of light in the sky. Aunt Annie and Uncle Jim stood back a ways, smiling but careful not to get too close. There was no way to fix everything, but they’d started and the love that existed between them gave Isobel hope. In her mind’s eye, Isobel saw a long and happy life for her cousin. One where she coached teams to victory and had the children she needed to heal the damage done by her family.
She looked then at the house—with its imposing wall of glass and saw the best of themselves reflected in it. Despite everything, Spite House had saved them all.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the author
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Meet Courtney Miller Santo
About the book
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A Brief History of Spite Houses
Spitefulness: The Short Beginning of Three Story House
Reading Group Discussion Questions
Read on
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More from Courtney Miller Santo
About the author
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Meet Courtney Miller Santo
Photo by Jenny Lederer
COURTNEY MILLER SANTO spent the first eighteen years of her life in the West and the last eighteen in the South. She doesn’t know which to call home and alternates between using “you guys” and “y’all” as her preferred second-person plural. She became interested in writing when she learned that letters form words but thought that to be an author you had to be a dead, bearded white man.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism at Washington and Lee University because it was the most practical way to see her name in print every day. She worked as a reporter in Charlottesville and Roanoke, Virginia, and tried very hard not to make her true stories better by lying. Eventually she gave up and discovered public relations, where businesses were happy to pay her to make their true stories better.
When her husband secured a job that provided health insurance and her children were old enough to tie their own shoes, she went back to school and wrote the novel she’d always wanted to write. The Roots of the Olive Tree, published in 2012, is loosely based on her great-grandmother, who could touch her toes and play Ragtime right up until she died at age 104. Redbook magazine selected the novel as its pick to relaunch its book club. Since its publication, hundreds of book clubs have enjoyed reading the story of five generations of mothers and daughters and asking one another “How long do you want to live?” and “What secrets will you keep from your children?”
Currently, Courtney teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis, where she earned her MFA. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, their two children, and their retired racing greyhound. Her newest book, Three Story House, like her first, is based on one of the stories her family tells when everyone is gathered together.
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About the book
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A Brief History of Spite Houses
GIVEN WHAT I KNOW about human nature, I’m almost certain that people have been building spite houses as long as they’ve been building houses, or tents for that matter. I can imagine an Ice Age family staking their mammoth-skin tent in a place that intentionally blocked the view of the know-it-all who routinely kept the best firewood for themselves. I became aware of spite houses when visiting Washington, D.C., in college. My roommates and I were at a restaurant (which was more like a bar) on Queen Street, and the waiter told us about a tiny house built in an alleyway down the street.
I found out more about the Hollensbury Spite House after that trip, but that night, staring at the alley-size house, I became an instant fangirl of all houses built out of spite. (I also snagged a commemorative brick from the sidewalk.) The idea that someone would build a house just to stop horses and buggies from traipsing through the alley next to his house delighted me, and I started to make up a story about who might live in the house now.
Over the years, I’ve collected stories about other houses. In Boston, I found the Skinny House, which is only ten feet wide and according to the legend was built when one brother tried to screw another out of his inheritance. He divided the property so tha
t his brother’s portion would be too narrow to build on. In Seattle, where my grandparents lived for many years, there is a house shaped like a piece of pie that was built after a disastrous divorce and unfair settlement. My sister married into a family who had a part in erecting a view-blocking addition in San Francisco’s Nob Hill, and then I discovered that Memphis had its very own version in the Winchester Mystery House, where out of spite a local lawyer kept adding to and altering his property, and ended up being forced to purchase his neighbor’s property.
There are, of course, thousands more houses built out of spite. I’d love to have you join the conversation and post pictures of your spite houses or just tell your spite stories. Join us on Tumblr at spitehouses.tumblr.com or feel free to post to www.facebook.com/courtneymsanto.
Spitefulness: The Short Beginning of Three Story House
AFTER HAVING HER PICTURE made in front of a bronze statue of Elvis, a woman wearing a dress several sizes too large boarded a trolley and took the seat nearest the driver. She was thirty-two years old and a minor celebrity thanks to her recent appearance on a weight-loss reality television program. Her first week on the show she lost twenty-seven pounds, which got her voted off. She returned for the last episode having lost another eighty-three pounds. And now, according to the scale, the woman was as thin as a rich man’s second wife, but needed the too-large dress to cover the folds of skin that had lost their elasticity. The town where she lived didn’t have the right kinds of doctors or even proper medical facilities, and so she’d come to Memphis. In a few days, a doctor would anesthetize her and perform what he euphemistically called a body lift, and yet as far as she could tell his work involved cutting away instead of lifting up.
Three Story House: A Novel Page 33