by Peter Straub
“This is the only part we added ourselves,” she said. “It’s a wonderful place to come to see the animals outside. The birds too. It’s on a separate zone, so you can sit here in the cold season without spending your money on heating the rest of the house.”
“That’s nice,” Richard said, thinking and then you take a quarter-mile hike to get to the kitchen.
“You’d probably like it if the rest of the house were like this,” Mrs. Bamberger said. “Most young people feel that way. My husband and I just love the old cottage, low ceilings and all. It reminded us of Miss Marple.”
Richard smiled: that was perfect. The original building needed only a thatched roof to make it an English country cottage in an Agatha Christie novel.
“Is there anything else you’d like to ask Mrs. Bamberger about the house?” Ronnie put in a little desperately.
The Allbees looked at each other. Let’s get out of here.
“Of course I have too much imagination,” Mrs. Bamberger said. “That’s what my husband used to say. But I know something that’s not imagination. You’re Richard Allbee, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Richard said. Here it comes, he thought.
“You were born in Hampstead at the end of the war? And you moved out to California before you went to school?”
Puzzled, Richard nodded.
“Then I knew your father,” she said.
Richard’s mouth fell open. “I never did,” he managed to say. “I never knew him, I mean. Apparently he didn’t care much for babies.”
Mrs. Bamberger was fixing him with a very steady gaze. She suddenly reminded him of his fifth-grade teacher. “Never should have married, that’s what. But he gave you your handsome face. He was shortish, like you. A very well-mannered man. But Michael Allbee was a butterfly. Could never stick to anything.”
Richard felt as if the floor were swaying. He knew he would always remember these moments, they would be part of him forever: the fat old woman in a polyester pantsuit standing before a bookshelf in a room with a glass wall. Then I knew your father. Michael Allbee. He had never heard his father’s first name before. “What else can you tell me?” he asked.
“He was good with his hands. Are you?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
“And he was pure charm. He only lived down the road. Michael used to come here to help out with the repairs and the lawn. He worked on houses all over this town. After he met Mary Green he stopped coming here, and pretty darn near broke my husband’s heart. We were going to help put him through college. But then he had the Green money to back him up, so he didn’t need us anymore.” She smiled at Richard. “Most ways, he was a good man. Nothing to be ashamed of. He didn’t marry for money. Your father wasn’t that sort.”
“He worked on houses?” Richard asked, scarcely believing it.
“As much as he did anything, that was what he did. My husband always thought he could have been an architect. But he could have been a contractor, anything of that sort.”
“Do you know if he’s alive?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. He was one of those people who never spend a minute thinking about the future, so it could be he still has one. He’d be in his early sixties today.”
Somewhere in the world a white-haired man with his face was buying a paper or cutting the grass. Living in a flophouse. Playing with children who would be Richard’s own nieces and nephews. Standing on the deck of a cargo ship smoking a pipe. Asleep in a hut on a beach. Begging from strangers in Billy Bentley clothes.
“Is your mother still alive?” Mrs. Bamberger asked.
“No. She died six years ago.”
“Mary was the strong one. I bet she made you work. She would have been afraid of that irresponsible streak.”
“Yes. Yes, I worked.”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” the old woman said. “On your mother’s side, you go right back to the earliest days in these parts. Your great-great-great- and a couple more greats grandfather settled this town in 1645. Josiah Green. One of the original Greenbank farmers. You’ve got pure Hampstead blood all through you. Greenbank blood. That’s where we started.”
“How do you know all this?” Richard asked.
“I know more about this town than anyone except old Graham Williams and Stanley Crane up at the library. And maybe I know almost as much as they do. I studied it, Mr. Allbee. I know all about those Greenbank farmers. A sharpie named Gideon Winter came in and got most of their land from them. I have a few ideas about him, but you wouldn’t be interested in them. You’re looking for a house, and you don’t want to listen to an old woman talk all morning long.”
“No,” Richard said. “No, that’s not true. I, uh, I . . .”
She squared her shoulders. “Are you going to buy my house?”
“Well, we have to talk about it, there are a lot of factors . . .”
She kept on looking into his eyes.
“No,” he said.
“Then someone else will. I’ll take you back to your car.”
As she opened the door for them, she said to Richard, “Your father had a lot to offer. I hope you have as much, young man.”
When they were safely in Ronnie’s Ford, Laura asked, “How do you feel?”
“I don’t know. I’m glad we came. I’m sort of stunned.”
“Let’s go back to town for lunch or coffee or something,” Ronnie said. “You look like you could use it.”
He nodded, and she backed out of the driveway. Just before she pulled out onto the street, Ronnie said, “Do you want to go up the other way? You could see where your father lived—there are only two other houses up this way. It has to be one of them.”
“No,” he said. “No, thanks. Let’s just go back to town.”
3
That was how the Allbees came to Greenbank and Beach Trail. They came in the afterglow of a revelation, and they bought the first house they saw.
“I think you’ll like this one,” Ronnie said as she took them down Sawtell Road. They turned right at the traffic light into Greenbank Road. “It belongs to another widow, Bonnie Sayre. Mrs. Sayre moved out last week, and the house has only been on the market a couple of days. We got the listing Monday. The Sayre house has four bedrooms, a living room, and a beautiful study Richard could use as an office. Both the living room and the study have fireplaces. There’s a nice porch too. The house was built in the 1870’s by the Sayre family, and it’s never been on the market before. The Sayres’ son is in Arizona, and his mother went there to live with him.”
She went over the bridge which crossed I-95 and then the smaller, almost humpbacked railway bridge just beyond it. “And Greenbank is a special sort of area. It has its own zip code and post office, and it’s the oldest part of Hampstead. Well, you know that. It might even have been named for one of your ancestors.”
“My mother never talked about Hampstead much,” Richard said. “All I knew was that we and my father were born here. Laura’s parents too.”
“Is that right?” Ronnie asked, delighted. “So this is a real homecoming. Oh, take a look to your right. That big house right on the Sound is Dr. Van Horne’s. We’re on Mount Avenue now. They call it the Golden Mile.”
“How much would a place like that cost?” Richard asked. Dr. Van Horne’s house, three stories of spotless white clapboard, was as long as a hotel. Its front looked directly over the last stretch of Gravesend Beach. A long drive wound through parklike grounds.
“Right now, I’d have to say nearly eight hundred thousand dollars. And that’s without a tennis court or in-ground pool.”
“We can’t afford this neighborhood,” Laura said matter-of-factly.
“The Sayre house is priced lower than the carriage house we were looking at,” Ronnie said. “It has two drawbacks. Don’t groan yet. The first is that it faces backward—you see the rear of the house as you drive up. There’s a little hill, and the original Sayre, the one who built it, I guess wanted t
o look down into the forest that was there.”
“What’s the second reason?” Laura asked.
“Well, Mrs. Sayre lived alone for a long time, I guess. She took in a lot of cats. I guess she got a little crazy a few years after her husband died. In fact, she took in all the cats. She must have had a hundred of them. When I heard about her, people just called her the cat lady.”
“Oh, no,” Laura said.
“Well, they’re not still there,” Ronnie said. “But the memory does linger on. Be grateful! If it weren’t for all those cats, the house would have been sold on Monday. There was an offer in for the asking price, but the prospect backed out when he got a whiff.”
“It’s really bad?” Laura asked.
“It’s rank, just rank,” Ronnie said, laughing.
“I know how to handle that,” Richard said simply. “White wine, vinegar, and baking soda. Then a lot of soap and water.”
The car turned up Beach Trail. Ronnie knew, but did not tell the Allbees, the reason why all the shades were drawn in the Hughardt home. Charlie Antolini, still too happy to go to work, waved from his porch swing. They went past an impoverished-looking party in black tennis shoes, Yankee cap, and baggy black sweatshirt. The old party was pushing himself home on the last leg of the daily constitutional, and his own last legs. They never noticed him, but being inquisitive, he noticed them.
I saw your mother, Lump. You would have been beautiful.
4
A second or two later the Allbees beheld their house for the first time.
5
From the journals of Richard Allbee:
* * *
We’re house owners again, or will be as soon as I get a mortgage. We signed the papers and paid the first small check this afternoon in Ronnie’s office. Does anybody know if he’s doing the right thing when he buys a house? I can see myself waking up in the middle of the night tonight, wondering if the kitchen is even smaller and darker than I remember. Are all the sash cords broken? Will I find some way to run wires down through the house without knocking holes in the walls? (The wiring is ancient.) How much water got in past the deterioriated flashing on the roof? Rotted timbers? And will one of those chimneys have to come down? The list of these questions could go on forever. And there’s the smell, of course. It’s bad enough to cause brain damage. The whole house was one huge catbox.
But it’s a beautiful house. When Laura and I walked in, we had one of those flashes of marital ESP and simultaneously said, “This is it.” I think Laura will love it, and that makes everything else unimportant. It’s a Second Empire house: mansard roof, rounded dormer windows, pillars beside the door, lots of good ornamentation. Very much the kind of house Laura and I hoped we’d find but were afraid we couldn’t afford. The back, which faces the street, is very plain, but the front is stunning, and even the view into the gardens down the little hill is wonderful. I’m high on the place—I’m even pleased by its looking backward, which seems so appropriate to my work. And when I look into the future—our future, Laura’s and mine—I think the old Sayre house will be a perfect place to raise our children. Big rooms, two acres of nice ground, an attic to make into a playroom—what fantastic, fantastic luck. I asked God to help us a couple of nights back, and I guess He did.
This day I acquired both a house and a father, and I cannot keep the latter out of my thoughts for long. Michael Allbee. I am sure he is still living. And I wonder if he might have worked on the old Sayre house while he lived in Hampstead. If he was a sort of free-lance carpenter, it’s possible.
Maybe luck really has visited us and our troubles will begin to leave. Maybe, at least, I will stop dreaming of Billy Bentley.
This is such a happy entry that I don’t want to mention last night’s dream—but for the sake of having something to smile at years from now, I’ll put it down. I was in the living room of a strange house. It was stripped bare. I was waiting for something. Outside was a streaming violent storm. I looked out the window and saw a figure pacing on the front lawn, and when I looked more closely I saw that it was Billy Bentley. In that instant he whirled around to face me directly. He scared me. That is the simple way to put it. He was grimacing at me fiercely. Rain had plastered his long hair to his skull. He was the embodiment of bad luck, of coming doom. The sky raged, and a ragged bolt of lightning sizzled into the ground behind him. Billy knew I wanted to keep him out of the house—that was suddenly the crucial element. He had to be kept outside in the storm. In agitation, I began to move around the empty room, and I woke up barely able to keep myself from going downstairs to make sure the doors were locked.
Enough of such stuff. As soon as we have the house tied up, I’ll go to Rhode Island to locate a contractor for the work up there. I have a couple of leads. . . .
6
Telpro had given Leo Friedgood a week off, and he had requested another week, promising to be back in the office on Monday, the second of June. For seven days he had seen policemen almost every waking hour, either in his house or in a dingy little room of the cramped old Hampstead police station. During these sessions he had been forced to admit that his wife had been intimate with several other men, and that he had condoned, if not encouraged, her sexual activities. Admitting this had made Leo feel stripped bare. It was a humiliation deeper than any he had ever known. The police, at first sympathetic, had turned cold, almost contemptuous toward him. A massive old uniformed cop the others called Turtle smacked his lips at Leo the third or fourth time he went to the station. That this ravaged old brute, a failure even by police standards, might be expressing an attitude held by the other officers and detectives gnawed at Leo. He was a success, they were not. (By Leo’s standards, no policeman could be a success.) He paid more in property taxes and mortgage payments than they made in a year. He was more powerful than they, more an engine in the world. His wristwatch was worth a third of their salary, his car three-fourths. But these things which meant so much to Leo seemed to count very little with the police who questioned him. Even when he was no longer even faintly a suspect, he had felt their contempt. “How many times a month did your wife go to Franco’s? How many times in the past month? Didn’t you ever ask her the names of the men she brought back? Did you ever take any pictures?”
The face of that fat old wreck called Turtle pushing out his meaty lips—bah! He was sure they laughed about him in those little rooms. This knowledge as much as his genuine mourning for Stony kept him home, incapable of working.
For the first time in his life, Leo drank at night. He warmed TV dinners or burned hamburgers under the grill, and invaded his cellar for good wines to waste on these terrible meals. Before dinner there would have been several whiskeys. With rubbery salt-heavy goulash in a tin tray he would drink a bottle of Brane-Cantenac 1972 Margaux while the television blared out soothing stupidities. When the uneaten half of the awful dinner went into the garbage, he began on malt whiskey or cognac until he passed out. One day he found an Israeli liqueur made of chocolate, and downed the entire bottle in two nights. He could not weep—as if the sight of Stony’s mutilated body disarrayed on their bed had burned all the tears from him. Sometimes he put on a record and shuffled around the living room in a drunken lonely dance, his eyes closed, glass slopping in his fist, pretending he was a stranger dancing with his wife.
Doesn’t your husband mind your doing this sort of thing?
Mind? It’s how he gets off.
He slept in the guest room. If he managed to get to bed before unconsciousness felled him, he took a glass with him. Two mornings, he woke up and caught an odor like that of death from a half-filled tumbler perfectly balanced on his chest.
The pale brown duvet bore a damp kidney-shaped stain that smelled equally of the distillery and the graveyard. The television set facing the bed showed crazed American couples leaping openmouthed before an oleaginous gent with a racetrack suit and dyed hair. A game show. “Oh, my God,” Leo said. Head, mouth, stomach, all were in disorder. He was due at the p
olice station in three hours. Maybe Turtle Turk would be there again, leering at him.
Hurriedly he got out of bed, switched off the television set, and went into the bathroom. His bowels released a ribbon of flame into the toilet. He dialed the shower up to an uncomfortable hotness and stepped in. The water boiled his hair and face. His hands found the soap. Leo lathered his chest, belly, balls. The stink of the night before sluiced toward the drain. He soaped himself again and more luxuriously, now feeling no worse than on the nine previous mornings. Leo let the water drum on his skin, needle against his tongue. For a moment he forgot about Turtle Turk, about Stony, about General Haugejas, about Woodville Solvent and DRG.
When he turned off the shower he noticed the specks on his hands.
He stared at them with incomprehension, dimly aware that the appearance of white spots on his hands meant something important to him but momentarily unaware of what they signified. Then he remembered what had happened to the body of Tom Gay.
“Hey,” Leo said, grabbing for a towel. He dried himself quickly and inexpertly, all the while trying to keep his hands in view. Blue jeans, polo shirt, boat shoes. He licked at the spots and encountered slipperiness. He scrubbed the backs of his hands on his jeans. A few of the spots were now pink—like pitted little mouths. Leo watched in dread as the pinkness gradually filled in with white.
“Oh, my God,” he said. His mind seemed frozen by the touch of an icy thread emanating from his belly. Panic recalled to him an irrelevant vision of a burning car wedged beneath a truck, the more pertinent memory of the three bodies in the glass room. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”
The telephone rang four times behind him, then ceased.
Leo was staring at the backs of his hands, which were flattened on the rumpled duvet. How many spots were there? Ten altogether? On his left hand they described an irregular oval from the bottom of his thumb to the base of his little finger; on his right they fanned upward from his wrist. He prodded with his index: a trace of slipperiness came off. Leo shuddered. Still in the first stages of his panic, he began to pace aimlessly around the bedroom, holding his hands out before him.