by Jonathan Dee
Haley didn’t have to do any sort of investigative reporting to learn any of this. It was all right there. She never even had to leave her desk. Most of it was on Wikipedia. It was the history of the town, and yet it wasn’t, because people didn’t want it to be.
She turned in her paper to Mr. Mac; he handed it back with the comment, “Wow! Nice job!” and a grade of A-minus, on account of her not using as much primary-source material as she might have. She didn’t tell him that she’d been through the entire Caldwell House “archive,” courtesy of her mother; it consisted mostly of Katarina’s journals and was sanitized to the point of uselessness. She showed her work to her mother, and that did not go well. Karen didn’t say much, but it was clear that she viewed Haley’s conclusions as a personal attack, meant to hurt her by denigrating something on which their survival depended, by which her own sense of integration with the town was defined. “I don’t know why you have to be so negative,” she said. “I know you’re a teenager and all that, but still.”
Haley’s knowing the truth changed nothing. She got a summer job as a busser at the fancy Todd Van Dyke restaurant where the Benihana used to be. Two hundred bucks per person for dinner and it was packed every night. She never recognized anyone in there. She wanted to talk to them, ask who they were and why they had come there, but the bussers had been told unambiguously on day one that they were never to speak to diners unless asked a question.
The training for the job was insane. Literally her only duty was to take away people’s dirty plates—which was more than enough to do, considering there were usually sixteen or more courses to each meal—yet it was considered necessary for her and the other back staff to spend a day tramping around a local organic farm, listening to lectures about soil and where vegetables come from. They took themselves so seriously. You’d think their job was feeding the poor, rather than the rich, who could fend for themselves just fine. To make things even more awkward, Haley learned on this field trip that one of her fellow summer employees was Allegra Durning, her former friend from Mullins. She felt some hostility there, that hybrid of hostility and condescension that reminded her of the school itself. Small towns were hard to grow up in, because inevitably you moved on from certain friendships but then the friends themselves remained right where they were, injured and resentful. Haley was already thinking how liberating it would be to move away from Howland, when she was able, to show up somewhere else where nobody was working off of some old version of you.
Something was changing about her—in her. She had less patience. She felt she saw things more clearly than other people, saw other people more clearly than they saw themselves. She tried to keep these insights private, but it wasn’t always easy. One night at the restaurant, the maître d’ seated in her area a family of five: father, mother, two girls and a boy, the oldest maybe nine or ten. Over the next hour and a half, Haley cleared away course after course that the children hadn’t touched. They didn’t complain, or even look especially miserable; they endured in silence, while their parents, who seemed quite happy—rapturous, even—talked to each other, mostly about the food. Haley couldn’t decide whether to feel solidarity with these strange children, clearly brought there against their will by their hideous parents whom they would probably grow up to resemble, or to feel like slapping them for refusing to eat a turnip or a carrot, because waste and money clearly meant nothing to them. Course thirteen was a small bowl of new potatoes in a chervil sauce; Haley watched the children stare impassively into their bowls for about five minutes and headed over to the table to clear their places again.
“Whoa, one second,” the mother said. “Kids, are you done with those?”
Haley was conscious of keeping her mouth from falling open. None of the kids had so much as tasted anything put in front of them for the past hour. They stared balefully at their mother and said nothing.
“All right,” she said to Haley, and resumed talking to her husband. But Haley must have stood there a moment too long before beginning to clear, because the mother—whose hair was black, who wore long earrings that looked like diamonds and a sleeveless dress to show off the sloped muscles in her arms—turned back to her: irritated, for just a second, and then self-deprecating. “I know,” she said. “It’s an awful waste. I’m sure they’d rather just go to the Taco Bell we passed on the way here, but we’re going to raise them to appreciate good things, instead of just succumbing to the ocean of crap. Am I right?”
“Are you?” Haley said.
She had the father’s attention now too. The mother gave it another try. “They’ve always been incredibly picky eaters,” she said, smiling. “They always want to know where everything comes from.”
“I was just wondering that about you,” Haley said.
She was fired. Both her parents were pretty angry at her, in their different ways; her dad gave her a lecture about disrespect and about the fad for hating wealthy people, and her mom pointed out how hard it would be to keep college admissions officers from noticing the anomaly of her early dismissal from what was supposed to be a summer job. It was already August, too late to find anything else. Her mom said she was damned if Haley would be rewarded for her bad behavior by getting to lounge around at home all month and watch TV, so she made Haley come to work with her at Caldwell House, to do some filing and copying and answer the phone. The work was off the books, but Karen said she’d pay Haley something if she did a decent job and managed not to mouth off judgmentally to any strangers.
It was the first time Haley had been inside the place since writing her research paper. Strangely, until she’d learned about the greed and venality of the people who built it, who lived and died in it, she’d never really looked at it as an actual home. It was more of a mock-up, a museum with beds in it. Now she saw traces of the Caldwells everywhere, even the poor dead children. The sterility of the house was their sterility. She felt like a trespasser. But in a good way. She retyped some of her mother’s boss’s correspondence, and she made sure the little glossy pamphlets, with their utterly bogus tragic history of the Caldwells, were stocked in the wooden boxes in the foyer and at the entrance to the gardens.
“You know,” Haley said, holding a stack of pamphlets, “the families of the strikers Caldwell’s guards killed were evicted from company housing that same day. Children too.”
“That was a hundred years ago,” Karen said, “and all of those people are dead now one way or the other, and you know what survives? This house. The beauty of it. Which also manages somehow to put a roof over our heads. So why don’t we try to focus on that?”
One afternoon Haley answered the phone—“Caldwell Foundation, how can I help you?”—and a woman on the other end asked if the second-floor bedrooms were reopened to visitors yet.
“They’re still undergoing renovation,” Haley said, which was what her mother had instructed her to say if this question came up. She said goodbye, and then sat and thought for a while. Her mother was out at the groundskeeping shed, talking to Richie, the head gardener. Haley left the desk and went upstairs to the master bedroom. There didn’t seem to be any trace of renovation going on. The bed, huge and ornate, had a plastic-encased mattress on it, with no sheets or pillows. It didn’t look particularly attractive, nor comfortable, but still, there was no reason Haley could see why people shouldn’t even be allowed to look at it.
What was a house, anyway, and what wasn’t? Her aunt had been fired and then pretty well driven out of the Berkshires (not that she would have stayed) not so much for providing shelter as for providing the wrong kind of shelter, unauthorized shelter. The space she thought was hers, she’d been angrily corrected, was not hers, nor its usefulness hers to determine. And now Haley found herself in this space, which scorned usefulness itself. As a child, she had never once imagined her room as someone else’s room before it was hers, but of course it was exactly that: it was a space, and over time you and others passed through it. A house passed from occupant to occupant, and its h
istory, or the memory of its history, was wiped clean each time. She could see an argument for taking the Caldwells’ house out of that rotation, so to speak, as a way of immortalizing the crime of its construction. But that’s not what was happening here at all. The people of Howland preserved it, guarded it, took pride in it, when they should have gotten together and somberly burned it to the ground.
One Friday afternoon toward the end of August, her mom had a doctor’s appointment. Friday, according to the custody schedule, was the day Haley switched houses; Karen asked her to ask her father if he would mind picking her up from work. “You don’t have to worry about locking up the house,” she said, “I’ll get Richie to do that.” Haley said okay. At three, her mother kissed her goodbye and said she’d see her Monday morning and drove off. Haley sat in the empty office. Then she went out and sat in the empty dining room, watching, from the cool indoor gloom, the mothers and children on the manicured lawn. She recalled the “progressive dinner,” something she hadn’t thought about in years: the feeling, in the aftermath, of having struck some sort of blow, but secretly, allegorically, and without consequences. She still saw that Walker kid sometimes in the hallways at Regional, but they didn’t have any of the same classes. She went back into the office behind the kitchen and dialed her father’s number.
“Daddy,” she said, “I’m so sorry to spring this on you last minute, but a friend of mine from the restaurant invited me to the Cape with her family for the weekend. Is it okay with you if I go?”
“Well, sure, honey,” her dad said, “I guess. What are they, giving you a ride?”
“Yeah. They’re picking me up straight from here. From work.”
“It’s okay with your mom?”
“Well, yeah, plus it’s technically your week or whatever now, so.”
“You need me to bring you any stuff?”
“No,” she said, though only when she said it did it occur to her that she didn’t have anything with her but what she wore. “They want to come back early Monday morning, to avoid the traffic, so I’ll just have them drop me off straight here, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, sounding a little quiet like he sometimes did now in the face of disappointment. She loved him for that. “I’ll see you, what, Monday night then I guess?”
“I guess,” she said. “Thanks. Love you.”
Around four forty-five, Haley turned out all the office lights and walked quietly upstairs to the Caldwells’ master bedroom. Almost an hour later, she heard the front door open. Richie’s footsteps resounded as he walked through the first floor and switched off the lamps in the front parlor, the dining room, the ballroom, the foyer. He exited again, and Haley heard the chirps of the alarm-system keypad as he locked up the house behind him for the weekend.
There were still hours of daylight left, which meant she wasn’t all alone in total darkness but also necessitated staying away from the windows. Not that there was much chance of her being seen—not once the grounds were closed, anyway; the house was set too far back from the road for its windows to be visible through the trees. Still, she was relieved when night fell. When fatigue overcame her, she slipped off her shoes and climbed onto the Caldwells’ bed. The mattress was a good one, though she did miss the presence of at least a sheet. She thought she might have seen, once, where the house linens were kept, but it was too dark now, she would have to look in the morning.
She’d gamed out so little of what she was doing that she hadn’t even thought about food. She remembered her mother leaving a yogurt in the office fridge, but when she looked for it Saturday morning, it wasn’t there. The solution, she decided, wasn’t so complicated; she knew the code for disarming the security system (her mother hadn’t shown her, exactly, but Haley had watched her do it enough times), so she just punched in the numbers and left the house to walk into town. It was less than a mile each way to the Price Chopper, open but empty at that hour; she bought some snacks, drinks, protein bars, and the like—nothing that needed to be cooked—and in the parking lot she transferred it all from the plastic Price Chopper bag to her backpack. She felt nervous walking back up the driveway to the house, and she realized that was because she’d forgotten to lock the front door behind her. She felt that kind of ownership of the place, like it was hers and she’d left it exposed. As quickly as that. Inside, she locked the door behind her and reset the alarm.
The house was closed to visitors on the weekend but the grounds were kept open. Haley dragged a heavy wooden chair over to the window, then pulled it back a few feet, and sat watching the strangers on the grass at the foot of the great house, vicariously entertained, like an invalid, while she thoughtfully ate a protein bar. She imagined one of the children looking up at the window and trying to convince his impatient mother that he had seen a ghost.
She tested on herself various theories or explanations of what the hell she was doing. A political protest. Mental illness. The cheap thrill of petty crime. Running away from home. Performance art. All these explanations could be made to fit but didn’t convince. The truth was that she had no easily articulated idea of the why of what she was doing. She was doing it in the first place in order to figure that out.
All that time alone, in silence, unstimulated, undistracted, would invite a person to think, and she did spend most of the weekend thinking; yet if you’d asked her on Sunday night, as she asked herself, what she’d thought about, she wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Monday morning she made sure every trace of her presence was gone—food wrappers gathered, chair dragged back from the window; there wasn’t much other than that, really—and waited nervously for her mother. She heard lawnmowers buzzing outside. She realized she couldn’t explain being inside the house—her mother didn’t know she knew the code—so she deactivated the alarm, went outside, reset it, and sat on the steps. Ten minutes later Karen’s car pulled into the lot. She unlocked the front door and looked alertly around the front hall before her eyes landed back on her daughter, who was wearing the same clothes she’d worn to work on Friday. “Jesus, doesn’t he even make you brush your hair?” Karen said.
There were guided tours every other Wednesday, but otherwise those who had purchased a grounds pass were free to walk around and explore as they pleased. It agitated Haley to hear, or even to imagine, people—strangers, the public—walking in and out of the house, up and down the stairs, leaning over the CLOSED FOR RENOVATION signs in the bedroom doorways. At four thirty Haley’s father pulled into the parking lot and waited for her—he never came into the house—to take her home. It wasn’t so bad at her father’s. A little depressing, but that was mostly just because she could feel how much it depressed him. And it felt so temporary. They could never make it theirs. She kissed her mother goodbye, went out to the lot, kissed her father hello, and rode home.
She took a long shower before dinner. Her dad struggled heroically with cooking for her; tonight it was a version of something her mom used to make, ziti with sausage and broccoli. He ate only the broccoli.
“So how was the Cape?” he said.
“Amazing,” Haley said. “I had no idea how rich these people were. The house was huge. Big enough for three families. And they’re only there like four or five times a year. The rest of the time it just sits empty.”
She felt, out of nowhere, the sting of tears, but she managed to suppress it.
“Isn’t that messed up?” she said.
Her dad smiled faintly. “Yeah, well,” he said. “There’s a lot of houses like that around here too. Family places. Not your home, but a place you can come home to. And you can have more than one place that feels like home to you, as you well know. Houses are a strange business. It’s rarely got to do with need, literal need I mean.”
“Not a lot of justice to it,” Haley said. “That business.”
“I don’t know if it’s a question of justice, really,” Mark said.
She went to bed that night exhausted and fell asleep instantly but then woke in the dead of night, a
s if she had jet lag or something. She’d been sleeping in that bedroom for almost a year—not right after they sold the old house, there was another short-term rental in between. She hardly remembered that place now at all. All the stuff in this current room was her stuff. In the middle of the night she had to pick out various objects in the darkness and reassure herself where she was.
She drove herself to work at the mansion the next morning, and left again that afternoon. It occurred to her, at one point—looking up at Caldwell House from the parking lot, waiting for the Escort to start, trying not to flood it as she’d been taught—that she was very likely the first person to have spent a night under that roof in fifty or sixty years, maybe more. That didn’t make her feel proud or subversive. It made her feel outraged. Why was this, the grandest, certainly the largest house in town, built by cold-blooded invaders, supposed to just sit there? Why was that supposed to be beautiful? It belonged to each of them if it belonged to anyone at all. But instead they made a fetish of it, and they told themselves that fetish was their history. Which it was, just not in the way they thought.
That night, after she’d said good night to her dad and closed her bedroom door, she stuffed a duffel bag and a backpack with as many clothes and simple toiletries as she could fit. There was no way to wake up earlier than he did, but in the morning she waited in her room until the noise in the pipes behind her wall told her he was in the shower, and she dragged her bags through the house and onto the back seat of the Escort. She was very calm. She looked through his cabinets for any nonperishable food but there wasn’t much: nuts, mostly, and vitamins. “Ready already?” he said when he entered the kitchen. His hair looked thin when it was wet. He looked beaten and sad. She noticed these changes in him this morning just as if she hadn’t seen him for years.