by Lea Wait
I hoped they’d hired local people. People in Haven Harbor could use the work. And without even seeing the inside of this place, it was evident there’d be full employment here for builders, electricians, plumbers, painters, and wallpaper hangers for some time.
It would take a lot more than paint to make the house livable. And even fixed up, the carriage house wasn’t a place I’d imagined show business celebrities would live. And now they were staying in a motel? Typical Maine, but way below Hollywood standards.
“Have you checked out the bed-and-breakfasts in town?” I suggested. “Several of them are quite luxurious, and you’d be closer to Aurora.”
“Don’t worry. For now, the motel is fine.” She hesitated. “We’re hoping Haven Harbor will be our summer home in the future. We didn’t want to impose on the people who live here.”
“When Mom stays somewhere, it often causes a bit of commotion,” Patrick added. “We’re staying south of here, out on Route 1, to try to keep our presence as quiet as we can for right now. We won’t be there long.” He headed toward the carriage house as Skye opened the wide front door and Sarah and I followed her into the large front hall.
No one said anything at first. I suspected Skye wanted us to absorb the beauty of the place and its potential. And the incredible task she—and we—had taken on.
We were facing a wide oak-paneled staircase, which climbed to an open-railed hallway circling the second floor. Above it, another staircase led to what I assumed was a third floor.
In 1970, the only year I knew much about the family, the Gardeners had been a family of three. This place must have been overwhelming then. Possibly earlier generations of Gardeners had been larger. And I suspected guests visited frequently. Also, I reminded myself, they’d had live-in help.
I was no expert on elegance, but the water-stained carvings on the oak staircase and woodwork must once have been spectacular. Elaborate scrollwork imitating rolling waves might have been considered simple when this house had been built. Today the dark oak overwhelmed the entrance hall.
“‘Buzz the dull flies—on the chamber window—Brave— shines the sun through the freckled pane—Fearless—the cobweb swings from the ceiling,’” Sarah said, almost whispering.
“What?” Skye asked. “I didn’t catch that.”
“Emily Dickinson. But she was writing about the home of a woman who had died,” said Sarah.
We were all silent. After all, this home, too, had held death. It smelled of mildew, as well as other scents I wasn’t sure I wanted to identify.
If the rest of the house was like this, Sarah wouldn’t have much to appraise. It would all have to go.
I started snapping pictures. I made sure to show the entire hall, and then focused on close-ups of damage to the floor, carpet, and woodwork.
The walls had once been papered in a gray blue scroll pattern, echoing the pattern carved in the woodwork. Most of that paper had peeled off, revealing large patches of mold. The enormous brass chandelier was now green, and a large hole in the floor blocked the entrance to one of the side rooms.
How could the family have let it decay so? I began to understand why Anna Winslow had suggested it just be torn down. Once, this place might have been a showcase. Today it was a disaster.
Skye West was the first to speak. “As you can see, she’s a grand old lady, but she needs a little tender loving care.”
I glanced over at Sarah, who was shaking her head. I couldn’t imagine the amount of money and time it would take to return Aurora to its earlier glory. Or even to habitable condition. I took several pictures of each wall. “I’m going to photograph it all,” I explained. “You’ll have a record of what was here, and what condition it was in when you bought it.”
“I’d appreciate that,” said Skye. “I’ve already found photographs showing what it was like in the forties, fifties, and sixties. I’d love to put together an album of those, plus pictures of what the house looks like now, and how it will look after we finish fixing it up.”
With all the money I assumed the Wests had at their disposal, why hadn’t they bought one of the big modern homes being built along the coast? Those homes were clean, open, welcoming, energy efficient . . . and didn’t reek of mildew and rotting boards.
“How did you happen to find this place?” I had to ask. “What brought you to Haven Harbor?”
As Skye turned toward me, a small piece of gray plaster fell off the ceiling onto her shoulder. “I like a challenge,” she said, brushing off the plaster. “I’d seen pictures of what Aurora once was. It’s always been my dream to restore an old home.”
Maybe Aurora had been featured in a glossy decorator magazine years ago. Or in an article about the Gardeners. Wherever Skye had first seen it, she’d certainly picked a home with plenty of room for improvement.
“I wish I’d seen it in its heyday,” said Sarah. She looked around once more and then opened her notebook and started to write. “The only thing in the hall worth appraising is the chandelier, and I’d need to see that closer to decide whether it was worth restoring.”
“When the construction crew gets here I’ll ask them to take it down. I don’t expect you to climb a two-story ladder.”
Sarah made a note. “Great. Where would you like us to start?”
Skye pointed to Sarah’s right. “Let’s begin with the living room. The first floor is in better condition than the second and third floors. The other floors protected it somewhat from leaks in the roof.”
The large living room was filled with upholstered furniture that squirrels or raccoons had torn apart. Some of the pieces had once been covered with needlework. The animals hadn’t cared. If any of the furniture was worth saving, all the upholstery would need to be replaced. I walked over to a large sofa with a carved oak back. Was it worth restoring? That would be up to Sarah and Skye. Victorian furniture wasn’t exactly my area of expertise. I took some overall shots of the room and then started at the door to the front hall and began photographing the furniture, paintings, and decorations on the right-hand wall.
“This room is going to take some time to document,” Sarah pointed out to Skye. “It looks as though everything is the way the Gardeners left it.” She looked into a pair of glass cabinets, where blue-and-white china shared shelf space with rounded sea stones, shells, and sea glass.
I focused my camera on each shelf. I didn’t know anything about china, although that blue color was relatively common in Maine. But were these pieces the then-inexpensive china used as ballast by sea captains returning from the Orient in the 1800s or modern reproductions? I knew more about the shells and stones. Shelves in my bedroom were filled with similar souvenirs of the sea. How long had these summer finds been here? Who’d collected them?
The house was over a hundred years old. I’d never thought of nineteenth-century “rusticators,” as summer visitors to Maine were called then, searching beaches for the same treasures I’d looked for as a child. But perhaps they had.
“Your idea that we should walk through the house first to get an overview was a good one,” said Skye, stepping over a hole in the floor and heading out of the living room toward the room across the hall. “Why don’t you wait to take notes and pictures until after I’ve shown you the whole place? That way you’ll have an idea of how much work you’ll have to do. The dining room is this way.”
Aurora’s long mahogany dining table could have seated fourteen people easily, and I suspected a wall-length sideboard would contain treasures. But what I saw first were the three mounted heads hanging over the marble mantel: one moose, complete with antlers, one bear, and a five-point buck. Displaying hunters’ trophies wasn’t unheard of in Haven Harbor, but it was much more common in hunting lodges and homes farther Down East. Based on the condition of the heads, some Gardener from a while back must have been a hunter. When I was able to take my eyes off the animal heads, I realized there also were two large fish displayed over the sideboard: a cod, of a size not often seen o
ff the coast of Maine today, and a striped bass. None of the preserved creatures were in good condition; the bedraggled animals were missing patches of hair, and one fish was missing a tail.
I wouldn’t have chosen them for my dining room.
On the other hand, on the long outside wall, a series of framed needlepoint panels was hanging between the windows.
Sarah and I both moved toward them.
Chapter 5
Embroidery decks the canvas round and yields a pleasing view, so virtue tends to deck the mind and form its blissful state.
—Sampler embroidered by Nabby Kollock Ide (1790–1813), Wrentham, Massachusetts, 1804
I walked over to look at one of the large needlepoint panels more closely. “This is Haven Harbor Lighthouse,” I said.
Skye nodded. “All the needlework panels in this room are places here at Aurora, or close by, in Haven Harbor.” She pointed at the one closest to her. “That’s the main staircase in the house. And I love the one of a moose in a field of flowers, over near the door to the kitchen.”
Sarah walked to the other side of the room, looking carefully at each panel in turn. “Is this the fountain that used to be in front of the house?”
“Yes,” said Skye.
The fountain Mrs. Gardener had destroyed after Jasmine’s death in 1970—I’d never seen a picture of it. Just as Ob had described it, the statue of a naked woman, partially concealed by a cape, was surrounded by plumes of water. The pool looked shallow—too shallow to have drowned someone. Maybe Jasmine had stumbled on the stone border and had hit her head.
“In old photos of Aurora, the fountain is beautiful,” Skye went on. “And Millie Gardener did all this needlework. More of her stitching is upstairs, but these pieces are her best. Because she’d had them framed, they were better protected than a lot of her pillows and wall hangings. I’d like them restored, if possible.”
I was still staring at the needlepointed panel of the fountain. Why had Mrs. Gardener chosen to stitch a picture of the place her daughter died?
“We can restore these,” I said, focusing back on Skye’s question. I took mental notes: a picture of Second Sister Island, one of the three islands in Haven Harbor; the Haven Harbor Town Pier; an eagle flying over the yacht club building; the Congregational Church building; a wide view of Haven Harbor itself, filled with small sailboats and lobster boats. Sarah didn’t say anything, but pointed to mildewing in the stitching of some, to be sure I noticed it. Several of the pictures were also water-stained. I lifted one of those off the wall. The wall was stained, too. Strong winds must have driven heavy rain or snow through the clapboards onto the inside walls of the house.
“These panels are special, and were made for this house. They should stay here,” I agreed. “We won’t know how much work conservation and restoration will take until we remove the panels from their frames. We’ll need to remove the backings and replace them with acid-free cloth. Some are mildewed, some have water damage, and the yarn in several has faded or broken. The work is lovely, but the panels aren’t old enough to have value as antiques. If you’d agree, we could reinforce some of the stitching and perhaps replace some. Restore them so they’d look close to their original state.” I hoped I was right. I was still learning about needlepoint restoration.
I must have sounded authoritative. Skye looked around the room and added, “And they should all be reframed with acid-free materials and sun-resistant glass. Can you do all that?”
Sarah and I looked at each other.
“We can,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt. “We could have these back to you within a month, unless we find major problems when we take them apart.”
“You’ll let me know about that,” Skye said. “Take them all when you leave today so they won’t get mixed in with the items we’re going to sell. I love these pictures. And if they take you a little longer than you think to fix, that’s all right. The house won’t be finished for more than a month or two.”
A month or two? It looked to me as though the place would takes years of work. “We’ll need you to choose new frames when the stitching is finished.”
“I’ll be here all summer,” said Skye. “I’ll be reading scripts, but I don’t have any projects lined up until late in the fall. Restoring Aurora is my priority now.”
We moved on.
The kitchen pipes had broken at some point; the floor there was so rotten we didn’t dare examine the cabinets or their contents. I suspected Mrs. Gardener hadn’t done much cooking in the years she’d lived here alone. Either she’d had a cook, or she’d eaten out a lot. When the family had been here, the cook probably had an assistant or two. The kitchen was as large as a small diner. Now it was unusable. And it looked as though it had been that way more than the almost-twenty-years since Mrs. Gardener had died.
Everywhere I looked, the house needed serious repairs requiring even more serious money.
I hoped Skye had some blockbuster scripts to read. Did she have any idea how much it would cost to restore this place? It would be cheaper to paper it with dollar bills.
“We have to be careful where we step on the second floor,” said Skye, leading the way up the front stairway. “Patrick and I found rotten boards in several rooms. Some are under the carpeting.”
I sniffed. Mildewed carpets. They would all have to go.
The only furniture in the second-floor hallway was a built-in window seat overlooking Haven Harbor. The clear glass windows were outlined in green-and-blue stained glass. Unfortunately, two sections of the glass were missing, so rain and snow had blown in. Ocean breezes filled the hallway.
“I can hardly wait to have this sitting area repaired,” said Skye, looking at the damp seat cushion and the several needlepoint cushions on it. “I don’t think these pillows are worth trying to save.”
I agreed. The pillows were water-stained and mildewed; their threads faded. One had been torn apart. By a bird in the house? A squirrel? “They must have been lovely once,” I said, looking at one of a puffin and another that might have been a laughing gull. “But I agree. I don’t think we could reclaim them. What do you think, Sarah?”
She shook her head. “No. They’re gone. Sadly.” She picked up one of a chickadee. “We could reproduce them, though, if you were interested.”
Good for Sarah! I hadn’t thought of that.
“I like that idea,” Skye said. “Let me think about it. In the meantime let’s not throw them out.”
Sarah followed her into the room on the right side of the hall. I stared at the window seat for a few more moments before following them. Had Jasmine Gardener sat on that window seat, looking out at the harbor? It would have been a perch hard to resist. If she’d been a reader, maybe she’d curled up with a book and leaned against those pillows. Or maybe the pillows had been done after Jasmine died, and her mother had sat here, watching the harbor, thinking of what might have been. The world the Gardeners lived in had been far from the Haven Harbor I knew. And yet they’d chosen to summer here. To look down at the harbor, instead of staying in what I assumed was a palatial New York City home.
What had it been like for Jasmine? Had she loved Maine? Had she missed her friends in the city? Nineteen seventy was so long ago. And why had Mrs. Gardener chosen to stay here after her daughter’s death? Why hadn’t she left this place and returned to her husband and life in New York? I looked down into the front hall. This might have been a beautiful home, but it also must have felt empty for one person living here alone.
I forced myself to come back to the present time and followed Sarah and Skye into the first bedroom. “This was the Gardeners’ bedroom,” Skye was saying. “Mrs. Gardener spent most of her last years in this room.”
The bedroom was in better condition than the kitchen, but it, too, had been invaded by the mildew that seemed to have infected the entire house. A row of windows looked out over the harbor, as the window seat had. A high bed and several comfortable-looking chairs were arranged to face
a small television set. One wall was covered by framed photographs, some of them stained by dampness or faded by time.
What images of her life had Mrs. Gardener chosen to highlight and revisit?
Sarah was looking at the large floor-to-ceiling bookcase that filled the far wall. The bookends were rocks that could have come from Pocket Cove Beach. “These are all books on needlepoint,” she pointed out. “History of needlepoint, pattern books. It’s an amazing collection.”
“Are any of them worth anything?” asked Skye.
“I’d have to check their condition individually and their copyrights,” said Sarah. “They might be. Because they’re on an inside wall, I’m hoping they’re not as damaged as the pictures and embroideries on the outside walls. They’ll take a while to appraise.”
“We don’t have time for you to do a thorough appraisal of each book and magazine. Since you’re both involved with Mainely Needlepoint, why don’t you take all that stuff? Examine everything on your own time, save it, sell it, toss it out—whatever you decide is best. They’re now all yours.”
Sarah and I looked at each other. “Thank you very much,” I said. “That’s generous of you.”
She shrugged. “I admire Mrs. Gardener’s work, but I don’t plan to take up needlepoint myself. I’d like to see her collection go to people who could use it.”
“We could,” Sarah confirmed. “Thank you.”
Skye nodded. The subject was closed.
“I suspect Mrs. Gardener spent a lot of time in here stitching,” I said. And thinking, I added silently to myself.
“Her wardrobe room is next. You’ll see.”
A bathroom, smaller than those in many homes today, but with marble walls and a large Victorian claw-foot bathtub, was connected to Mrs. Gardener’s room. The room next to it held a dressing table and wide gold-framed mirror, a closet rod hung with clothing, and stacks of cardboard boxes.