At Home

by Bill Bryson

  Mizner was born into an old and distinguished family in northern California. His brother was the playwright and impresario Wilson Mizner, who, among much else, co-wrote the song “Frankie and Johnnie.” Before becoming an architect, Addison led a remarkably exotic life: he painted magic lantern slides in Samoa, sold coffin handles in Shanghai, peddled Asian antiquities to rich Americans, panned for gold in the Klondike. Returning to the United States, he became a landscape architect on Long Island and finally took up conventional architecture in New York City, though he had to abandon that career abruptly when the authorities realized he had no training in the field—“not even a correspondence course” in the words of one amazed observer—and no license. So, in 1918, he took his architectural practice to Palm Beach, Florida, which wasn’t so fussy about qualifications, and began to build houses for very, very, very rich people.

  In Palm Beach he befriended a young man named Paris Singer, one of twenty-four children of the sewing machine magnate Isaac M. Singer. Paris was an artist, aesthete, poet, businessman, and gadfly who wielded mighty power in the neurotic world of Palm Beach society. Mizner designed for him the Everglades Club, which instantly became the most exclusive outpost south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Only three hundred members were permitted, and Singer was ruthlessly selective in whom he allowed in. One woman was banished because he found her laugh annoying. When another member pleaded for clemency on behalf of her distressed friend, Singer told her to back off or be banished herself. She backed off.

  Mizner sealed his success by securing a commission from Eva Stotesbury to build El Mirasol, a winter home of predictably vast extent. (The garage alone held forty cars.) It became a more or less permanent project because each time anyone else in Palm Beach threatened to build something bigger Mrs. Stotesbury had Mizner slap on an extension, so that El Mirasol remained ever supreme.

  It is fair to say that there has almost certainly never been another architect like Addison Mizner. He didn’t believe in blueprints and was notoriously approximate in his instructions to his workmen, using expressions like “about so high” and “right about here.” He was famously forgetful, too. Sometimes he installed doors that opened onto blank walls or, in one interesting case, revealed the interior of a chimney. The owner of a smart new boathouse on Lake Worth took possession of his prize only to discover that it had four blank walls and no way in at all. For a client named George S. Rasmussen, Mizner forgot to include a staircase and so put an external one up on an outside wall as an afterthought. This compelled Mr. and Mrs. Rasmussen to put on rainwear or other appropriate attire when they wished to go from floor to floor in their own home. When asked about this oversight, Mizner reportedly said it didn’t matter because he didn’t like Mr. Rasmussen anyway.

  According to The New Yorker, Mizner’s clients were expected to accept whatever he felt like building for them. They would present him with a large check, disappear for a year or so, and come back to take possession of a completed house, not knowing whether it was a Mexican-style hacienda, a Venetian Gothic palazzo, a Moorish castle, or some festive combination of the three. Particularly infatuated with the worn and crumbling look of Italian palazzos, Mizner “aged” his own creations by boring artificial wormholes in the woodwork with a hand drill and defacing the walls with artful stains meant to suggest some vague but picturesque Renaissance fungal growth. After his workmen had created a well-crafted mantelpiece or doorway, he would often pick up a sledgehammer and knock off a corner to give it an air of careworn venerability. Once he used quicklime and shellac to age some leather chairs at the Everglades Club. Unfortunately, the body heat from the guests warmed the shellac to a renewed gooeyness and several found themselves stuck fast. “I spent the whole night pulling dames out of those goddam chairs,” recalled a club waiter years later. Several women left the backs of their dresses behind.

  Despite his idiosyncrasies, Mizner was widely admired. He sometimes had as many as a hundred projects on the go at once and was known to design as many as two houses in a day. “Some authors,” wrote Alva Johnston in The New Yorker in 1952, “have classed his Everglades Club, in Palm Beach, and his Cloister, in Boca Raton, among the most beautiful buildings in America.” Frank Lloyd Wright was a fan. As time passed, Addison Mizner grew increasingly stout and eccentric. He was often seen shopping in Palm Beach in his dressing gown and pajamas. He died of a heart attack in 1933.

  The Wall Street crash of 1929 brought an end to most of the more notable excesses of the day. E. T. Stotesbury was hit particularly hard. In a futile effort to calm his bank balances, he begged his wife to limit her expenditures on entertainment to no more than $50,000 a month, but the redoubtable Mrs. Stotesbury found that a cruel and impossible restriction. Mr. Stotesbury was well on his way to insolvency when, providentially, he too dropped dead of a heart attack on May 16, 1938. Eva Stotesbury lived on until 1946, but had to sell jewelry, paintings, and houses to keep herself modestly afloat. After her death a property developer bought El Mirasol and demolished it to put more houses on the same piece of land. Some twenty other Mizner houses in Palm Beach—the greater part of what he built, in short—have since been torn down as well.

  The Vanderbilt mansions with which we began this survey didn’t fare much better. The first having been built on Fifth Avenue in 1883, the Vanderbilt mansions were already being demolished by 1914. By 1947, all had gone. Not one of the family’s country houses was lived in for a second generation.

  Remarkably, almost nothing was saved from inside the buildings either. When the eponymous head of the Jacob Volk Wrecking Company was asked why he didn’t salvage the priceless Carrara marble fireplaces, the Moorish tiles, the Jacobean paneling, and other treasures contained within the William K. Vanderbilt residence on Fifth Avenue, he gave the questioner a withering look. “I don’t deal in second-hand stuff,” he said.

  * Commodore Vanderbilt was also intimately acquainted with the frailties of iron mentioned in Chapter IX. In 1838, a train he was riding on the Camden and Amboy Railroad derailed when an axle broke. Vanderbilt’s carriage was sent crashing down a thirty-foot embankment. Two passengers were killed. Vanderbilt was seriously injured but survived. Also on the train but uninjured was the former president John Quincy Adams.

  * Edison’s family was also in Canada till shortly before he was born. It is interesting to consider how different North American history might have been if Edison and Bell had both stayed north of the border and done their inventing there.

  • CHAPTER XI •

  THE STUDY

  I

  In 1897, a young ironmonger in Leeds named James Henry Atkinson took a small piece of wood, some stiff wire, and not much else, and created one of the great contraptions of history: the mousetrap. It is one of several useful items—the paper clip, the zipper, and the safety pin are among the many others—that were invented in the late nineteenth century and were so nearly perfect from the outset that they have scarcely been improved on in all the decades since. Atkinson sold his patent for £1,000, a very considerable sum for the time, and went on to invent other things, but nothing that secured him more money or immortality.

  Atkinson’s mousetrap, manufactured under the proprietary name Little Nipper, has sold in the tens of millions, and continues to dispatch mice with brisk and brutal efficiency all over the world. We own several Little Nippers ourselves, and hear the dreadful snap of a terminal event far more often than we would wish to. Two or three times a week in winter we catch a mouse, nearly always in the same place, in this bleak, small room at the end of the house.

  Although study makes it sound like a significant space, it is really just a glorified storeroom, too dark and cold even in mild months to encourage much lingering. This is another room that doesn’t appear on Edward Tull’s original plans. Presumably, Mr. Marsham had it added because he needed an office in which to write his sermons and receive parishioners—particularly, I daresay, the more unrefined and muddy-booted of them; the squire’s wife would almost c
ertainly have been invited into the more comfortable parlor next door. These days the study is the final refuge of old furniture and pictures that one member of the marriage partnership admires and the other would happily see on a bonfire. Almost the only reason we go in there now is to check the mousetraps.

  Mice are not easy creatures to figure. There is for a start their remarkable gullibility. When you consider how easily they are taught to find their way around mazes and other complex environments in labs, it is surprising that nowhere have they grasped that a dab of peanut butter on a wooden platform is a temptation worth resisting. No less mysterious in our house is their predilection—I might almost say their determination—for dying in this room, the study. It is not only the coldest room in the house but the farthest from the kitchen and all the biscuit crumbs and fugitive grains of rice and other morsels that end up on the floor and are there for the taking. Mice give the kitchen a wide berth (probably, it has been suggested to us, because our dog sleeps there) and mousetraps placed there, however generously baited, capture nothing but dust. It is to the study that our mice seem fatefully drawn, which is why I thought this might be the appropriate place to consider some of the many living things that dwell with us.

  Wherever there are humans there are mice. No other creatures live in more environments than the two of us do. House mice—Mus musculus, as they are known on formal occasions—are wondrously adaptable with regard to environment. Mice have even been found living in a refrigerated meat locker kept permanently chilled at –10 degrees Celsius. They will eat almost anything. They are next to impossible to keep out of a house: a normal adult can squeeze through an opening just three-eighths of an inch wide, a gap so very tight that you would almost certainly bet good money that no grown mouse could possibly squeeze through it. They could. They can. They very often do.

  Once in, mice breed prodigiously. In optimum conditions (and in most houses conditions seldom are other than optimal) a female mouse can start breeding at six to eight weeks old and can give birth monthly thereafter. A typical litter consists of six to eight offspring, so numbers can very quickly mount up. Two mice, breeding prolifically, could theoretically produce a million descendants in a year. That doesn’t happen in our homes, thank goodness, but very occasionally mouse numbers do get completely out of control. Australia seems to be particularly propitious in this respect. In one famous outbreak in 1917, the town of Lascelles, in western Victoria, was overrun with mice after an unusually warm winter. For a short but memorably lively period, mice existed in Lascelles in such densities that every horizontal surface became a frantic mass of darting bodies. Every inanimate object writhed under a furry coating. There was nowhere to sit. Beds were unusable. “The people are sleeping on tables to avoid the mice,” one newspaper reported. “The women are kept in a constant state of terror, and the men are kept busy preventing the mice from crawling down their coat collars.” Over fifteen hundred tons of mice—perhaps a hundred million individuals—were killed before the outbreak was defeated.

  James Henry Atkinson’s patent drawing for the “Little Nipper” mousetrap, 1899 (photo credit 11.1)

  Even in comparatively small numbers mice can do a lot of damage, particularly in food storage areas. Mice and other rodents consume about a tenth of America’s annual grain crop—an astonishing proportion. Each mouse voids about fifty pellets a day, and that results in a lot of contamination, too. Because of the impossibility of achieving perfection in storage, hygiene regulations in most places allow up to two fecal pellets per pint of grain—a thought to bear in mind the next time you look at a loaf of whole grain bread.

  Mice are notable vectors of disease. Hantavirus diseases, a family of respiratory and renal disorders that are always disagreeable and often lethal, are particularly associated with mice and their droppings. (The name hanta comes from a river in Korea where the disease was first noted by Westerners during the Korean War.) Fortunately, hanta viruses are fairly rare, since few of us breathe in the frail vapors of mouse droppings, but if you get down on your hands and knees in the vicinity of infected waste—to crawl around in an attic, say, or set a trap in a cupboard—you run the risk in many countries of infection. Globally, over two hundred thousand people a year are infected with hanta viruses, which kill between 30 and 80 percent of their victims, depending on how quickly and well they are treated. In the United States, between thirty and forty people a year contract a hantavirus, and about a third of those people die. In Great Britain, happily, these diseases remain unrecorded. Mice have also been implicated in occurrences of salmonellosis, leptospirosis, tularemia, plague, hepatitis, Q fever, and murine typhus, among many others. In short, there are very good reasons for not wanting mice in your house.

  Almost everything that could be said of mice applies equally, but with multiples, to their cousins the rats. Rats are more common in and around our houses than we care to think. Even the best homes sometimes have them. They come in two principal varieties in the temperate world: the emphatically named Rattus rattus, which is alternatively (and tellingly) known as the roof rat, and Rattus norvegicus, or the Norway rat. The roof rat likes to be up high—in trees and attics principally—so the scurryings you hear across your bedroom ceiling late at night may not be, I’m sorry to say, mice. Fortunately, roof rats are rather more retiring than Norway rats, which live in burrows and are the ones you see scuttling through sewers in movies or prowling around garbage cans in back alleys.*

  We associate rats with conditions of poverty, but rats are no fools: they sensibly prefer a well-heeled home to a poor one. What’s more, modern homes make a delectable environment for rats. “The high protein content that characterizes the more affluent neighborhoods is particularly enticing,” James M. Clinton, a U.S. health official, wrote some years ago in a public health report that remains one of the most compelling, if unnerving, surveys ever taken of the behavior of domestic rats. It isn’t merely that modern houses are full of food, but also that many of them dispose of it in ways that make it practically irresistible. As Clinton put it: “Today’s garbage disposals in homes pour out a bountiful, uniform, and well-balanced food supply for rats.” According to Clinton, one of the oldest of all urban legends, that rats come into homes by way of toilets, is in fact true. In one outbreak, rats in Atlanta invaded several homes in wealthy neighborhoods, and bit more than a few people. “On several occasions,” Clinton reported, “rats were found alive in covered toilet bowls.” If ever there was a reason to put the lid down, this could be it.

  Once in a domestic environment, most rats show little fear “and will even deliberately approach and make contact with motionless persons.” They are particularly emboldened in the presence of infants and the elderly. “I have verified the case of a helpless woman attacked by rats while she slept,” Clinton reported. He went on: “The victim, an elderly hemiplegic, hemorrhaged extensively from multiple rat-bite wounds and died despite emergency hospital treatment. Her 17-year-old granddaughter asleep in the same room at the time of the attack was unharmed.”

  Rat bites are almost certainly underreported because only the most serious cases attract attention, but even using the most conservative figures, at least fourteen thousand people in the United States are attacked by rats each year. Rats have very sharp teeth and can become aggressive if cornered, biting “savagely and blindly, in the manner of mad dogs,” in the words of one rat authority. A motivated rat can leap as high as three feet—high enough to be considerably unnerving if it is coming your way and is out of sorts.

  The usual defense against rat outbreaks is poison. Poisons are often designed around the curious fact that rats cannot regurgitate, so they will retain poisons that other animals—pet dogs and cats, for instance—would quickly throw up. Anticoagulants are commonly used, too, but there is evidence to suggest that rats are developing resistance to them.

  Rats are smart and often work cooperatively. At the former Gansevoort poultry market in Greenwich Village, New York, pest control authori
ties could not understand how rats were stealing eggs without breaking them, so one night an exterminator sat in hiding to watch. What he saw was that one rat would embrace an egg with all four legs, then roll over on his back. A second rat would then drag the first rat by its tail to their burrow, where they could share their prize in peace. In a similar manner workers at a packing plant discovered how sides of meat, hanging from hooks, were knocked to the floor and devoured night after night. An exterminator named Irving Billig watched and found that a swarm of rats formed a pyramid underneath a side of meat, and one rat scrambled to the top of the heap and leaped onto the meat from there. It then climbed to the top of the side of meat and gnawed its way through it around the hook until the meat dropped to the floor, at which point hundreds of waiting rats fell upon it.

  When eating, rats will unhesitatingly gorge if plenty is available, but they can also get by on very little if necessary. An adult rat can survive on less than an ounce of food a day and as little as half an ounce of water. For pleasure they seem to enjoy gnawing on wires. Nobody knows why, because wires clearly are not nutritious and offer nothing in return except the very real prospect of a fatal shock. Still, rats can’t stop themselves. It is believed that as many as a quarter of all fires that can’t otherwise be explained may be attributed to rats chewing on wires.

  When they are not eating, rats are likely to be having sex. Rats have a lot of sex—up to twenty times a day. If a male rat can’t find a female, he will happily—or at least willingly—find relief in a male. Female rats are robustly fecund. The average adult female Norway rat produces 35.7 offspring a year, in litters of 6 to 9 at a time. In the right conditions, however, a female rat can produce a new litter of up to 20 babies every three weeks. Theoretically, a pair of breeding rats could start a dynasty of 15,000 new rats in a year. That doesn’t happen in practice, because rats die a lot. Like a lot of other animals, they are more or less programmed by evolution to expire fairly easily. The annual mortality rate is 95 percent. A determined extermination campaign will normally reduce rat populations by 75 percent or so, but once the campaign stops the rat population will recover in six months or less. In short, an individual rat hasn’t got great prospects in life, but his family is effectively ineradicable.