Alpha was surprised that the inside of the house wasn't
more beat up. Fourteen people had lived in it for more than a decade, after all, and from the outside it seemed that it would be; paint was flaking from the north side, the roof of the lean-to sagged, and the hedge that bordered it on three sides had grown up to the windows of the second story. But it was structurally sound, Martin's father said, surprisingly so, and the hardwood floors didn't need refinishing; the baseboards were battered, but otherwise the old oak woodwork, the sliding doors of oak to the master bedroom, the turned posts of the oak banister leading upstairs, the bookshelves around the bottom of the bay window, were hardly scratched, and their gold-and-black grain stood out as though new-minted and burnished to its highest sheen. There were no stains or adolescent carvings on the roll-top desk upstairs.
The Russells had left with the desk a matching chair that looked brand-new, and Alpha couldn't understand why, unless it'd been there when they moved in, and they were that honest. There was no other clue to their life in the house, no old receipts or letters, no stray socks in any closet, not even a drawing or set of initials on the walls, or, as she put it, "not a speck of themselves or their dirt."
The attic, however, was filled full of valuables, none of them the Russells', and they were so layered with dust it looked as if the Russells had never touched them; these belonged to the Halvorsons, the family who'd built the house and lived in it in its first state; their name was on daguerreotypes and photographs, on the flyleaves of books, underneath chair seats, and even written, along with a set of measurements, across the bosom of an old raggedy dress form.
In the attic Martin found a large, decaying, leather-bound volume, A Century-End History and Biography of North Dakota, and in it an engraving of a daguerreotype of Mr. Halvorson, a twin to a picture of him in a shoe box, along with this:
ALVARD J. HALVORSON. This gentleman, of
whom a portrait will be found on the opposite page,
occupies a prominent position as a real-estate dealer
in Hyatt, Stusrud County. To his influence is due
much of the solid prosperity of Stusrud and Ecklund Counties.
Our subject was born in Hamlin Township, Michigan,
Aug. 1, 1839, and was the only son of William and Dora
(Waldorf) Halvorson, the former of Scandinavian and
the latter of German descent. Mr. Halvorson was raised
on his father's farm and attended country schools and at
the age of nineteen went to Indianapolis, Indiana, in company
with his father and later was engaged in business and also in
farming with his father in Indiana for about twenty years.
Our subject moved to Valley City, North Dakota, in the fall of
1879 and became interested in Stusrud County lands in 1881,
since which time A. J. Halvorson CO. has added as much as
perhaps any other firm in the development of the possibilities
of the agricultural and stock-raising interests of North Dakota,
and he now conducts an extensive real-estate business in Hyatt,
where the family located in 1895, two years after the founding
of Hyatt.
Our subject was married at Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1865, to
Miss Catherine Maxwell, who is of Scottish descent. Mr. and
Mrs. Halvorson are the parents of three children who bear the
Following names: Olivia C, Alice N., and Lydia. The two older
children were born in Indiana and the last named in North
Dakota. Politically, Mr. Halvorson is a Republican and has taken
a highly active part in affairs pertaining to local government.
Nobody living in Hyatt at the present time could remember the Halvorsons, much less say why they'd moved and left so much behind, or where they'd gone from here. Martin drove to McCallister and did research in the county record books and didn't find many allusions to Mr. Halvorson, but learned how it was possible for him and his family to be forgotten the way they were; the area had changed that much. The U.S. Cavalry, while routing out the last of the Sioux in the area, used to bivouac near the village site, on a prominence now called Hawk's Nest, and the village itself was plotted in 1892 by Richard Hyatt, an English lord, and began as a settlement of wealthy and cultivated Englishmen and Scots (one of whom constructed the artificial lake and a nine-hole golf course at the edge of town), and then turned into a trading center for the German and Scandinavian and Irish immigrants who homesteaded in the area, and for a while was the county seat; and then after being missed by the main line of the railroad, and suffering the effects of the Crash and the Great Depression, and having the county hall hauled away to Fessenden in the dead of the night, it became what it was now, a poor village, mostly German and Roman Catholic, with only the lake remaining as a reminder of its past. "It seems old Hyatt knew his Longfellow well enough to name the lake Hiawatha," Martin said. "And had the taste not to name it Gitche Gumee." Hyatt's population was two hundred and thirty-two, a figure Martin knew before he began his research; he'd taken the 1940 census.
Families other than the Russells must have lived in the house since the Halvorsons, but it looked as though nobody had bothered their effects in the attic, as though to tamper with them or remove them were to tamper with the heart of the house. Could that be? Or maybe they'd had so many possessions (wasn't the desk theirs?) that people had merely taken what they wanted without much diminishing a large, original store. Martin, for instance, as he walked around the attic, said that when they left, if they ever did, he was going to take those candlesticks, that teapot, the horse collar there, and a wheelbarrow full of these books.
Alpha said that just to stand in the place made her temperature drop ten degrees, and she'd rather he left everything the way it was.
"But what about these?" He held up a set of copper bowls with pewter medallions on their handles. "These are collector's items for sure."
"I have more bowls than I know what to do with already."
"What about a book? Wouldn't you like to read a few of these books?"
"I would if I'd bought them." She picked up Timmy, who was dropping fluffs of dust into a china commode, and started out the door.
"Let's have an auction," Jerome said. "Let's sell all of this stuff and make a bunch of money." He and Charles were sorting through a dusty stack of phonograph records.
"Leave those alone," Alpha said. "They aren't yours. I don't want the two of you playing in this attic—ever, you understand. I want the hook at the top of the door to stay hooked, the way the Russells had it when they were here. You don't belong in this place."
They turned to their father, who was rummaging through a round-topped trunk bound with leather straps, and Jerome asked if they could move this—he rapped on an old Victrola with a knuckle—and all these records into the room next to the attic; the door was plenty big, he pointed out. Martin's eyes were bright and abstracted, and, unaware that Alpha had spoken, he said, "Sure, why not? Let's get it in there and see if it works."
*
The Victrola sat in a corner of the upstairs room that became their playroom, near the door that led to the attic. It was such a tall machine they had to stand on a stool to put records on its turntable, and inside its lifted cover, beveled like a coffin lid, "Lydia" had been scratched into the wood with something sharp, and the name, foreign to them, seemed strangely appropriate there; no needles survived with the machine, so their father fashioned one anew from the end of a nipped-off safety pin. They found only a single record they liked among those in the attic, and the rest, thick Edison records with hymns on them, they sailed out a second-story window toward Brian and Leo Rimsky and Douglas Kuntz and other of their friends, who stomped on the ones that went rolling, and caught some they tried to sail back.
They played that same record over and over, in spite of the scratches on it—years of them, layers of the
m—that made the metallic tenor sound as though it came out of the center of a gale, and never tired of bearing the voice tell about Sal, a maiden fair, singing Polly Wolly Doodle all the day, with her curly eyes and her laughing hair . . .
They stood on the stool and worked the crank, staring at the name scratched into the lid. "Fare thee well! Fare thee well! Fare thee well, my fairy fay!" The voice was adenoidal and no matter how many times it brought up, frail and tinny from the ancient grooves, the image of a grasshopper sitting on a railroad track (singing Polly Wolly Doodle all the day), they always had to get down, laughing, and roll around and slap the floor to get themselves sane again.
They had their own library in the playroom, and they had clay, blocks, marbles, and mallets, dominoes, Lincoln Logs, an electric train; and a handmade alphabet with wooden characters five inches high, which they'd found in the attic and kept in dull-green ammunition boxes their Uncle Jay had brought back from the war. But none of their toys captured their- interest like the Victrola, and when they weren't playing it, they spent hours at the roll-top desk.
Their father had appropriated the desk. "Boys," he said. "Here is where I'm going to sit when I write that book of mine," a project he talked about often, especially after an unusual or moving experience, or after he'd told a story out of his past. He referred to the book, simply as "the book of my life." When he'd been up to the room for an evening, Jerome and Charles would go to the desk the next day, slide its slatted cover up, and search through the drawers and cubbyholes for evidence of the book, in which they hoped to be included, pulling the wonderful pranks they pulled. Usually there was a neat pile of paper in the center of a green blotter, with a pen beside it, presumably full of ink. A bottle of ink and one of eradicator stood ready, as did the large, leather-bound volume from the attic, appropriated now, too. There was also a portable Underwood typewriter that their father let them bang away on when they wanted to work on those wonderful stories of theirs.
Digging through the pigeonholes of the desk, they found old letters, scripts of dramatic and patriotic readings their father had performed in high school and college, a rubber stamp that reproduced his tall, tilted signature, a watch fob braided of his mother's hair (a lighter shade then), a broken pocket watch, some rocks from the Badlands, and a tiny tube they could look into and see a pyramidical pile of fieldstone and the inscription. Geographical Center of North America, Rugby, North Dakota. In a drawer was a half-filled box of flaky cigars with "It's a Boy!" on their cellophanes, and in another a metal file that contained insurance policies, birth certificates
(their own and their parents', too, which was unsettling), government savings bonds in their names, and their father's baby book. In the center drawer were pens and pencils and a ream of that same white paper, which never seemed to diminish.
Once, there was this on the top sheet:
CHAPTER ONE
— My father's influence on my life {Mom's too)
CHAPTER TWO
— The Depression Years
CHAPTER THREE
— I meet Alpha, my wife-to-be
CHAPTER FOUR
?
Other than some notes to himself and a Christmas-card list, they never found anything else their father had written.
*
They couldn't resist the temptation of the attic, although their mother was upset by this. She disliked the place, disliked even more the idea of anybody's being in it (she never entered it herself), and was so fervent and humorless in her dislike that their father started calling North Dakota "That cold-storage box way up at the top. The attic of the United States!"
They'd put a record on the Victrola, move a stool to the attic door, unlatch the hook, ease the door open wide, and sunlight coming through a window in the far well fell over them with a warmth sunlight had nowhere else. Cobwebs powdered with dust, and shining filaments recently strung in place, sparkled in a shifting radiance inside the golden air. The dress form, a brass bedstead, the boxes and trunks of memorabilia, a wooden wardrobe with a dress sword and sash hanging from its top, chairs books, an oval mirror that held their tilting reflections, stood around them in solid eloquence.
Charles tiptoed over to a settee, upholstered in red velvet damaged by moths and mice, and sat down. He bounced his weight on its springs. Who'd sat here? What had they talked about? Had anybody cried on it, as he had on their couch? Or done a flip on it? He looked at Jerome, who hadn't moved since they'd stepped inside; the Halvorsons' effects were as real and awesome as a roomful of strangers, and part of a world removed from them by time —by half a century, their father said—and by convention and law: the world of adults. But here they could handle and examine that world in detail, in its many manifestations (and only through touch would it give up its mystery), as they couldn't examine the world of their parents in the rooms below.
Only a few moments after they'd unhooked the door, they'd hear, "Are you two into that attic again?" from the foot of the stairs.
"No!" Both at the same time; a dead giveaway.
"You stay out of there when your father's not around! You hear?"
"We aren't in here,” Charles said.
"Don't lie to your mother!"
They looked at one another—Jerome pushing out in a curl his big upper lip—and then Jerome went over and began to examine an object of more interest than Charles's numskull knavery, as Charles picked up a wooden doll with most of its limbs missing, while the dented and damaged dress form, made of varnished strips of paper lifting up in crisp translucent curves, stood above them, unmoving and silent, like a second, more permissive mother. Jerome studied a wooden box with wires and disclike electrodes dangling from it; its lid swung open like a little door, and from what he could make out of the instructions, which were pasted inside, it was a device for giving shocks to the head and feet.
"Look at this," Charles said. He took a lace dress from a trunk and held it in front of him. "This is what they wore then. What would you think if you saw somebody wearing this? What would you think if I was a girl?" He wrinkled up his nose and giggled like one.
"Quit it," Jerome said. "Put it back." He was more like his mother; a dress was too personal to disturb. He picked up a candlestick and was removed to their living room in a different setting, at night, with candle flames lighting the faces around the table, a sound of silver scraping on plates, a rustle of skirts, and then a man's voice, gentle as candlelight, rising from the shadows: "What I'm going—"
"Hey, look at this," Charles said. He'd slipped on the rusty jacket of an old black suit of tails many sizes too big for him.
"Take it off. Put it back."
"Okay. But I get to keep this." It was a book. Children of the Garden, that personified the common domestic flowers, giving them human features and appendages, and names such as Betsy Bluebell. "We'll keep it in the playroom."
"Oh, all right. But don't leave it where Mom’ll see it." Jerome went to a box of daguerreotypes and fading tea-colored photographs and found pictures of rural families lined up in front of farmhouses; the farmer, bearded or with sidewhiskers, sitting in a kitchen chair; beside him his wife, her sun- or gray-streaked hair pulled back tight, wearing a long black-sleeved dress, seemingly old enough to be the children's grandmother; and the children, all of them, even the babies, were big-headed and looked mature.
There were pictures of houses they recognized, of Main Street as it had been at one time, with a horse and carriage in front of Schommer's Tavern, and several views of their own home. Jerome motioned to Charles and showed him a rear view of their house, and then put his fingertip on the attic window.
"Look at this," he said then, and wiped his forearm across another picture: a plump man in muttonchop whiskers stared up at them with the fallow and sparkling eyes of an old rogue. Jerome frowned. "It's Mr. Halvorson." He flipped past the photographs of him and his wife, who was broad and square-jawed and looked enough like her husband to be his brother. Two of the daughters looked like her.
In a portrait of the third girl, however, Jerome saw what he was looking for in the others. She was sitting at one end of the settee, an open book in her lap, a finger along her cheek, staring out with sober eyes on the world beyond; her long hair, coiled on the settee, covering one thigh and part of the book, a white bow at her crown.
"See," Jerome said, and touched the lace dress she was wearing. "That was hers."
"So?"
"You shouldn't be playing with it."
"Why?"
"If it was hers— You just shouldn't. Look how pretty she is."
"Not anymore."
"What do you mean?"
"She's old and ugly by now, or else dead."
Jerome turned the picture over, and read, "Lydia, at the age of thirteen, in the year of our Lord, 1904."
"See," Charles said. "That's even before Dad was born, and look how old he is."
Jerome wasn't listening. He saw the girl running through the downstairs hall on a day as sunlit as this one, coming up the steps, her hair a shaking tangle in the sunlight, and into the playroom to the Victrola. He turned. His mother was in the doorway, flushed and out of breath from climbing the steps in her condition.
"What did I tell you two? Get out of here! Get out, get out, get out!"
*
In August, Alpha gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Marie, after Martin's mother, in an effort to say that that part of the past was forgotten for her. Jerome and Charles were envious of all the attention the girl got, and embarrassed by her. But Tim, who was always left out of their projects and play, would stand at her bassinet with his hands clasping and unclasping behind him, sometimes for an hour, as though she were his only hope. Martin was proud of her in the way that only the father of a daughter can be proud, and while Alpha was in the hospital he painted their bedroom pink and white and bought an expensive camera he shouldn't have. Alpha had always wanted a girl and was happier than she'd been in years. The house was becoming hers. Over the first winter,
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