“How long have you been looking,” the unreasonably tall and solicitous realtor asked me.
“About 66 years, I said, ignoring the elaborately carved banister to my right.
He resembled Perry, my long-lamented late retriever, displaying both confusion and expectation. I walked in the middle of an open house; why shouldn’t he assume I was looking to buy?
Most realtors are not usually comfortable with ambiguity. “I lived here when I was child,” I said by way of explanation that proceeded no further.
He smiled broadly: “How nice. You are looking to buy your childhood home. I should warn you, it probably has gone up in price.” He chuckled, but had enough sense to stifle when he saw my stony stare.
“I didn’t sell this house. I left.” I received nothing of the proceeds after my mother died. I never wanted anything from her. “Don’t worry. It is ancient history and I am not interested in revisiting.”
He looked at the brochure in his hand and awkwardly returned it to the dining room table. He couldn’t help himself and he asked with an enthusiasm reserved for the homosexual realtor. “So this was your home 66 years ago?”
“No, I left here 66 years ago. I lived here from 1933 to 1949. It was never my home.”
“Of that’s right, it used to be an orphanage or something.” I admired the ebullient way he pronounced “orphanage” as if that was a good thing.
“It was girls’ home. Some of the girls were orphans, but most were simply girls whose parents didn’t want them. Before your pout, most of us didn’t want our parents either.”
Perry-like he cocked his head and looked sadly at me with his brown eyes. “Your parents sent you here?”
“Mother,” I corrected. “My father passed away when I was two-years old. Unfortunately, she came with me or, more accurately, we never left.” Was he going to cry? It was my sad history, what did it have to do with him? I could not mourn a man I did not remember; why should he?
“So you and your mother lived here after he passed?” All I wanted to do was look around the house. I didn’t want to recount the part of my life that served as the firm foundation for a lifetime of emotional vertigo.
“My mother founded the Reba Place School for Girls when my father ‘passed.’ Curious word ‘passed.’ It seems so arbitrary as if he wasn’t paying attention and thus ‘passed.’”
He blushed. “I am afraid I am betraying my Georgian roots. I was raised to never use such words as died. My mother was that way.”
“My mother was far more direct,” I said, smiling at his discomfort. “I do not remember when my father died, but I have no doubt she probably told me he was dead and crying would not bring him back.”
He coughed; he was not trained to have such conversations with potential buyers. His job was to be enthusiastic, hand out the brochures, point out the woodwork, hint at the seller’s motivation and repeat with the next prospect. He had no use for an 82-year-old-woman who would have preferred to burn the house down.
“She looks good,” I said trying to be supportive. “Over there, separating the parlor and dining room, was a ridiculously intricate spandrel screen over two ghastly columns,” I said. “I am glad they’re gone.”
This he could understand. “Must have brighten up the place. That’s what I like about these old houses. Each generation adds something to it. Makes it better. There’s a lot of upgrades in the kitchen.”
“Is that how you see life?” I asked, “a never-ending series of upgrades? The young, always looking forward with such abandon; absolutely convinced of history’s inexorable march to better. Don’t worry,” I said, putting my wizened hand on his arm. “You have to think that way or you just couldn’t go on living. For the old, we only look backwards. I blame my mother. She blames her mother. And perhaps one day we will discover who is ultimately at fault.”
He nodded sympathetically, but with expectant eyes hoping salvation would appear in the guise of other visitors.
“I loathed my mother,” I said, walking up to the stairs. “Do you know made me strip this staircase by hand with nothing but a dental pick and a small brass brush? Someone in the past had decided to paint it. My mother felt it was garish and needed to be stripped.”
He wrinkled his nose. I thought he was talking about my mother. “What a shame. I think the woodwork is the best feature of this house. Especially the staircase. You did a very nice job,” he said, nodding like one of those dashboard figurines vulgar people put in their cars.
“My mother believed in honoring the past and anything that was not original had to be restored. She always lived in the past, even as a child. It wasn’t her fault. She was desperate to get her mother’s approval, which was like embracing a cloud. According to her, my grandmother was a cold woman who never wanted children, but, since it was expected, she submitted to my grandfather, who was interested in having a legacy, but not necessarily in being a father or a husband. Perhaps her uterus knew of her reluctance and belched out fetus after fetus until it missed one: my mother. Having a miracle baby—as the doctor described her—did little to change my grandmother’s attitude towards children, even her own. With no son was coming, my grandfather found a younger woman to accommodate him.
“Parenting to my grandmother could be summed up in two words: grow up. My grandmother urged my mother to become an adult as quickly as possible so as to provide companionship. My mother was encouraged to talk and walk early. She was supposed to help with household chores and suffer the consequences of ignorance or awkwardness.”
“They never quite found the sweet spot. Apparently my grandmother’s heart grew up equally fast. She was barely fifty when criticizing my mother for something perfectly acceptable for a teenager, she grabbed her chest. The doctor said she was dead before she hit the floor. I hope she was alive while the floor rushed towards her. But then I am a bitter old woman.”
“I wouldn’t call you old,” he said.
“But bitter, yes? I winked, which made him even more uncomfortable. “My mother lived with a series of aunts until she met my father who bought this place as a vain promise of better things to come. After he ‘passed,’ she founded the Reba Place School to provide love to young women who needed it, but she needed also the money to keep this house. Reba Place was her way of killing two birds with one stone. Unfortunately, she was a terrible shot. She thought she could learn to love like she could learn French by eating croissants. The girls we took in didn’t seem to appreciate the effort. Perhaps they had higher expectations, despite coming from broken homes. The mutual disappointment suffused this house like a haar. The more they pulled away, the more she resented them.”
“Would you like to look around?” he suggested as a way to get rid of me. Wait until you see the kitchen.”
The kitchen was a gaudy affair of shiny appliances and overly-dramatic granite countertops. My mother would have been appalled. She insisted everything be done by hand---just as had been done in the past. Who knows what ghost she was trying to exercise? All I know is it led to grated knuckles, cut fingers and skin so stripped by the lye soap that we could have used it as sandpaper on the staircase.
“Can’t you just scream at all this storage? You could fit two of my kitchens in here. You should see the master suite on the third floor. It used to be the attic.”
Images of the attic hove into my mind like a ship crashing through the fog—the cobwebs, the shedding insulation and the wooden hangers that were there as inadvertent correctional devices.
I returned to the entrance way and placed my hand on the banister. It was still as smooth as the day my mother finally admitted the staircase was done. I remember her single nod. She looked at the spandrel and columns that were covered in layers of thick paint. “Now those.”
The same desire of 66 years ago rolled in. Then, as now, I reached out for the well-worn brass doorknob and pulled. “Perhaps this is a bad idea,” I said to the realtor, leaving the way I left years ago.
Relieved, he could not help by be enthusiastic. “You really didn’t a wonderful on the staircase. It is the best feature of this house. Makes my job easier.”