The House Takes All

It was a while after my husband left that I remembered my grandmother’s house. My mother’s mother once lived in a house her cousin had won in a poker game. My grandmother and the owner of the house were all Southern gentility, so the house was, I imagine, quite a nice one. This was in the early twenties and the house was in the mountains of Hendersonville, North Carolina.

My grandmother must have felt a little displaced. She had been a Birmingham belle and had once refused a marriage proposal from one of the Duke University Dukes. She’d thrown the breakfast tray across the room the day the maid brought it to her with the morning paper announcing Angier Biddle Duke’s engagement to someone else.

By the time she got to North Carolina, she was well past such pets. She’d fallen in love with a charming, Irish lawyer from Atlanta, married him, had four children, and then watched her husband go down the slippery steps of alcoholism. When her cousin won the house (what hand could possibly have caused such domestic recklessness?) she was husbandless. He’d gone to New York to get work. She didn’t know she would soon be widowed by heart failure.

But talk about displaced. The woman whose husband had lost the house walked up and down the sidewalk in front of it all day, glaring at my grandmother. Apparently the woman wasn’t all that sympathetic to poker honor.

My mother was six or seven in North Carolina. She loved her father outrageously. It would be a long time before she had direct knowledge of the perfidies of husbands.

First she would be raised in Washington and New York by her mother who, though she had no visible means of support, had a Boston Terrier with a rhinestone collar, gave her three daughters debuts in Birmingham, and provided her son an education in the engineering school at the University of Virginia. Maybe her cousin and her brothers saw to it my grandmother had what she needed. Or maybe she had the Southern fairy dust about her that makes beauty and a determination to live well their own rewards.

My mother married the first time against her mother’s wishes. I don’t know much about Ray, except that he was probably a womanizer and beneath my mother in social class if not in actual income. Need I say he drank? I also know they lived in Schenectady–in an apartment. My mother had lived in a lot of apartments–but they were in Washington and New York. Not Schenectady

My mother always regretted that her mother didn’t live long enough to see her married happily and with two children. After her divorce, my mother had gone to live with her brother in Virginia, to help take care of his two little boys, one of whom she had on her hip when my father drove up to Oak Lawn, home of friends. It was actually my father’s brother, an engineer in school with my maternal uncle, who had been dating the lovely divorcee, but I imagine my father was a goner from the instant he saw a beautiful, dark-haired, other worldly woman holding an infant on her hip in front of an old Virginia house.

My father had his own house history. He was the grandson of a Hanover County plantation owner whose daughter had settled at the foot of the Blue Ridge. A smart, talented, beautiful Southern woman, my paternal grandmother had run her father’s plantation after her mother died when my grandmother was eleven. She took a tumble–literally–for the fun-loving, bon vivant son of the University’s bursar. The story has it she’d heard of a good gymnast and had gone to see him compete at Fayerwether Hall. My grandfather, the gymnast in question, missed his grip on a trapeze and tumbled right out the front door, onto my grandmother, who was coming up the steps just then.

In what must have been their best years together, my paternal grandparents lived in a tiny house on the land she named The Terraces, close to the University of Virginia. As two sons were followed by a daughter and another son, my grandmother stitched up a tent and sent the two older boys to live in it. Year round.

My grandfather built the marvelous house on that property through which most of my childhood ebbed and flowed. Every room had a door and each one had so many and such large windows and French doors it was like being outside. The cabinets between the kitchen and dining room were glass so not only could cups and china pass through, light did too. The windows were as close to floor to ceiling as my grandmother could get them. There was an enormous window at the stair landing so that light flowed downstairs and up, throwing itself over the curved balcony above and into the bedrooms around it.

I can remember my father calming an owl at that window. The bird had come down one of the several chimneys and beat itself into daylight and fatigue against the closest thing to escape she could find. My father talked to her, stroked her head, then gently opened the big window behind her, unlatched the screen, and set her free.

My grandmother craved freedom.

There was, instead, a law career for my grandfather which his drinking and continuation of a fraternity lifestyle didn’t interfere with,and home-schooling of the four children for my grandmother. She taught them science and mathematics and literature, along with music, art, drama, and heavy labor in the garden. She also took up the temperance cause. Eventually Grandfather moved into the cottage in the backyard behind the house and Grandmother took full possession of the big house. I thought for many years that all grandfathers lived in the back yard.

My father had spent his adulthood, up until the time he met my mother, traveling and doing good–rebuilding roads in Poland and working in a refugee camp in the south of France where orphans were given new homes after the war. My father brought my mother to live in his mother’s big house, but first he had to steal her from his brother.

My father stole my mother from his brother at my uncle’s own house. They’d met a few times after the initial knocking-down at Oak Lawn, mostly at the dining room table at my grandmother’s where my uncle brought my mother to family dinners. She and my father, older than his brother by a slim fifteen months and a bachelor still at 36, were friendly and she probably wasn’t suspicious when my father invited her for a drive in the country to visit his brother’s farm.

Did my father know his brother was entertaining? Did he, though loving his brother, want to protect my mother from another womanizer? Did he know they would see a fur coat thrown over a living room chair and hear laughter from the upstairs bedroom when they walked into my uncle’s ramshackle farm? Did my father plan even the aftermath–the recovery from the shock through ice cream at Howard Johnson’s on 29 North? When my mother got over her surprise, she said, she and my father got a great laugh out of it.

And the rest, as they say, is history. A proposal on the Nine Mile Circuit, the loop of bypasses around Charlottesville, marriage ten days later at the University Chapel, my mother frothing out of the church in the white peasant blouse and blue skirt of the once-already-married, flowers pinned in her hair, and the happiest part of her life yet to come.

My mother and grandmother could not have been more different people and the war they carried on over houses was proof. Or rather the war my mother carried on. My grandmother was far too domestically unconcerned to be bothered. I remember her as stern and remote, passionate solely with her gardens, which were abundant and beautiful. On her in-town property she had vegetable gardens, terraced gardens of lilies, a pond, a pool, a frog pond, boxwood gardens, a bowling green and a pine alley. There were unexpected, hidden gardens and birds galore. And my grandmother always out there somewhere, a cloud of white hair, white-blue eyes, an old denim garden dress, dirt impacted under her fingernails, seated on her low cane chair, weeding, transplanting, watching.

She was a complete iconoclast. Though not a political conservative, she was such a believer in radical individualism, she took against FDR and complained bitterly about him in her diaries. She never would forgive him for taking us off the gold standard.

She traveled, too. Two trailers in the yard testified to her wanderlust. After she’d gotten her brood to high school age, she shipped all four off to boarding school and went for Florida every year. She camped out on a square of property on the Gulf down there all winter.

But inside The Terraces neglect reigned. Oh, it was a beautiful house, stucco, cool, windowed, full of curves and light. But my grandmother never did have it painted and I don’t think a single window was curtained. This must have galled my mother, used as she was to the niceties. She was city girl and liked her flowers delivered.

She lived in the old woman’s house, though, much of her married life, and was obedient to my grandmother while the old woman was alive. My aunt, my father’s only sister, her husband and children were obedient too–they all lived with my grandmother. Whether everyone was poor, or my grandmother exercised a kind of tyranny over her children, or they were simply an old-fashioned Southern extended kin family, it would be hard to say.

It was from that house my mother left to give birth to my brother. Instead of going home to the relative chaos of a three-family house, she was taken into Montebello, home of my grandfather’s three maiden sisters and about a mile from The Terraces. I don’t know that my father had anything to do with this decision–maybe he was trying to give my mother respite from the unrelenting unmotherliness of his mother, finding a nest for her where she might be clucked over as she had been by her own beautiful Gibson girl mother. In any case, she was taken in by the three “aunts” and held there with her long-desired infant son. I imagine the old women were good to her, though they weren’t much given to motherliness either, its not having descended on any of them. They were professional women–educated and employed, one as a school principal, one as the University registrar, and one managing the house and yard for the three sisters and their brother, who left his exile in the cottage behind his wife’s house to dine with his sisters every night.

Though not motherly, they were also not embittered by being married to an alcoholic, and their house was magnificent. They were for me the grandmothers the biological one wasn’t, full of fun and imagination and hospitality, though they were quite elderly when the various great-nieces and nephews became their charge for weekends or evenings when our parents got shut of us. The house was two story brick, with wings and a verandah. A sunny kitchen with a swinging door, a cavernous dining room, the formal living room, a parlor, a hall that ran the length of the house from front door to back, bedrooms and baths tucked upstairs and in the east wing. Tea roses, boxwood gardens, a gold fish pond, mature climbing trees, a circular drive, and an old black gardener named Willis outside.

Down in one of the room under the house was my great-grandfather’s wooden leg, complete with shoe, which had replaced the leg shot off in the Civil War. Did he have another one to be buried with or was it just considered extraneous? We were too dazzled by it to ask.

The old ladies clucked over Mom–a little too much, I gather. One morning the eldest sister Virginia was folding infant t-shirts–which my mother had already folded. Virginia was the University Registrar, the maker of the tiniest stitches imaginable on her wasp-waist lace and silk blouses, and the definition of old maid. My mother said to her, uncharacteristically defiant, “I do know how to fold t-shirts.” The old woman went on folding, smoothing, looked over her glasses at my mother and said, “Do you?”

My mother had had it. My grandmother must have divined this because she pulled up in front of Montebello the next morning in her old black Chevvie, went inside her sisters-in-law’s house, told my mother, “Pack up, Susie, we’re going home.” When she had stowed my mother, brother, and gear in her car, she said, “I’ll say your good-byes for you,” and went back inside to deal with her husband’s sisters as one strong old Virginia lady to three others.

When my mother and father were leaving to go to the hospital for my brother’s birth, my grandmother had gone to Mom’s car window and handed her a bunch of ragged robin’s–some little blue flower from her garden.

These were probably the only two times those women got along. The rest of the time was war–the rather one-sided one I mentioned. When my mother’s cat had kittens, my grandmother took the whole basket, mother cat included, to the SPCA. The birds, you know. My mother’s red setter had to be taken back too.

My mother fled–first to my uncle’s farm, for a year of completely unsuitable rural isolation, then back to The Terraces, where they lived again when I was born, When I was three my mother staged her most successful insurrection and we landed in Copley Hill, University faculty and staff housing, which was, at that time, a series of army barracks made into duplexes, plus some trailers, a nursery school, post office branch, and a Coke machine on a hill high above the Dairy Queen on 29 North.

My mother loved that dinky little two-bedroom duplex. She lavished her domestic adoration on it–curtains were made, pies baked. Kids washed in tides all around the hilltop and everyone can tell you no birthday invitations ever were issued. A mother went out on a rickety wooden back stoop with a cake and, before all the candles were lit, a sizable flock of children, hopefully including the birthday celebrant, had landed.

My aunt and uncle also exited the big house at that time and lived nearby at Copley Hill. A big red book was kept by one mother each month and in it was listed names of the mothers in the babysitting co-op. No one had any money–it never stopped anyone from having a good time, at home or out. My farm-owning uncle had come back to the US by then, with the French wife who knew how to handle him, and he had settled into a long, domestically rich life which would eventually include six kids.

But the forces of the universe sucked my mother out of that relative bliss. She discovered breast cancer when I was six, and though the operation was successful and she lived another 35 years, she was stricken, ashamed, and weakened by it, so much so that I, as a first grader, knew my mother was changed utterly but didn’t know why until I was 22. It just wasn’t talked about then.

So she was drawn back–not all the way into the Terraces but into the very lovely Cape Cod next door–just a bamboo forest away from my grandmother. There my grandmother came for lunch everyday, twisted my mother’s carefully ironed curtains away from the windows, pinned them on top of the bookshelf with a heavy volume, and sat at the end of the table across from my father. Eventually, we would move all the way back, when the old lady died and my father took over the big house.

By then the aunts had died, as had my grandfather and the uncle who lived much of his married life in The Terraces. My mother delighted in having the house painted–champagne white–and finally it did sparkle inside with the crystallinity my grandmother must have intended with all those windows. It was always a quirky house. The individual heaters in each room, though working from the same furnace, separately made noise, one of them sounding just like someone opened the front door, ran through the house and out the back, slamming that door.

I don’t think Mom was ever happy there, and I know she was thrilled when, after Pop’s retirement, they sold the house and moved to the country. Relative silence had reigned for the last two years they lived in The Terraces–the old furnace which made a different sound in every room (the outlet in my parents’ room sounded just like someone banging open the front door, running through the house, and banging out the back door) had given up the ghost. Two years of heavy blankets and space heaters. By then Montebello had long been sold too, to the University. The children were gone. After having lived in my grandfather’s cottage while I finished my Bachelor’s degree, I’d taken up the restless, house-jumping life I’d pursue for many years. My brother was in New York, living in an apartment with his wife and baby daughter.

My father wanted to put up a Jim Walters. Modular was always, to him, the logical way to build. My mother dug in her heels. Eventually they built a scaled down version of Montebello, a little Palladian on the hilltop of their northwest Albemarle County property.

My parents didn’t always get along. They were alike in many ways–Southern, genteel, well-bred. They weren’t entirely similar in temperament though–my father’s practicality, socialist politics, and social gregariousness combined with an emotional remoteness at home didn’t always resonate with my mother’s soft, girlish, hopelessly impractical love for the arts and her children, her appreciation of a good dry martini, her reverence for her mother’s diamond bar pin and Chinese silk opera cloak, and her need for male worship.

Maybe the mountains of North Carolina had left their stamp on her, though. She took to life in the country this time, loved its peace, their home, and their huge husky-shepherd Heathcliff who ate small living things routinely including, probably, their cat. They lived rusticated for fourteen of their forty four years together.

For my mother, the perfidiousness of husbands had finally taken a comic turn. She was devoted to Pop, a temperate, peaceful, cultured man, and I don’t know that she ever could gauge his quiet worship of her. One tale my mother recounted, after several years out in the country and nearly forty with Mr. Practicality, showed the extent to which she had come to live, peacefully and–more–merrily, with both. She’d been hanging curtains on a precarious old stepladder at the sliding door to the patio when a booming thunder storm suddenly hit the mountaintop. My father was reading the paper in his armchair across the room when a heart-stopping crack of lightning knocked out the electricity. My mother, terrified all her life of lightning, called out in a quaver, “Chic, Chic.” My father, complete confidence ringing in his Virginia bass, called out to her, “Hang on to the curtain, Babe.”

She told this story with a great laugh, and we both laughed the summer I was home reading for comprehensive exams. It was another stormy twilight and I was reading Crome Yellow when the lights were, once again, blown out. Mom appeared in the living room with a candelabra, fully lit, and two glasses of white wine. She and I settled down with our reading. A little while later we heard Pop’s accordion from somewhere outside. We had to do some tracking, candelabra held high, and finally realized he was ensconced on his toilet, playing a polka or a shottish or two, with the lid down, the door to the outside open (his bathroom, quite naturally–his being his mother’s son–having a door to the outside), and the big, fat, old husky Heathcliff outside warbling accompaniment.

My father, born into Virginia plantation class, had, as I mentioned, turned socialist in college and for a long time this seemed to explain what began to look like a compulsion to get rid of family property. The plantation, the two big in-town houses–all were long gone when my mother died. My father, desolate without her, tried to get rid of the country property then, but my brother and I were on to him and saw in it a form of self-abnegation. We were no longer so in awe of his ideals. And, besides, we were Virginians, weren’t we? We had land-lust.

By the time I figured out to hang onto property for dear life, I’d bounced through scores of houses. Something about growing up in such domiciliary stability must have driven me to it. I lived in apartments, duplexes, a girls’ boarding school dormitory. I’d driven one boyfriend to buy me two houses. I lived in a log cabin in Fluvanna County before I flung myself into a whirlwind of moving on the Gulf Coast–first in graduate school in Houston where, one year, I moved four times. Then, as a married lady, down the coast to Mobile.

I’d washed up in a rental house outside Nashville with my husband, two small children, and a new job when my mother began her swift spiral into congestive heart failure.

I don’t think this is such an unusual phenomenon–when she died, I had to buy a house. My friend Heather did this when her daughter left for college. Something about losing an absolutely essential tie to home-ness, comfort, safety, pleasure, ease–drove us to real estate.

I live in a one-story brick cottage in an old working class neighborhood that’s been gentrified over the last ten year by Nashville up-and-comers–gays, musicians, liberal lawyers. I have a white picket fence.

To be accurate my husband made this house the beautiful place it is. He built the picket fence in front and the stockade fence in the back that guards my big lot, my dogs, my kids. He ripped up carpet, tore down wallpaper, Kilz’d paneling, detexturized ceilings and painted every surface. He refinished all the floors. He and his father tiled the den and kitchen, built the children’s playhouse and swing set. They’d built a greenhouse in Mobile and they hauled it here. My husband planted the trees he’d grown from slips taken at the hospital where the babies were born. He put in a goldfish pond, a rosebush under my study window. He took down an old hackberry so the sun would hit the greenhouse, and he covered the stump with a Meideland rose. He built a gazebo, laid in a lily bed, and obedient plant. He brought home bamboos and transplanted fountains of ornamental grass. He lured hostas to surround the pond. He grew Autumn Joy clematis up the picket fence.

And then he left.

So I, like my two grandmothers, am unhusbanded. By alcoholism in this case too.

My children are growing up–they play in the neighborhood parks, go to school nearby, have their friends over. They seem to be remarkably happy and outgoing kids. I attribute much of their stability to their home.

My aunt says that when she told my grandmother my grandfather had died–though they hadn’t lived in the same house for forty years and who knew when they last spoke–a spark went out of the old woman. My other grandmother, though beautiful and admired by rich and famous men, never remarried after her charming Irish lawyer died far from home. I can’t promise that kind of fidelity–it’s the late 90s, I’m only 45–but I rest here now in the bower my husband promised me when we married–the beautiful and secure home, the gardens and pond, the birds, dogs, fish.

Only no husband, father, caretaker, gardener. Let this be an elegy.

Let this be an elegy for my beautiful, sad, courageous grandmothers. An elegy for those charming, drunken Irishmen, my grandfathers.

Let it be a song of celebration too–for our houses which protect the soft, deep wounds inside, for all of us, for our dedication to our absolute inclination to go on enjoying who we are and where we live and whom we love. Let us enjoy that our loves are not commonplace, nor are our houses common places. Let us celebrate that we have not always lived or loved or built wisely–but sometimes we did it well.