The kitchen opened up onto the dining room, which was rectangular, with shag carpeting in three shades of gold, and a chair
rail of white beadboard that rose to about four and a half feet above the floor and ran the length of the walls. This chair
rail supported a shelf that over the fireplace widened into a mantel and then narrowed again as it continued its journey around
the room. Nancy used it to display mementos and knickknacks, everything from a taxidermied piranha to a clay impression of
Mark’ hand from when he was in kindergarten. On the first day of December, though, all of this decorative rubbish would be
cleared away to make room for the onslaught of Christmas cards that the Wrights received annually, as many from psychoanalytic
institutes, colleagues, and former patients of Ernest’ as from relatives and friends. In those volatile years, it was fashionable
to write a Christmas letter or verse and have it printed on the card along with a photograph of the sender’ family, and sometimes
these works had an unintended edge of heartbreak:
Jane and Allen’s twelfth anniversary
Was celebrated with divorce.
The party, though, was only cursory,
The marriage having run its course.
To the right of the fireplace, a curved archway led into the living room, the least used room in the house, with its Danish
modern leather chairs, one of which the cat, Dora, had peed on the day it had been delivered; the stain was still there a
dozen years later. Here, too, was the piano, a matte black 1920 Knabe with beautifully fluted legs. Nancy had bought it “for
a song” (her joke) at an estate sale. And then—the bar connecting the two parts of the H—there was the front hall, with the
stained-glass door that nobody used, and off of that a sort of family room that had been Ernest’ study before he’d moved into
the attic above the garage, but which Nancy still called the study, and where you would usually find Little Hans, the family
schnauzer, asleep on a leather rocking chair. (Little Hans, Dora—everything in that house was a Freud joke.) It was in the
study as well that Ernest kept his collection of toy airplanes, a rare foray into sentimentality for him, gathered mostly
to honor the memory of his father, who had dreamed of flight since boyhood but had himself flown only once, near the very
end of his life, on a commuter plane that carried him from St. Louis to Chicago to visit a heart specialist.
On the other side of the front hall was the bedroom wing. There were four bedrooms, the largest Nancy and Ernest’, the smallest
Ben’. Mark’ room Ernest had had made over into a library almost as soon as his son had left for Vancouver. Daphne’ had a queen-size
bed and therefore did double duty as the guest room on those rare occasions when there were overnight guests. A corner bathroom
with two entrances connected this room to Ben’. He often complained that his sister woke him up in the small hours with her
loud and frequent peeing. About these rooms I can tell you less than I can about the others, because I very rarely had occasion
to go into them.
Outside, in addition to the barbecue pit, there was a good-size swimming pool that the Wrights themselves had had built, and
in which Nancy swam a rigorous twenty laps daily, even in bad weather. There was also a camellia garden, and a vegetable garden,
and a koi pond with no koi; one winter, preparatory to repairing a leak, Ernest had drained it and put the koi into a barrel,
from which they’d been stolen, over the course of a single night, by a family of raccoons. After that he gave up on koi, and
filled the pond with impatiens—another oddity, the fish pond/flower bed, in that yard where nothing was what it had been meant
to be.
As for Nancy—well, if the barbecue pit was Carcassone,
she
was Dame Carcas: tall, with a stately bearing. Tight curls, black going to gray, helmeted her head. She had a snub nose. Her
eyes were the color of raisins. I remember that in those years, as was the fashion, she often dressed in flowing saris, muumuus
patterned with exotic flowers, the sort of dresses that transform fat women into shapeless balls but lend to statuesque women
like Nancy an even more imperious, aristocratic aspect. Her breasts protruded, one might say, with pride, they were like the
buttresses of a cathedral. Whether she was smoking a cigarette on the porch, or feeding the cat, or overseeing the preparation
of the Thanksgiving turkey, she radiated the slightly weary, slightly burdened grandeur of one of those monarchs whose biographies
she was forever reading—Mary, Queen of Scots, Catherine the Great. But more than either of them, Elizabeth I. In her imagination,
I fancy she saw herself as the reincarnation of the Virgin Queen.
One peculiarity of home ownership in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the Wellspring campus is that the university
itself owns all the land. When you buy a house, you buy
only
the house; the land will then be leased to you for ninety-nine years at the rate of a dollar a year—
but only on the
condition that you are a tenured professor or senior
administrator
at the university.
And though a spouse can inherit a lease, it can be passed on to a child only in the unlikely circumstance that the child,
too, is a tenured professor or senior administrator at the university—a rule that enraged Nancy, who had a mystic feeling
for her home, and wanted it to remain in the family. What plots were hatched in the seventies to get Daphne—now a psychologist—a
position at the student health center! All to no avail. Ernest was killed, and Nancy died, and the house passed out of the
family’ hands, until Ben, rather remarkably, reclaimed it.
To understand how this odd provision came into being (and it really is the heart of the story), you need to know something
about Wellspring’ history. The university was chartered in 1910, when cattle baron and theosophy devotee Josiah Red-dicliffe
sectioned off ten thousand acres of hilly farmland for the purposes of founding a college that would serve as “a wellspring
of knowledge and hope forever more.” The “forever more” is key: Although the charter invested the board of trustees with the
power to decide just how to
use
the land, it stipulated that not even an acre of it could be sold. In its early years, Wellspring was isolated, an “Eden of
learning” amid the arroyos and swaying grasses. And this was just how Josiah Reddicliffe wanted it: He had a vision of sturdy
young males going out to round up cattle after a few hours spent reading Pliny the Elder. But then a few merchants and bankers,
doctors and lawyers, opened shops and practices on the fringes of the campus. In 1920, the town of Wellspring was officially
incorporated. Four years later, chiefly to appease certain members of the faculty who were getting weary of the commute from
Pasadena, the board of trustees came up with the land lease scheme that obtains to the present day. These professors built
the first houses on Florizona Avenue, including the one Nancy Wright was so determined to keep for her children.
Why did she care so much? Ernest certainly didn’t. Indeed, one afternoon a few months before his death, he came home and announced
quite casually that he’d just put the house on the market, and put a down payment on a new condominium on Oklakota Road. Nancy’
outrage, he later said, baffled him. Why should they go on rattling around in such a big house, he argued, especially now
that he was retiring, and Daphne and Mark were on their own, and Ben was about to start college? He was not the sort of man
to understand the mysterious sensibilities that yoke some people to their homes. “I hardly even notice where I live,” he told
me once. “Rooms, furniture. Intelligent people don’t care about these things.” Still, on this occasion at least, Nancy must
have prevailed—whether through threats or pleading or bargaining, I shall never know, the secrets of that bedroom having died
with its occupants—for a few days later, he withdrew the offer on the condominium, and stopped the sale of the house.
It was after he was killed, and she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, that Nancy began in earnest her campaign to keep the
house. In this she was joined by Daphne and Ben, both of whom had by then moved back home, and who shared her obsession. Right
out of college, Daphne had married Glenn Turner—principally, I think, because Glenn now had a position as an assistant professor
at Wellspring, and therefore a shot at being able to buy the house. But then Glenn was turned down for tenure, and Daphne
left him, landing on her mother’ doorstep with two small children in tow. Likewise Ben, for somewhat more obscure reasons,
decided to return from New York to the family fold. The three of them, along with the two grandchildren, were living together
in the house (only Mark—married now, and a lawyer in Toronto—had achieved any degree of independence) when Nancy arranged
her famous meeting with the provost, the meeting at which he tried to explain to her, as calmly as possible, the university’
position, the consensus that, were the rule in question ever to be changed, or an exception made, within a matter of years,
nearly every house on Florizona Avenue would belong to the child of a professor, and there would be nowhere for the professors
themselves to live. Worse, some of those children might decide to try to profit from the situation by selling their houses
to “outsiders” of the sort who were even then colonizing the rest of the community. Prices would rise to such a level that
no faculty member could
afford
to live on Florizona Avenue—an argument against which, like all the others, she stopped her ears. Her opinion was fixed and
passionate: That house, for her, was more than a house; it was a spiritual inheritance, her children’ birthright. As she left
the provost’ office, she swore that she would never give up. If need be, she would die fighting.
After that she really got going. First she organized a petition drive, soliciting all her neighbors for support. Then she
barraged the board of trustees with letters. Then she persuaded a reporter from the
Wellspring Sentinel
to do a story “exposing” a rule little known outside the university. Lastly, she threatened the administration with a lawsuit—all
without success. The petition drive yielded only a few dozen signatures, the board of trustees rejected her arguments, the
article in the
Sentinel
was buried near the back page, the lawsuit never got off the ground. By the time Nancy died, all her efforts had been exhausted—and
yet, even in her final delirium, she could speak of little else besides the house. To comfort her, Ben lied. He told her that
at the eleventh hour, the provost had given in, agreeing that the Wright children could take over the land lease. And she
accepted what he told her, or at least pretended to, and seemed to die in peace. Teary-eyed yet stoic, Ben and Daphne now
organized the estate sale during which much of their parents’ worldly chattel was sold and hauled off, including the Danish
modern leather chair with the cat pee on it, and the piano, and the stuffed piranha. Dora was dead. I took Little Hans, who
lived with me until his own death a few years later. Two law professors—a married couple—bought the house, and Ben and Daphne,
each bearing a third of the considerable profits, went their separate ways. For years I didn’t hear from them. I didn’t know
that they were still plotting. I didn’t know that, especially for Ben, the reclaiming of that house, the fulfillment of that
final lie at his mother’ deathbed, had become the driving ambition of a frustrated and unhappy life.
N
ANCY WRIGHT “FOUND” me, as she found so many of her friends, at the hairdresser’. This was in November 1967.1 suppose I should
say something more about what I was like at that time. I was twenty-eight, and had been working at Wellspring for just over
a year. I was fat, with freckled, vigorous cheeks, and most of the time I wore men’ Oxford shirts and denim skirts with elasticized
waistbands. I still do. Perhaps because of this, most people assume me to be a sexless spinster, or short of that a lesbian,
when in fact I have always had a fairly easy time attracting men. Wives be warned: It is not necessarily the glamorous woman,
the woman with the pronounced cheekbones and the red hair piled loosely atop her head, who is the femme fatale. On the contrary,
the homely secretary may pose a graver threat to your domestic security. For there is often a great disparity between what
men actually want and what they feel, for the sake of appearances, they should pretend to want. Thus, even within the deceptive
realm of infidelity, one encounters secondary levels of deception. One of the married men with whom I had an affair, when
his wife found a love letter he had written to me, insisted that it was for another woman—a more conventionally “pretty” woman—that
the missive was meant. Others were glad to sleep with me, but would not be seen with me at restaurants. This attitude probably
would have caused me greater offense had it not fit so well my need for privacy and independence. I was a creature too prone
to passionate excess to thrive within the conjugal yoke. Affairs with married men better suited my character and disposition.
The married men appreciated that I had no wish to interfere with their domestic stability. I appreciated that they were less
likely to importune, to demand total loyalty, than would a conventional suitor. It was a system that worked well through a
number of long affairs, including one with Ernest Wright.
And why, I now find myself trying to recall, had I gone to the hairdresser’ in the first place? I wasn’t in the habit of doing
so—even then, I preferred to keep my hair short and to the point—only that week one of the other secretaries in my department
must have put it into my head that I ought to “do” something with my hair, such as have it set. And so that Saturday, more
to appease a sense of youthful insecurity than from any genuine enthusiasm, I went to Minnie’ Beauty Salon on Calibraska Avenue.
I endured the ordeal of having my hair washed, cut, and then rolled with curlers, after which I was put to roost under one
of the old-fashioned, kettle-shaped dryers. Next to me Nancy knitted. We had only met once before, at a department function.
“Hello,” she said. “Do you play piano?”
I thought I’d misheard her. “Excuse me?” I asked.
“Oh, it’ you,” she said. “Sorry, I didn’t recognize you under there. How are things going?”
“Oh, hello, Mrs. Wright! Fine, thank you.”
“I hope Ernest hasn’t terrorized you too much.”
“No, not at all.”
“I’m only asking about the piano because I’m looking for a four-hand partner.
Do
you play?”
“Badly,” I admitted.
“Good, that’ just how I play,” she said, and dropped a stitch.
Ben was with her. I don’t know why. He must have been thirteen at the time. He was sitting near the window, scowling at Robert
Graves’
Greek Myths.
“Ben, say hello to Daddy’ new secretary, Miss Denham,” Nancy shouted.
Ben mumbled something.
“What was that?” Nancy called, so that people turned. “E-nun-ci-ate.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Ben screamed.
“No need to shout.”
“It’ not my fault that you can’t hear under that thing.” He returned to his book. In those days there was still an old-fashioned
drugstore on Calibraska Avenue, with a lunch counter. Those customers who happened to have appointments at Minnie’ over the
lunch hour made it their habit to order in cheeseburgers, BLTs, and the like, and eat them under the dryers. Now a delivery
boy came through the door, bearing bags of food, and Minnie called out our orders.
“Chicken salad?”
Ben and I raised our hands simultaneously and were each handed a sandwich in wax paper. Already addled by Nancy’ interrogation,
I unwrapped mine without ceremony and started gobbling.
Suddenly Ben put his sandwich down.
“What is it?” his mother asked.
“It’ not on toast,” Ben said.
“Well, the drugstore must have forgotten,” Nancy said.
“These things happen.”
“But I ordered it on toast.”
“Now Ben—”
“She
has my sandwich!” he cried, pointing at me. I stopped chewing. And it was true; on closer examination, I saw that my sandwich
was
toasted. Clearly Minnie had mixed up our orders.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Here"—and realized that I had already eaten half.
What I didn’t know—what I wouldn’t learn until a few months later—was that among the many food phobias from which Ben suffered
at the time was an irrational aversion to untoasted bread; he simply refused to eat untoasted bread, which he claimed was
“germy.” Nor was he remotely gracious during the fretful parrying that followed. I apologized; he sulked. Despite his mother’
remonstrances, he would neither accept the remaining half of my sandwich, nor allow a new one to be ordered for him. “I’m
so sorry,” Nancy said. “Go ahead and finish your lunch.” But of course mortification and pride forbade me from taking so much
as a bite. Nancy couldn’t finish her grilled cheese, either. I wondered if I’d have to quit my job, or ask to be transferred
to a different department.
Afterwards, she tried to make it up to me. “He’ a sensitive boy,” she said. “He writes poetry.”
“How nice,” I answered. In truth, I was thinking only that as soon as I could decently ask to be unplugged from the dryer,
I would get out of Minnie’, never to return. Yet Nancy was not about to let me off so easily; she could be assaultive in her
generosity, especially if she felt that she had a debt to repay. “Let’ do play together,” she urged. “You could come over
on Saturdays, when you’re off work. I’ll make lunch afterward. Where are you from, by the way?”
“North Florida.”
“Do you live alone? Are you going home for Thanksgiving?
Come for Thanksgiving.”
“But—”
“Unless you have other plans. Are you going back East? To your family?”
I didn’t feel like explaining that I had no family, so I just said, “No.”
“Then it’ settled.” She wrote the address down on one of Minnie’ business cards. “Oh, and if you come early, we can try some
four-hand. Too-da-loo.”
They left. I thought that I would wait a few days and then call to say I couldn’t come; that I had “forgotten” a previous
invitation. But the next day at work, Ernest said, “So happy you’ll be coming to Thanksgiving. Nancy told me about running
into you, and she’ tickled pink.” (Such locutions as “tickled pink” often slipped through the veneer of old-world severity
that he affected, recalling his Midwestern childhood.)
“Dr. Wright,” I said, “really, it’ very sweet of you, but I wouldn’t want you to feel—from a sense of duty—”
“Do you often feel people ask you places from a sense of duty?”
“Yes. No.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, think about it,” he said. “And perhaps we can talk about it more on Thanksgiving, hmm?”
Thanksgiving was the following Thursday. Per Nancy’ instructions, at eleven o’clock in the morning I made my way down the
brick path to the front door, and rang the bell.
Daphne let me in. She was in her nightgown. Her long blond hair—which she rarely bothered to comb—gave her a look of careless
prettiness, or pretty carelessness. “Mom, someone’ here,” she said through a yawn. “Come in.” And she led me through to the
kitchen.
From the stove, Nancy waved a baster in greeting. A cigarette smoldered in an ashtray next to a large pan filled with breadcrumb
stuffing. There was a festive, roasting smell. I had dressed carefully—and all wrong, I saw now—in a dark blue suit and cream-colored
blouse with a frilly collar: the outfit I had worn when I had gone to interview for my job. Nancy, by contrast, was wearing
a muumuu patterned with wild green flowers that looked like they might bite your hand off, and orange flames shooting forth
toward jagged peaks: the very embodiment of Florizona.
On subsequent Thanksgivings, the moment I arrived, Nancy would draft me into chopping something. This time, however, having
accepted the bottle of wine I had brought, she instructed Daphne to “keep an eye on the bird,” and took me off on a tour of
the house. In terms of detail, I absorbed very little that first visit, though I did notice the toy airplanes, and the piano,
and that the furniture in the living room was strikingly “modern.” Nancy introduced me again to Ben, and for the first time
to Mark, who was now a sophomore at Wellspring, with a bony, brooding face and a unibrow. They were sitting on the study sofa,
thumbing through a book of
Krazy Kat
cartoons. By way of greeting, Mark looked up and gave me one of those frowns that can be so much more compelling and attractive
than a smile. His very straight brown hair was parted in the middle and cut severely just below the ears, while Ben had shaggy,
rather dry hair, paler than his brother’, and inclined to wave. Even so, he too had parted it in the middle. Like Mark, he
had his left leg crossed manfully over his right, ankle on knee. They wore more or less identical outfits—pale Oxford shirts
and flared jeans—but because Ben’ legs were so long in relation to his torso, his didn’t seem to hang on him properly. The
jeans rode up, revealing a band of pale flesh just above the sock line.
We finished up in the bedroom wing. “I won’t subject you to Daphne’ chaos,” Nancy said, bypassing one closed door and opening
another to reveal the master bedroom, which was utterly pristine, the enormous bed made up for the occasion with the “dress”
bedspread, tailored from heavy slub linen. From here we walked out onto the back porch, which ran the whole length of the
house and gave onto a vista of old oaks, red-leafed Japanese maples, and a few exotic fruit trees, including a guava. A very
green lawn swept down to the pool, which had been built parallel to the barbecue pit; beyond that I could make out just the
edge of the former koi pond, as well as some exuberant rose bushes. For the first but by no means the last time she told me
the story of how she and Ernest had come to acquire the house.
There was a moment of spectacular quiet in which all you could hear was the remote trilling of a lark. “It’ very beautiful,”
I said—ineptly, I thought—and Nancy, her breast rising with emotion, gave me a smile to suggest regal forbearance: noblesse
oblige.
“I shall never live anywhere else,” she said. “When they take me out of here, it’ll be feet first in a pine box.” Then she
lit a cigarette. “Well, we’d better be getting back to the kitchen, shouldn’t we?” And she walked me across the porch to the
back door.
The kitchen was empty. “Oh, where is Daphne?” Nancy inquired of no one, and ran to open the oven. In those years supermarket
turkeys almost always came with a little built-in thermometer that popped up when the meat reached a certain temperature;
fortunately, we now discovered, the device remained unejaculated, which meant that even though Daphne had fallen down on the
job, the meal’ ruination was not imminent.
In fact, Daphne was in her room. Through the locked door, Nancy shouted, “Daph! What are you doing? I asked you to keep an
eye on the turkey! Do I have to do everything myself around here? And while you’re in there, do something with your hair.
It looks like a rat’ nest.”
We returned to the living room, where she sat me down at the piano. “Let’ start with this,” she said, arranging some music
on the desk. “It’ a baby transcription of Beethoven’ Eighth Symphony.”
The truth was, it had been several years since I’d sat in front of a piano. All through elementary school and high school,
in our little town in Florida, my sister and I had taken lessons from Miss Busby, who lived with her own sister in the country
and was paralyzed from the waist down. Her house was built from heart pine and had what was known as a “dog trot,” a long
corridor through which a cooling breeze blew even on the hottest summer afternoons. But now it was almost a decade since I’d
left Miss Busby, and my sister, and our little town. I’d followed a boyfriend to California, where he’d married someone else.
“Be patient with me,” I said, cracking my fingers. “I may be rusty.”
“Don’t do that,” Nancy said. “It’ll bring on arthritis.”
“I know. I shouldn’t. I won’t.”
“Now—one, two, three—” And we began.
That day we played for almost an hour. I was dreadful, though not as dreadful as I’d feared I’d be. And Nancy, to her credit,
was patient with me, offering gentle pointers when I made a mistake, or lost my way. “Trust me, it’ll sound better next week,”
she said as we finished, then closed the music desk, after which we returned to the kitchen, where Daphne, Mark, and Ben were
playing Scrabble at the tulip table. This was one Thanksgiving tradition; another, more obscure in origin, was to play Edith
Piaf records on the Harmon-Kardon stereo.
It all rather overwhelmed me. Until then, I had only experienced family life from a great remove—on television, or at the
house of a great aunt in Tallahassee, to which my sister and I were sometimes invited out of pity in the years after our father
ran away and our mother died. And now here I stood, an old maid in an inappropriately formal suit, while Edith Piaf sang
“Je ne regrette rien”
and teenagers laughed, and from the upper of the two wall ovens there wafted a smell of meat and onions and sage, and from
the lower one a smell of nutmeg and pumpkin. Ernest came in, smoking a pipe. Most of the morning he’d been in his office over
the garage. He was wearing a bow tie. With him was Glenn Turner, who had just finished his Ph.D. He too was smoking a pipe;
he too was wearing a bow tie.