Belonging (11 page)

“Thanks for warning me.”

“Okay. Well. Let’s see. The house remained in the Farthingale family for seventy-five years, but was seldom lived in for all that time—no one wanted to be stuck out in the sticks. I guess now and then when a newlywed couple was saving up the money for their own place, they’d make do out there. But in the early twentieth century a summer visitor saw the possibilities and bought the house as a vacation home.”

“A vacation home, that long ago?”

“Oh, yes. Even before the turn of the century, Nantucket was a tourist resort. In the sixties a family named Baxter bought it from the Farthingales and used it as a summer house for quite a while. Put in heat and a modern kitchen and some other amenities. Like a lot of other people, they started coming down during the fall—it’s glorious here then—and then perhaps for Christmas, then early in the spring. Old man Baxter loved the island. When he died, the house passed on to his children, but this last batch of owners, Baxter’s grandchildren, prefer the mountains and don’t like coming here. At least that’s what they say. I have a feeling they’d just rather have the money than the house. Three quarters of a million dollars is a lot of money.”

“Yes,” Joanna agreed soberly, “it is.”

“Still,” Bob added, perking up, “you might be the one to find the treasure.”

“The treasure?”

They were just turning off the paved Quidnet Road, onto the rough Squam Road. The twigs and branches of the dense bordering thickets were still closed tight against winter, looking sticklike and brittle and gray.

“The treasure,” Bob repeated, pronouncing the words as if they felt good in his mouth. “Farthingale found a treasure. Or so he said. It was along the beach he walked
daily that he found a chest of gold and jewels, washed up on the sand after one of the many shipwrecks caused by fog and Nantucket’s shoals. He brought it home and hid it in his house. At any and all times when he did bless other men with his company, Farthingale boasted of this treasure. A chest of gold and jewels. He promised his sons he’d share it with them, then died before telling them where it was.”

“So no one else ever saw the treasure.”

“Right. But you see, Nantucket’s absolutely surrounded by shoals, and those and the fog and storms have caused plenty of shipwrecks over the years. There are written records of such wrecks and of cargo being strewn all across the beaches to be gathered up by whoever got there first. Clothes, linens, jewelry, money. There were also pirates who sailed these waters, capturing ships coming from England or the Far East, and sometimes after a battle the debris from a sinking ship would wash up on our shores.”

“But I would think anyone who owned the house would have searched it thoroughly.”

“Of course. Still, it’s a large house, an old house. A lot of house to search, four floors, really. Eight fireplaces. Two main staircases, a front for the family, a back for the servants, plus a third down into the basement and a small enclosed staircase leading up to a large attic. The attic itself’s broken up into several bedrooms, all with angled ceilings—something could be tucked away up there, under the wide-board floors.”

“Oh, the house sounds so wonderful, I can’t wait to see it,” Joanna exclaimed.

“Well, then, here we are!” Bob replied as he turned off Squam Road onto a wide white pebble drive. It was bordered with slanted, wind-twisted pines, gnarled scrub oak, and wild berry bushes, all so thick and high and overgrown they obscured the sight of the ocean. The wild greenery scratched and skittered along the sides of the Mercedes. Now the shrubs parted, and there was the house, serene and centered against the sea and sky.

It looked as charmingly forthright as it had the first time she saw it, two years before, and again last August when she’d crept down the drive for one brief, clandestine, longing look.

“It’s like something from a storybook,” Joanna observed.

Bob came around to help her out of the station wagon. “It’s a great old house, no doubt about it.” They stood side by side, looking up at it. “Its architecture combines the best elements of several periods and philosophies. The plain weathered gray shingles and the basic structural design reflect the Quaker belief in simplicity. But about the time
Farthingale built his house, the island was changing and architecture was, too. See the framing of the door?” Approaching the house, he ran his hands over two broad, flat, upright boards on either side of the door. “These are called pilasters, and the board that connects them over the top is called the entablature. You can see how it echoes very simply the structure of a Greek temple. This detail is carried on throughout the house, over the eight fireplaces, although as you’ll see, the ones downstairs are more decorative.”

“How did Greek Revival get out here?” Joanna asked.

“It all connects up to what was going on at the time. The United States had just come out of the Revolution and then the War of 1812. The people were eager to show in every way, especially in the outward appearance of their homes, that this country had thrown off the English influence and was becoming a strong republic on its own. They wanted to emulate the ancient Greek city-state, which was the birthplace of democracy, so they put up all these sort of miniature Greek temples. As a matter of fact, many of our big beautiful buildings in town—the Atheneum, the Methodist church, the mansions on Main Street—are Greek Revival, and I have to say those buildings are awfully damned elegant.” Bob shook his head in admiration, then smiled abashedly. “I’m an amateur historian. Just tell me to shut up when I get carried away.”

“No, no, I’m interested in all this, really,” Joanna told him, biting her tongue just before she blurted out, “It’s my field, actually.” He didn’t seem to know who she was—not that he should recognize her with the wig on—and she wanted to keep it that way for a while.

“I should be telling you stuff you need to know.” Bob stepped back and looked up, pointing at the windows. “Six over six windowpanes. See the ripples? That’s the original glass. The good news is that the house hasn’t been tampered with very much. You might say that its integrity is complete. That’s the bad news, too. Except for the necessary reshinglings over the years, it hasn’t been tampered with very much. It hasn’t been cared for. It needs a lot of work.”

“That doesn’t scare me,” Joanna told him.

“Okay, then, let’s go inside. I came out earlier to turn on the heat, but it’s still going to feel chilly. Damp. The way houses do when they’ve been shut up for a long time.” He turned the key in the lock, held the blue door open, and let Joanna pass before him.

Joanna stepped inside. Immediately she was overwhelmed with emotions and, standing very still in the central hall, she gazed around at the sunlight on the burnished wood floors. She heard the gentle hum of the furnace; she smelled wood and dust and sun. The house didn’t seem chilly. It seemed welcoming.

She felt she had come home.

“I want to buy this house,” she said.

Bob laughed. “You’d better let me show it all to you first.” But he waited patiently, letting her look, letting her take her time. They were standing together just inside the front door, at the front of the long central hall from which a wide, graceful staircase wound up to the second floor. Four doors stood open to other rooms.

Another smaller door, no doubt to a closet, opened underneath the staircase. The most compelling view was straight back to the opposite end of the house where tall glass doors framed a view of blazing blue sky above land which sloped to the sea, and Joanna hurried the length of the house to look out.

“One of the best changes the summer owners made was to install those French doors,” Bob remarked.

“Yes,” Joanna agreed, “I can see that.” Three steps led from the doors straight down to a small rectangle of lawn, which in its turn gave way to wild brush, and then the beach and the ocean.

“There should be a deck all along here,” Joanna said. She could envision it clearly: blue and white pots of pink geraniums that would be placed at the corners.

“Good idea.” Bob waited until Joanna turned from the view, then led her into the large front room, which opened directly onto a room equally large, with its windows full of ocean view. “What we’ve got on this side of the house are what were called, when the house was built, traditional ‘double parlors,’ one behind the other. So you can have one large open room, or put a wall in along here and have two good-sized single rooms. You could shut off the ocean-side room—that gets the worst of the wind—and use it only in the summer and save on heating bills if you wanted.”

“Oh, it’s beautiful,” Joanna gasped. The wide-board pine floors, with stain and oil and simple age, had become the color of butterscotch. The walls and ceiling were a gentle cream, marked and soiled enough to need painting. Pewter chandeliers hung from the plaster rosettes in the center of each room, and the two fireplaces were finished off in marble, with the mantels ornamented with beadwork.

She followed Bob across the hall. “Here we have the dining room. This fireplace has a built-in oven and a small closet for kindling beneath. It was once what was known as the keeping room where the family really lived and ate and cooked most of the year. That door leads to what was once the borning room, and is now the kitchen, and was modernized in the sixties. I’ll show you the kitchen in a moment, first, this door …” Bob stepped from the dining room into a small, low-ceilinged, unheated room, and Joanna joined him. “This little room is what people used to call a wart. It was probably a summer kitchen when the house was built. This century the owners turned it into a screened-in porch. Too bad you’re seeing it now when everything’s still dead. This room is great in the summer when the vines are blooming all over.”

“I can imagine.”

Holding the door, he led her back through the dining room and into the only room Joanna didn’t appreciate: a kitchen full of avocado appliances, with a linoleum floor and aqua linoleum counters.

“This will have to change drastically,” she announced.

Bob tapped the refrigerator door. “The appliances all function until you can get new ones. In here is a nice little half-bathroom.” Near the door to the central hall was another, smaller door, and now he opened it, revealing a set of very steep, twisting stairs. “Servants’ stairs. They’d come down from the attic this way.”

Joanna followed the Realtor up the stairs and along the hallway to the large bedroom. “Wow,” she said softly, and just leaned against the window, looking out at the panorama of beach, ocean, and sky. Dazzling. This would be her bedroom. The bed here, and a chaise by the window, and she could move it in front of the fireplace in the winter … “Does the fireplace work?”

“As far as I know it does. Of course, you’ll want it checked out.”

She ran her hand over the plain, oiled wide pine board which ran as a panel over the fireplace. It was warm to her touch.

“The Baxters built a nice large bathroom between the two rooms on this side, but you can always lock this door if you want the bathroom to be strictly for the master suite.”

They crossed the hall to another large bedroom with ocean views. This would be her study.

Bob knocked his fingers on an inside wall. “The Baxters put some new walls in
up here, to make enough bedrooms for all their children and grandchildren.”

“I can see that. I’ll have them knocked out. I need a large office.” She could envision it as she spoke: walls of shelves here and here—“Could you recommend a good carpenter? And a good electrician?”

“Surely.”

“I’ll have to have a lot of power in here for my computer, Xerox machine, and fax. This room will be my first priority.”

“What kind of work do you do?” Bob asked.

“Oh,” Joanna answered, “well, research. For the next year I’ll be working on two books, nonfiction, about houses.”

Before he could ask more, Joanna turned and went out into the hall and along to the front of the house. The windows in this large bedroom looked out over the driveway and the moors. The ceiling was high and the space was airy, but when it was painted and papered, it would be even brighter.

“No ocean views on this side,” Bob pointed out, following her. “However, this room and the other front bedroom will be much easier to keep warm in the winter.” He tapped the radiator running under one window. “Great heat, the best, steam heat, and when we go to the basement, I’ll show you the furnace. Oil.”

She followed Bob up a set of enclosed stairs to the attic, with its several tiny rooms wallpapered in summery flowers, the original pegs on the walls for clothes. The floors up here were unfinished boards, many at least two feet across.

They went down to the basement, and here, too, was a room with beautiful wide-board floors, as well as a fireplace nearly high enough to walk into, a beehive oven built into the bricks, and another, lower, gently arched opening for storing firewood. Here and there large holes gaped in the walls, and brick dust had sifted out onto the floor.

“They probably used this as a summer kitchen.” Bob nodded toward one pile of debris. “No doubt places knocked open when someone tried to find Farthingale’s treasure.”

Moving into other, less finished rooms, he pointed out the oil furnace and the great black oil tank, and the panel of electric fuse boxes, and the water heater. They went outside, walked around the house, looked up at the roof and the trim around the windows, and Joanna saw how much more weathered the wood was on the ocean side of the house. Basically, though, things were in good condition.

Bob locked up the house and drove her into his office in town, and while she drank a cup of hot decaffeinated coffee, he gathered together for her all the listing sheets printed with the details of the house.

It was time for her flight back to New York. The Realtor drove her to the airport, and while they waited for the plane to board, he bought her a sandwich. She was ravenously hungry.

“I want to make an offer on this house,” Joanna told him as they sat together at a table looking out at the flat paved airstrip. “Should I call you tonight?”