Life Among the Savages (2 page)

A Mr. Miller, who wore a leather jacket and a cap with earmuffs, took us to see the Donald house. This was a pretty place, set in an acre of marsh, but we unreasonably required a furnace, which Mr. Miller figured we ought to be able to put in for maybe two, three thousand. “Heat it with stoves,
I
would,” he said. “Don't cost's much to run's a furnace.”

“Money—” my husband said.

“Might be,” Mr. Miller said, looking doubtfully at my husband, “might be you're handy-like around a house?”

Mr. Faber, who wore checked hunting pants and rolled his own cigarettes, showed us the Grant house, which had only three rooms and a lovely garden, and the Exeter house, which was big and rambling and heated and even had plumbing. “Real nice house here,” Mr. Faber said as we stood, wondering, in the panelled dining room. “Priced at fifty thousand, but he ought to come down some on
that.”

“Fif—” said my husband.

“Well,” Mr. Faber said sadly, “I didn't suppose you cared to go
that
high, but I figured you'd enjoy
seeing
it.”

Mrs. Black, who picked us up again at nine the next morning, took us to see the Hubbard house, which had been made over from an old farmhouse, and had lovely floors and high ceilings and fireplaces and clean colored walls and even a garage, but no bedrooms. “The living room
alone
is seventy foot,” Mrs. Black said. “Studio type house, you might say.” She hesitated. “Matter of three, four thousand to build on a wing,” she suggested hopefully.

“But we want to
rent,”
I said, wailing. “We don't want to put things in and build things on and plough things out, we want to rent a house that's all put together
before
we move in.”

Mrs. Black sighed. “There's a nice place, the Exeter house,” she said at last. “Real big, suit you folks fine. Priced at–”

By the end of the second day we had even looked at a barn which someone had thought he might just rent out, but there were two cows and a tractor in that, and even Mrs. Black's optimistic suggestion that we could easily make up the stalls into bedrooms for the children could not encourage us.

“Well,” Mrs. Black said as she said goodbye to us in front of our friends' house, “I guess you folks are pretty lucky you got a place to live in the city.”

Wearily, that evening, we sat in the comfortable living room of our friends' house, sheltered beneath a roof, securely, though temporarily, housed, and tried frantically to plan. It was April second, we had had our second notice of warning to evict, and we had begun to think wildly of renting a trailer, or having the children live with their grandparents, or borrowing a tent and a canoe and exploring the Great Lakes.

“Exeter,” my husband said, miserably, “Exeter, McCaffery, Grant. Bassington, Hubbard, Donald. McCaffery, Bassington, Donald, Grant. Exeter, Hubbard—”

“We just can't
live
in a house without plumbing,” I said.

“Or a furnace,” my husband said. “McCaffery, Hubbard—”

“Maybe we
could
get an extension from our landlord,” I said without hope. “Maybe if he knew how hard we tried he might let us have a few weeks more.”

Our friends sat, shaking their heads sympathetically, although their own home was paid for and firmly fixed upon its foundations, with its furnace working smoothly and its plumbing in repair.

“If we only had some
money,”
my husband said and everyone sighed.

We had to take the train home the next day, and on the way to the station I stopped in at the one grocery in town for cigarettes. After I had paid him the grocer said, “Couldn't find a place, I guess.”

“No,” I said, surprised, although I was to learn later that the grocer not only knew our housing problems, but the ages and names of our children, the meat we had been served for dinner the night before, and my husband's income.

“To bad you weren't interested in the Fielding place,” the grocer said.

“We didn't even hear about it,” I said.

“Would have called you,” the grocer said, “but Mae Black, she said you only wanted to buy. Not for sale, the Fielding house.”

“What's it like?”

The grocer waved his hand vaguely. “Old,” he said. “Been in the family a long time.” He accepted a nickel from a small boy, helped him take the wrapper off a pop-sicle, and said, “Whyn't you call old Sam Fielding? I bet he'd be real glad to take you over there.”

There was only one train a day from the town. If we stopped long enough to look at the Fielding house we would not be able to leave until tomorrow; I hesitated, and the grocer said, “Won't do any harm to
look,
anyway.”

I went outside and put my head in through the window of the car where my husband was waiting with our host and hostess. “Ever hear of a house called the Fielding house?” I asked.

“The
Fielding
house?” said our hostess, and our host said, “What on earth do you want with
that?”

“What's the matter with it?” I asked.

“Well,” said our hostess, “it's a thousand years old, I think.”

“A million,” said our host. “It's . . .” He gestured helplessly. “It's got these big white pillars across the front,” he said.

“Is there a house in back of the pillars?” my husband asked. “Because if there is, and it has plumbing and a furnace and bedrooms and they'll rent it to us, we're going to be living there.”

The Fielding house was a very old house about a mile out of town. It was the oldest in its neighborhood and the third oldest in the township; we had passed it, we realized with something of a shock, several times when we drove with Mrs. Black or Mr. Miller or Mr. Faber to look at other houses. It had been built—I looked it up in the town history shortly after we moved in, when I was vainly trying to come to terms with it—about eighteen-twenty, by a doctor named Ogilvie, who set it up as a manor house in the center of a great farm. The classical revival was upon the county then, and Doctor Ogilvie modeled his house after, presumably, a minor Greek temple; he set up the four massive white pillars across the front, threw wings out to both sides and then, with true New England economy, left the house only one room deep behind its impressive facade. When the Ogilvie family died off or moved away, as it did shortly after the house was built, it passed into the hands of a family named Cortland, who sold off most of the farm land and changed Doctor Ogilvie's woodshed into a summer kitchen. The Cortlands eventually sold the house to a family named Fielding, who promptly bought back all the surrounding land, now somewhat built up with houses, rented the houses out, set up a lumber mill on the river that used to run across Doctor Ogilvie's farm, and hired their tenants as employees. It seemed from the town records that the original Fielding had been a farm hand for Doctor Ogilvie, and the family no doubt had their eyes on the place even then. As the town developed the Fieldings became wealthier, and eventually the final generation of authentic Fieldings died off in the house and the entire property went to three cousins, all of whom lived in severely modern houses in neighboring towns, doing handsomely on their interests in the lumber mill.

When the manor house was put up for rent it was as though a vital part of the town had slid imperceptibly into the river, and a great coolness arose between the Fielding heirs and the Bartletts, who owned the second oldest house in town. During the worst housing shortages, when the lumber mill was going full blast night and day, the old manor house on top of the hill stayed empty, its white pillars sagging and its driveway choked with dead leaves or smooth with unmarked snow. When we saw it first it looked faintly ridiculous, and even the fences on either side and along the front leaned a little bit away from it, without actually renouncing it, as though they deplored it privately and yet wanted to present a unified front to the world of inhabitants. Sam Fielding was the only one of the Fielding cousins who retained the family name and so it had apparently been felt that he was the logical one to show us the house; he was a small quiet old man with the slow voice of the thoughtful Vermonter, and he stood with us at the foot of the lawn and he and my husband and I stared silently up at the huge pillars, the spread wings, the iron weather vane which stared mutely back at us.

“That's it,” said Mr. Fielding undeniably. “I'd like to get
some
use out of it.” He looked away quickly, as though avoiding an accusing glance from the house. “Good house,” he added.

“It looks so . . .” I hesitated. “Imposing,” I said finally.

“Imposing,” Mr. Fielding agreed. He declined a cigarette from my husband and took out a cigarette of his own; it was the same brand, but it was his own. “Clean it up some,” he said, nodding his head at the house.

“May we go inside?” I asked. “If we were interested in the house, I'd rather like to see the inside.”

“Door's open,” Mr. Fielding said.

We hesitated, my husband and I. Mr. Fielding settled himself comfortably on a tree stump and crossed his legs. “Door's open,” he said again.

Together my husband and I made our way to the front door, avoiding just in time the broken step that led onto the porch. Once among the pillars the sense of the house came upon one with a rush; here was a house, as compared with the makeshift McCafferies and Exeters. My husband tried the front door tentatively, and it swung open. Gingerly, watching out for broken floorboards, we went inside, into a wide hall shadowed by the pillars and backed by a straight, lovely, colonial stairway; somewhere to our right were a carpet flooded with red cabbage roses and a harmonium, under dark old pictures which seemed to lean forward a little to watch us, surprised; we went into a kitchen where a monumental ironwork stove threatened to fall on us, and in the kitchen there was a table thick with dust and on it were a dusty cup and a plate with two solid, ancient doughnuts on it. There was a chair pushed a little away from the table.

“I'm sorry we stayed,” I said to my husband earnestly, my hands shaking as I looked at the two hideous doughnuts, “we interrupted their lunch, let's leave right away.”

“If it weren't the only house in town . . .” he said, but he followed me rapidly outside.

Mr. Fielding rose to meet us as we came back down between the pillars, and when we were near him he said, “Weather's closing in. Snow before morning.” He escorted us solemnly to the station, discussing the weather, and as our train came in he remarked, “Fix her up some, then, before you folks come in the spring.”

“Tell me,” I said, “how long since anyone's been
in
that house?”

“Not since the old man died,” he said. “Four year I figure that might be.”

“But to straighten it up?” I insisted. “Look over his things, or anything?”

“Never really figured it would rent,” he said thoughtfully. “No sense rushing things.”

He waved to us kindly when we got onto the train. During most of that next two weeks I held firmly to the impractical conviction that I didn't
care
if it was the last house in the town, or in the world for that matter, and I didn't
care
if it meant living in the park, I was not going to live in a house with two petrified doughnuts. The following week, however, we received a letter from Mr. Fielding, saying that the house was being fixed up, and did we feel that fifty dollars a month was too much rent?

“You seem to have taken the house,” I said unjustly to my husband.

“It's probably because we went inside,” he said. “No one else has ever gone inside, and that probably constitutes a lease.”

A week later we received another letter from Mr. Fielding, saying that the house was all ready for us, except for the outside, which would be painted when the weather opened up. Since we had not answered his last letter, he figured that his rent was too high, and did we think we could manage forty?

A strong sense of guilt impelled my husband to write back immediately saying that fifty dollars a month was fine; “before he
gives
it to us,” he told me.

“But I'm not—” I said, realizing that of course I was.

I came up on the train, a day after my husband. I brought with me a wildly excited Laurie, and Jannie, in a basket; and all the way up on the train, crushed in between Laurie and the baby's basket and the suitcases and the sandwiches, I was wondering if anyone had thought to take away the kitchen table and the doughnuts: my husband had promised that if we really couldn't stand it we could try once more to find something in the city. Mr. Fielding was with my husband to meet us at the station, and when I saw Mr. Fielding again the whole clear sense of the house came back to me and I was ready to turn around and go back right then. He smiled at me cheerfully, said, “Afternoon, young fellow,” to Laurie, and stared gravely at the baby for a minute; she stared back at him, and then he nodded to me and said reassuringly, “Fixed her up some.”

I knew what he meant when I saw the house. It had been literally scraped clean, down to the wood in the walls. Mr. Fielding had put on new wallpaper, rich with great gorgeous patterns, the windows had been washed, the pillars straightened, the broken step repaired, and a cheerful man in the kitchen was putting the last touches of glittering white paint to the new shelving; there was a brand new electric stove and a new refrigerator, the floors had been repaired and varnished, a hornets' nest had been removed from the farthest pillar on the right. The lawn was just beginning to show green, and Laurie ran in and out between the pillars, touching every one, and then, shouting, up and down the straight stairway. In her basket Jannie smiled, looking up at the sky over the trees.