The Architecture of Fear (38 page)

"Is there anything else in there?" asked Nona.

"This is it. It used to have a lid with a cow for a handle."

"Maybe it'll turn up. Lots of old cupboards and crannies in this house."

"Grandma made good cookies," said Donald.

Nona began to giggle, then covered her mouth, not wanting to embarrass her husband.

"I'm funny?" he asked.

"You're just a kid, that's all."

"Yeah. A kid pushing fifty."

He set the full-moon cookie jar on the table.

"Come on, hon. Let's see what we can do about setting up the dining room as a temporary bedroom."

She started down the hallway to the staircase, offering a mild complaint to whatever unknown person decided the scant furnishings belonged on the top floor. On the third stair she stopped and called back, "Don?"

A few steps more, she stopped again, looking over the banister.

"Don?"

He stood in the empty dining room, paralyzed by a painful nostalgia, unable to answer. In another moment she repeated, "Donald, you coming?"

"A... a minute," he stammered. "Do you smell anything?"

"Cleaning chemicals."

"No..."

"What?"

"Cookies."

"What?" she called again.

"Yes, I'm coming," he said more loudly, moving into the hall, from which Nona was visible on the wide walnut staircase. He looked back through the dining room and into the kitchen, its door ajar.

***

They spent their first night in the house. They found out soon enough they needed everything, positively everything, and after a feeble look around the kitchen, Nona decided to drive out for some picnicking stuff. "No use filling the refrigerator until we get it cleaned better than that," she said, disgusted by the odor. "But I'll pack the freezer compartment with instant dinners for the time being."

"No, bring milk and stuff; I'll have it clean before you get back."

Thus Donald was alone in the house for the first time since childhood.

He walked about the premises as a man lost in a dream, searching for something his conscious mind could not specify. It led him back to the kitchen, ostensibly to clean out the small refrigerator, though something other than that had beckoned him there. He stood with head turned to one side, looking at the big, thickly hewn table. For a moment, at the edge of his vision, he thought he saw an iron stove-oven where the range actually stood; he closed his eyes against the vision—or to preserve it. He smelled the warm pastry and his heart went out, the past calling to him in a way that hurt. He opened his eyes and watched the sunlight on the wooden table, watched the bright window-shape edge toward him, across the table's top.

His legs felt weak and he was dreaming, "Grandma, Grandma," and the moving square of light reached the table's end and began to drip onto the floor.

When Nona returned home, he barely heard her, barely heard the door.

"Donald?"

He barely heard.

"Don? You here?"

Barely heard.

Time had passed without his moving—or had he moved? Guilt smote him: the refrigerator! He hadn't cleaned it! He had stood in one place so long, his knees were about to give way. Where was he? What was his dream? His vision had not strayed from the tabletop, and momentarily he saw two big bags of groceries plopped down, saw his wife in the kitchen with him. When she had put down the hefty load, she turned suddenly, gasped with a moment's fright, and said, "Donald! You frightened me! I thought you were outside somewhere."

How could she have entered the kitchen without seeing him in the doorway? "Oh Nona, I was daydreaming, but it won't take long to finish cleaning the refrigerator."

He thought his voice had echoed as through a tunnel, but Nona heard nothing funny. Or had she? Her brow wrinkled in a puzzled way and she said:

"What have you got in your hand?"

"This?" He looked at his half-eaten prize and answered with an almost banal matter-of-factness, "It's a cookie."

"I know it's a cookie. Where'd you get it?"

Fortunately she turned her attention to the piles of groceries before he had to answer; for he could not have begun to think of a reply. He turned his attention instead to scrubbing the inner walls of the old fridge.

***

They lived in the house off and on for the next three months. Sometimes it was too dusty from workmen and they had to clear out for differing lengths of time. But nothing went over schedule, though some things certainly cost more than expected. In a few weeks the walls had been replastered and the floors bared and sanded. Almost last of all, they hired a pair of young women who swedished floors, and the stink of the process was unbearable. But when it was completed, the house was theirs from then on—no more motel, no more eating the same boring couple of dishes available in the town's lamentable restaurants.

And through this time there was so much to worry about, so much to keep an eye on, so much coming and going of laborers and craftspersons, that Donald had scarcely a moment to himself in the house, and the uncanny odors of the past only occasionally assailed him. When memories did spring snares, and then only for the odd moment, he might feel pleasantly disoriented, but unable to hold onto these strange sensations long enough for identification.

After they were really settled in, their possessions scattered among the rooms, some useless things sold to neighbors at a lawn sale, the rest to a junk dealer for almost nothing, there remained a lot to do to the place, but only one more critical item, and that at least was outside. The illegal cesspool had to be replaced by a real septic tank, another shocking expense incurred while the north part of the backyard was torn to pieces.

Nona marked off the areas she did not want the tractors spoiling, for she had taken a fierce liking to the old rose bushes and wasn't even sure she wanted them much pruned, let alone crushed by workmen and tractors skirting the house day after day.

But when all was said and done, and despite the huge amount of money spent on the improvements, and the innumerable arguments with workers who did not wish to complete work on their own promised schedules, it was all foolish worry, for the sale of their coastal home combined with Donald's investments to make them more than commonly well-off. Neither would ever have to work for a living. There was no mortgage over their heads; their major financial problem for the future would be, quite simply, juggling their tax situation so as not to be totally devoured by the government's demands.

They'd come to the place in the glorious spring with the wild gardens in full bloom. They'd camped alternately in the house and in a motel through the dusty, torn-up summer. Come autumn, with the wind tearing the leaves from the yellowed poplars along the lane and from the maples on the far back property, the house was truly theirs. Additional work was planned for the coming spring, but could be put off indefinitely if they desired. The house was more than habitable. It was a wondrous comfort.

One night, having sat at the same moment on opposite sides of their bed, with moonlight glinting into their second-story bedroom, Donald said, "Are you still certain, Nona? Do you want to live here?"

She looked at him askance, as though he had offered a joke so feeble it didn't even deserve a polite chortle. As she threw herself back onto her pillow she saw his expression and knew he was deeply serious. "How can you ask it?" she said gravely. "You can't be having second thoughts! The worst is over, Donald. We're home!"

"Yes," he said, and lay back quietly. "Home."

***

In the backyard were apple trees planted by Donald's great-grandparents, on the southern edge of the land. These gave fruit in autumn. Two of the trees had tiny, hard apples of a species nobody could identify. They looked like dwarf Romes, perfectly formed, bright red and gorgeous. These, as Donald was to explain to Nona, would still be clinging to the branches at the height of winter.

"Obviously a type no longer grown," said Nona. "Too small for commercial value," she said.

"And a great pity," he added. "They don't drop from the limbs until spring, so we'll have a natural storehouse of fresh apples anytime we want. Even my grandparents couldn't name them, as I recall."

Beyond the small orchard were the woods consisting largely of maples and a few scattered firs. Occasionally a raccoon would be seen moving about, or a possum. At night an owl hooted.

Nona had taken a fancy mainly to the front gardens which, though a tangle of thorns, she was intent on preserving in a tastefully wild state. She was raking poplar leaves every other day or so, pruning minimally for the plants' winter rest, and making idle repairs to rockeries and the like. The backyard with its fruit trees became Donald's province. Hence, when they were outside together, they were not, strictly speaking, together at all, but parted by the house. Donald found it disturbingly symbolic:
parted by the house.
Yet didn't Nona love the house as much as he? Didn't she feel the generations of familial love with the same intensity? There might be a particular personal element he could not fully share, the remembrance of those years of peace amidst formative years otherwise tumultuous; but there was no cause to consider this a division between Nona and himself. Was there?

Donald split lengths of wood that had been delivered in two large loads at the north edge of the back property, dumped unfortunately into the mud left by the septic tank installers. His muscles ached marvelously most of the time. Days went by during which he and Nona seemed never to speak to each other, though they were getting along as well as ever—they had always gotten along—and Nona was happy. But with the settling of winter, there was a colder space between them than ever in their lives. Didn't she notice it too? He didn't think she did.

Was it because Donald kept secrets? He'd never kept secrets before. Now he did. It was because he didn't wish to sound foolish. For instance, once, while splitting wood, he caught sight of two old rabbit hutches nearby. When he looked about the area with a careful sweep of his vision, there were no hutches. When he investigated the area, all he found, among the weeds at the edge of the maples, was a section of wire that might or might not have been part of one of Grandpa Nathan's rabbit hutches.

Then a real snow came. It was not a bad winter. It was pleasant, and the heating bill was kept minimal by Donald's fascination with and soon-skillful handling of the fireplace that he'd had fitted with an airtight liner. It gave off a tremendous amount of heat in the living room, but was rarely too hot for comfort because much heat was able to escape straight up the walnut staircase to their bedroom. The extra rooms on the second floor, and the entire top floor, were mostly shut off to conserve fuel, but not so completely as to ever become damp.

The dining room off the living room got its heat from two sides, since Nona had reverted to her early interest in gourmet cooking (a lack of proper restaurants and other urban distractions might have been the cause of that). She was often in the kitchen preparing something or other, and became a baker with a vengeance. Donald never mentioned how, all too often, Nona's bread smelled like cookies baking.

Small secrets, harmless secrets, but there were many of them.

Did Nona have secrets too?

Were they drifting apart in such comfort as they had fashioned?

***

One evening he was sitting before the fireplace, the fire a pale ghost behind the dark mica of the airtight door. Nona came down from an upstairs room that she had already cluttered with sewing and hobby matter. She brought a book, plumped down nearby, and began to read. He remained silent. Then Nona looked up from the book with a sigh. "Donald, I'm very happy." And it was a relief for him to hear it, because he wasn't sure anymore what happiness was, if he'd ever been happy; this lost sense was something he'd imagined Nona must be feeling too. But the house could scarcely be expected to awaken
her
childhood memories. It was a new world for her, an older way of living that she had not known previously. She was enormously comfortable. She'd always been comfortable, but never idyllically. For Donald, the idyll was too reminiscent of an earlier peace in his life, an island against turmoil, an island that once before had been washed away. The things he felt were uncanny. He kept expecting to encounter his great-grandma on the stairs, to hear her gentle demands of Grandpa and Grandma: "Oh, how am I ever going to get to the dimestore today?" and of course Grandpa would volunteer. Or to see Grandma in the kitchen—baking cookies or apple pie or one of her blessed casseroles. Or to see that big table spread out even bigger with its extra leaves, covered with some holiday feast—Thanksgiving or Christmas—the house crawling with relatives of all ages, from three states around, since "the upstairs matriarch," Great-grandma Bess, was the center of the clan until the day she died.

Always absent from the premises was his mother. Never in his nostalgic reminiscences did he see her in this house. She had grown up here, but left early, all but outcast or at least self-exiled, too wild a girl for that conservative time and place. But in Donald's time, his mother was apart from the family, apart from the house, and nothing in it reminded him of her. He loved his mother so much, yet she had disliked her own parents out of some rebelliousness unexplained to him, blamed them for the mistakes she had made in her own life, resented that they had taken care of her son at a time when she could scarcely take care of herself but would accept no charity in her own behalf. A stubborn woman, and the only thing stronger than her unhappiness was her pride, injured by the confession that she needed help for her son's sake if not her own. And after that time, right up to the present time, he hated to think about his mother. How he
had
to think about her, as penance for not wanting to! How close he came to hating himself for loving the memories of this house more than any memory he could uncover with his mother in it...

But Nona, it would seem, suffered none of these conflicts. She smiled across the top of her book at Donald's quiet fire and said, "Isn't it like a dream?"