Bless This House

To each of the four in the household the bed is a different story. Laudette sees spooks in it; Gloria sees an excellent place to hide; for the playboy it is a classic stage for sex games; the split pea finds it a perfect place to crack.

While the others make their comments on its epic size, how a single person would only need a tenth of it to be comfortable, the uniqueness of the posts, what filling is in the extra-large, double-plush mattresses, Sarah’s smile gets even more crooked. She thinks she hears distant baying. The dogs! Or is it her imagination? Are her litanies, her bitches and moans, finally getting her somewhere? Harry nudges her, and asks her if she would like to see the rest of the house and then go out to catch a bite, but she does not answer. There’s a babble, cross-talking voices and raspy whispers, mumbling and grumbling, numberless rhymes in her head, and she is trying to pick something out. The look of concentration deepens in her eyes. She feels pulled to the hall where in a closet she finds, folded like flags, large as parachutes, protected between layers of waxed paper, fresh linens. There is also a broom and dust mop.

She surprises them when she comes back swinging at the dust, muttering and stuttering under her breath. Harry tries to give her a hand, but she goes after a cobweb as if he were not there at all, and nearly hits him in the head with the mop. Usually moony and lethargic, this burst of energy is not like Sarah. But if the split pea is consistent in anything, it is that she can be counted on to contradict herself. It doesn’t take everyone long to give her the space she needs to carry on her cleaning. Harry looks at Laudette. Gloria sees them shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. Mummy is a sad case. Harry nods and Laudette takes Gloria by the hand. The three of them leave the room, and finish their walk through the house.

Over on the east side of the second story they once again find no windows. The dressing room has mirrors running along every inch of wall space, reflecting an infinite vanity in all directions. Then there is a bath, with a marvelous marble soaking tub with brass feet like a big lion’s paws.

“Why, it’s as big as the holy water font the Dipster Jackson used to douse us in by the dozen,” Laudette says, recalling her youth as a member of Jambalaya Jackson’s Dunkard Church. “He called us his ‘Donuts of the Almighty!’”

There’s another room, in the northeast corner, a small second bedroom, with plain white walls, a straight-back chair and a desk. The bed is so narrow there is barely enough room for a man to roll over in it. With perfect economy of space there are drawers and shelves beneath. It is really not much more than a ship’s berth. The room is as modest and austere as the one diagonally across the courtyard, the one that Sarah is cleaning, is excessive.

This would be Homer’s, or was it Ulysses’? Whoever’s it was, Harry thinks, it’s a refuge of simplicity from the complications of women. But, he muses unhappily, separate bedrooms only work when a man has one, but is invited to visit his lady’s chamber.

The third story is a hotel. There are a dozen rooms designed as guest quarters for when the butterfly’s house would be filled with overnight party guests. Most of the rooms are unfurnished, several are unfinished. Love made Penny cut her entertaining short, and want no other overnight company but Homer. The three larger rooms on the west side were taken over by Homer when he moved in. He worked in them for over twenty years, doing blueprints, and enjoying his woodcraft hobby.

The workshop, with its tool benches, drafting tables, and drawing boards occupies Harry and he takes a few moments to investigate, but Gloria and Laudette quickly lose interest. While they precede him to the fourth and final level, Harry pokes around. He makes a discovery inside the closet in the southwest corner of the house: a door that leads to a passage between the inner and outer walls. The reason Homer needed those four bedposts to hold up the house is that the wall behind them is hollow in order to accommodate a hidden staircase. The well, secured to two of the bedposts, was a way up or down to the mistress’s bedroom, designed by the architect as a quick getaway should Ulysses come home unexpectedly. Harry lights a cigarette, keeps his lighter burning and explores. Shortly, one flight of cobwebs down, he is a silky mess standing inside the south wall of the big bedroom. He can hear his wife on the other side of the wall, whispering, sighing, sobbing, as she works. He feels along the wall for a way to her, a latch of some kind, and finds a string about knee-high. He pulls it and a low door opens. He gets on all fours and crawls forward head first.

She hears rattling coming from the lower compartment of the large oak cabinet next to the bed. It startles her to think perhaps her prayers are being answered. Her derangement softens as she approaches the armoire cautiously.

“Cornie? Is that you?” she whispers.

Flinching, she slides back the bolt of the fancy brass device on the hardwood door.

Oh, what a disappointment it is to find Harry, web-coated, on all fours, instead of Corn Dog!

She will not share her bed but will share some feelings she has about the house with him. “I’m cleaning up my corner here, Harry, but let’s not be too extreme about putting this house in order. We want to preserve the haunting quality of the place and not modernize it out of existence, right? And we mustn’t take advantage of these strange passages to be spying on one another.” She turns a cold cream cheek. “You may kiss me goodnight, then turn yourself around and go back the way you came.”

She leans forward, presents her cheek, then pushes him back to a squat, helps him into the armoire and out the rear. When he is back rattling around in the walls she slides the bolt on the doors, back and front.

Locked out, he goes upstairs to rejoin Gloria and the sitter. They are exploring the fourth story: the greenhouse, a solarium high enough from floor to skylight to grow good-sized trees. They are sad to see that the plants in the huge clay containers have gone to pot. Uncared for by the government, what once must have been an oasis of greenery now stands as stumps, dead and brown.

“Fooey!” says Laudette to Harry when he joins them. “A lot of room, but nowhere to stay.”

“But with some work this place could really be a palace,” he says. “Hey, I don’t know about you girls but I’m famished. What say we go out for something to eat?”

“Yeah, Daddy-o.”

“Ready whenever you say, Sir Harry.”

On their way out he goes back to the big bedroom, knocks on the hall door. “Cupcake, are you sure you wouldn’t like to go out with us? I’ve heard there’s a good Attic place right around the corner …”

He gets no answer.

While her family sits in the Acropolis Restaurant sampling the wonders of spinach pies, feta cheese, and oregano chicken, Sarah cleans and dusts the room, strips the bed, and works in a frenzy, spreading out those colossal fresh sheets.

When they return, there is a dead silence coming from the big bedroom. The master is left like a dog in a strange house, sniffing around for a place to lie down. He makes his way back up to the workshop where he tries to get comfortable on a day bed he finds there, but thoughts of how incommodious his marriage of convenience has turned out to be continue to plague him.

In the meanwhile Gloria, with Swan’s consent, settles into the Parlor of Roses. Like it or not, the baby-sitter must be on hand, nearby, and has to make the hard choice between the mischievous angels and the bosomy mermaids in the deep blue sea. Pacing the hall, undecided, going through a bag of donuts which she bought for the morning, the sitter can hear Gloria the tentmaker upholstering a camp for herself, taking down drapes, stretching them over a furniture framework, removing all the needlepoint rose cushions from the chairs and laying herself down to sleep. “Bless that child, Lord,” Laudette prays. “It doesn’t scare her to be on her own, and thank goodness she doesn’t make too much work for me. And bless Sugar. Please keep her from going out of her mind completely. And bless Sir Harry for having a good heart and the money and the patience to take care of us. But above all bless this house, because if there ever was a place that had the devil in it, here it is.”