Arriving back in Littleford after my long absence, having achieved some success in my prospecting, and pleased with myself, I felt worthy to be welcomed home. In the glow of this good mood, I was reminded of how substantial a house it was, as though seeing it for the first time.
Our well-known house, which locals called Tower House, was a Victorian beauty, at the top of a long slope of a grassy embankment on Gully Lane, near the center of town. It boasted a tower built against it on the right-hand side, an octagon like an oversize organ pipe rising to a turret, with a dunce cap roof of blue tiles. The tower room had been Dad’s study, where he sat and smoked his pipe and looked across rooftops to the river.
Cedar shingles, weathered silvery gray, covered all sides, with assertive gables and protruding eyebrows over the upper windows of the façade, a wide porch or veranda across the front, which you approached by climbing up from the street on fieldstone (metamorphic and igneous) steps. On a late afternoon such as today, the last of the light was caught in the teasing flaws of the windowpanes of the tower and seemed to wink in the bubbles and inclusions of the old handmade glass.
People glanced at the house as they passed and said, “Look.” It was admired in town for its classic features and its air of welcome—that big elegant porch, the asymmetrical façade like Frank’s crooked smile. Today I saw that it needed some repairs: gutters to be cleaned, the peeling white trim to be scraped and painted, the black shutters framing every window to be rehung. The weather vane had to be balanced—a bronze arrow revolving on the peak of the turret slumped a little, and the lightning rods, adorned with glass balls skewed through the middle of the shaft, on the roof ridges, were rusted.
But even with its bruised nobility, it was home, and after my spell in the desert, I was glad to be here.
I’d been summoned home by Mother. I thought it was my gold. People talk of stimulants and intoxicants and drugs, injecting them, smoking and swallowing them, but the greatest stimulant I know is gold. As a geologist, I’m objective, but experience has told me that the very mention of it—the single word—has the effect of transfixing a listener. Gold fever is not just a prospector’s term, it is the human condition.
The price of gold is fixed every day, and it fluctuates, but we know to a tenth of a penny what a troy ounce of gold is worth. It sometimes declines sharply in value, but that makes no difference to the average person, who believes it is vastly more valuable than the market decrees. Gold seems like a magic substance that goes on growing, becoming scarcer and more precious. It is warm, it hums—you can touch it, you can fondle it, and display it and cuddle it. You can chunk it in your palm. It is visible wealth.
My success in finding gold was talked about in Littleford—Frank must have discussed it at length with Mother, because she told me how proud she was of me, that it was a satisfaction to her to see that her example to me of hard work had paid off. This was her way of taking credit, but it was innocent and admiring, and I was glad I’d given her some pleasure.
My gold finding gave her an idea. What if she arranged to have my name put on the title deed to her home, Tower House? It would serve two purposes. I was living like a gypsy (so she said), so I’d have a base in my hometown that I could call my own. And it would be a help to her, because I could see to repairs and other expenses.
I said, “Wouldn’t it make more sense to put Frank’s name on the deed? After all, he’s actually living in the house.”
Behind on his alimony, Frank had moved from the three-decker in Winterville and was in his old room here. Even with my loan of the fifteen thousand as a possible down payment, he hadn’t found a place to buy.
“I can’t do that to him,” Mother said. “He wouldn’t be able to afford the taxes.”
“You want me to pay your taxes?”
“It’s your house. They’d be your taxes.”
“You’re giving me the house?”
“Yes, but I’ll go on living in it. When I go to my reward, you can live in it.”
I tried to find a problem with this, but it seemed generous and helpful. Mother was bequeathing the house to me in advance. She would live rent-free, as my tenant. And Frank was welcome to stay until he found a place of his own. I would pay all taxes and utilities. Meanwhile, the house would appreciate in value.
“Have you mentioned this to Frank?”
“Yes. He’s very excited about it—he’s pleased for you.”
“That you’re giving the house to me and not to him?”
“It’s for the best. He’ll go on living here until something opens up for him and Whitney leaves him alone. He says he wants to talk to you about it.”
He wants to talk to you about it prepared me for one of Frank’s long-winded stories. They were attention-seeking, as all monologues seem to be, but more than that—especially in Frank’s case—they were a kind of indirection, misleading me, or boring me, to the point where I lost the plot, Frank saying, So what do you think—good idea, right? and I’d say Oh, yes, out of a dizzying sense that I could not stand to hear another word. And then I’d realize that I’d just agreed to some cockamamie idea that he had masked with his monologue.
“Maybe we should get a lawyer, Ma.”
“Frank’s a lawyer.”
“I mean an impartial one.”
“Cal, this is a simple transfer of ownership. It’s not necessary to involve anyone else.”
She seemed offended that I’d raised this question, as though I doubted Frank’s motives, not trusting him to do the right thing. And, of course, knowing Frank, I had trouble trusting him.
“Besides,” Mother said, “Frank has power of attorney for all my affairs.”
I said okay, and Mother convened what she called “a house meeting” a few days later. I had left my prospecting in suspension when she summoned me. Her sudden message, its urgency, suggested to me there was a crisis I needed to help with. But it seemed it was the house, my name on the deed that was needed, nothing more.
Frank looked haggard, an effect of his humiliating and costly divorce. But instead of talking about that, or Whitney, who had just given birth to a son—news to me—he launched into a long story about the extraction of a wisdom tooth. He pulled a clear plastic pouch from his pocket and showed me the discolored and still somewhat bloodstained tooth: “Go ahead, hold it—look at that root.”
I took the pouch; the tooth reminded me of a small water-smoothed fragment of basalt tinted by proximity to red sandstone.
“Not like a normal pronged root—it’s called a fused root,” Frank said. “Now consider that lower portion left in a person’s gum after it’s been broken off during an extraction. Imagine the damage. I had a case—great case. Dentist tells the patient, ‘Hey, we got the tooth, but the root was attached to the jawbone, but you’ll be fine.’ Patient goes home and wakes up that night in pain, but what does he get when he calls the dentist the next day?”
“I have no idea, Frank.”
“He got a hand job—sorry, Ma, but it was the truth,” Frank said. “And then he did the right thing. He called me.”
“So what was the problem?” I said, handing him back his tooth.
“Before I could insert myself he opted for more oral surgery. Result—extensive oral nerve damage, chronic pain, a fractured jaw, memory loss, migraines, permanent loss of taste, fear, anxiety and depression.” He bounced the tooth in his open palm. “Oh, yes, and our old friend, suicidal ideation.”
“I take it this was one of your cases.”
“Big case, but it was a referral, so I had to split the payout with about ten senior partners. On the other hand, there was an instructive takeaway for me, which is why I’m telling you this story.”
“I’m guessing the takeaway was related to your participation.”
“Bingo. Ever stand in a running brook and look down and see the stones in the bottom?”
“All the time, Frank.”
He leaned at me, turning so that I was presented with the drama of his droopy eye and dragged-down mouth. “I looked into the rushing water and saw clearly the right stone in the bottom—and it represented malpractice, the liability of the dentist. Listen, what if I hadn’t seen to the heart of this, and the guy’s underlying comorbidities. . . . ?”
Words are sometimes blunt instruments. I stopped listening, my head hurt, my eyes ached as they do when someone is monologuing, directing the unrelenting spiel at my eyeballs. I nodded, I became breathless with impatience, and finally I stood up and backed away and holding my hands up as though fending him off, I said, “I get it, I get it.”
“Here’s the deal,” he said, and he began wagging a finger at me. He droned on that I had to consider his importance to this wisdom tooth personal injury case in relation to the title deed of Mother’s house. Yes, I was a big earner at the moment as a gold seeker, but what would happen if the day came when I was not flush? What then—when I could not afford the upkeep, that in the event of my defaulting on the property taxes (“God forbid”) someone tripped and fell on the fieldstone steps in front and sued the owner? He’d known many cases where the lien on such a house bankrupted the owner, and the house ended up sold or repossessed by the bank.
My head hurt, my eyes burned. I said, “Please, Frank, what’s the answer?”
“I cosign the deed.”
“That makes you part owner,” I said.
“That makes me your insurance. In case something goes wrong.”
“It seems to me a little—what?—presumptuous.”
“I owe you, Fidge. You’ve been really helpful to me. That’s why I’m doing this.”
“Signing the deed?”
“Yes. I’m doing you a favor.”
Mother had been listening, squinting to understand, said, “Frank’s doing you a favor.”
And she saw this offer of Frank cosigning the deed as something unifying. In the past she’d often spoken of the house as a meeting place for us, after she passed away. She’d said, I want you to think of the house as somewhere you can gather with your loved ones. Have parties and meals together. Celebrate Christmas. Enjoy your families. It would be a way of remembering me.
Think of it as a clubhouse, she was saying.
Frank, still toying with his extracted wisdom tooth, said, “Cases like that broken root—if I hadn’t had to share, I’d be shitting money—sorry, Ma, but it’s the truth. I’ve got plenty of prospects. I’ll be back on my feet soon. I have lots of cases lined up. But at the moment I’m hurting.”
“That’s why I’m giving the house to Cal,” Mother said. “He’ll be my landlord.”
“Fidge deserves the house,” Frank said. “He needs an anchor.” He cocked his head at me, fixing me with his good eye. “But will he be able to maintain it in the years ahead?”
“I’m pretty sure I can,” I said, though not expecting this question I sounded somewhat uncertain.
Frank said, “Back when Whitney and I owned a house together—before the, um, split”—he gulped and paused to regain his composure. Then he swallowed and started again. “Now and then, one of my friends, or their kids, would ask whether they could stay at the house. ‘Could we just crash there for a week?’ I’d say, ‘I’m glad you used that word ‘crash,’ because this house is worth five hundred kay. It’s as though I have a Rolls-Royce and you’re asking to borrow it to go for a long drive. Think of the house that way. Sure, you know how to drive. You can tune the radio, you can find the cup holder, you can tool around in it. But what if you crash it—huh? Do you have five hundred kay–plus to replace it?”
My headache deepened, my eyes blazed, and Frank was still in full flow: the car being totaled was like the house burning down. What then? Or plumbing emergency—what if the flood insurance doesn’t cover it? Or, say, a stumble? A back injury—someone falls and becomes a paraplegic?
He went on in this vein until I wanted to scream. Mother was nodding in approval, looking upon Frank with admiration. I was baffled, because he had the lawyer’s ability to go on at great length; and rather than explaining simply why he was cosigning the deed, it was as though, through his talk, he was making the whole matter incomprehensible, creating dense fog where, a while ago, there had been sunlight.
“Like I say, I’d be doing you a favor,” he said. “With my name on the deed you’d have the confidence that in an emergency, I’d be able to step up.”
“I don’t envisage an emergency,” I said.
“No one envisages an emergency,” he said, so gleefully that spittle formed on his lips. “That’s why insurance companies exist.”
“So I’ll insure it.”
“What if you fall behind on the payments?”
“I’ll borrow.”
“Using what for collateral?”
“The house, I guess.”
“Then there’s a greater risk of losing the house.”
Mother was looking anxious. Losing the clubhouse, she was thinking.
Frank smiled, and I knew that whenever he gave me his pistachio-nut smile he was about to deliver bad news or a crushing revelation. “What if you get hit by a car?”
“That’s simple,” I said. “I die and the house goes to my next of kin.”
“Your next of kin is me.”
“So you’ll get it, without ever having to sign anything in advance.”
“What if you don’t die in the car accident?” He was still smiling his nutty smile, a front tooth snagged on his lower lip. “What if you end up with a spinal injury—cervical, worst kind. Wheelchair—bedridden. Quadriplegia.”
The front tooth was yellow and after he’d said this, he smiled more openly, more yellow teeth.
“What will you do then?”
Mother looked at me, and then at Frank, who was gloating.
“Then you’ll lose the house,” he said.
Mother clucked and said, “I think Frank’s right. Cosigning the deed is a good idea.”
“Purely a matter of formality,” Frank said. “I’d be signing to help you down the line. This is just to ease your mind. You’d be responsible for taxes and utilities, and all the rest of it. Repairs and whatnot. I want no part of that.”
“But you’d be half owner,” I said.
“In name only,” he said. “When the right time comes, I’ll take my name off the deed. You’ll be sole owner then.”
He leaned close to me, facing me with his half-bright, half-grim expression.
“But in the meantime, if you had a problem, I’d be there for you.”
One thing I have not mentioned. Frank was peculiar in having very strong body odor that always made family discussions of this sort somewhat awkward. It’s possible that Mother did not notice, that, being so feeble, her sense of smell was impaired. Yet Frank gave off a powerful smell, sour, like infected meat, hanging like something solid in the air, as though from a hamper of unwashed clothes, or a cage in which a small animal has died, an upper room that has been locked all summer in its pong of sweat and dirt and dead skin.
All the time we were talking I was aware of this corpselike odor, and it made me, in my shallow breathing, eager to end the discussion, even against my better judgment, to agree to his proposal. I craved to run outside and take a deep breath. In his stepping close to me, Frank stirred a cloud of stink around me that was like something physical, his bad breath like a filthy hand against my face.
“Okay, okay,” I said and slid out of my chair and backed away.
Frank had a new copy of the title deed in his briefcase. As we both signed it he repeated that this was no more than a formality, but that I would thank him later, if my fortunes faltered. And, in time, he’d cancel his signature.
“I love it when I see my children are on the same page,” Mother said. “A mother’s dearest wish is to see her children happy.”
I said, “I like the thought that I own property here. And I’m glad you’ll be able to live here without worrying about maintenance.”
“When I get my ducks in a row, I’ll get a place of my own,” Frank said. “Why are you smiling?”
“Because this is all so unexpected,” I said. “Last week I was in a tent in the Arizona desert. Today I’m a property owner in Littleford.”
“My landlord,” Mother said.
But the other thing, the thought I did not want to share with them, was that, owning this house, I would at last have a place to store my books and mineral samples and the odds and ends I’d accumulated. I’d always agreed with Mother when she called me a gypsy—carefree, no fixed address; and I’d thought I was liberated. But I saw now that owning a house gave me greater freedom to travel, because now I had my own home. The happiest traveler is the one who has a place to return to, with the certainty of being welcomed. I’d once hated the thought of sleeping in my own bedroom. It seemed like an admission of failure. But now Tower House, the grand house on Gully Lane, was mine. Mother was my tenant, and so was Frank, until he was solvent again. I’d gotten the house without using any of my gold, and in the knowledge that I was now a property owner, I had one wish: to go away.