Helen did not tolerate loss, so she knocked on the door of the large gracious home she had once sold—not two years earlier—and when the bewildered owner ushered her into the foyer, she asked if she could buy her house back. For some reason which I never understood, he said sure. I was told he could not handle its massive rooms with their fretted tin ceilings and the several fireplaces, one surrounded by blue-green marble tiles from Italy, or the twenty or so French windows in the sunroom and the two staircases, front and back.
Helen was my mother, and she had not thought much about loss when she and my father decided they would sell that house on Main Street now that their three children were grown and no longer there. She was glad. She did not think she missed them. So they bought a small Arts-and-Crafts place on Brockton Avenue, a few streets away from the big house on Main Street.
The nice artsy-craftsy place on Brockton Avenue backed onto one of the small city’s large ponds. My father was thrilled. He had a rowboat. And though the children might come to visit, there was no room for them to stay too long.
Years earlier, my mother had moved away from this city. She’d been born here, and her parents were still living here, and so was her brother. She had left with my father, a career officer in the Navy, but when he had been retired, my grandmother, a powerful woman who also did not tolerate loss, found the Main Street house. She wanted my parents to buy it. She would not tolerate the loss of any more children—her firstborn had died during a tonsillectomy. She told everyone the Main Street house was a mansion, and with that she lured first my father and then my reluctant mother into its gracious clutches.
It was quite a place. As a child, I marveled at the old dumbwaiters and the bell tucked under the table in the dining room to ring for the servants that catered to the previous owners of the house, who had built it to their ample specifications. There were so many rooms that some of them needed names, like one little room tucked away on a landing. For some reason we called it the sitting room, perhaps because my sister and brother and I sat on the couch near the bay window to watch television there.
My mother did not tolerate loss or even believe in it. After she moved to Brockton Avenue, she withdrew into the bedroom and refused to eat. No one could find anything organically wrong with this wisp of a woman, so she consulted a psychiatrist, who suggested she buy her house back. Maybe he was kidding. Maybe he didn’t say that, but that is what she heard. My frantic father said okay. So she knocked on the front door of the Main Street house and told the owner she wanted it back. He said sure.
My mother wanted to turn the clock back. Then nothing could be lost, and she didn’t believe in loss anyway. Soon after they bought back the house, I sat in the huge kitchen after midnight and heard the sound of scraping. It was my mother, dragging boxes across the floor, dragging and then unpacking them. In a matter of weeks, she had the house exactly as it had been. She repainted the rooms in their original colors. The familiar kitchen table was in exactly the same place, the chairs in the dining room the same, the beds and bedside tables. I have no idea how she recovered all the furniture that had never been moved into the small Arts-and-Crafts house that backed onto the pretty pond. Perhaps she had stored it.
My father removed the ornate cast-iron radiators in order to install an up-to-date heating system to reduce the cost of running the big house. He had wanted to move to save money. The house ate into everything, but my mother was happy. Two of her children soon moved back into their childhood rooms. She said that made her unhappy. I’m not so sure. I do know that when I visited her again, and we sat on the little screen porch near the pink-and-white dogwood trees, we passed the time with a magazine quiz. What was your greatest accomplishment, it asked. She answered right away. Her house.
She vowed never to leave. She would not tolerate loss, she would not believe in loss. My father died, my sister left in a huff, my brother smashed his bedroom wall. She would not believe any of it. Loss means change, and she more than most people hated change. She knew her house was bright and shining and beautiful still, even when it rotted and she shriveled. So my husband and I helped her stay in that house. Until her ninety-eighth year, she made sure no one rearranged the pictures on the mantel above the blue-green fireplace that was across from her bed.
When she died, we quickly sold the house. I had not liked living there but the house had grown on me, year after year, because my mother loved it. She loved the way the light filtered through the windows. I am not like my mother. I sold the house, and then I mourned it. I mourn it still, its wainscotting and beamed ceilings and the big cedar closets with their sweet smell. I mourn the house perhaps more than I mourn her. Or it’s the same thing.
Brenda Wineapple is working on a book about the Scopes trial.
