G. H.
Indecision has clung to me like a wet shirt, and even now I find I’m a bit—what shall I say—in a state, but I am, finally, resolute as to the necessary course of this experiment: I must observe my subject from a nearer vantage point.
Extraordinarily unmoving streets for half-past seven in the morning. Still and gleaming, full of potential noon radiance and grass silver-frosted to prayerful erectness, but a morning so perfectly still and unmoving that the groan of his car door as he opens it—got to remember to oil this thing—is jarringly out of place. He throws a camera, clipboard, rolls of sketches, and his laptop into the front seat and heads for the expressway, and then the narrower roads that will lead him to the shore.
Little sleep the night before, and that little filled with the same unpleasant events and expectancies as the previous nights. Yes, but even so he feels surprisingly rested, even—despite the nature of this particular project—exhilarated as he sets off. Maybe it’s just having a new project, some excitement there, the relief of having any new work, or that the fall is rising toward its peak of color and the landscape of Connecticut has a burnished look, a mysterious evanescent lushness. In a few weeks, he knows, when everything will have drifted down, the once-mighty mountains, humbled down to hills by eons of wind, will stand leaf-stripped, gaunt and revealed in the true bones of their shape. But not now, not in this mellow golden distraction of light, amid these dazzling dying colors. Perhaps it is just the effect of these perceptions, or of moving so fast down still unfamiliar roads, but nothing now seems straight or clear. It doesn’t matter. He knows his way to Kestrel’s Eyrie.
It stands directly above the ocean, on a bluff at the end of a grand curve of cracked drive through a ruin of formal gardens. He makes further notes on the outbuildings, the placement of yet fine trees, the project refining itself automatically, reflexively in his mind as he brings his car to a halt before the pride and massive folly of C. J. Kestrel.
Entrepreneur and high-reacher after the good life, Kestrel had, by the late 1880s, magicked his father’s small business, transforming the bark and leaves of Hamamelis virginiana into an astringent called witch hazel, into a large and thriving nostrum and cosmetic concern.
From there the younger Kestrel branched out into various shipping ventures. In short, he became something of a local magnate. And, in the manner of the magnates of the time, Charles J. Kestrel had had built for himself what was quaintly termed a cottage. This cottage, a stolid New England fortress on a jagged rise above the ocean.
Perhaps as a tribute to the modest factory from which his prosperity had sprung, Kestrel had requested of his architect that his monument by the sea be faced with the same rough-hewn local brownstone thatas distinguished the paternal enterprise. Kestrel’s architect, while assenting to this filial tribute, also asserted the younger Kestrel’s independent spirit, or ambition, or ponderous sense of whimsy, in the four squat crenate corner towers, and in the spindly fifth center one that commanded a view of both entrance and oceanr The boarded windows were shadowed by deep, patterned arches, and the whole monumental excrescence, with its dark stone festoonery and heavily sprawled porticoes, seemed out of scale with the freshness of the morning air, the fey delicacy of the light. But Matthew now suspected that maybe old Kestrel’s architect had had more in mind than anyone dreamed, for monstrous as she was, this old dowager of his creation had stood firm against all storms.
By the time he’d circled once around the building, Matthew had already weighed its mass again, already begun to fit even more tightly to scale what he saw with what he knew. To sort out the new possibilities.
Herbert Vinca wanted to make of this a modem pleasure dome, a cruelly expensive inn with shops, restaurants, even a small theater. The usual spa, pool, tennis courts, and so forth. They would certainly be able to do all that, Matthew thought, if they approached the problem properly: Kestrel’s cottage by the sea already had the proportions of a small hotel.
Had, in fact, been converted to one, some four years after the Kestrels moved in, for after only three years in the Eyrie, Kestrel ‘s great flight in the rarefied air of the landed gentry had been terminated by a storm at sea. The waves had tortured and then ripped apart a ship carrying a sizeable crew and a small complement of passengers that included Kestrel’s only son—as well as a cargo in which Kestrel had invested too heavily, and had not, squeezed by debt and hubris, insured. Local legend credited the father with more despair over lost cargo than lost progeny; whatever he most mourned in private, the public fact was that the lost cargo and ship and the cost of the Eyrie together left Kestrel in bankruptcy, and the seaside cottage was stripped of much of its finery and sold to pay off creditors. Kestrel and his wife quietly disappeared, but his name remained on his monument. Kestrel’s Eyrie.
Matthew consulted his watch, returned to the front entrance, tried the lock, but found it held fast. He expected Timothy and Herbert to arrive at any moment, although in fact Katie had input the wrong time on Matthew’s calendar, and his companions would not arrive for an hour yet. After standing there for some minutes, he wandered around to the back, trying the doors as he went but gaining no access. At last he settled himself on the cold stone wall of the terrace above the ocean, to think about the building and both the problems and the opportunities it presented.
Nice place to wait a minute, anyway, before they get here, listen to the ocean, the wind, people say the wind sighs, sings, hums, as if we could draw all of nature like a bow across the human shape, narrow it down so we can comprehend it. “Words of the wind,” words from a song on the radio, a singer singing about singing. No, trash in my head, don’t want that, a song about singing. Trash. Singers singing about singing—like architects making buildings that’re really statements about buildings. Statements have nothing to do with whether it’s good or bad—theory’s redundant, anyway, since all of it comes out of your head. My head to paper and computer to object standing on the ground—no, somebody’s need or desire to my head to the computer to something that stands, will stand on the ground after I do. A while anyway, and then time or somebody else’s need or neglect will tear it down and nothing left—stupid. Why even think about that on a morning like this, the gulls swooping and the sky so open and a couple minutes just to sit looking down at the ocean, the waves splashing up, a new job about to begin, everything really just about to begin, the sun so warm. Not tired at all, could sit here forever, but they’ll be here soon, some tricky turns getting here. Maybe they got lost, but they’ll be here soon.
And he thought of the windings of distance to this place, the familiar morning portrait of his street as he’d left it, the bad night he’d spent, yet again, being wakened again and again by the raccoon in the crawl space, how the evening before when Mrs. Morel had stopped by to pick up her dinner she’d said she’d made up her mind, would Sarah buy her that radio, dear, what does it cost, here is the money—how it was true, even a loony-tune like Mrs. M. could get lonely, how the first time she’d mentioned the radio he and Sarah talked about it, made love, made up a boyfriend for her, old Sir George Whatshisface—Hooper. How they’d made up the name, what the old guy would be like. Remembering this, not realizing the morning had gotten warmer, stiller, that everything now was warm and still and achingly bright—there was no realization of this, no words, because he was part of that warmth and stillness, that aching brightness, could not think or feel of it because he’d entered it.
So that he was genuinely surprised—but pleased all the same—when with throat cleared and courage clenched I approached him with a nod and a “good morning.” I begged his pardon, hoped I wasn’t intruding on his solitude on this splendid morning–it really was quite splendid, wasn’t it? We had a bit of mild chat about the breeze and the view, and then I suggested that it was getting rather bright in the sun, and “Would you care to come inside and wait there for your friends? The interior is most interesting.”
“Love to see it,” he laughed, “but the place is all locked up.”
“I think, actually, I’ve discovered a way in.” And I ushered him into the Eyrie by the French doors off the terrace.
“Funny,” he said, “I tried to open those doors and couldn’t.”
“Oh, yes? Well, there’s a peculiar little trick with the handle.” I confessed to having explored the building quite thoroughly. “I say, you’re not the owner, are you? You won’t have me arrested? I assure you I just looked about.” And he laughed at my mock anxiety and I promised to walk the premises with him, but first, “Would you mind terribly if I made some tea? Would you care for a cup? I know I’ve made myself frightfully at home here, unforgivably bold, but you see, when I was exploring the place earlier this morning I saw the tea things and I’m afraid gave in to temptation.” And so I brought him down to that cavernous old kitchen, where we chatted while I made the tea. He leaned against the dusty cabinets with the good-humored look of someone idly chatting up a harmless lunatic. He was of course curious about me, and after he’d stepped over to introduce himself I had no recourse but to mention my own name.
As matter-of-factly as I could, I choked it out.
And then his hand, extended to shake mine, fell slowly through the air, nerveless as a leaf; the blood of him fled his face. Well, I thought, trying to steel myself, Well, now, what did you expect after playing that asinine trick? You knew it would make this more difficult. Just press on.
“Are you feeling quite well, my boy?”
“No,” he said, “yeah, I mean it’s just so—I, I mean, my wife and I, we—”
“Yes?” I said, as gently as I could, my own heart leaping like a wild horse in a pen.
“We. A couple of days, nights ago. We were. We were joking. We made up this name. I mean, your name.” He sounded as if he could barely breathe.
“How very odd,” I said, my voice as light as a paper boat while pity and shame turned iron and lead and dragged me under so I could scarcely breathe. “Well, how extraordinarily odd.”
“Well,” I said, “Well,” I gasped, “I can only say, with the poet Archilochus, that
‘Nothing in the world can surprise me now. Nothing
is impossible or too wonderful. . .
Anything
may happen, so do not be amazed if beasts
on dry land seek pasture with dolphins in
the ocean, and those beasts who loved sunny hills
love crashing sea waves more than the warm mainland.’
“Of course—Matthew, is it? I have such a dreadful head for names—of course, Matthew, we know that Archilochus is referring there to a total solar eclipse that was visible in the Aegean in 648 b.c.e., but l think our little coincidence here is in its own way quite as extraordinary, don’t you? And yet, you know, I’ve always believed that prescience and premonition and telepathy and other phenomena that are not currently explicable, given the present limits of science, must someday reveal themselves to have perfectly simple sorts of explanations, don’t you?” All this blather poured out rapidly, with as much charm as l could scrape up and smear upon him, as if he were a cake and I were Cook, so very long ago, busy with some too-quickly-cooling icing.
And then with my most amiable smile l took up his hanging hand and shook it vigorously. “Now then,” l said, turning away to the tea things, “do you take sugar and milk?” And all the while I fiddled with cups and spoons, I spouted examples of the alarming and the dreaded that had, with the progressive revelations of science, become perfectly ordinary aspects of life. But all the same while, dinning in my head, were the lines I’d passed over from Archilochus’ poem:
. . . for Zeus, father
of the Olympians, has turned midday into black night
by shielding light from the blossoming sun,
and now dark terror hangs over mankind.
By degrees, as I nattered on, I saw him grow calmer, and at one point, when I made a mild witticism, he reached over and rather tentatively clapped his hand on my arm. I felt in his touch, and perhaps he knew,, that he was willing himself to produce this gesture for a far more urgent reason than fellow feeling: to reassure himself that our handshake, before, had happened: to confirm again my solidity, my bodily reality. A moment later he turned the course of the conversation and asked if I l had lived in the Eyrie—as if I had not already made the reverse quite clear. I told him no, and with a passing nod at truth said I’d just happened by and thought to take a look in, when l noticed the lock on the French doors was broken. It really was a monster of a dwelling, wasn’t it? Did he know that Kestrel had stipulated the place must have fourteen bedrooms, although he and Mrs. Kestrel had had only the one child?
Yes, he knew.
But he really didn’t want to talk about the Eyrie, he said; he knew enough about it already. Instead he began, hesitantly at first, to ask me questions. Where I’d come from, how long I’d been in the country—the stream became a deluge.
I laughed as I handed him another cup of tea and told him there would be time, plenty of time to answer him. “Do you propose to learn my entire life’s story in the next few minutes, my dear young man?”
“No, no, sorry, I’m being rude. It’s just, well, I hadn’t expected to see anyone except—never mind, not important. So. You’re from England.”
“England, yes. From the lovely countryside of Devon. Near the town of Winkleigh. I was born in a place called Netherwoods Park.”
“‘Sounds beautiful. What’s it like?”
And so I began. As I spoke, in the cool stillness of the kitchen, a bit of me strolled off, arms crossed against my chest, and turned, in amaze and amusement, to watch my conversation with Matthew. I’d been so apprehensive about approaching him, so alarmed at his reaction to my name. And yet here we were a few minutes later—he relaxed and inquisitive, so extremely curious about me, and I—I’d be recording an untruth should I say that I wasn’t pleased and flattered by his interest. It had been so very long since I’d spoken with anyone that having another interested in my life is a delightful novelty. Indeed, after years of an existence that had become dry and brittle with solitude, I suddenly felt myself expanding, becoming weightier and yet more pliant in conversation, quite as if I’d been an old forgotten sponge, and his desire to know me the easeful, transforming moisture.
And so we chattered on quite happily until we heard the great heavy door slam upstairs, and Timothy calling his name. Disoriented, a trifle embarrassed, perhaps, at having to leave the conversation so abruptly, Matthew excused himself with many apologies and made his way upstairs to the dining salon, entering it from one end just as Timothy and Herbert were entering it from the other. A profusion of tables filled the room; their round, dull particle-board tops so crowded together that they resembled meshed gears, and the three men had to wind their ways around them to meet, in time, near the center.
Timothy looked at the empty tea cup that Matthew still carried in his hand and laughed in surprise.
“Hi, there–just make yourself right at home, why don’t you?”
“Don’t mind if I do. You get lost? I’ve been here,” he checked his watch, “been here an hour and ten minutes. Hi, Herb.”
“Hi, Matt, hello.”
“We’re only about five minutes late,” Timothy said. “You must’ve gotten the time wrong.”
“Nope, I didn’t. Katie did.” If Matthew’s speech was rather rapid and his face slightly flushed, he gave no sign of any irritation such as might be expected in one kept waiting for over an hour: “Katie’s taking a night school course in English poetry, Herb. She’s been screwing up appointments ever since she started learning meter.” Matthew’s magnanimity was charming; Timothy laughed, but Herbert was consternated, his gaze fixed on the fine porcelain teacup in Matthew’s hand.
“Where’d you get the tea, Matthew?”
“Down in the kitchen, actually.”
“Here? You got it in the kitchen here? My God, how’d you make it? Here? I didn’t know anything in the kitchen was still working. Not still working? My God. And I’m very glad you could wait for us inside, very glad and all, but the doors should have been locked. Supposed to all have been locked anyhow. Tea.” Herbert rubbed his flummoxed head. “Supposed to all have been locked up tight as a drum.”
“I came in through the French doors at the back, just wandered around, and somehow wound up in the kitchen,” Matthew lied fluently. “The last owners must’ve left the pot I saw there, just a little electric kettle, probably for the family, I guess, and there was tea there, so I just, you know, made myself right at home. Did you want some tea, Herb?”
“No, no thank you. Electric pot? The electricity’s on?” Herbert shook his head. “Tight as a drum! Everything off. Shut off and locked up!”
Timothy gave his partner a bemused smile, pried the tea cup from Matthew’s fingers, and set it on one of the tables. He turned to Herbert. “You want to show us around, or should we let Matt do it?”
So although the encounter was a trifle strange, they all smiled, and Herbert led the way through the Eyrie. He showed them what was and, rifling through a thick manila file now and then, told them as best he could what had once been; Herbert was meticulous in matters of property.
Pinball and game room, originally a salon. Wainscoted walls covered with peeling olive-drab paint and pocked from darts thrown wide of their mark, a ripped blue leatherette couch with rusting chromium arms, on one of which dangled the sharp-toothed remnants of a billiard ball rack. Fluorescent tubes, hung at a vague vertical alongside the door, daubed with the same fatigued green as the walls. Matthew heard a fine tinkling, as of a woman’s jewelry against a crystal sherry glass, from a wind chime made of seashells that some romantic soul had gone to great trouble to hang over a little plywood bar angled into the far corner of the room.
Matthew was thinking about the effort it had cost the wind-chime-hanger to drag a heavy extension ladder into the room and climb it, then nail a dirty piece of string into the high ceiling, all so that seashells might make their delicate tune amid the juke box wails, and shimmer through the grey confusion of tobacco smoke—thinking about all this to crowd out his desire to find me, to ask me all the questions pressing forward in his mind.
“This big room here was a theater, if you can believe that, a theater on the second floor.” Herbert talking.
“Maybe Kestrel wanted to be a patron of the arts.” Tim.
“Maybe he and Mrs. Kestrel just had wild fantasies. The last folks used it as a storeroom, as you can see. Yes, a storeroom.” Herbert.
Matthew stumbling over the rusted skeleton of a bed frame, fingering a pile of torn grey velvet curtains, climbing past an air conditioner clotted with dust to stand upon the stage, to stand and face the crowded wreck of the theater.
And it was there that he thought he caught a glimpse of me. But, no. I’d been following at too discreet a distance to be spied. I had no inclination to meet the others; I desired only to hear their conversation, to linger in this place in which I, very deliberately, happened to find myself. Matthew raised a hand and opened his mouth as if to speak, but no one stood at the door.
Timothy looked up at him and frowned: his partner didn’t seem to be attending to busi ness.·· “Hey, there, you look like you’re about to give Hamlet’s soliloquy.”
“No. I was just, I’m just wondering, Herb, about the right way to bring this place back to life. In the way you want. Lots of possibilities.”
They continued on, peeking into dumbwaiters, closets, rooms hastily partitioned up and rife with the dispiriting smells of stale sea air and unprosperous bodies. Slowly moving through the rooms, passing down stairs and up again, talking, touring, photographing and measuring what they’d already photographed and measured, finally reaching the cavernous basement kitchen, Herbert still flipping through his notes but glancing around with a proprietor’s jealous eye. And then, still talking, still searching through his appraisals, his correspondence, his land surveys, he saw, approached, and carefully unplugged the gleaming electric kettle. Timothy looked at my not-quite-empty teacup, frowned thoughtfully as he looked at Matthew—who flushed slightly but kept his eyes on the tablet he was typing on.
Finally back up the steep metal servants’ stairs to the first floor. Again into the dining salon where sat Matthew’s empty tea cup. Which Timothy picked up and fingered. Matthew now fidgeting, anxious to leave. Work to get back to. Of course. But taking leave of Herbert was no abrupt process. Wasting time, time passing. Watching, smiling over his irritation as Herbert licked a pudgy index finger in preparation for yet another search through his papers for some recorded fact. Finally, finally heading for the front door, stopping every few feet so that Herbert could point now here, now there, to a panel, say, of frayed and heavy brown damask drapery behind which materialized a vision of profitable boutiques. As Herbert yammered and schemed and Timothy nodded soothingly at everything he said, Matthew looked, without realizing he looked, left off hearing, without noticing that he didn’t hear, began wandering without intending to, to the open French doors.
“Ah, yes, Matthew, yes. Thanks for reminding me. Why don’t we leave this way? Might as well go this way, so we can lock these doors. Thanks. Thank you.”
Timothy looked at Matthew speculatively, and Matthew shrugged with more nonchalance and humor than he felt. The top of his head seemed to rise up and fly away as he watched Herbert discover the lock on the doors to be perfectly intact and in perfectly good working order.
Certainly an error on my part, that.
next, 5 October
previous, 28 September
The Nature of Things 