by Garth Stein
“Your great-great-grandfather,” my father said, standing behind me. “Elijah Riddell.”
“Why’d he put a painting of himself in his own house?” I asked.
“That’s what rich people do.”
“Rich people are weird.”
“Maybe she’s in the kitchen,” my father said, starting off toward the back of the house.
I wanted to stay and explore the rooms, but I was intimidated by it all. The house began to feel alive, almost, and breathing—a thought disturbing enough to make me follow my father toward the kitchen rather than linger by myself.
We walked past a dining room with a table nearly twenty-five feet long, surrounded by dozens of chairs, then a dark room with floor-to-ceiling books and stained-glass windows. Eventually we arrived in the kitchen, which I initially judged to be larger than our entire house in Connecticut. To one side of the kitchen was a cooking area with a large butcher block table worn smooth by decades of chopping, a bread oven, and a giant cast-iron stove beneath an expansive copper exhaust hood. Opposite the stove was a long wooden table with a quirky assortment of wooden chairs, an entertainment area of a sort, with a couple of easy chairs and a small sofa and a new TV on an old TV cart. On another wall was a stone walk-in fireplace outfitted with long hooks, which, my father explained, were used for cooking cauldrons of stew in the old days. He pointed out the rotisserie brackets, too, which were used for sides of lamb and slabs of beef.
“To feed the armies?” I asked, but he ignored my comment.
“This place was built before electricity,” my father said. “There was no gas supply. The whole area was wilderness when Elijah built his estate. Everything in this house was coal fired; I’ll show you the basement; it’s a pretty fascinating place. At some point someone put in a cutting-edge system where they used calcium carbide and water to produce acetylene to power an electrical generator—”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“I thought it was cool when I was a kid. I can show you the system. Anyway, they had electricity up here before anyone else did. Long before The North Estate was annexed into the city and they brought up municipal electricity and gas.”
“Is that where our inheritance went? Developing a cutting-edge electrical system?”
“You know,” he said, “at some point you’re going to realize that being a smart-ass isn’t as much about being smart as it is about being an ass.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Did you read that in a fortune cookie?”
“Probably.”
I smiled for the first time on our ridiculous journey. Part of it was my father’s joke. Part of it was my father, himself.
I mean, he looked ridiculous. He looked like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo! He was wearing the same old khakis he always wore and a white T-shirt and boating shoes—and he traveled like that! He’d gotten on an airplane and flown across the country looking like that! When my grandmother and grandfather on my mother’s side would visit from England, they would wear formal clothes to fly. My grandmother would wear pearls and a fancy dress, and I once asked my grandfather why they did that and he said, “If we crash and die, we want to die in our best clothes.” Now that’s respect for the system.
Jones Riddell—my father—was sporting a wiry beard that was too long and gray, and the mustache covered his upper lip, which drove my mother crazy—but she never said anything. She never made him change. I knew she let him be all the things she disliked so much so she could continue disliking him. The hair on his head was too long and his face was too tan and was getting wrinkled because he spent so much time outside in the sun working on his boats. My mother didn’t make him wear sunscreen because she had given up. If I walked out to the road to get the newspaper from the box, my mother made me put on sunscreen, but not my dad. She had given up on him altogether.
We stood awkwardly in the kitchen of the empty house. I glanced out the bay window that faced north to the meadow and saw a woman riding a bicycle, looking like she had been plucked from an old-fashioned movie. She rode an antique-style bicycle, with baskets attached to a platform extending over the rear wheel. The baskets were full of groceries overflowing from paper bags. The woman, who was youthful and lithe, wore a long dress that fluttered coquettishly over her tall boots, and somehow—miraculously—never got caught up in the chain. Her long auburn hair was held by a ribbon tied low near the nape of her neck, and she held her face slightly raised toward the sky, as if to greet the sun. I pointed to her and my father noticed.
“There she is,” he said as the woman cruised up the drive.
She spotted our car parked in front of the house and looked to the bay window and must have seen us inside because she smiled and waved. She rode up to the back of the house and disappeared from view; a few seconds later, she entered the kitchen. Her cheeks were flushed and she was out of breath. Her eyes were bright and smiling and, I noticed, locked on my father. She rested one hand below her neck and the other on her hip. Her dress was sleeveless, revealing her toned arms, and it fit tight around her waist, showing off her womanly aspect in a way I had only seen in movies and on TV.
I was quite taken with her. When my father said I was going to meet my aunt, who lived with my grandfather, I assumed she’d be wearing mom-jeans and have jowly arms and sagging elbow skin and a couple of chins. I figured she’d be nice and all, but old-lady nice, with a hairdo that ladies get at the salon, fixed in one place and glued to stay that way for a week without moving. I didn’t think my aunt would actually be hot.
“Brother Jones,” she said, luxuriating in the words. She didn’t take notice of me at all. “You’ve come to save us.”
My father was flustered.
“Serena,” he said, trying to snap himself out of it. “You look . . .”
“I look?” Serena prompted playfully.
“You look grown-up.”
“Oh, please. You can do better than that!”
“You look beautiful.”
“That’s better,” she said with a smile.
She stepped to my father and embraced him in a way that made me uncomfortable. I had always thought of hugs in boxing terms. There’s the clinch and then the break. Usually the boxers break on their own, but if they hang on too long, the referee has to separate them. In this case, I realized I would have to be the referee because the clinch was lasting way longer than it should have, so I cleared my throat deliberately. Serena released my father, but as she pulled away, she said, “You really have to shave that awful beard,” which I found amusing, not only because it was true but because it was like when one boxer takes a swipe at the other after the referee separates them. You’re not allowed to sucker punch your opponent on the break; you have to wait for the ref to signal fight-on.
“You must be Trevor,” she said, whirling toward me and swallowing me entirely. There was no other way to describe it. I was paralyzed.
“Give Aunt Serena a kiss,” my father said.
Serena smiled at my awkwardness. I couldn’t stop staring at the hollow where her throat met her collarbone.
“A handshake will suffice for now,” Serena said, holding out her hand. “We’ll save our kisses for later, okay?”
“I’ll take a kiss,” I managed to squeak, and she laughed. She leaned in and gave me a peck on the cheek, and I could smell something good, a whiff of something citrusy and fresh.
“Aren’t you sweet?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“I am not a ma’am, and I hope to never be one. I’m Aunt Serena, if you insist on formality, though I wish you wouldn’t. Simply Serena will do.”
“Yes, Simply Serena,” I said, eliciting a grin from her.
“Cheeky monkey,” she said, and she looked me over carefully like I was on the sale rack at Macy’s. “He has your eyes, Jones. Not in color: the coloring must be from Rachel. But in shape. He’s definitely a Riddell.”
“He’s definitely a Riddell,” my father agreed.
“But I’m being selfish! You must be starving. I’ve never been on an airplane myself, but the movies say how awful the food is. You must let me make you something to eat. Have you had lunch? Even a snack to hold you over until dinner.”
Without waiting for an answer, she rushed outside.
“Help her,” my father prompted, so I followed her and helped with her shopping bags.
Serena made sandwiches because we hadn’t had any lunch: a freshly roasted turkey waited for us in the refrigerator. When we had finished, Serena took us upstairs and showed us our rooms, which were at opposite ends of a long hallway.
“I thought you’d like some privacy,” she said to me as she led me down the hallway after we’d left my father in his room at the front of the house. “Plus, it’s cooler near the back of the house. I put your father in his old bedroom so it would feel familiar. But it’s very hot in the afternoon sun and we don’t have air-conditioning. I think you’ll be happier here.”
She showed me to a room that was empty except for a bed, a dresser, an oscillating fan, a small desk, and a rocking chair; the walls and the floor were bare.
“Your father told me you want to be a writer when you grow up,” she said. “That’s an admirable profession. I’ve always admired writers. I moved this desk in for you. Do you need pens or paper?”
“I have my notebooks,” I said.
“Oh, nice,” she said with a satisfied smile. “It’s a little rustic here, but it’s very peaceful. Please make yourself at home. I know you’re tired after your trip, so I’ll leave you alone to take a nap. Dinner will be at seven downstairs. You’ll get to meet Grandpa Samuel. Won’t that be a treat?”
“Do you have a job?” I asked her.
She seemed startled by the question, and I felt embarrassed for wanting to know more about her.
“Of course I have a job. Someone’s got to put food on the table, and Daddy certainly isn’t going to do it.”
“What do you do?”
“I work for a real estate developer. I’m sure it would seem quite boring to a young man like you: a writer! Steeped in the world of letters! Well, it’s important that we all have our goals, though some may be more modest than others.”
She left me alone, then, as promised. But I didn’t take a nap; naps made me nauseous. And, besides, I wanted to figure out Serena. What adult has never been on an airplane? My family was practically poor—well, we were actually poor at the time, but before that we were only practically poor—and I had been on an airplane a bunch of times.
I unpacked my bag into the dresser. I paced around in circles for a while because it was hot and I was tired. Finally, I lay back on the bed, laced my fingers behind my head, stared at the ceiling, and listened to the fan making its whirring noise, tipping back and forth on the floor.
I must have fallen asleep for a moment, because I was startled awake by the sound of someone’s voice, or so I thought. Was it my father? There was no one in my room, and the rest of the house was quiet. I got up and looked down the hallway. Nothing. I felt a slight chill; the breeze from the fan brushed my neck and I shivered. I could have sworn I’d heard someone say my name.
And as I closed the door and returned to my bed, I heard a low creaking sound, somewhere deep in the joists of the house, as if the house itself were calling to me.
– 2 –
LEAVING NEW HAVEN
I was two days shy of my fourteenth birthday when we arrived at Riddell House in July 1990, but I remember being so sure of things back then. I knew the simple facts. My parents were broke. They’d filed for bankruptcy and lost their house in Connecticut. My father had lost his business—which was part of the reason they went bankrupt in the first place, a cataclysm which caused a great deal of tension in their relationship. I knew that my mother had left my father and me to seek refuge with her family in England. And I knew my father had brought me to a bizarre house in Seattle so I could see my past, my history. I’d never been to Riddell House before; I’d never met my grandfather or my aunt, and my father wanted me to know them. If you’re a chicken, at some point your rooster father shows you an egg and says: “That’s where you came from.” I understood that.
And I also knew that my mother’s flight to England and my father’s flight to Seattle were more than separate summer vacations. It was the beginning of their trial separation. Because things had been difficult between my parents for a while. And a couple can only fight with each other for so long before they cave in each other’s souls and collapse. Even if they once loved each other a lot. Even if they still did.
There were other kids at school in Connecticut whose parents had gotten divorced. I’d seen it. Kids bragged about the two Christmases they got. Double the presents. Double the love. But I could see it in their eyes, even then, when I was a kid. I could see they were bluffing. Hot Wheels only last so long before the axles get bent and they don’t drive straight. RC cars are only fun until you can’t find the controller.
It was a dark time in our lives when the bank foreclosed on our house and put it up at auction. We went to watch—it must have been a life lesson my parents wanted me to see, but I’m not sure it was a good idea. It wasn’t exciting, like selling a painting or an antique car when they show it on TV. It was pretty boring. A guy announced a price, someone else handed him a couple of pieces of paper, and he banged his gavel: our house was sold to a company in Alabama.
I felt let down. Is that an understatement? I thought my father was going to save us. I thought we went there so he could trump everyone with a final bid on our own house. He would raise his hand and the auctioneer would point to him and call for any challengers, of which there would be none, and our life would be back to normal.
But he didn’t save us. We walked away like everyone else did: our hands stuffed into our empty pockets.
It was very warm, an old-fashioned July heat wave, when we retired to our motel near the airport in New Haven. It wasn’t a horrible motel: it was clean and had a large parking lot and a pool surrounded by a tall iron fence. I’d been an only child my whole life, so I knew the drill. I put on my swim trunks and went to the pool, which didn’t entirely suck, even though some German tourist kids were winging a tennis ball back and forth in a weird game of chicken ball—three kids, whizzing a saturated tennis ball around like a missile, skimming it off the water. It was so intense, I was afraid my teeth would get knocked out if the ball hit me. I liked the pool, but I didn’t feel safe with the tennis ball flying around like that, so I got out and wrapped myself in extra towels I had taken from the towel cart, and I lay down on a vinyl lounge chair next to my parents, who were in the middle of a tense conversation and so didn’t notice me.
“Look at our lives,” my mother said to my father. “Everything is gone. You’re bitter and angry all the time.”
My father said nothing.
“I’ve been patient, Jones,” my mother continued. “I really have been. I’ve tried to help you. But you have to help yourself. I love you, Jones. On some level, I will always love you. But you have to understand: the moment has been forced to its crisis.”
There was a long silence. I was buried in my towels; I don’t think they even saw me or knew I was listening. That was how I got most of my information: listening in on conversations not meant for me.
“I feel like an ass when you quote poetry at me,” my father said, finally. “Who was that? Coleridge again?”
“Eliot, actually.”
My mother shook her head sadly.
“You’re not finished with that place,” she said. “You’ve always told me you were finished, but you aren’t. You still carry it with you wherever you go.”
“It’s difficult,” he said.
“No. Splitting an atom is difficult. Confronting your past is just something you’re meant to do. I’ve already agreed to let you take Trevor. So take him to where you grew up, to Riddell House. Show him who you are and show him why you are. And maybe you’ll
find yourself there, too. And then . . .”
“And then?”
“And then we’ll be better able to see where we are.”
He nodded, but didn’t meet her eyes. She looked at him for a long time until he looked back.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said as she stood up to leave.
He reached his hand toward her. She hesitated a moment, and then she, too, reached out her hand, but not all the way, just until their fingertips touched. She nodded once, turned, and left.
My father lingered for several minutes, and then he left, too. As he walked away, one of the German kids winged the tennis ball across the pool; it ricocheted off a lounge chair, hit my father in the ribs, and bounced dead at his feet. He paused a moment, then picked up the ball and threw it as hard as he could, harder than I’d ever seen a person throw a ball. It soared out of the pool area, across the parking lot, bounced off a motel balcony railing, and landed in the bushes. And then he walked away.
Later that night, when my mother and I were together in the motel room—my father was in the shower—I asked her again to come with us to Riddell House.
“Oh, Trevor,” she said. “You simply don’t have the life experience to understand what’s going on here.”
Maybe I didn’t, I remember thinking very clearly. But I understood two things: first, somewhere along the way, my father had gone wrong and my mother stopped loving him; second, I could fix him. I could pull him together. And I believed that, by the end of the summer, if I did my job right, I could deliver my father to my mother as if he were a regular, loving person, like when she first met him.
