by Emily Anglin
After finishing a master’s degree in English, I’d been teaching communications at a college in the city off and on for three years, until a bad experience on campus prompted me to leave.
I’d gotten into the habit of leaving sandwiches on a bench in a concrete courtyard outside the classroom I taught in, because I’d seen a woman through the window leaving the courtyard one morning, and I believed she was sleeping there at night. But then I got a letter from security saying that I’d been reported by a community member for leaving garbage on the campus, and I didn’t see the woman again after that. I’d been thinking of leaving the college anyway, and the letter made the time feel right to move on. I knew I should stay to work on the situation, but instead I walked away.
Grant’s outside-the-lines thinking struck me as a welcome shift change from what I’d come to see as an unfeeling bureaucracy at the college. And my sister, my closest friend in the city, had recently moved away for a job, so it made all the more sense to look for something else, somewhere else.
Later that summer, after not working for a few months, aside from some freelance editing work, I saw a job posting online for the one-year contract with the city of Alden as their marketing and communications officer, and applied. Grant called me within the same week to tell me they were interested in talking to me. When he said “talking” he meant just that, it turned out. They let me do a phone interview for the job. Grant never even mentioned the possibility of Skype, or of me visiting by train or in a rented car, expenses I’d started calculating as soon as I got his first call. But no such expenses turned out to be necessary. Everything was paid for by his plan—Alden’s plan.
“You’ll see what I mean about space when you drive in,” he explained again, about a week before my move. “Houses, warehouses, offices, schools, stores: we have spaces of all kinds. It may look empty. I don’t want to deceive you about what you’re getting into. But I hope and expect that we’ll look on the space as an opportunity. You’ll see what I mean.”
Grant’s title was Cultural Affairs Officer. He himself had recently been hired by the corporation of the town of Alden. Alden’s main landmark had been a large, turn-of-the-century military academy, but it had shut down in the 1970s after a financial scandal. An Alden citizen named Allen Poole had bought the Victorian building, converting it into a music conservatory, and then, when that failed, a retirement community, before it finally fell into disuse, sat vacant for half a decade, and was burned down by arsonists who were never identified. Grant said that part of our job would be brainstorming about new uses for the large academy grounds that now sat empty, aside from the building’s foundations
In those final, hot days in the city, lying sweating in my tiny apartment, waiting out the need to eat as long as possible, turning radio programs spoken in languages I didn’t know to high volume to block out traffic sounds that poured in through the always-open window, with its screen torn from the box fan I kept in it, I’d appreciated Grant’s phone calls as a dispatch from another world altogether. I was entertained by the fact that he only called, and never emailed, and by the strange intimacy of talking to someone so frequently who knew nothing about me.
I did see what Grant meant about space when I arrived in Alden.
It was raining lightly in the mid-sized town north of Alden where I got off the train, and the cab was there waiting for me. (“You’re Curtis’s guest, right?” Curtis, I’d learned, was Grant’s assistant.) Grant had explained that the closest I could get to Alden by train was a half-hour drive away, and from there a cab was the only option. (That was one of the things we could brainstorm about together, Grant had said—the transportation situation.) The driver lifted my two large suitcases into the trunk; I’d brought what I cared to keep, and gotten rid of the rest.
The cab flew in solitude along a small highway, past silos, a distant fenced yard where a horse stood, head lowered, and fields where rows of orange gourds and yellow summer squashes sat in lines on the soil, glowing in the bright grey daylight. The white-haired driver’s face in the rear-view mirror was pale and lined; his grip on the wheel and ease with his turns said he’d driven these roads most of his life. A manila envelope—the one communication I’d received from Grant or his office that wasn’t a phone call, the one piece of evidence that I had any business coming to town—was getting damp from my sweaty hands. The thought that this whole thing could be a scam had occurred to me, but I’d pushed it out of my mind. A friend of mine had accepted a job at a university abroad teaching music; when he got there, it turned out the university didn’t exist, except as a website. There was no job, and money he’d sent at the request of his contact for accommodations and travel expenses had disappeared into thin air. At least I’d sent no money, I thought; if things turned out not to be what they seemed, I’d just turn around and leave.
The envelope’s contents had provided welcome, more tangible backup to the story Grant had given me about Alden’s situation and his role in it. Mr. Allen Poole, the son of a long-serving mayor, and grandson of one of the military academy’s founders, had made a bequest to the town, including cash, as well as several houses and buildings that were to be put to new use by Grant, in keeping with Poole’s wishes for Alden’s future. Mr. Poole had specifically bequeathed the funds and assets to Grant, and Grant had been hired formally by the city as a director in charge of promoting growth and vitality. One of the properties bequeathed by Allen Poole was the house I’d be staying in—called Founder’s House; another was the lot where the ruins of the burned-down academy stood.
“One good thing,” Grant had explained, “is that Allen’s bequest means we can put you up in style. I think you’ll be very comfortable.” Alden’s plan was to entice new employees there with the offer of free accommodations in unused, city-owned houses. The package in the envelope was the one concrete sign I had that anything he’d said was true. I opened the envelope and checked for the hundredth time that the key to the house I’d be staying in was still there. I pulled out a stapled, photocopied package of information about Alden and looked at it again.
The final page of the stapled package was titled “Founder’s House—Orientation,” in a cursive font. It explained that the house had been the family home of the Poole family, where Allen Poole had grown up. I was still expecting that there had been some mistake about this detail, that I’d be staying in an apartment in the house, rather than in the whole house. I was staring at a small picture of the house at the bottom of the page, its finer details inscrutable—was that stained glass? I loved stained glass, and had never lived in a building that had any—when my phone rang. My “hello” elicited a glance, with raised eyebrows, in the rear-view mirror from the cab driver, then a nod, and a drop of his eyes back into meditative highway gazing.
“We’re so happy you’re on your way,” said Grant, on the other end. “And I’m so happy you’ll be staying in Founder’s House. I know what it’s like trying to live in the city these days. Everyone fighting over a square foot of land or a one-room basement apartment.”
My mind raced, and I flushed—had I told him about my apartment? I thought I had studiously concealed my circumstances (“Freelance, right now” instead of “unemployed,” “between opportunities” instead of “recently gave up,” “researching new fields” instead of “adjusting expectations”). No, I hadn’t said a thing, and certainly nothing about my apartment. He must have been speaking in generic terms.
“Founder’s House is one of Alden’s gems. We wanted to make things nice for you during your stay. I shouldn’t say this, but we got hundreds of applications for your job. But we feel fortunate that it’s you we chose.”
The cab pulled off the highway, following a sign to Alden, and turned onto a long street that was empty at first except for the odd garage or gas station, and then, as we entered town, became lined with storefronts.
“This is the main drag up here,” said the cab driver.
There were real estate signs on almost every building. Before I could take much of it in, we turned right.
“We’re headed down toward Founder’s House,” said the driver. “This used to be the wealthy part of town, down by the lake.”
Sailing south down an empty residential street lined with increasingly bigger houses, we came to the top of a hill, and as we came over it, with a drop in my stomach, I saw the sky dip down ahead of us, to meet a thick line of deeper blue.
Over the hill, the street began sloping steadily downward, toward the water, and the houses became massive, rambling Victorian structures. I ran my finger over the shape of the key through the paper, not knowing quite what to say to the driver, but feeling like I should share my admiration for the sheer size of the houses. I lifted my phone to the window and tried to hold it steady enough to frame a few of them as we passed. Some were so big they were hard to even see in their entirety at once, in their many-sidedness, with multiple storeys, gables, turrets, stacked porches; one red house was so big that it looked like it had a whole second house growing out of the side of it, as though its ethereal self had frozen mid-stride as it stepped out of its body to walk away.
Some of them looked loved. I took a picture of a tire swing hanging from a willow tree, and a calico cat sitting in front of a wheelbarrow full of sticks and leaves with a pair of faded work gloves hanging over one rusted side. But many of them, at least half or even more, looked under-tenanted, empty, or abandoned. Porches sagged, ivy grew up over brick, or even right over windows.
“Vacancy,” the cab driver said.
I started, and looked at him in the rear-view mirror. We had paused at a stop sign. I wondered if he was talking to himself, and felt disconcerted. He was staring across the road, and my eyes followed his line of vision. He was shaking his head.
“That’s just a shame,” he said. “Graffiti everywhere.”
The word “Vacancy” was written in massive, spray-painted, mock-elegant cursive letters across the face of a yellow house. The red letters had been scrubbed at until they had turned pink, and the faded colour had an incongruously gentle effect against the white-trimmed, pale-yellow brick, like writing on a cake. The clouds had begun rolling around the sky, opening cracks of faint blue, and as I looked at the decorated house, a ray of early fall sunlight bathed the brick, lighting up the letters. I found it odd that I hadn’t seen any people walking around, or on the porches of any of the houses.
“Don’t pay much attention to that,” the driver was saying. “I’ve seen it happen in other generations, but the town comes back from it, and then the visitors come back. I used to work for the city myself, driving seniors—before I was a senior myself. Between good times, kids around here get bored. There’s not enough to do. It’s a lovely old neighbourhood, lots of history. The military academy was just down the way—it was famous. It still is, even though it burned down a while back now. Lots went on here right in this block or so. Politicians used to live here. The mayor. Which brings us to our final stop. To our right, Founder’s House.” He pulled to a stop in front of the Victorian mansion that I recognized from the picture in the information package, and I got out.
It was the biggest building I’d ever approached as a resident. But the thought of living anywhere so large, the idea of such a large structure housing a space that was private rather than public, unshared, without “open” hours, came over me in a rush of what I can only describe as a combination of fear, disbelief, and more than a little greed.
My phone began to vibrate in my pocket, and I pulled it out. Grant was calling. I sent the call to voice mail, intending to call him once I got inside, not wanting to interrupt the silence of the neighbourhood. A second later, I got a text from him: “The house is all yours. Make yourself at home.” Alden seemed willing to speak to me only in disembodied voices: Grant’s voice on the phone, the written word in graffiti on the house. But no, that word wasn’t for me. Or maybe it was, and it was telling me what I suspected—that I wasn’t supposed to be here. At least not like this, invited not by the town, but by a single voice that might just have been an echo of a single voice, an echo of my own.
A bird landed in a tall tree in the yard of the house across the street behind me, and I thought I could hear its individual feathers sifting the air. I lifted the phone up to my eye and took pictures of the stained-glass windows, each composed of leaf-sized droplets of coloured glass that together formed an image of a lion among eagles and peacocks against a backdrop of gold and green.
I pulled the key from the envelope and unlocked the front door, which led into a foyer with a stained-glass transom above a second, inner door, which stood ajar. I took a picture of the transom on my phone, before going through into a large wood-panelled hallway.
Rooms of panelled wood to all sides of me gleamed in the sunlight they absorbed from small windows. Twin living rooms flanked the front hall, decorated sparsely, with an ’80s chair-and-loveseat set in each. I imagined parties of the Poole family and guests moving from room to room, or sitting for family dinners in the dining room, and felt that it couldn’t be right for the house to be opened to just one person.
I wondered if I should call Grant, but decided I would look around upstairs first, to find my bearings. Up past a window seat on a landing that looked out over an overgrown side yard, I passed second-floor bedrooms, one furnished with just a large bed, one empty except for a telephone on the floor. At the end of the hall, a third door had a small handwritten sign taped on it: “Theresa’s Room.”
Sitting on the bed in my room, I stared at a framed print of a painting of willow trees on the wall before I got up to go back downstairs. On my way down, on the wall beside the head of the stairs, I noticed a fourth, thinner door, which looked like it must lead to an attic. There was a sign on it: “Debbie’s Room.” Maybe I wasn’t alone, after all. I knocked on the door, but was answered with silence. I was thirsty, so I went back downstairs, through the dining room and into the kitchen, toward a sink, and started opening cupboards.
A flurry of quick knocks behind me set my heart racing. I grabbed the sink and turned around. Framed momentarily in the kitchen-door window was the face of a man in a shirt and tie. The door opened, and he stepped inside, arm already extended for a handshake.
“Theresa. Welcome. I’m Grant. So good to finally meet you in person. I tried calling but couldn’t reach you. I wanted to be here so that there’d be a familiar face to greet you when you arrived.”
I guessed he meant “a familiar voice.” The face I’d pictured, which had become familiar in my mind, to the point where I’d assumed, unconsciously, that I would probably recognize him when I saw him, wasn’t like I’d pictured it at all. He had dark hair in thick waves that looked like they’d been subdued with a gelled comb. Deep circles ringed his eyes. He wore a stiff white shirt and a plain grey tie.
“You must be hungry,” he said. “Have you eaten?”
“I’m just a bit thirsty,” I said. “But I couldn’t seem to find a glass.”
“No glasses?” he said. “We’ll have to fix that. Do you like apples? Or pears?”
“I like apples,” I said. “And pears. I like both.”
He held his hand to show me a clear plastic bag of apples and pears.
“I brought you a fruit bowl,” he said. “Well, not the bowl, but the contents.” He set them down on the counter. “But you want more than fruit after your long trip. Come on. Let’s go get you a drink and I’ll show you around.”
I was feeling already like this had been a mistake, but I was overwhelmed by the house. I wanted to sleep in it just one night, at least, and feel its size and silence all around me, even though the idea of being alone there scared me. But then I recalled the sign saying “Debbie’s Room.” Maybe I wouldn’t be alone after all. I would give it at least the night to see what happened.
Grant’s car was par
ked down the street. The driveway was muddy, he explained. The car was a white Escalade SUV.
“The city’s car,” he said, as we got in. “One of the perks.”
The interior smelled like leather. We started driving down the hill, toward the lake. We passed a set of tennis courts, closed up with big locks and heavy chains, but with a chain-link fence that had been cut open from the bottom, to form a kind of curtained entrance just big enough for one person. There were no nets. Big cracks in the pavement grew thick with ragweed and goldenrod.
“There’s something sad about abandoned tennis courts, isn’t there?” Grant said. “It seems like such a waste. A tennis court is such a cool thing to do with space.”
“It’s true,” I said, my head feeling light. I wondered why the courts hadn’t been resurfaced. Maybe the kids in town would like a place to play tennis, if the town could provide rackets and balls, an instructor, and maybe set up some drop-in hours. But I was so thirsty it was hard to think. The sun had come out now, and it was shining through the window on my side onto my legs, in the still and airless car.
“I’m sorry, but if we could find a drink for me soon, I’d be really grateful,” I said. “I haven’t had a drink since I left the house.”
“They didn’t offer you a drink on the train? I guess rail travel really isn’t what it used to be. We’re going to make that up to you. I’m taking you somewhere special for a welcome-to-Alden toast.”
He veered toward a field with stone walls placed at irregular intervals in it. As we got closer, I saw the ruins of a large building in a field—the location of the military academy. One small building remained, a chapel with boarded windows and a spire. There was another small, square building across the field that looked intact, but elsewhere on the grounds, tall, wide piles of stone and brick sat; sections of the ground were tiled, what remained of its bathrooms. Much of the rock was charred. On the spire of the chapel, vertical red lettering had been scrubbed from the white stone, a word that had been painted sideways down the spire’s length. Only the faint word “Vacancy” was clearly visible, written left to right at the spire’s base.
