Belonging

by Nancy Thayer

  “How did Greek Revival get out here?” Joanna asked.

  “It all connects up to what was going on at the time. The United States had just come out of the Revolution and then the War of 1812. The people were eager to show in every way, especially in the outward appearance of their homes, that this country had thrown off the English influence and was becoming a strong republic on its own. They wanted to emulate the ancient Greek city-state, which was the birthplace of democracy, so they put up all these sort of miniature Greek temples. As a matter of fact, many of our big beautiful buildings in town—the Atheneum, the Methodist church, the mansions on Main Street—are Greek Revival, and I have to say those buildings are awfully damned elegant.” Bob shook his head in admiration, then smiled abashedly. “I’m an amateur historian. Just tell me to shut up when I get carried away.”

  “No, no, I’m interested in all this, really,” Joanna told him, biting her tongue just before she blurted out, “It’s my field, actually.” He didn’t seem to know who she was—not that he should recognize her with the wig on—and she wanted to keep it that way for a while.

  “I should be telling you stuff you need to know.” Bob stepped back and looked up, pointing at the windows. “Six over six windowpanes. See the ripples? That’s the original glass. The good news is that the house hasn’t been tampered with very much. You might say that its integrity is complete. That’s the bad news, too. Except for the necessary reshinglings over the years, it hasn’t been tampered with very much. It hasn’t been cared for. It needs a lot of work.”

  “That doesn’t scare me,” Joanna told him.

  “Okay, then, let’s go inside. I came out earlier to turn on the heat, but it’s still going to feel chilly. Damp. The way houses do when they’ve been shut up for a long time.” He turned the key in the lock, held the blue door open, and let Joanna pass before him.

  Joanna stepped inside. Immediately she was overwhelmed with emotions and, standing very still in the central hall, she gazed around at the sunlight on the burnished wood floors. She heard the gentle hum of the furnace; she smelled wood and dust and sun. The house didn’t seem chilly. It seemed welcoming.

  She felt she had come home.

  “I want to buy this house,” she said.

  Bob laughed. “You’d better let me show it all to you first.” But he waited patiently, letting her look, letting her take her time. They were standing together just inside the front door, at the front of the long central hall from which a wide, graceful staircase wound up to the second floor. Four doors stood open to other rooms.

  Another smaller door, no doubt to a closet, opened underneath the staircase. The most compelling view was straight back to the opposite end of the house where tall glass doors framed a view of blazing blue sky above land which sloped to the sea, and Joanna hurried the length of the house to look out.

  “One of the best changes the summer owners made was to install those French doors,” Bob remarked.

  “Yes,” Joanna agreed, “I can see that.” Three steps led from the doors straight down to a small rectangle of lawn, which in its turn gave way to wild brush, and then the beach and the ocean.

  “There should be a deck all along here,” Joanna said. She could envision it clearly: blue and white pots of pink geraniums that would be placed at the corners.

  “Good idea.” Bob waited until Joanna turned from the view, then led her into the large front room, which opened directly onto a room equally large, with its windows full of ocean view. “What we’ve got on this side of the house are what were called, when the house was built, traditional ‘double parlors,’ one behind the other. So you can have one large open room, or put a wall in along here and have two good-sized single rooms. You could shut off the ocean-side room—that gets the worst of the wind—and use it only in the summer and save on heating bills if you wanted.”

  “Oh, it’s beautiful,” Joanna gasped. The wide-board pine floors, with stain and oil and simple age, had become the color of butterscotch. The walls and ceiling were a gentle cream, marked and soiled enough to need painting. Pewter chandeliers hung from the plaster rosettes in the center of each room, and the two fireplaces were finished off in marble, with the mantels ornamented with beadwork.

  She followed Bob across the hall. “Here we have the dining room. This fireplace has a built-in oven and a small closet for kindling beneath. It was once what was known as the keeping room where the family really lived and ate and cooked most of the year. That door leads to what was once the borning room, and is now the kitchen, and was modernized in the sixties. I’ll show you the kitchen in a moment, first, this door …” Bob stepped from the dining room into a small, low-ceilinged, unheated room, and Joanna joined him. “This little room is what people used to call a wart. It was probably a summer kitchen when the house was built. This century the owners turned it into a screened-in porch. Too bad you’re seeing it now when everything’s still dead. This room is great in the summer when the vines are blooming all over.”

  “I can imagine.”

  Holding the door, he led her back through the dining room and into the only room Joanna didn’t appreciate: a kitchen full of avocado appliances, with a linoleum floor and aqua linoleum counters.

  “This will have to change drastically,” she announced.

  Bob tapped the refrigerator door. “The appliances all function until you can get new ones. In here is a nice little half-bathroom.” Near the door to the central hall was another, smaller door, and now he opened it, revealing a set of very steep, twisting stairs. “Servants’ stairs. They’d come down from the attic this way.”

  Joanna followed the Realtor up the stairs and along the hallway to the large bedroom. “Wow,” she said softly, and just leaned against the window, looking out at the panorama of beach, ocean, and sky. Dazzling. This would be her bedroom. The bed here, and a chaise by the window, and she could move it in front of the fireplace in the winter … “Does the fireplace work?”

  “As far as I know it does. Of course, you’ll want it checked out.”

  She ran her hand over the plain, oiled wide pine board which ran as a panel over the fireplace. It was warm to her touch.

  “The Baxters built a nice large bathroom between the two rooms on this side, but you can always lock this door if you want the bathroom to be strictly for the master suite.”

  They crossed the hall to another large bedroom with ocean views. This would be her study.

  Bob knocked his fingers on an inside wall. “The Baxters put some new walls in up here, to make enough bedrooms for all their children and grandchildren.”

  “I can see that. I’ll have them knocked out. I need a large office.” She could envision it as she spoke: walls of shelves here and here—“Could you recommend a good carpenter? And a good electrician?”

  “Surely.”

  “I’ll have to have a lot of power in here for my computer, Xerox machine, and fax. This room will be my first priority.”

  “What kind of work do you do?” Bob asked.

  “Oh,” Joanna answered, “well, research. For the next year I’ll be working on two books, nonfiction, about houses.”

  Before he could ask more, Joanna turned and went out into the hall and along to the front of the house. The windows in this large bedroom looked out over the driveway and the moors. The ceiling was high and the space was airy, but when it was painted and papered, it would be even brighter.

  “No ocean views on this side,” Bob pointed out, following her. “However, this room and the other front bedroom will be much easier to keep warm in the winter.” He tapped the radiator running under one window. “Great heat, the best, steam heat, and when we go to the basement, I’ll show you the furnace. Oil.”

  She followed Bob up a set of enclosed stairs to the attic, with its several tiny rooms wallpapered in summery flowers, the original pegs on the walls for clothes. The floors up here were unfinished boards, many at least two feet across.

  They went down to
the basement, and here, too, was a room with beautiful wide-board floors, as well as a fireplace nearly high enough to walk into, a beehive oven built into the bricks, and another, lower, gently arched opening for storing firewood. Here and there large holes gaped in the walls, and brick dust had sifted out onto the floor.

  “They probably used this as a summer kitchen.” Bob nodded toward one pile of debris. “No doubt places knocked open when someone tried to find Farthingale’s treasure.”

  Moving into other, less finished rooms, he pointed out the oil furnace and the great black oil tank, and the panel of electric fuse boxes, and the water heater. They went outside, walked around the house, looked up at the roof and the trim around the windows, and Joanna saw how much more weathered the wood was on the ocean side of the house. Basically, though, things were in good condition.

  Bob locked up the house and drove her into his office in town, and while she drank a cup of hot decaffeinated coffee, he gathered together for her all the listing sheets printed with the details of the house.

  It was time for her flight back to New York. The Realtor drove her to the airport, and while they waited for the plane to board, he bought her a sandwich. She was ravenously hungry.

  “I want to make an offer on this house,” Joanna told him as they sat together at a table looking out at the flat paved airstrip. “Should I call you tonight?”

  Bob laughed. “I don’t think there’s any rush. The house has been on the market for years. We’ve got an exclusive listing, so no one else can get to the owners. Take your time. Think about it. Be sure.”

  “I am sure,” Joanna said.

  “Even so, why not sleep on it? Call me in the morning. I’ll be in the office, ready to take down all the details.”

  “I assume the house is available immediately.”

  “Immediately.”

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.”

  Joanna smiled. “So will I.”

  Six

  Tuesday morning Joanna called Bob Hoover and, after the customary discussion, made an offer on the house.

  By Wednesday morning the owners had accepted.

  In three weeks she would own her own house.

  That evening she showered and dressed in a loose-fitting Armani pantsuit and T-shirt and loafers, then hurried out to a nearby Mexican restaurant where with gusto she devoured a pile of nachos deluxe. At seven she took a cab down to the CVN building. She was fairly sure most of the Fabulous Homes staff would have left for the day. Certainly Gloria would have gone. She always had a date.

  The cab pulled to the curb and she stepped out. A snarling, red-faced, fat woman in a purple coat was intently propelling herself toward the cab in a frenzy to get it before a grim-faced man in a trench coat. As she grabbed for the cab’s door, Purple Coat knocked Joanna aside, tripping her in the process.

  “God damn!” Joanna cursed as she fell. She reached out wildly to prevent herself from hitting the pavement. Trench Coat was close enough to catch her, but he was furious at losing the cab, and only swore under his breath and stalked away. Joanna’s elbow hit the curb. Her breath was knocked out of her. The sidewalk flowed with people hurrying in the cold, some of whom cast curious glances her way and rushed on. She pushed herself to her feet and brushed her elbows and stalked toward the network building. It certainly wasn’t the first time some random bit of minor violence had occurred; usually she simply chalked it up to life in the city and forgot about it. This time it frightened her and made her resolve even more complete.

  After the commotion of traffic and voices, the hush of the empty lobby of the CVN building fell over her like a glass bell. Joanna said hello to the security guard at the front desk and signed in, strode across the glossy marble floor to the bank of elevators, and went to the thirty-seventh floor.

  Here the dove-gray walls and charcoal-gray carpet along the narrow hallways combined with overhead track lighting to provide all the warmth and charm of a nuclear submarine at abysmal depth. Gloria had left for the day, thank heavens; Joanna was in no mood for her shiny pertness. Now as she entered the reception area to her office, she noticed—really saw for the first time—the many various touches Gloria had added to brighten what was really a cold and impersonal area. Framed posters of Monet’s water lilies hung on the walls; when she first saw them, Joanna had privately been critical of Gloria for having such pedestrian taste. But even though everyone in the world loved water lilies, they were still beautiful, Joanna realized. They added a depth to the room. As did the photographs of Gloria’s nieces, nephews, parents, and her cute little dog, Peppy, a white toy poodle. Gloria would have a white toy poodle.

  A vase of pansies sat on Gloria’s desk next to her neat piles of folders. Even her computer was tied up like a present in a green-and-white-plaid ribbon with yellow silk daisies tucked into the bow on top. Gloria decorated her computer to match the season or the holiday. Joanna had thought this a rather dim-witted and even silly thing to do, but now in her nesting mood she saw it differently. It might be cute, but it was also personal; it made this room Gloria’s.

  In contrast, Joanna saw as she unlocked her office door and entered, flicking on the lights, that her room, this room where she’d worked for five years, had no personality, no sign of what individual worked here. Instead of pictures or posters, charts and graphs and a blackboard and a corkboard and an enormous calendar hung on the walls. Every flat surface was covered not with framed photographs, but with file folders, videocassettes, and working paraphernalia. The most homey area was the space formed by a long leather sofa and two chairs all turned to face a wall of large remote-control television sets with VCRs. The low table in front of them actually did hold coffee from time to time, but more often it held file folders and pads of papers for the notes Joanna made for her shows.

  Well, her office might not be charming, but it was organized. Joanna went out into the storage closet off Gloria’s reception area, returning with two cardboard file boxes. Pulling her office chair around to face a bank of file cabinets, she sat down and began to transfer from the file cabinets to the boxes all the files about the two books she wanted to do. It didn’t take long. On weekends, while Carter was with his family, Joanna had prevented herself from dwelling gloomily on his absence by carefully, even meticulously, organizing the material and writing the outline of the books. Everything was in order. Closing the boxes, she taped them shut and labeled them in large black print. She’d have them mailed to her agent; Sheila could keep them and forward them when Joanna had a new address.

  That done, she looked around. What else did she need to take from this room? What else did she want? Rising, she went to her desk and studied it. Odd, but she loved what she saw there; it was all as beautiful to her as a vase of roses. Her in and out boxes, crammed to overflowing with correspondence, memos, materials to be copied. Folders color-coded for different shows. Vouchers to be signed. Letters. Pens, tape, paper clips, a high-tech speakerphone. A computer unadorned by ribbons. Dictionaries, great heavy illustrated books on architecture, furniture, home decoration. Surveying these things filled her with a rich contentment. She ran her hands over the objects and was satisfied. Well, she would be able to replace them all in her study in her house. New pens, dictionaries, folders, equipment. Yum.

  She looked at her watch. It was almost eight-thirty, time for her appointment with Jake. She stood a moment in the doorway of her office, memorizing the room as it was now, although she was certain its every molecule was engraved into the plates of her memory.

  She would miss her office a million times more than her apartment.

  Flicking off the light, she pulled the door shut and locked it. Standing next to Gloria’s desk, she studied it a moment, as if memorizing it, then put a hand-addressed sealed envelope in the middle of Gloria’s blotter, where she wouldn’t fail to see it. Then she turned her back on it and went out to the wall of elevators and up to the forty-fifth floor.


  Jake’s secretary was gone, but he was there, talking on the telephone; she could hear him shouting. Smiling, she let herself into his office and sat down in a chair facing his desk. He rolled his eyes at her about his conversation, then scribbled on a notepad and punched keys on his computer. She could tell he’d been running his hands through his curly salt-and-pepper hair; it stood out in all directions, making him look like a sixties revolutionary. But he wore a three-piece gray suit hand-tailored just for his stocky, muscular body. Now the jacket was thrown over a chair, his vest unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled up, and his red silk tie yanked down. The top two buttons of his white shirt were undone. He was working hard, he was always working, full speed ahead, top volume.

  Finally he slammed down the phone and collapsed into his chair. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he announced. “When I heard about Carter’s accident, then heard you were sick, I was afraid you’d gotten injured, too.”

  “I’m fine, Jake. But I’ve got some heavy news.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Joanna rose from her chair and walked across the room to lock the door. When she returned to her seat, she said, “This is all just between you and me. Okay? No one else should know. No one.”

  “All right, whatever you say.”

  “I want your word, Jake. Promise me. You won’t tell anyone.”

  “Hey, Joanna. Have I ever not kept one of your secrets?”

  Joanna just stared at Jake, and soon his expression changed from indignation to puzzlement.

  “Okay, I promise. Tell me. What’s up? Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay, Jake. I’m better than okay.” This was the first time she’d shared her news with anyone, and she felt an uncontrollable smile break out across her face. How should she phrase this? She wanted the announcement to be joyous, and elegant, and—