by Daniel Stern
The day on which Elly set out to walk through the museum-like town toward the newly completed house was Saturday, the day on which she habitually took her dreaded piano lesson. Elly woke that morning, as she did every morning, suddenly. To become conscious was always a shock.
She lay in the hot wash of morning sunlight streaming through the blinds and knew immediately that she was depressed. Having had long experience with early-morning misery, she could tell she was depressed before anything concrete could swim up to consciousness. Then she began to hunt for good, solid reasons with which to dispel the troubled state of mind. She kept her eyes shut. She could hear her mother rattling plates in the kitchen; it was a bright sound, carrying with it the promise of food and hot coffee in the mouth. Steps were paddling to or from the bathroom: Daddy, or—suddenly she remembered—Lang. That would do for a starter. This was a fine thought. Lang was the house on the hill. Then she remembered that she had to modify that phrase after having seen the house grow. It was the house in the hill, built right into the side of the earth. Well, that was just fine with her. “The girl in the house in the hill” tripped through her mind like a nursery rhyme. The girl in the house in the hill. That was to be her, Elly Kaufman.
“Elly.” It was her mother’s voice. “How about—” The voice stopped suddenly, as if Mrs. Kaufman had remembered the guest in the house.
“Coming,” the girl in the house in the hill shouted at the very top of her voice, and threw the covers off the bed and onto the floor. The depressed state of mind was staved off, and she felt as she always did at such times, that it would never return.
She hopped out of bed, still keeping her eyes tightly shut. It was a game she played sometimes to reacquaint herself with her world, the world being now this, her room, at other times the bathroom (which had the added thrill of danger since there was always the possibility of a razor blade carelessly left lying about, as her exploring hand swept the cold marble sink), at other times her parents’ room when they weren’t at home. It was always played in the morning, as the world was too familiar at any other time.
Deliberately depriving herself of the sense of sight, she ran her hand across the table next to her bed, over the rough binding of the book, the texture of which set her teeth on edge so that she moved on quickly to the smoothness of the lamp, and then stepping with unaccustomedly short paces she moved her bare toes over the brassiere lying on the floor just where she remembered having flung it the night before. So far so good. The room was beginning to take on its familiar configurations. But she had forgotten about the pile of music she had been going through the night before, looking for an easy piece to take with her in case she decided not to lie to Mr. Larkin about having to go to the dentist but instead take her lesson. She took a step forward too quickly and stubbed her big toe on the hard binding of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” by Johann Sebastian Bach. She sat down swiftly on the floor and, seizing her toe in her hand, massaged it furiously.
She began to feel depressed again, instantly. She decided at that moment that she would not attend her piano lesson. She was a little relieved then, and lying back on the tufted rug she closed her eyes as tightly as she could, then opened them suddenly. The effect was dazzling and she squinted ecstatically at the window. That was the wonderful thing about light. You could turn it on and off and manipulate it, not artificially with a wall switch, but with your own actual body, your eyes. She loved bright natural light or, if at night, brilliant electric light. “I’m a completely modern person in that sense,” she had once told Roz. “I can’t imagine myself when they had only gaslight. Maybe in the great ballrooms in Vienna—that might be, with millions of candles in a chandelier.”
Pleased about her decision to play hooky from her piano lesson, Elly bubbled at breakfast, scrambling through her food, taking her time only when the coffee arrived. She and her mother were alone in the kitchen, her father having left long before. He was to be in Indianapolis for the day. Lang had apparently left after a quick cup of coffee.
“You ready for your lesson?”
“Yes, Mother,” she said with the lowered eyes and preoccupied voice which sometimes discouraged further discussion.
“You came in pretty late last night, didn’t you?”
“Pretty.”
“Where were you?”
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“For God’s sake leave me alone! I was out with friends, that’s all.” She was still feeling pretty good, but under the barrage of questions she felt her good spirits withering.
“All right,” Mrs. Kaufman said, “take it easy.” She had no real purpose in asking these questions; she meant only to let Elly know that it was not too easy to do anything she wanted to do.
“Don’t forget to pick up your taffeta dress. The wedding’s tomorrow night.”
“I don’t understand what any girl would see in my cousin Lester.”
“That’s the trouble with you. You can’t see the things other people see. You’re a bright girl, Elly. You just don’t see what you don’t want to see. Lester is a lovely boy. He’s got success marked on his forehead in indelible ink.”
“Did Daddy have success written on his forehead? Seems to me we were miserably poor for an awfully long time.”
Mrs. Kaufman mopped up some spilled coffee near Elly’s saucer. “We always tried to make you feel you weren’t poor. But I don’t know—it seems like you could never wait to get out of the house. All right, so it wasn’t the-the, but it was a clean, nice place to bring your friends.”
Elly was silent, thinking about what to tell her piano teacher that afternoon.
“Well, now you’ll have a home like nothing anyone around here has ever seen before.”
Elly nodded, thinking, The girl in the house in the hill.
Mealtimes were usually just an ordeal of her mother talking and herself giving the illusion of listening. Frequently she placed a book beside her plate, at which she could glance from time to time when it became necessary to avoid a particularly unpleasant recrimination.
“Mom, when did Dad say we’re moving?”
“It’s not up to your father. It’s my decision to make.”
“When do you say we’re moving, then?”
“Next week, sometime. All the furniture will have arrived by then.”
“Isn’t it marvelous, Mom! And the custom-built phonograph is finished. I took up an album of records the other day, the Brahms Violin Concerto, and tried the machine out. It sounded terrific.”
“Try not to talk so that you sound so excited all the time, dear. You’re a young lady now. A little poise.”
“Yes, Mom,” she answered absently and left the house.
Elly trailed her hand in the water, which flowed slowly over the mud and stone which blocked its path. This little trickle, Elly knew from her recent explorations on their property, widened to a vigorous riverlet, some two acres or so behind the house, flowing through, as if it had lost itself temporarily, a pine forest, so that the little muddy splash in which she dipped her fingers carried at some later time and some other place a richness of green pine needles embellished with rough, crumbly brown pine cones.
She was not far from the house now and she stood up and began to run. She hopped over the stream, conserving her breath in deep draughts. Near the road she saw, as she crossed it, two children skipping rope, racing each other; they seemed to be moving incredibly slowly because of her own speed. Things looked so different when you were moving. She had just learned the meaning of the word kinetic in dance class and had decided that people ought to keep moving as much as possible all the time. That’s what she would do if she ever got away.
She was panting when she reached the foot of the hill. She walked up the stone steps slowly, one careful step at a time. Halfway up, she heard a sound that certainly didn’t belong to the open air of the afternoon. It was a violin accompanied by a piano. It was the recording that she had left the other day. When she re
ached the top and walked through the transplanted flowers and bushes, she saw Lang leaning against the glass wall nearest her, making notes on a pad. She had assumed he would be in Indianapolis with her father.
There was a long terrace that curved around the asymmetrical shape of the house. On either end of the terrace the glass that was the main substance of the house was replaced by a dark wood, rich and grainy in texture. There was no furniture in the house except for the beds, which were built into the walls in each bedroom. She opened the door softly.
She leaned against the closed door and listened to the Brahms for a moment. A partition separated them, but Lang was too absorbed in what he was writing to notice her silent entrance.
Finally she said, “Hello.”
He turned sharply and in the same instant thrust the pad and pencil into his pocket. “What are you doing here, Elizabeth?” They had never been alone before.
“I didn’t know you’d be here, honest I didn’t. I just came to see the house and maybe to listen to some music alone.” This last was not exactly true, but it sounded good on the spur of the moment.
Lang grinned. “Yes, it’s a beautiful concerto. I heard Heifetz do it last year in Carnegie Hall.”
“Do you go there often?” Elly dropped to the floor, facing Lang, and stared at him in just the same way as she had that first evening at the dinner table. It did not, however, unnerve him now.
“As often as I can. I’m pretty busy. My wife loves music very much.” As he said this last, it sounded to him quite irrelevant and he felt like a fool for feeling it necessary to mention Lorraine to this child. What was he afraid of?
“Does she?” Elly asked rhetorically, with the same clear-eyed gaze.
“As a matter of fact she doesn’t,” he was forced to admit. “I usually have to drag her to concerts.”
Elly laughed. “Nobody drags me. I can’t get enough out here. Sometimes we go into Indianapolis and even Chicago. Who’s your favorite composer—Brahms? I don’t know, I love Bach, especially the choral stuff—so rich. You know what I like about you?” She stopped, suddenly ashamed, the sound of the violin loud in the silence.
“Yes, go on, please, Elizabeth.” He was, against his will, fascinated by the tumbling of words from the pale-pink lips. “What do you like about me?”
“I’m being presumptuous, I guess,” she said. “There’s no reason for it, I suppose, but it seems to me that you’re so much a stranger here, so much like me in that way.”
“It doesn’t take much to tell that I’m a stranger here,” he said. He was playing naïve. He knew the difference between being a stranger and “so much a stranger here like me.”
“Never mind, I can’t make it clear.”
“Yes, I understand what you mean, Elly.” (How did she know?) “How do you like your house?”
“Oh, it’s wonderful. Do you know what I’ve been calling myself—I don’t know why I want to tell you this: the girl in the house in the hill.”
Lang laughed. “It sounds like a song. That’s wonderful.”
“Mr. John Marron Lang,” Elly said—there was somehow a great intimacy in the smiling use of his full name—“are you laughing at me?”
“No, Elly.” (Ah, she thought, so I’m not “Elizabeth.”) “To revive an old chestnut, I’m laughing with you, not at you. Let me turn the record over.”
She watched his big body bend over the phonograph and then let her gaze drift over the living room which seemed enormous because of the absence of furnishings. From where she lay on the floor she could see all the way down the hill, past the filling station quite a distance down the road and, vague in the distance, the first few houses that marked the beginning of Colchester.
“I’m playing hooky from my piano lesson. You can’t mention that I was here or that you saw me at all.”
He turned. “Why aren’t you taking your lesson? Don’t you like music?”
She scrambled to her feet. “You know better than that. I just can’t play. I get all tied up inside and the notes won’t come out. Besides, I’d rather listen.”
“So would I,” he said. “I’ll keep your secret.”
But he didn’t like the idea of being her fellow conspirator. She must have so many secrets, he thought, perhaps nothing but secrets. She may be skipping a lesson, but she knew I was here. But she’s so young, only nineteen or so. Was she experienced? he wondered. Well, even if she is, I’m not.
“We shouldn’t be here alone, you know.”
“That’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me all day.”
“Anyway, it’s true.”
“Isn’t there anything constructive we can do to demonstrate the purity of our hearts? What were you doing when I came?”
“Taking some notes. Nothing important.” He had been taking notes, but they were for a letter to Lorraine. The kind of letter he would never send. The kind that said, If I’m not man enough for you why don’t you get rid of me; get yourself a more serviceable male? Or is it that you want me that way? Dear Lorraine, do you want me the way you tell me I am?
“Well, is there anything at all left to do?” she asked, noticing how pensive he seemed, feeling him slip away from her, leaving her alone in the transparent house.
“We could hang the draperies. The rods and all are up already.”
“Let’s. Then if anyone came you wouldn’t be compromised.”
“Me compromised?” He laughed.
“Yes, you. My family already expects the worst of me.”
His eyes recorded her entire body, almost involuntarily, and he said, as if he didn’t expect her to hear him, admiringly: “Yes … yes, I can believe that.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just that you’re going to be a very beautiful woman.”
He was committed now; under the guise of aesthetics we were all made prisoners; carry the ideas for a house with you and after a while it built you; it said, I am right this way, build me, and free choice was gone; he built. He had told her she was beautiful. What awful responsibilities could be demanded of one, after that first and final tribute?
After all, the only weapon Lorraine had in making him suffer was that he had told her that he loved her. Without that she was as helpless as any other woman.
Elly very nearly moved toward him then but she was suddenly afraid. “To the drapes—oops, Mother makes me say ‘draperies’—to the draperies then.”
She hated herself for retreating to what must be his idea of what a young girl was like. She contradicted this, however, with a movement which she always employed when desirous of attracting a man, a trick she had always known, or at least since climbing on the knees of uncles who smelled of cigars and perspiration. She shook her long, dark blond hair so that it fell out like a halo close about her cheeks and looser upon her half-bare shoulders. She was gratified to see Lang turn swiftly.
“They’re back here in the kitchen.”
When he returned with the thick green material she was standing on the first rung of the ladder left there by the workmen, face pressed against the glass, staring down the field of the long, long afternoon. There was a terrible twinge within him, seeing her. It was as if he had been away tor years, leaving in the living room a child, and returning to find a woman, staring hopelessly at what might be the bright day, or a vague hint of his reflection in the glass that surrounded them. The sight of her long legs made him harden himself. They would hang the draperies and go away from here. Then he felt like a fool. She would probably scream if he touched her. What the hell was he thinking of!
They worked in silence, except for his instructions to her and a bit of joking, mostly from Elly and rather tense wit at that. Lang felt dizzy standing on the top rung of the ladder. He had lost all sense of time. The girl might have been there five minutes or five hours. She smelled of lilacs. The afternoon sky was clouding over and the sun disappeared and reappeared with some regularity.
“I hate it when the clouds get thick,” sh
e said. “It makes me kind of depressed.”
They were finished and he descended and tested the drawstrings. It was quite dark in the room until he opened them again. Elly was still on the stepladder and Lang was hoping she wouldn’t say anything. He was afraid that she would utter some word or combination of words that would touch some depth in him that had prompted the never-to-be-mailed letter to Lorraine. She spoke. She turned to him and, looking down, said, “I want to thank you. You’ve made us very happy. Myself, more than Mom or Dad. This house is going to change everything for me.”
Good God, did he believe in magic? He was relieved that these weren’t the words. “Yes, I know,” he said, “the girl in the house in the hill.”
“I wrote a letter to my cousin in New Haven yesterday. I said—I don’t know if she’ll understand. You can see I’m a bug on being understood—‘Dear Joan,’ I said, ‘the heart is made of glass. And now my house is made of glass.’”
Lang pulled the drawstring and the room was dark again. They were the words all right, or close enough to them to do the job. It was Lorraine who was moving him toward Elly, Lorraine placing his arms about her waist and lifting her from the ladder in one movement. She was light and kissing her was feathery at first; she was only an idea, an idea of a younger girl to whom he was as much a man as his height and strength seemed to indicate; but then her flesh and his became quite real.
Is he going to? Elly thought. And will I if he wants to? They were running, it seemed to her. No, they were walking, arms tightly entwined, and Elly was surprised to find there were no sheets on the bed and almost laughed, a little hysterically. She hadn’t been expected, there were no sheets and, as in her fantasy alone in her bed, he rested his face on her breast and his great hands were clenching and unclenching. And then his hands big enough for each one to encompass a breast opened her blouse and her wide, wide skirt and she was as wild and abandoned as when she fled screaming with laughter from the boys chasing her after school, and then over his shoulder she could see past the open door of the room an undraped portion of glass wall and the shadowy reflection of something strange and she remembered fleetingly the horrid thing in school in the play they read: the beast with two backs, only it wasn’t horrid at all and there was the clenching and unclenching of his hand on her shoulder.
