by Kerr, Jean;
I don’t know that the twins had any very concrete picture of their dream house. One thing they didn’t want was a playroom, since they really prefer to cut up the new magazines in the middle of the kitchen floor while I’m trying to serve dinner. I have tried to explain to them about playrooms, but I can see that the mere notion of a room in which there was nothing to break fills them with panic and frustration.
Gilbert may have had strong preferences, but at seventeen months he was a boy of few words. In fact, they were so few I can list them. He could say, with ringing clarity: cooky, ice keem, no, kolly-pop, no, Cokee-Cola, NO, and take-a-walk. Of course this taciturnity has certain real advantages. It means, for one thing, that he can’t sing a single verse of “Davy Crockett.” And we’re hoping that by the time he’s five—which I think of as the age of treason—the whole thing will have blown over.
Christopher, now that he is eight and quite sophisticated, has at one time or another expressed a desire for a house that would have no sinks or bathtubs. But, as I keep telling him, such a sanctuary would be hard to come by these days.
In the beginning we made the usual mistake of looking at houses we could afford. I am working on a proposition, hereafter to be known as Kerr’s law, which states in essence: all the houses you can afford to buy are depressing. For months and months we followed happy, burbling real estate agents through a succession of ruins which, as the agents modestly conceded, “needed a little paint and paper to make them happy.” These houses invariably had two small dark living rooms and one large turn-of-the-century kitchen—and I don’t mean the nineteenth century. At my various feeble protests that I would like to get away from a pump in the kitchen, the agent was usually very stern. “If you want six bedrooms in your price range,” he’d say, “you must expect an older house.” Well, I did expect an older house, but not any older, say, than the battle at Harper’s Ferry. I remember one house in Larchmont. No one knew when it had been built, but it had two cells in the basement and a tunnel going down to the Sound for the protection of runaway slaves. Looking back, it seems to me that we should have snapped up that place. With four boys, you never know when you’re going to need an escape hatch.
By this time we had been looking for nearly a year, and I had just about decided to wait until the boys were married and buy a smaller place. Then one afternoon we had an appointment to go back and see a house in which we had been mildly interested. There was some little mix-up on time and we found ourselves with half an hour to kill. At this point the real estate agent, Mrs. McDermott, suggested, “Look, there’s a crazy house down on the water. It’s nothing you’d be interested in, but would you like to see it just for the laughs?” We said, “Oh, sure—if it’s that funny.”
Well, we got our laugh, starting the minute we pulled up at the front door. It was a huge brick castle in which clock towers and cupolas and tilted chimneys all blended in a style that Walter was later to describe as neogingerbread.
The front door itself was a tremendous carved-oak affair that looked like the door of St. Gabriel’s Church—not unreasonably, since it turned out that it was the door of St. Gabriel’s Church. Hanging on the door was a large, hideous lion’s head. This seemed to be a knocker, but when Walter went to knock it, it fell off into his arms. (It’s since been put back.) Eventually someone on the inside heard our halloos, and the door swung slowly open on its great hinges with a whistle and a creak like that gate on Inner Sanctum. We stepped inside. I jumped back suddenly to avoid colliding with two cannon and fell into a gun rack. As we were picking up the guns, we noticed the courtyard.
Though it hadn’t been apparent from the outside, the house was actually built on four sides around a large open court. Tudor-ranch, you might call it. Many of the walls bordering on the court were of glass, so that the great outdoors seemed constantly to be coming indoors. Normally, I wouldn’t have minded a bit, except that this particular courtyard strongly resembled an M-G-M set for The Prodigal. There were Persian idols and towering stone cats and Chinese bells and gargoyles, and I expected Edmund Purdom to step out of the fish pool any minute. The fish pool, by the way, drained into a smaller fish pool through a diving helmet which then lighted up. It took us some time to tear ourselves away from this bit of Old Baghdad, particularly as Walter had got his foot caught in the diving helmet.
Working our way back through a room that had been completely assembled from an old Hudson River steamboat, we saw the living room—or, rather, we saw the fireplace, which was all you could see in the living room. It was a monster rising two stories high. At the base there were two large stone arches over which loomed layers and layers of brick, interrupted by occasional layers of field-stone, and in the center of which reposed a series of Dutch tiles depicting, I am told, Death and the Knight. Hovering over this was more brick in a variety of colors, leading the eye to a vast blue panel, quite near the ceiling, onto which had been glued thirteen ceramic angels. (They may be muses; we’ve never climbed high enough to see.) Somehow or other, the final effect was so like the grotto at Lourdes that you felt there ought to be crutches hanging on it.
At one moment Walter was leaning against a section of oak paneling in order to get a better view of the ceiling, the ceiling being composed entirely of carved pink and gold plaques representing the Vanderbilt coat of arms (it had come from the old Vanderbilt place in New York City). I called to him to notice the selection of gilt semi-Byzantine pillars, some of which supported the balcony while others were just standing there, only to discover that he had quietly vanished. The section of paneling had swung back into an old secret closet, and so had he.
The next thing we knew we were exploring a winding staircase, at the foot of which gleamed a glass box containing the works of a clock. “Oh, I forgot to tell you about that clock,” remarked Mrs. McDermott. “It plays the duet from Carmen at noon.” … “Of course,” I chirped, “and how about Beethoven’s Fifth at six?” As it turned out, though, she was merely stating the facts. The clock was connected electrically to a thirty-two-bell carillon in the courtyard which—what with one thing and another—I hadn’t even noticed.
After that, we passed through a number of conventional rooms. That is to say, except for the Venetian paneling and the iron gates and the portholes and the stained-glass windows, they might have looked just like any other rooms.
Not the dining room, though. Even in this house it was something special. It was entirely lined with mirrors, not only the walls and the ceiling but the top of the diningroom table as well. I was sure that if you glanced down while you were eating, you could see your inlays reflected all over the room. Walter was fascinated. He kept trying to calculate the number of possible reflections. Obviously he was imagining an infinity of images like the boy on the Cliquot Club bottle who is carrying a bottle with a boy on the bottle who is carrying a bottle, etc., etc. He’d say, “Now, let’s imagine you’re here at breakfast in your old pajamas with your hair in curlers—how many times?” It was staggering, all right. And we were staggering as we got back out on the sidewalk.
Mrs. McDermott turned to us and asked playfully, “Well, what did you think of all that?” Walter and I replied in the perfect unison of a Greek chorus, “It’s the nuttiest house we ever saw, we’ll buy it.” Whereupon she, faithless to every real estate code, screamed, “You’re not serious, you’re out of your minds!” Walter said, “We’re out of our minds, but we’re serious.”
As we drove home in a trance, Walter finally broke the silence by asking fearfully, “What do you suppose we like about it?” But by this time I knew. Somewhere among the bells and the gargoyles I had become aware of the fact that it was just the house for us. For one thing, the master bedroom was completely isolated in a wing by itself. Then there was a room off the garage that would make a wonderful playroom, and another one off the living room that would make a perfect den. Nearly every room in the house had a glorious, sweeping view of the Sound, and the dining room—miracle of miracles—had a heavy
oak floor which obviously would never require a rug.
Now one of the problems of my life is trying to keep the dining-room rug clean. A friend of mine solved a similar problem in the living room by buying a rug the color of Coca-Cola. But it’s not really possible to find a rug the color of mashed potatoes, Russian dressing and butter-pecan ice cream. (Though this is a project I do wish some enterprising rug company would mull over.)
When we’re at home we always eat dinner with the boys. Heaven knows why. It will eventually give us ulcers, and even in my most optimistic moments I can’t honestly believe that their childhood is being enriched by the warm and tender memory of those family meals accompanied by a steady stream of directives: “No, you can’t make a sandwich with your potato chips”; “Yes, you have to eat the tassels on the broccoli”; “Don’t put your finger in the plate—all right, don’t put your thumb in the plate”; “No, we don’t have carrots all the time,” and so on and on.
In dealing with our children, we don’t lean on any of the more advanced methods of child psychology. I tend to remember the immortal words of that philosopher and father, Moss Hart, who once announced that in dealing with his children he kept one thing in mind: “We’re bigger than they are, and it’s our house.”
I do read in the textbooks that even an occasional spanking tends to make a child feel insecure. This may be so. On the other hand, if a child really needs a whacking and doesn’t get it, I feel very insecure. Normally, our boys accept discipline with resignation, even detachment. There was a night, though, when the twins had been sent to their room for some infraction (they had removed the caps from a whole case of beer, as I recall) and we could hear revolt brewing. Johnny muttered, “Well, I’m not going to give her any more kisses. Col, you tell her you won’t give her any more kisses either.” And then I heard Col say, in his croaky little voice, “I couldn’t do that. It would break her heart.”
We didn’t consult the twins about the house, but we did take Chris over on one of our subsequent tours of inspection. He wandered over the whole place in utter silence, and even on the way home couldn’t be prodded into venturing an opinion. Some hours later a single sentence escaped him:
“Compared to that house, Camelot was modren.”
But then, Chris’s avowed goal in life is to become a comedian. I don’t know what’s happened to the youth of America. I can remember when boys wanted to be policemen or firemen or something respectable. Lately, Chris rattles off everything in a quick, flat patter, obviously trying to approximate the cadences of his idol, Bob Hope. I say to him, “Christopher, don’t you dare lie on that new bedspread,” and he snaps back with, “I will always tell the truth on this bedspread.” I say, “Christopher, you’re filthy!” and he remarks, “I resent that. I don’t deny it, but I resent it.”
Any lingering doubts we may have had about buying the house quickly disappeared when we discovered that nobody really wanted to sell it. It belonged to Charles B. King, a charming old gentleman who had been an inventor and an early associate of Henry Ford (he got out just before the nick of time, as I understand it) and who had taken over the property in the early twenties, when it was still the stable and coach house of an estate that has since become the Larchmont Shore Club. King was a collector and world traveler, and he clearly never passed a junk shop or a cathedral without picking up something for his fairytale house. He built it up piece by piece, whim by whim. His affairs were now being handled by a committee, and, through negotiations that lasted as long as the San Francisco Conference, we discovered that on Mondays and Wednesdays the committee was willing to sell the house but couldn’t agree on a price. The rest of the time it was agreed on a price but wouldn’t sell.
It seemed as though we were permanently stalemated when a friend of ours called on the phone one morning to say, “You know that house you were trying to buy? Well, it burned down last night.”
We were stricken (particularly as we had just sold our own house), and we rushed right over. At first glance it looked as though Nuremberg had been bombed all over again, but we finally realized that only one side of the quadrangle, plus portions of two other sides, had really been destroyed, and that the living quarters proper had barely been touched. Faced with the problem of rebuilding, the committee turned around and agreed to sell us the house, charred timbers and all.
Having made up our minds that we were going to go ahead no matter what anybody said, we began to ask the opinions of our friends and relations. My father, who is a contractor, marched glumly around the house muttering darkly about stresses and strains, so I cheerfully pointed to the water and said, “But, Dad—look at the view you get.” He contented himself with observing that during hurricanes we’d get the view right in the basement.
Most of our friends agreed that, like New York, it was a great place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. “Maybe you could charge a shilling and show people through,” one said. Someone else had a really bleak thought. He walked up and down the echoing living room and announced, “Obviously the only people you’ll ever be able to entertain here are actors. Nobody else could be heard.”
I have a friend who is a decorator, and I was sure he’d be fascinated by the place. I showed him through, and then waited for him to exclaim and extoll. “Well?” I asked brightly. “Well?” He paused with the air of a man being torn between the demands of friendship and of honesty. “I will say this,” he at last said, “you have a lot of interesting horizontals.”
After that I stopped asking for opinions, but I didn’t stop getting them. We began to bring contractors in to get bids on the reconstruction. Without exception, they all burst into peals of hilarity the minute they set foot inside the door. I’d say, “Now, we want to eliminate this door and put in linoleum,” and they’d shout, “Holy fright, take a gander at that ceiling.” I’d say, “Now, about the linoleum,” and they’d say, “My brother-in-law is a junk dealer. Would he get a bang out of this!” Some days we never got back to the linoleum at all.
Eventually, we worked out a system. To this day, when somebody comes to the door—a new milkman or a boy from the delivery service—we take the milk or sign for the parcel and then stop everything while we show him right through the house. It’s much simpler than having him hover around the kitchen asking questions for twenty minutes.
We knew we were moving on May first, but we hadn’t been able to do any packing beforehand because we were working so furiously to finish the first act of our projected musical comedy, Goldilocks. (Don’t miss it when it opens sometime in 1965.) Working on the musical means that we first of all locate the four children and threaten them with violence and sudden death if they come near us. Then we take coffee and cigarettes and hide in the den. Walter sits at the typewriter in gloom and in silence. I stretch out on a couch and leaf an old copy of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue—in gloom and in silence. Eventually one of us thinks of a line and the other groans and out of this jolly companionship comes reams of material, most of which is rewritten thirty-eight times.
I had planned to take the week off just before the move so that I could pack, and perhaps discover what was in those boxes in the attic marked “Sloms, drinds and blue jeans.” On the first of the week, however, I came down with a sudden cold which quickly developed into bronchitis. I piteously begged the doctor for pleurocillin or peneomyacin or one of those things that cost eight dollars for six tablets and cure you overnight. The doctor just shrugged his shoulders and murmured sympathetically, “Now if you only had pneumonia—” Unfortunately, I didn’t have pneumonia, so I was sick all week and we had to have the moving men do all the packing. And a conscientious crew they turned out to be. When we arrived at the new house, I discovered that at five dollars a carton they had carefully packed, in excelsior, a fine assortment of broken crayons, three wheels from an old tractor, the back covers of fourteen coloring books, odd slats from an old Venetian blind, and a number of empty tins left over from Birdseye frozen chicken pies.
> My mother came to help us move. This was a great boon, except that there is something wrong with her metabolism. She is not able to work for more than nineteen hours without stopping. During this period she is sustained by nothing more than several gallons of hot tea, which she consumes while on the top rungs of ladders or deep inside crates. By midnight, when I was ready to sob with fatigue, it was nothing for Mother to announce cheerfully, “Well, what do you say we clean out the garage?” She was a little disconcerted, though, when she discovered she wasn’t able to pick up a television set, and I heard her moaning softly, “Jean, I’m afraid I’m beginning to slow down.” I don’t know whether it’s true, but we can hope.
On the whole, moving day was like a scene from an old Mack Sennett comedy, with the four men moving our stuff in and the three men moving their stuff out plus the contractors and the plumber who was installing the washer and the little boy from next door who came to show us where the birds’ nests were and the men from Macy’s who brought the wrong beds. Not to mention the engineers who came to fix the furnace and spent an hour and a half looking for it. I had one man bring four loads up to the attic before I discovered that he was there to install the television set.
Walter had a show to review that night, so at six o’clock we just dropped everything and went into New York, leaving Mabel—our combination maid, housekeeper, nurse, companion, and friend—to find the children and find the food and find the beds. She also had to find the fuse box, since only one light was working and that was out in the burned-out section of the garage. She, talented girl, found it too. By the time we returned home at one o’clock in a driving sleet every light in the house was blazing away cheerfully. We were in our new home.
