The Old House

 The Old House

It had been twenty-four years since he’d last seen it, but the place looked exactly the same. He’d left the house more than two decades ago, having sold it just before he got married. The house belonged to his brother and him, and friends and relatives s had advised him to buy out his brother’s share of their inheritance, but he would always decline. “Too many memories,” he’d quip,” thanks, but I don’t want to live in a ghost house.” So they split the profits, his brother and he, and both began to embark on their new lives with their brides.

He was always serious when he explained how he could not live there any longer. His parents and sister had died two years earlier in a tragic automobile accident. He would spend almost all that time living there alone, surrounded by their memories. Sounds and images would flood his melancholy mind; sometimes imagined ghosts would crowd in on his depression, as mourning turned into a grief which would nearly overwhelm him at times.

Now, almost two and a half decades later, having become a widower twice, he struggled to balance the waning years of a successful teaching career without a mate, but still the father of two children, a boy of twenty and a girl of eight. There were times when he wanted to cry, but carefully held his emotions in check before his children.

One day, he learned through his friend Richie that his old house was for sale. Richie had lived in the neighborhood long after everyone else had left it, and he would keep his friends abreast of the news of the old surroundings. Richie himself had called the real estate agent and inquired about the price. His friend reflected on how much had changed since his parents had bought the old house in the mid-fifties. They had paid $15,500 for their home, a modest cape cod residing on a 50 by 100-foot plot in a still semi-rural part of Western Long Island. His brother and he had sold it fifteen years later for $34.500, more than double their parents’ purchase price. Now, almost twenty-five years after that, the house was selling for $350,000, ten times what they had received. When his brother and he had sold it, the real estate market was in decline, and it had taken them the better part of a year to sell. And it was told that the buyer had sold the house after only a year later to a man and his two sons. They had lived there all this time, and their father, having recently been forced to take up residence in a nursing home, the sons needed to unburden themselves of their father’s property.

He would pass the neighborhood occasionally and notice changes. The two large mimosa trees in the front of the house has been cut down, and in place of them, the two  symmetrical sides of the lawn had been replaced by a small semi-circular driveway which gave it, he thought, a somewhat hideous look in relation to the rest of the houses on the block most of which had kept their original appearances. Richie had told him that he found out that they had filled in the swimming pool which his father had built in the backyard, but he saw for himself that, by and large, from outward appearance, the house looked mostly the same.

Curiosity was getting the better of him about it, and so he decided to call the real estate agent to make an appointment. That morning, he pulled up to the house with his son to see it. It was early, so they would have time enough to view it before his daughter was let out from school. Parking across the street, he noticed the large for sale sign in front of the house and thought about how such signs would never have been permitted in neighborhoods of this ilk even during the times his brother and he had left it. Only in the past few years were middle-class neighborhoods like this one becoming slowly diverse in character.

They walked up to the front door and would have rung the bell, when they noticed the door was opened. A sign on the door bid them entrance They went in. In front of them, an agent was escorting a young woman through the house. No one had bothered to greet them, and he thought it odd. But no more odd than the view that lay before his disbelieving eyes. The living room, other than the furniture and accessories, appeared exactly as it had been when he had lived there. His father, having been a woodworker, had built cabinets and matching tables in the front of the room all of a cherrywood-like Formica, complete with cabinets for stereo and vinyl records and a large centerpiece for the television. The TV cabinet was closed, and the matching tables were gone, but everything else appeared exactly as it had been.

Meanwhile, the agent and his customer had disappeared through the rooms at the back of the house. He was so speechless, he said little of what he was thinking to his son until they walked into the kitchen. It was like walking through a time machine that took him back to the late sixties. Nothing about the kitchen had changed! The light birchwood Formica was still intact on all the cabinets, and, amazingly, they appeared in decent shape. A small table stood between the cooking and sink area and the dining portion. On it, a beige telephone rested. He was certain that it was, in fact, the same phone that had been used by his mother, complete with the rotary dial and the cradle for resting it on your shoulder as you talked. Could this have been the same rented phone his mother had used? In those days, you left the phones in the house and just cancelled your contract.

His son watched him as he carefully traced the fingers of his right hand over the phone, the cabinets and the built- in wall-cabinet with its two ovens, top-to-bottom, that his father had built then, a little ahead of its time. Now, as he regarded them again, they appeared so antiquated. As he looked at the stove and the ovens the wonderful smell of his mother’s spaghetti sauce filled the nostrils of his memory once more.

The agent and the woman appeared from the second floor now, having passed in front of them during all this time. At this point, they proceeded to the basement, where he and his son followed. The basement remained semifinished, the bar still intact as it had been. He was immediately aware that it had been freshly painted where wood paneling had once adorned the walls. At this point they proceeded to the unfinished part of the basement. His son and he followed behind. The woman was asking the real estate agent questions. “Was this stairway to the outside here when the house was built, or was it added?” This was clearly an addition to the house and was obviously added so that there could be access to the basement directly from the pool. He was explaining this to his son, and hoped that the real estate agent would hear him, since the woman was not being  offered an answer. Through the Bilco doors he could clearly see that the space where the pool had been was all grass now. They soon returned to the main floor. The woman seemed puzzled as she asked the agent further questions. 

It is a standard practice when showing houses, that real estate agents generally show the basements of houses last. In that way, if the house presents itself well, even if there is anything left to be desired in the lowest level, the prospective buyer will have had a favorable first impression of the major parts of the house. This agent likewise followed this preferred method. The woman had a question about the stairways.

“Isn’t it usual for the stairway to the second floor to be placed in the space between the living room and the kitchen, and not as soon as you enter the side door?” She had already been upstairs after leaving the kitchen, and he thought it curious that she did not ask this then.

He began explaining to his son that his father had reversed the stairs so that they could provide a separate entrance upstairs for renters. His memory flew quickly back to a time when he was about twelve years old. His parents had added a dormer and bathroom upstairs, and his brother and he had shared the upstairs sleeping quarters with two boarders for over a year when his parents had fallen on hard economic times. He remembered that one of them was a neighborhood woman whose daughter was in his brother’s class. Estranged from her husband, his mother would often invite her down for coffee. She eventually reconciled with him and moved out. The other was a creepy woman with a large mole in the middle of her forehead whom is brother and he, appropriately enough, called “the mole lady.” He remembered her name was Muriel. 

He explained to his son that his father had somehow engineered the shifting of the stairways, which shared a common space, to accommodate the boarders in privacy. People in the neighborhood talked for many years about how he had been able to accomplish this.

The image of his father, an Italian immigrant with barely a fourth-grade education, accomplishing this amazing feat of engineering, almost filled his eyes with tears, as he stood in the side stairway once more.

During all this he noticed that the real estate agent did not know the answer to her questions, and he was offering responses like “I’m not sure.”  His explanations to his son were met without comments from either the woman or the agent. It was as if they were two ghosts, his son and he, walking and commenting behind them. Maybe they were just not listening.

Before the woman left, he showed his son the rest of the house where there were some obvious changes. The bathroom on the main floor had been somewhat renovated; fresh paint adorned the walls in the bedrooms where wallpaper had been. Once the woman had left, he began to talk to the real estate agent. “You know, I used to live in this house. I wanted to see it one more time, but I didn’t want to waste your time.”

By now he had realized that this was an open house. “Why didn’t you tell me that over the phone,” the agent rejoined, “I would have gladly shown it to you anyway.” Before they left, he favored the real estate with all the details about the house the agent had not known.

They crossed the street and quickly entered the car. He began to cry uncontrollably as the memories of all that had passed, good and bad, while living in that house, flooded his mind. His son was silent in the back. A few days later, he took both his children back to the old neighborhood. They stopped into Eddie’s Pizza after he showed them different scenes of the environs, some of which had changed and some of which had not.

The pizza in Eddie’s was not your classical Italian pizza. It was cooked in a charcoal oven on a crust as thin as a matzoh. Unlike a matzoh, though, it was soft to the teeth. But the taste was just as he remembered, all those years ago. And that was all that mattered.

John DeSantis

November/2020