My Father’s House

In the early 1930s, a few years before I was born, my father bought a summer house. This was an astonishment to all our relatives and friends. For one thing, we were not the sort of people who “summered.” My father was a working stiff; even in the best of times we made do with city parks, the public pool, the fire escape, the air-cooled movie house. For another thing, these happened to be the worst of times, the years of the Great Depression, when it was a generally accepted fact that anyone’s father could join the jobless at any moment.

But my father didn’t believe this fact applied to him. It might apply to others—to his brothers-in-law, for instance—but he had never been out of work, not for a day, not even the day after he got off the boat as a 16-year-old runaway from the Pale, landing in Galveston, Texas, without a penny or a word of English. My father was his own man. Everyone who knew him knew that. If he decided he would have a summer house for his family, so it would be. Sixty miles north of New York City, where we lived, he found a bargain, a three-room bungalow on a full acre of land.

Upper Westchester County was a pretty area, almost rural then. Wild strawberries ran unchecked under the trees; an ancient-looking hickory, more than 50 feet tall, fronted the dirt road, and down the way was a real farmer, who grew tomatoes and corn for the market and kept a cow.

The bungalow had no heat or electricity, but it was a well-built little house, and it had some style. The roof was peaked, the front door was arched, and the tiny foyer opened onto a living room with a cobblestoned fireplace that wouldn’t have been out of place in the hall of a minor baron. Also, the house was nicely perched on a grassy rise surrounded by gently sloping land.

The catch was this: It was not to be our house. No, it was too good for us. We could camp out in it for a while, but my father’s plan was to rent it so as to subsidize our house. What house was that? That house was still a gleam in his eye. He saw years of work ahead. It made him glad.

Now, where should he begin? The first thing he did was add a porch to the side of the bungalow—not a simple deck, but a crude outdoor room, with a cement floor, knee-high concrete walls, and a roof held up by two-by-fours. Good! he thought, as God had once looked upon his works and found them good. Without delay, he started building a room behind the porch.

[From the September 2023 issue: The ones we sent away]

Summer after summer, he went on building, adding a room here, a room there, raising the roof to make attic rooms, digging out a basement to put a room there. Summer after summer, an old, paint-streaked house painter’s ladder leaned against our house, and every weekend my father climbed it—up and down he went, 15 or 20 feet off the ground, one hand to haul him up the ladder, the other to balance a shoulder-load of whatever materials he was working with. After a few years of this, I was born, and my father sometimes treated his infant daughter to a ride up the ladder, while my mother, hands clapped over her mouth, screamed silently below.

My father was an amateur in every sense. He had no training in construction, let alone in architecture or in any of the auxiliary trades, such as plumbing and electrical. But in addition to being stubborn and tenacious, he was a stranger to self-doubt. Consulting no books on these subjects, although sometimes taking a little expert advice, he figured things out as he went. He never had an overall plan for the house, and never, for a single moment, did he stop to consider the matter of aesthetics. It was the work he loved, the making: hammering things to other things, mixing and pouring and rolling out cement, finding his materials. As for those, they were mostly scavenged. My father used lumber discarded from other building sites—or what was carelessly left unguarded. He found pieces of metal along the roadside, old rolls of linoleum, asphalt shingles. Only if an item was absolutely necessary and nothing could be substituted, and then only if it was on sale, would he fork over cash for it. He didn’t have much money, but he liked to keep a firm hold on what he had.

Many summers, eight or nine of them, the years of my childhood, passed in this way. My father might have gone on making rooms forever, but one summer, for reasons known only to him, he decided he’d made enough. Not that he was stopping work; in a handmade house, stuff always needs doing.

Strangely, the house wasn’t an eyesore. The peaked roof and arched door of the original bungalow—now occupied by tenants—plus the two-by-fours holding up the porch roof, which from a distance could be mistaken for columns, lent it a kind of visual coherence.

Once inside, however, the anarchic heart of the house revealed itself. People who build houses usually have a feeling for the space being enclosed and a plan for its use. Not my father, who placed interior walls willy-nilly, leaving him with leftover spaces that became dark, narrow hallways. Steep staircases sprouted from the hallways to connect the basement to the attic. My father forgot about handrails for these staircases and forgot about closets altogether.

He also forgot about any space that could serve as a living room. The front door opened into the kitchen, which was furnished with a stove, a sink, and an oilcloth-covered table surrounded by unmatched wooden chairs. Unmatching pieces of linoleum covered the floor. At the beginning of each summer, a new strip of yellow, curling, chemical-smelling flypaper was affixed to the ceiling, turning blacker and blacker as the months went by. The icebox, for which a block of ice was delivered weekly, dripped slowly in the dark hallway behind the kitchen. The remaining space—not exactly rooms, but more than alcoves—held beds for us, and for the droves of my visiting aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Eventually, my father put in a bathroom, and we abandoned the spider- and wasp-infested outhouse down the hill. And although he had not yet gotten around to installing a furnace or boiler, he gave us hot water by running pipes from the well over the roof. On sunny days, our water was boiling hot; even after a spell of cloudy days, it was still warm. This was solar heating in the 1940s—that’s how clever my father was.

Not beautiful, not even comfortable, the house was exactly as my father intended. It was a shelter. And it was solid. The roof didn’t leak, the pipes brought water from the well, no electrical fires occurred, nothing ever collapsed. And it was bound to be forever sui generis, because who would want to use it as a template?

In September, we moved back to the city, where I went to school and waited until June came around, and we could go back to the place that was the very center of my life, the genesis of my life. It was there that my great-aunt Saidie taught me to read, where my father taught me to swim, where I found my first best friend, where I got my first period, where I fell in love and kissed Freddy, who later kissed another girl: love, desire, and heartbreak in a nutshell. It was also where, during my 12th or 13th summer, things went wrong between my father and me.

“I like girls,” my father had said when he was told that his first child, his only child as it would turn out, was a daughter. He did like girls; he liked all little children, but of course he liked me best. He didn’t dote on me; doting was not in his nature. He was a teaser, so I learned that teasing was a sign of love. He wasn’t the most patient of men, but he held his impatience in abeyance, and taught me not only how to swim, but how to plant corn and tomatoes and how to drive a car, although that tested him. I adored him. Of course I did.

Then, suddenly, from one day to the next, or so it seemed, he turned cold. He spoke to me only when necessary, and then in a clipped tone. I couldn’t get a smile out of him. I couldn’t get his attention. I felt I’d lost him. What had I done?

I asked my mother: “Is Daddy mad at me?”

Maybe she knew, maybe she didn’t, but she was no help: “Oh, you know Daddy; he has so much on his mind.”

Years went by and nothing changed. Why? It was always nagging at me. I couldn’t come up with an explanation. When I was in my 20s, I took the problem to a psychotherapist.

“Sex,” she said. “Classic.”

Sex. Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that? It was so simple, it explained everything. I’d been a flirty little girl, a show-off, in the throes of early adolescence, flooded with hormones, running around half-naked, crazy for boys. And my father had been stirred by his daughter; it took him unawares. He was an unworldly man, never venturing far from the family circle, and a puritanical man, convinced of his own righteousness. How horrified he would have been at this agitation of feeling. How disgusted. But at whom? Who would a man like him blame?

[From the April 2022 issue: My father, the fool]

In time, I got married. One day, I telephoned home to tell my mother that I’d gotten a good job at a magazine. I heard her call to my father: “The kid has news.”

“She’s pregnant?” I heard him say.

Ah! So that was the needed repair. A perfectly natural wish, and I was my father’s only chance. Okay, I’d have a child, a boy for a change. My father would forgive me. All that adolescent sexiness wouldn’t have been wasted in the air. He’d play with his grandson, tease him, toss him around, teach him how to swim, how to hammer things to other things, drive a car. My son would spend his summers in my father’s house. My father would know that his line would survive.

But there was to be no grandchild. Not then, not ever. I was to blame for that. I often wonder why I declined nature’s insistent call. Was it spite?

In his late 60s, my father retired. He wanted to give up the city apartment and spend the rest of his life in his own house. My mother felt otherwise. She knew how dreary winter would be in the country, how lonely she’d be. She wanted a city life; she wanted to meet her daughter for lunch, go to movies and matinees, shop at Macy’s, be companioned by her sisters and friends. I would have bet a lot of money on whose wishes would prevail. And once my parents had moved upstate, time took wing. Overnight, it seemed, they passed from sturdy middle age, to old age, to frailty. “I’m living in my last days, darling,” my mother once said when I came to visit.

And the house. It wasn’t the same house in winter. In summer, all the windows and doors were open; we lived outdoors in the sunlight; when it rained, we sat on the porch. And when we came indoors, we were grateful for the cool.

In winter, the house was shut up tight. It was cold inside—it looked cold; it felt cold; it didn’t matter if the thermometer read 72 degrees. The light from the north-facing windows was aluminum gray. In the evening, it looked even colder in the blueish light from the fluorescent ceiling fixture. There were still no handrails on the steep staircases for the now-infirm inhabitants. The dark, narrow hallways, where one day my mother would stumble and break her hip, were still narrow and dark. There was no comfort in the wooden kitchen chairs on which my parents sat all day and evening because there was nowhere else to sit. Desperately needed repairs mounted because my father could no longer do them, and my mother could no longer clean. Inevitably, the house deteriorated. First it became dingy, and soon decrepit and foul from lack of care.

Age takes people in different ways. My mother slipped into senility, while my father remained bitterly aware of his losses. The physical strength that had for so long been at his service, been his essence, had deserted him, while the force of his nature only grew stronger, and with it, his anger. I was bitter and angry too, as my father refused all paid help to keep the house clean, to see that my mother took her pills and had a bath, to wash the dirty sheets and clothes, to shop and cook for them. And what could I do? Rush up there in the middle of the night when disaster struck? Yes, that happened, and more than once.

There is no stopping time. Day by day, my parents’ lives darkened, crackled, and finally dissolved, like a photograph thrown into a fire.

When the time came, I buried their ashes under the hickory tree, and I sold the house to a building contractor who knew what had to be done with it.

I’m told that my father’s house has been gutted and reconstructed. I haven’t seen it in its new glory; I never will. But I should tell the new owner that he bought more than he bargained for. On a long-ago day, when the house was still in process and my father kept a wheelbarrow full of coal next to the furnace, I stole a lump. I knew just what I was going to do with it. With my toy shovel, I dug a hole in the lawn; I dug as deep as I could—halfway to China, I thought—put the lump in the hole, and packed all the dirt very tightly around it. I remember the exact spot on the lawn. If the owner should dig there, he’ll find the diamond I left behind.