The Soul of a House

This is a republication of an essay from June, 2023.

EASTER EGG!—That porch you see is the one whose roof I used as a stage when I dressed up as the Church Lady at age 12 and preached at passersby.

169 Port Watson Street, Cortland, New York, circa 2020

Note to readers—When I write on such things as this I am hoping that you will feel some of the emotions I feel. Music can help that, as it’s pure emotion that conveys what language cannot. Please listen.

Houses have souls, they have dispositions to the world. That disposition is there in the frame, whatever good or bad may have happened inside that house over its life. Some are welcoming, some are forbidding and hostile. Some are inert.

The house you see above has a warm soul; more on it later.

Houses have occupied my imagination all my life. They’re in my dreams and in my waking fantasies. A peripatetic existence, being dragged across the country and back, and always bugging out when the rent couldn’t be paid, leaves a hole in a child’s heart. This is especially so when the child does not have a family that can make any place they occupy a home just by practicing home and love on that spot.

When I was very young, before kindergarten, I hadn’t yet transferred my longing for home to actual houses, and away from my family. When I was four years old, things had not yet darkened.

My mother, Bonnie, married my stepfather, Chuck, in 1978. Never having met my own father, Chuck was to be my “dad.” In the beginning, it looked like that might take. It did not.

The first place the newlyweds moved into was a log cabin on the side of a “mountain” in South Otselic, New York. Up a winding country road with a steep drop-off at the end of the road.

Hidden in a glade, and next to a Christmas tree farm, the cabin was near a stream that had a tiny, arched, wooden footbridge. Spring and summer were glorious there, it was an enchanted place.

Winter was fierce, but cozy. This is perhaps when my sense of aesthetics, home, and the love of the cold and quiet winter developed. The cabin was small, but it protected us. There was no electricity or hot running water. We had oil lamps by night and a battery powered transistor radio to hear from the world.

In the summer we used the outhouse. In the winter there was a chemical manual-flush toilet in the back room.

I remember bathing in a portable tub in front of the flames of the Franklin potbelly stove that heated the house and made whatever was in the stew pot. I also remember falling asleep in front of those flames, loving the drowsy, silent fall into unconsciousness while everything was safe.

That winter, we got into the Jeep Wagoneer to go down the mountain into town. The 1967 VW (cream-colored, black seats) was surprisingly good in snow, as older drivers will remember, but it was no match for the mountain. It stayed parked in winter while the Jeep took over.

Chuck was driving carefully, but ice had the last word. The front of the Jeep went over the edge of the precipice, and we scrambled out, terrified, and slid down the side of the mountain on our backsides to get to town. The Jeep was eventually towed off the ledge, but we soon moved into the house in town.

It sat at the crotch of the Y-road in South Otselic. The right fork led up a residential street, while the left went into the country where Steve and Lucy’s sugar farm was. My stepfather used to hold me on his shoulders to look into the enormous metal cauldron with a log fire underneath while Steve ladled the sap—up and out, pour it down, up and out.

The 3-story turn-of-the-century house was like all the others in the Northeast; broken into flats. We had the upstairs below the attic. There was a balcony porch where we watched the bats at twilight swoop in and out of the belfry of the church across the way.

South Otselic was a one-light town. It still is. There is one traffic light at the single intersection. If you go straight, you end up at the house at the Y. If you take a left, you go up the mountain to the cabin.

Main Street was only two blocks long. Sam’s store was the centerpiece. A real country general store and grocery. My mother worked there for Sam and his wife, also a Lucy. As things used to be, they lived in the apartment above the store.

Mother would grind beef and fat, mix the right proportions for hamburger meat, and put it in the glass case. When a customer wanted hamburger, she scooped the amount to order onto the white, enamel Hobart mechanical scale, wrapped it in white paper, and wrote the weight and price on each bundle.

Sometimes I was allowed to have a candy from one of the jars. I always chose butterscotch.

One night I heard my parents on the porch from my bed. There was some other noise I couldn’t identify. I walked onto the balcony wondering where the orange light was coming from. My mother was crying. “Come here, Josh.”

”Sam’s store is burning, but Sam and Lucy got out.”

My stepfather hoisted me up onto his shoulders and I watched the world burning down. I had never seen a house fire before. The white, three-story plain-Victorian was a torch. It wasn’t just “on fire,” it was consumed and the fire was feeding itself. You could hear the whoosh of the draft as the flames shot 20 feet into the air above the roof. Eventually the firemen just stopped and watched it burn. There was nothing to do.

We watched for I don’t know how long while my parents cried. Sam’s store had a soul, and a good one. Now it was gone.

It is still gone. Nothing has been rebuilt on that parcel on Main Street.

***

In 1984 my mother, my brother, my sister, and I, were living in a stucco apartment in the back end of a street that terminated against the concrete wall of a shopping center you didn’t go to after dark. We’d come to the state four years earlier, sneaking out of the house we rented in Tully, New York, at midnight. The rent was due, and my stepfather Chuck couldn’t find a job. The late 70s and early 80s were a terrible time for blue collar skilled workers in upstate New York. Chuck was a talented glassblower who specialized in making electrodes and similar components, but the industry was in a slump, and automation was making men like him obsolete.

Grandmother’s silver Buick was idling quietly outside the house. Within two hours we boarded the train in Syracuse and went across the country to the land of promise.

Four years later my mother was alone with three children after escaping the man who tried to kill her after he’d done what he could to ruin his children.

That stucco apartment was a morbid concrete box. I hated it. My mother hated it. Sylvia next door hated it. But what else could a single mother family, or a retired librarian, afford?

We boarded a Douglas DC-8 on Capitol Airways at LAX. It was the first time I’d been inside an airplane, let alone flying. We had the rearmost seats next to the bathroom. It was probably one of the last cross-country flights for Capitol as it went bankrupt in November of that year.

The first house we landed in was on Union Street in Cortland, New York. Like most houses in the Northeast then (and now), it was a late 19th century farmhouse/plain Victorian divided into flats. We had the upper flat. Part of our apartment was the upstairs hallway at the top of a staircase with a wooden balustrade. I knew the house was haunted; I could feel it. It was a cold and hostile uncanny feeling. My imagination decided that a Victorian lady stood at the top of that staircase and looked out onto the street. Maybe she was waiting for her children to return.

I don’t think I believe in ghosts, or in the supernatural, but I’m also not sure that I don’t believe in ghosts. Whether they exist in the “real world” or only in the collective human mind doesn’t matter. We can be haunted, and so can houses.

We left that flat as soon as we could for a real house. All our own. An entire house. Not a flat. Not a concrete pre-coffin in Orange County. A real, honest to goodness house.

It’s the one you see at the top of this article. In my day, it was painted brown with yellow accents. And it was a fundamentally good house. The worst of my mother came out in that house; this was her “Margaret White” phase. The night raids. The tirades in which she vaulted between hysterical laughter and uncontrollable sobbing happened in that dining room.

I tried to kill myself in that house.

But it was not the house’s fault. The house was good, and it was good to us.

Let me tell you about it.

It was built in 1906. When it was new, it would have been home to a solidly middle class family. Not rich, but prosperous and comfortable. Downstairs, and up the walls along the main staircase, was three-foot-high wainscoting. The entries and arches between each room had turned wood pillars. There was crown molding in the living room and dining room, painted over with white, as is the custom for houses whose glory days were over.

Shabby, frayed around the edges, but not a dump. The front door opened into a proper foyer with a tiled floor. At the left and back of the foyer was what I thought of as the “grand staircase”. Done in the same wood as the wainscoting, and with a beautiful wood banister with newel posts at the bottom, and at the landing.

It landed halfway up on a platform with a picture window and a built-in bench seat. The top band of the glass was stained in primary colors. Then, it turned right. The second stair from the top was the one that creaked distinctively. This was how you knew she was coming.

The yellow wallpaper would have driven Charlotte Perkins-Gilman to distraction, but I loved following the darker brass colored motif as it wound across the mustard yellow background. Like an autostereogram, your eyes could begin to see the pattern vibrate and flex.

Upstairs were five bedrooms. In the Victorian style, the hallways were very narrow and the ceilings very high. Every three feet, lead pipes with caps on the end stuck out of the walls where the gas lamps used to burn.

I chose the smallest bedroom at the very back of the house, around the sharp corner in the hallway. It had been the servant’s quarters. Though it wasn’t true, I felt protected and safe there. The room had a real wardrobe, as the room had no closet. I felt sure that if I approached it in just the right way, Narnia would be there for me behind my winter snow pants and scarf.

Directly next to my room was the “secret staircase.” I had gone through every inch of the house, pressing on wainscoting panels and trying to move the curlicue worked wood ornamentation to make the secret room appear that I just knew had to exist. But it didn’t.

The secret staircase did, though. It was a spiral wooden staircase built into the back wall, with a window to light it halfway down. The stairs were behind a closed door up and down; it communicated with the kitchen below and emptied out into a dark corner behind the refrigerator. What could have been better?

We children went through the tornado of 1986 in that house. My mother lost her sanity most completely in that house. I hit my mother for the first and only time in that house; it was an act of self-defense that stopped her from touching me again. My sister spent years of bad childhood sickness in that house.

My obsession with emptying my bladder completely before I could sleep began in that house. You were not allowed to get out of bed without permission, and you didn’t dare ask for it. Mother was sleeping, after all, and you couldn’t wake her to get it. I would tip toe so, so gently to the bathroom 10 steps from my room; I’ve always had to urinate frequently, and especially at night before bed.

Sometimes I made it, other times I was punished. When I developed full-blown, diagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder six or seven years later, my ritualistic behaviors took the form of getting up every five minutes for up to five hours to squeeze out every single drop of urine. Did I miss some? Did I try hard enough? Get up again in two minutes.

But the house is good. My sister knows it, too. We ache for that house. Always have. We talk about what we would do if we bought it, how we’d bring it back to its proper state. How happy we would be.

My mother dreams of houses too. Her own childhood was desperately unhappy and as nomadic as mine turned out to be. My mother’s quilts, wall hangings, and sketches are full of houses. If we’d been childhood contemporaries, I think we could have been friends.

My sister’s paintings of houses hang on my walls. She longs for the same things.

The house has been in my dreams these 35 years. Sometimes I stop by and tour it, horrified to see that the owners have ripped out the walls for an “open floor plan” and painted everything beige. Other dream owners have filled it with a menagerie of 19th century painted circus animals and carnival glass.

I drive by the house most times I’m on the road in upstate New York to visit friends or family. For 30 years of making that drive, I’ve not had the courage to knock on the door and ask if I could just look inside. I’m not sure I want to know.

As you see, it is a sad and luster-less beige today. But it’s there. It exists. A family lives in it. That’s good.

And the house is good.

Last night, I dreamt I went to it again. To Manderley.