Part 11 (1/2)

”Don't you call me baby. Ever ever again.”

”Don't you be chewing out my guts because your friends let you down. I'm on your side, remember? I'll be with you in two days. I should have known better than to let you loose in the world on your own.”

Her palms felt moist the way they used to all the time before she had the baby. She wondered if they'd feel like that all the time now. She kept walking up and down the sidewalk in front of the bank, then she realized she was looking conspicuous. She walked in and walked up to Martin Cunningham's desk.

”Well, Kathleen, aren't you a sight for sore eyes? How long are you home for?”

”Two weeks,” she said, and she was blus.h.i.+ng. ”Only, you see, Mr. Cunningham, Kevin's coming next week and I'm afraid I've overspent what he gave me to tide me over. I'm just off the phone with him, he said I could get a cash advance on the Visa.”

”You can, of course,” he said. ”l.u.s.t hand it over, said the dodo.”

She had no idea what he meant by that dodo bit. She was worried that the lie came to her so easily.

He took the card and came back with a slip for her to sign. Then he went away again and came back with five hundred pounds.

”Anything else we could be doing for you?”

”No, you're grand,” she said. ”Thanks.”

She ran out the door before she could start worrying that he was looking at her funny.

As she drove home, she wondered how they'd make the money up. They just made it month to month, and they were careful. Maybe it meant they couldn't come over again at Christmas. Or maybe she'd get another job. Kevin was always saying she could make more money somewhere else. With her looks and her way with people. She was getting to be known in town; people knew her from church, and with the singing in Harrigan's.

She'd taken Jimmy's car and she left it in front of the B & B. Slowly, she walked the half mile to her parents' house. The nausea that began when she thought of the Visa bill grew when she smelt the heavy smell of the tomato sauce. She couldn't bear the thought of eating it. She knew what would happen. She'd walk into the kitchen and they'd give her a piece of bread dipped in the sauce. She'd cut it up into small pieces with a knife and fork and eat it slowly, piece by piece. When they asked her how it was, she'd tell them it was fantastic.

Rosecliff.

We should begin with the house, or the story of the house. Or the facts that make up part of the story of the house.

The name of the house is Rosecliff. Its location is Newport, Rhode Island.

What am I doing in Newport, Rhode Island? What am I doing looking at the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island? I who pride myself on having no interest in the habits of the wealthy, or in architecture that's overembel-lished, self-proclaiming in its tone. The answer: I am meeting a friend who is at a conference there. An old friend, and like me, brought up in the working cla.s.s. We will stay in a bed and breakfast, walk and talk, catch up.

I don't like the bed and breakfast because although my room has a four-poster bed, it doesn't have a bathtub. A working fireplace (although instead of logs, there's an artificial log wrapped in paper, ignitable at the touch of a match), but no bathtub. A stall shower. And worse: communal breakfasts, at a long mahogany table- Chippendale, I think, because of the ball and claw feet. Everyone, except for my friend and me, is part of a couple. On a pilgrimage to the unimaginable wealth of the past. They talk, without exception, about money. ”CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT THAT'D COST YOU TODAY?” They are fecund in their idioms having to do with money. ”That'd set you back quite a lot.” ”They must have been rolling in it.” ”That was worth a pretty penny.”

Furthermore, it's raining and we have to be out of the room at ten so that the place can be made up. It is in a spirit of anarchic churlishness that I approach the great houses, walk through the avenues of trees where water drips extravagantly from the costly leaves of horse chestnuts, copper beeches, elms.

Of the great houses, Rosecliff appeals to me most, because it's white: an a.s.set in a blinding rainstorm. Also, I'm disposed to its original owner because she has a wonderful name: Theresa Fair. And she was arriviste and unlucky. Not completely unlucky: her father discovered the Corn-stock Lode, a vein of silver worth two hundred million dollars. ”Know what that'd be in today's dollars?” my breakfast partners would say.

I don't know, but it sounds like quite a lot.

Theresa Fair married Herman Oelrichs, scion of a s.h.i.+pping fortune, turned her back on the crude society of her native San Francisco, and took up the business of New York society with an avidity that must have burned like l.u.s.t. She hired Stanford White to build her Newport summer palace. Or cottage, as they were called. Stanford White: killed by a maniac for love of a floozy.

Already the substantiality of Newport is being undermined.

Theresa Fair Oelrichs and Stanford White argued about the details of the construction of Rosecliff. He'd meant it to be a copy of the Pet.i.t Trianon at Versailles, which was a pleasure palace, not a residence. Mrs. Oelrichs needed rooms for her guests. Reluctantly, White added a second story. But Mrs. Oelrichs needed rooms for her staff. White agreed to a third story, provided it would be narrow, short, and invisible. He built forty rooms, each of them only ten feet high. They must have been cubicles. They cannot be seen from the outside, because they are set back and hidden by a bal.u.s.trade. The comfort of the servants was in no one's mind.

In the Grand Ballroom, where Stanford White had commissioned a painted sky in the middle of the ceiling, Tessie Fair Oelrichs had her famous bal blanc(she was obsessed with whiteness, with the color white) in imitation of the one given by Louis XIV. All the women were told to wear white, and if their hair wasn't white, to powder it or to wear white wigs. She herself wore a headdress made of ostrich feathers and diamonds. She tried to get her friend, who was secretary of the navy, to dock some navy s.h.i.+ps outside her house. But he refused. So she had mock s.h.i.+ps built by Newport craftsmen, outlining their sails in newly invented electric light.

She doesn't seem to have been happy. Her husband, it was said, traveled a lot on business and was rarely in the house. One day, in 1920, when she was supervising some construction, perhaps in the ballroom, a piece of plaster fell from the ceiling, blinding her in one eye. She suffered a nervous breakdown, and took to her bed in Rosecliff, entertaining imaginary guests. Of her son, not much is known. She died in 1926, so the house was his during the Depression, that time that was so hard on great houses. Fortunes were lost; servants could not be hired, since their wages could not be paid. During the thirties, says our tour guide (without whom you can't see the house), the great houses were ”white elephants.” You could buy them, the tour guide says, ”for a song.” Immediately I see houses, especially the white Rosecliff, lumbering, vulnerable, loyal as old elephants, and then I see sharpsters in checkered suits putting nooses around the melancholy pachyderms' n.o.ble necks, leading them off singing something like ”ja-da-ja-da-jadajada jig, jig, jig.”

I don't know what condition the house was in in 1941 when Anita Niesen bought it for her daughter Gertrude's twenty-first birthday. She paid only twenty-one thousand dollars. Perhaps a thousand dollars for each year of her daughter's life. Gertrude was a cabaret singer. A nightclub singer. They were from New York.

This purchase was not a good thing for the house. Anita and Gertrude lived in the house only one season: the summer of 1941. Having spent money on the house, they couldn't afford servants to maintain it. They had a summer there alone, mother and daughter, playing house. At the end of the season, they closed the house, but they neglected to drain the pipes. They didn't arrange for proper heating. So in the winter, the pipes burst and the house was ruined by water damage. The great heart-shaped staircase, copied by Stanford White from a French original, was encased with ice. The tour guide shows us pictures.

Suddenly, I am jolted from my torpor. The torpor I always feel when I hear the word ”wealth,” one syllable, top-heavy, though single, over-upholstered, a soft mountain, an avalanche, the dark pulpy apple with an unfathomable center. Something about the word ”wealth” overtires me. Makes me long for sleep. Or death. I don't like these big houses because they're death houses. Built by people who, like the ancient Egyptians, are choking to death on the fat of the land.

But when I hear about Anita and Gertrude, and not having money for servants, and not knowing enough to drain the pipes, I am no longer breathing the thick air of wealth.

It is the air of carelessness. The air of ruin caused by carelessness. Stupidity or lack of knowledge. I can think of nothing but the staircase encased in ice, and the fact that you can't talk about it without repeating the syllable ”case.” It is the case that the staircase was encased in ice.

For two years I think about the nightclub singer and her mother and the staircase encased in ice. I go to the newspaper morgue and find everything I can about Gertrude Niesen.

But I'm not really interested in Gertrude or her mother. I'm interested in the damage to the house. The damaged house. I'm not really interested in the house before or after its damage.

The shame of a damaged house. I'm interested in the house's shame, and what I believe must have been the people's lack of shame.

I want to tell the story of a damaged house, but I don't know how. I don't want to make the story an anecdote.

Or a study in the clash of social forces.

I thought of inventing a third character and telling the story from her point of view. A poor relation. A female cousin. First censorious, then shy. In love with Gertrude's father. I had thought of having her explain the father's presence in Gertrude's career and Gertrude's plan to win her father away from this poor cousin, who gave him the attention his wife and daughter would not.

I didn't know how else to explain the father's presence in the articles about Gertrude. There, he's portrayed as being initially so reluctant for his daughter to have a career in show business that she's forced to run away from home: her respectable home in Brooklyn Heights. This is the hook, with Gertrude: she's well brought up, genteel even, she went to a finis.h.i.+ng school, the Brooklyn Academy. Eventually, though, Mr. Niesen relents. He sees that talent will out, so in the later articles he's hovering, attentive, making sure the reporters get things straight. He's the detail man. Calling the coast. Making train reservations.

What I can't explain is why, since he was involved in real estate as a profession, he would have allowed his wife to buy a property she couldn't possibly maintain, why he wouldn't have told her that pipes had to be drained, that the house couldn't be left as I imagine they left it, closing the door behind them, taking a taxi to the train.

But I'm not really interested in the father. I'm interested in the damaged house. Because I think one of the things I fear most is that my carelessness or ignorance will cause a damage I could never have foreseen and can never repair.

You'd think I'd be interested in Gertrude. I always wanted to be a cabaret singer. A torch singer. Lounging like Gertrude, in smoky lounges. Gertrude's big song was ”Light My Cigarette.” Gertrude, the finis.h.i.+ng school chanteuse. Gertrude, born, in the photos I xerox from the morgue, to embody the word ”blowsy.” Short, with a bra.s.sy pageboy, overfull lips and bosom. A beauty mark, which may or may not have been penciled in. Her Russian mother. Her Swedish father, the detail man.

But what I think about is the staircase encased in ice. The ruined fabrics. The woodwork a sponge, the plaster a chalky milk. The terrible, aggressive stupidity of being careless with something that took so much time to create and maintain. The dreadfulness of how easy it is to do damage. The shamed house, like a grand lady given the pox by her philandering husband, full of tremors, marks on her face like carbuncles, like the sh.e.l.ls of snails.

Two years after I saw the house I talk to another friend about this story and what it means to me. She says: ”There are some things you can't play with. They're too powerful, they always win in the end.”

But, I say, it was the house that was hurt, not the people, really.

But, she responds, that kind of hurt humiliates whoever inflicted it. And besides, the house was rebuilt by another rich person.

But I don't think Gertrude and her mother suffered. I don't know why I believe that: perhaps because of Gertrude's smoky eyes, and the way she ordered her father around. And the fact that her mother sold the house at a profit. I would never have been able to sell the house. I would have been so ashamed that I would have had to live there forever, to bear witness to my carelessness, my dereliction. I wouldn't have been able to repair the house myself, or come up with the money, so I would have insisted upon my own continued presence at the center of the ruin. This is how I know that Gertrude and her mother were nothing like me. And why I'm jealous of them, and contemptuous. I believe they were incapable of suffering.

My friend and I both feel that, given damage that extensive, someone must have suffered.

But we don't know who.