The Cat's Pajamas

I said it three times. Quietly.

THE HOUSE

1947

IT WAS AN INCREDIBLE, insane old house looking wildly out over the city with staring eyes. Birds had built nests in its high cupolas so that the place resembled nothing more than a thin, night-haunted old woman, hair untidily kept.

They had walked up the long hill in the windy autumn ni

ght, Maggie and William, and now when she saw the house she set her Saks Fifth Avenue suitcase down and said, “Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes.” He carried his battered old luggage buoyantly. “Isn’t it a bean? Look at her, isn’t she priceless!”

“You paid two thousand dollars for that?” she cried.

“Why, it cost thirty thousand dollars, fifty years ago,” he declared, proudly. “And it’s all ours. Boy!”

She waited for her heart to beat again. She was sick. She looked at him and then at the house. “It—it looks a little like a Charles Addams house, doesn’t it? You know, the man who draws the vampire cartoons for The New Yorker?”

But he was already up the walk. She came carefully after him up the moaning front steps. The house soared up, three mansarded, pillared, fluted, rococo flights of it, towers and peaks and bay windows pregnant with broken glass; a fine nicotine stain of years upon it. Inside there was a silence of moths and hung window shades and furniture draped like little white tombs.

Again she felt everything sink within her. When you have lived in a big clean house on a big secluded street all of your life, with servants invisibly keeping the order, with a phone wherever you put out your hand, with a bathtub big as a swimming pool, and your only exercise is the energy it takes to lift an immensely heavy dry martini, then what is one to think when confronted by a rusty mountain, a haunted catacomb, a thing of gray work and utter chaos? Oh God, she thought, if Americans’ lives come to this, fewer houses, incredible prices. Why did people marry at all?

It was hard to keep her face together, to make it look right, because William was shouting up and down stairs, walking swiftly, tall, through the rooms, proud as if he’d built it himself.

“I am Hamlet’s father’s ghost,” said William, coming down the dim stairs.

“—father’s ghost,” said an echo from up the stairwell, at the top of the house.

William smiled and pointed up. “Hear that? That’s the Listener at the top of the house. Old friend of mine. He hears everything you say. I was saying to him only yesterday, I love Maggie!”

“I love Maggie,” said the Listener at the top of the house.

“A man of taste, that Listener,” said Bill. He came and held Maggie’s shoulders. “Isn’t this house swell?”

“It’s big, I’ll give you that. And it’s dirty, I’ll give you that. And it most certainly is old.”

She watched his face watching hers. And by the slow change of his face she knew that her own face wasn’t doing a very good job of loving the vast place. She had ripped her nylon stockings on a nail, coming in the door. There was dirt on the expensive tweed skirt she had brought from ’Frisco already, and—

He took his hands from her shoulders. He looked at her mouth. “You don’t much care for it, do you?”

“Oh, it’s not that—”

“Maybe we should have bought that trailer.”

“Oh, no, don’t be silly. It’s just I have to get used to this. Who’d want to live in a bread box trailer? There’s more room here.”

“Or maybe waited another year to get married, with more money.”

“Perhaps we won’t have to stay here long, anyway,” she said, trying to be gay. But it was the wrong thing to say. He didn’t want to go, ever. This was a place he loved and wanted to fix over. There was a permanence in the way he looked at it.

“Up here is the bedroom.” At the top of the first landing, where a feeble bulb burned, he opened a door. There was a room with a four-poster bed in it. He had scrubbed and swept the room himself and fixed the bed as a surprise for her. There were bright pictures on the wall and new fresh yellow-print wallpaper.

“It’s nice,” she said, still forcing it.

He did not look at her as he said, tonelessly, “I’m glad you like it.”

THE NEXT MORNING he was all through the house, up and down the stairs, whistling and singing, full of breakfast vigor and ideas. She heard him ripping down the old shades, sweeping the hall, breaking the old glass shards from a broken kitchen window. She lay in bed. The warm yellow sun streamed in the south window and touched her idle hand on the coverlet. She lay, not wanting to move, incredulous at the sound of her resilient husband ricocheting from room to room with the momentum of his inspiration. Resilient was the word. You hurt or disappointed him one day, and the next day it was forgotten. He bounced back. That was more than she could say for herself. He was like a string of firecrackers set off to explode all through the echoing house.