now a solid green curtain. She'd loved the view, loved the garden, even keeping yearly journals of its progress—yes, there they were, pretty albums bound in silk that she'd pored over, writing the names of shrubs planted and sketching their flowers, recording its successes and failures in her precise script so unlike my own scrawl. I turned away sharply out of the room; as Holmes followed me, he gently shut the door, cutting off the watery sunlight and plunging the hall-way back into gloom.
The entire house was a stage set with dust-coloured shrouds. The long dining-room table was little more than a floor-length cloth punctuated by the regular bumps of its chairs, its long tarpaulined surface set with three blackened candle-sticks. The music room was home to a piano-shaped mound and a small forest of chairs; the pantry, its door giving way reluctantly to a third key on the ring, lay waiting, the house's silver, crystal, and china neatly arrayed in their drawers and on their shelves.
In the dim library, Holmes gave a grunt of disapproval at the smell of must. This had been my father's study, where he had kept accounts and written letters, typing with remarkable facility on the enormous Underwood type- writer, its mechanism so heavy my child's fingers could barely propel the keys to the ribbon. The Underwood, like the desk and the two chairs in front of the pristine fireplace, was draped; the carpets here had been rolled up against the wall, and emanated a faint trace of moth-balls.
The stillness in the house was proving oppressive. I cleared my throat to remark, “How many acres of dust- covers do you suppose they used?”
Holmes merely shook his head at the disused and mouldering volumes, and went on.
As we worked through the rooms, various objects and shapes seemed to reach out and touch my memory, each time restoring a small portion of it to life: The looking-glass near the door, for example, had been a wedding present that my mother hated and my father loved, source of much affectionate discord. And the fitted carpet in the back parlour—something had happened to it, some catastrophe I was responsible for: something spilt? An upturned coffee tray, perhaps, and the horrified shrieks of visiting women—no, I had it now: Their horror was not, as my guilty young mind had immediately thought, because of any damage to the carpet, but at the hot coffee splashing across my young skin, miraculously not scalding me.
My eye was caught by a peculiar object on the top of a high credenza: an exotic painted caricature of a cat, carved so that its mouth gaped wide in a toothy O. But shouldn't there be a flash of yellow, right where that stick in the middle . . . ? Ah, yes: Father's joke. He'd found the cat in Chinatown and fixed a perch across its open mouth, then arranged it on the precise spot where my mother's canary, which was given the occasional freedom of the room, liked to sit and sing. How Levi and I had giggled, every time the bird opened its mouth in the cat's maw.
As I worked my way through the rooms, there was no entirety of recall, merely discrete items that sparked specific memories. I felt as if some prince was working his way through the sleeping events of my childhood, kissing each one back to life. Or tapping them like a clown with a trick flower that flashed miraculously into full bloom.
Not that I'd ever much cared for clowns, nor had I been one for fairy tales: The passivity of that sleeping princess had annoyed me even when I was small.
Only when we reached the very back of the ground floor and Holmes pushed open a swinging door did I discover a place that felt completely familiar, wall to wall: the kitchen. No cloth shrouds here, just white tile, black stove, shelved pots, a row of spoons and implements. The wooden table where I'd sat down with plate, glass, and home-work. The ice-box (unchanged from my infancy) from which I'd taken my milk, tugging at its heavy door. The pantry, startlingly equipped with food-stuffs: biscuits and coffee in their tins, flour in its bin, preserves in jars that had gone green beneath their wax seals.
Ghosts are most often glimpsed at the corners of one's vision, heard at the far reaches of the audible, tasted in lingering scents at the back of one's palate. So now the house began to people itself at the furthest edges of my senses: A wide-bottomed cook, her back to me, laid down the wooden spoon she was using to stir a pot and bustled away through a door. It happened in one short instant at the very corner of the mind's eye, and she was gone when I turned my head, but she lived in my mind. Then at the base of the door I noticed a trace of long-dried soil, and with that, through the window in the upper half of the door, a much-abused, sweat-dark hat the colour of earth seemed to pass: the gardener.
His name had been . . . Michael? No, Micah. I'd loved him, I knew that without question, although I remembered next to nothing about him. He had rescued a bird for me one time; the neighbour's cat had pounced and feathers flew and I—small then, perhaps four, sitting on the back steps (Were there back steps on the other side of that windowed door? I crossed to the window: yes, two of them, leading down to what had once been a neat gravel path-way)—I had screamed in full-throated protest at the sight, bringing Micah around the corner with one hand clamping down his hat and the other holding a rake, his stumpy legs so close to running that the very sight of him silenced me. The cat shot away into the shrubbery; Micah gathered the bird, gentled it, placed it in my sheltering hands where it lay for a time, stunned but not injured. Its heart thrummed nonstop, astounding the palms of my hands, until suddenly it jerked into life and launched itself into the air, flitting into the branches of the apple tree, then away.
I looked down at those hands, two decades older. Curious, the means by which memories were stored. The door-frame mezuzah, the bird, both lay in the skin of my hands. Why was the mind said to have an eye and not a hand, or a tongue? Perhaps touch, taste, odour, sound were linked to the heart rather than the intellect. Certainly both of these tactile memories I had retrieved carried with them profound and specific emotional charges, the one of homecoming, the other of competent authority, both of them immensely reassuring.
I raised my eyes to the grubby window, and in that instant it was as if the kitchen door flew open and the sun spilt into the room. I knew, beyond a doubt, what I wished to do: I would clean the house, restore it, remove the decay to which my neglect had condemned it; and I would find the people who had been here, friends and workers, and talk to them all, weaving myself back into the tapestry of community. For too long, I had turned my back on my past. Holmes was right: I had brought us here for a reason.
Feeling as if I had cast off a heavy and constricting garment, I spun on my heel to go in search of Holmes, to tell him what I had decided, and nearly fell over him. He was stooped to look into a small mirror placed awkwardly on the wall.
“Holmes, I—” I began, and then I took in his attitude, that sharpening of attention that put one in mind of a dog on scent. “What is it?”
“Does this not seem to you an odd location for a looking-glass?”
“For a man your height, certainly. But even in America, few cooks are over six feet tall.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, waving away my explanation. “I mean the placement itself.”
Once my attention was drawn to it, I could see what he meant. It was a round glass set in an octagonal frame, somehow Chinese looking, but a looking-glass used by servants to check their appearance before entering the house would surely be located near the swinging door, not above the long bench used for pots and dishes on their way to the scullery. I took his place before it, bending my knees to bring my eyes to a more normal level.
“It's also too small to see one's entire face in it,” I noted in surprise.
“Queer,” he agreed, opening and shutting the cabinets to survey their contents.
“Could it be intended as a means of keeping one eye on the back door while working at the bench?” I speculated, but unless it had shifted over the years, its only view was the cook-stove, and there was no sign of a prop fallen from one side. While I was craning this way and that, taken up by the minor puzzle, Holmes continued on his circuit of the room.
“Did your family have a resident pet?” he asked, back again near the swinging door.
He was squatting before a roughly glazed porcelain vase or bowl that sat on the floor at the base of the wall. Six inches at its widest and five inches high, it was primitive in craftsmanship but oddly graceful—and precariously placed, considering the traffic there would have been in and out of the door.
“I don't believe we did. We had a canary, but cats made my brother sneeze, and my mother disliked dogs.”
I could see why he asked, for when I picked it up to examine it, beneath the dust the mineral deposit left by a pint or so of evaporating water was unmistakable. Still, it was an odd utensil for the purpose, its sides narrowing at the top to an opening that would prove awkward for feline muzzles. Too, surely it would have been better placed in the corner between the sink and the back door, or even inside the scullery. I put it back where I had found it and cast my eyes around the kitchen for anything else out of place. All I could see was a long-dead pot of some unidentifiable herb withered on a window-sill—no doubt an oversight on the part of Norbert's cleaners, not a deliberate peculiarity.
