MORE STATELY MANSIONS
WE'VE KNOWN the McClellans, Grace and George, for about two years now. They were the first neighbors to call on us and welcome us to the village.
I expected that initial conversation to lag uncomfortably after the first pleasantries, but not at all. Grace, her eyes quick and bright as a sparrow's, found subject matter enough to keep her talking for hours.
"You know," she said excitedly, "your living room could be a perfect dream! Couldn't it, George? Can't you see it?"
"Yup," said her husband. "Nice, all right."
"Just tear out all this white-painted woodwork," Grace said, her eyes narrowing. "Panel it all in knotty pine wiped with linseed oil with a little umber added. Cover the couch in lipstick red—red red. Know what I mean?"
"Red?" said Anne, my wife.
"Red! Don't be afraid of color."
"I'll try not to be," Anne said.
"And just cover the whole wall there, those two ugly little windows and all, with bottle-green curtains. Can't you see it? It'd be almost exactly like that problem living room in the February Better House and Garden. You remember that, of course."
"I must have missed that," said Anne. The month was August. "Or was it Good Homelife, George?" Grace said.
"Don't remember offhand," said George.
"Well, I can look it up in my files and put my hand right on it." Grace stood up suddenly, and, uninvited, started a tour through the rest of the house.
She went from room to room, consigning a piece of furniture to the Salvation Army, detecting a fraudulent antique, shrugging partitions out of existence, and pacing off a chartreuse, wall-to-wall carpet we would have to order before we did another thing. "Start with the carpet," she said firmly, "and build from there. It'll pull your whole downstairs together if you build from the carpet."
"Um," said Anne. "I hope you saw Nineteen Basic Carpet Errors in the June Home Beautiful."
"Oh yes, yes indeed," Anne said.
"Good. Then I don't have to tell you how wrong you can go, not building from the carpet. George—Oh, he's still in the living room."
I caught a glimpse of George on the living-room couch, lost in his own thoughts. He straightened up and smiled.
I followed Grace, trying to change the subject. "Let's see, you are on our north side. Who's to our south?"
Grace held up her hands. "Oh! You haven't met them—the Jenkinses. George," she called, "they want to know about the Jenkinses." From her voice, I gathered that our southerly neighbors were sort of lovable beachcombers.
"Now, Grace, they're nice enough people," George said.
"Oooh, George," Grace said, "you know how the Jenkinses are. Yes, they're nice, but…" She laughed and shook her head.
"But what?" I said. The possibilities raced through my mind. Nudists? Heroin addicts? Anarchists? Hamster raisers?
"In 1945 they moved in," Grace said, "and right off the bat they bought two beautiful Hitchcock chairs, and…" This time she sighed and shrugged.
"And what?" I demanded. And spilled India ink on them? And found a bundle of thousand-dollar bills rolled up in a hollow leg?
"And that's all," Grace said. "They just stopped right there."
"How's that?" said Anne.
"Don't you see? They started out beautifully with those two chairs; then they just petered out."
"Oh," said Anne slowly. "I see—a flash in the pan. So that's what's wrong with the Jenkinses. Aha!"
"Fie on the Jenkinses," I said.
Grace didn't hear me. She was patrolling between the living room and dining room, and I noticed that every time she entered or left the living room, she made a jog in her course, always at exactly the same place. Curious, I went over to the spot she avoided, and bounced up and down a couple of times to see if the floor was unsound at that point, or what.
In she came again, and she looked at me with surprise. "Oh!"
"Did I do something wrong?" I asked.
"I just didn't expect to find you there."
"Sorry."
"That's where the cobbler's bench goes, you know."
I stepped aside, and watched uncomfortably as she bent over the phantom cobbler's bench. I think it was then that she first alarmed me, made me feel a little less like laughing.
"With one or two little nail drawers open, and ivy growing out of them," she explained. "Cute?" She stepped around it, being careful not to bark her shins, and went up the stairs to the second floor. "Do you mind if I have a look around up here?" she asked gaily.
"Go right ahead," said Anne.
George had gotten up off the sofa. He stood looking up the stairs for a minute; then he held up his empty highball glass. "Mind if I have another?"
"Say, I'm sorry, George. We haven't been taking very good care of you. You bet. Help yourself. The bottle's there in the dining room."
He went straight to it, and poured himself a good inch and a half of whisky in the bottom of the tumbler.
"The tile in this bathroom is all wrong for your towels, of course," Grace said from upstairs.
Anne, who had padded after her like a housemaid, agreed bleakly. "Of course."
George lifted his glass, winked, and drained it. "Don't let her throw you," he said. "Just her way of talking. Got a damn' nice house here. I like it, and so does she."
"Thanks, George. That's nice of you."
Anne and Grace came downstairs again, Anne looking quite bushed. "Oh, you men!" Grace said. "You just think we're silly, don't you?" She smiled companionably at Anne. "They just don't understand what interests women. What were you two talking about while we were having such a good time?"
"I was telling him he ought to wallpaper his trees and make chintz curtains for his keyholes," George said.
"Mmmmm," said Grace. "Well, time to go home, dear/'
She paused outside the front door. "Nice basic lines to this door," she said. "That gingerbread will come right off, if you get a chisel under it. And you can lighten it by rubbing on white paint, then rubbing it off again right away. It'll look more like you."
"You've been awfully helpful," said Anne.
"Well, it's a dandy house the way it is," George said.
"I swear," Grace said, "I'll never understand how so many artists are men. No man I ever met had a grain of artistic temperament in him."
"Bushwa," said George quietly. And then he surprised me. The glance he gave Grace was affectionate and possessive.
"It is a dull little dump, I guess," said Anne gloomily, after the McClellans had left.
"Oh, listen—it's a swell house."
"I guess. But it needs so much done to it. I didn't realize. Golly, their place must be something. They've been in it for five years, she said. You can imagine what she could do to a place in five years—everything right, right down to the last nailhead."
"It isn't much from the outside. Anyway, Anne, this isn't like you."
She shook her head, as though to wake herself up. "It isn't, is it? Never in my life have I had the slightest interest in keeping up with the neighbors. But there's something about that woman."
"To hell with her! Let's throw in our lot with the Jenkinses."
Anne laughed. Grace's spell was wearing off. "Are you mad? Be friends with those two-chair people, those quitters?"
"Well, we'd make our friendship contingent on their getting a new couch to go with the chairs."
"And not any couch, but the right couch."
"If they want to be friends of ours, they mustn't be afraid of color, and they'd better build from the carpet."
"That goes without saying," said Anne crisply.
But it was a long time before we found leisure for more than a nod at the Jenkinses. Grace McClellan spent most of her waking hours at our house. Almost every morning, as I was leaving for work, she would stagger into our house under a load of home magazines and insist that Anne pore over them with her in search of just the right solutions for our particular problem house.
"They must be awfully rich," Anne said at dinner one night.
"I don't think so," I said. "George has a little leather-goods store that you hardly ever see anybody in."
"Well, then every cent must go into the house."
"That I can believe. But what makes you think they're rich?"
"To hear that woman talk, you'd think money was nothing! Without batting an eyelash, she talks about ten-dollar-a-yard floor-to-ceiling draperies, says fixing up the kitchen shouldn't cost more than a lousy fifteen hundred dollars—without the fieldstone fireplace, of course."
"What's a kitchen without a fieldstone fireplace?"
"And a circular couch."
"Isn't there some way you can keep her away, Anne? She's wearing you out. Can't you just tell her you're too busy to see her?"
"I haven't the heart, she's so kind and friendly and lonely," said Anne helplessly. "Besides, there's no getting through to her. She doesn't hear what I say. Her head is just crammed full of blueprints, cloth, furniture, wallpaper, and paint."
"Change the subject."
"Change the course of the Mississippi! Talk about politics, and she talks about remodeling the White House; talk about dogs, and she talks about doghouses."
The telephone rang, and I answered it. It was Grace McClellan. "Yes, Grace?"
"You're in the office-furniture business, aren't you?"
"That's right."
"Do you ever get old filing cabinets in trade?"
"Yes. I don't like to, but sometimes I have to take them."
"Could you let me have one?"
I thought a minute. I had an old wooden wreck I was about to haul to the dump. I told her about it.
"Oh, that'll be divine! There's an article in last month's Better House about what to do with old filing cabinets. You can make them just darling by wallpapering them, then putting a coat of clear shellac over the paper. Can't you just see it?"
"Yep. Darling, all right. I'll bring it out tomorrow night."
"That's awfully nice of you. I wonder if you and Anne couldn't drop in for a drink then."
I accepted and hung up. "Well, the time has come," I said. "Marie Antoinette has finally invited us to have a look at Versailles."
"I'm afraid," Anne said. "It's going to make our home look so sad."
"There's more to life than decorating."
"I know, I know. I just wish you'd stay home in the daytime and keep telling me that while she's here."
The next evening, I drove the pickup truck home instead of my car, so I could deliver the old filing cabinet to Grace. Anne was already inside the McClellan house, and George came out to give me a hand.
The cabinet was an old-fashioned oak monster, and, with all the sweating and grunting, I didn't really pay much attention to the house until we'd put down our burden in the front hall.
The first thing I noticed was that there were already two dilapidated filing cabinets in the hall, ungraced by wallpaper or clear shellac. I looked into the living room. Anne was sitting on the couch with a queer smile on her face. The couch springs had burst through the bottom and were resting nakedly on the floor. The chief illumination came from a single light bulb in a cob-webbed chandelier with sockets for six. An electric extension cord, patched with friction tape, hung from another of the sockets and led to an iron on an ironing board in the middle of the living room.
A small throw rug, the type generally seen in bathrooms, was the only floor covering, and the planks of the floor were scarred and dull from long neglect. Dust and cobwebs were everywhere, and the windows were dirty. The only sign of order or opulence was on the coffee table, where dozens of fat, slick decoration magazines were spread out like a fan.
George was nervous and more taciturn than usual, and I gathered that he was uneasy about having us in. After mixing us drinks, he sat down and maintained a fidgeting silence.
Not so with Grace. She was at a high pitch of excitement, and, seemingly, full of irrepressible pride. Sitting, rising, and sitting again a dozen times a minute, she did a sort of ballet about the room, describing exactly the way she was going to do the room over. She rubbed imaginary fabrics between her fingers, stretched out luxuriously in a wicker chair that would one day be a plum-colored chaise longue, held her hands as far apart as she could reach to indicate the span of a limed-oak television-radio-phonograph console that was to stand against one wall.
She clapped her hands and closed her eyes. "Can you see it? Can you see it?"
"Simply lovely," said Anne.
"And every night, just as George is coming up the walk. I’ll have Martinis ready in a frosty pewter pitcher, and I’ll have a record playing on the phonograph." Grace knelt before the thin air where the console would be, selected a record from nothingness, put it on the imaginary turntable, pressed a nonexistent button, and retired to the wicker chair. To my dismay, she began to rock her head back and forth in time to the phantom music.
After a minute of this, George seemed disturbed, too. "Grace! You're going to sleep." He tried to make his tone light, but real concern showed through.
Grace shook her head and opened her eyes lazily. "I wasn't sleeping; I was listening."
"It will certainly be a charming room," Anne said, looking worriedly at me.
Grace was suddenly on her feet again, charged with new energy. "And the dining room!" Impatiently, she picked up a magazine and thumbed through it. "Now, wait, where is it, where is it? No, not that one." She let the magazine drop. "Oh, of course, I clipped it last night and put it in the files. Remember, George? The dining-room table with the glass top and the place for potted flowers underneath?"
"Uh-huh."
"That's what goes in the dining room," Grace said happily. "See? You look right through the table, and there, underneath, are geraniums, African violets, or anything you want to put there. Fun?" She hurried to the filing cabinets. "You've got to see it in color, really."
Anne and I followed her politely, and waited while she ran her finger along the dividers in the drawers. The drawers, I saw, were jammed with cloth and wallpaper samples, paint color cards, and pages taken from magazines. She had already filled two cabinets, and was ready to overflow into the third, the one I'd brought. The drawers were labeled, simply, "Living room."
"Kitchen."
"Dining room," and so on.
"Quite a filing system," I said to George, who was just brushing by with a fresh drink in his hand.
He looked at me closely, as though he was trying to make up his mind whether I was kidding him or not. "It is," he said at last. "There's even a section about the workshop she wants me to have in the basement." He sighed. "Someday."
Grace held up a little square of transparent blue plastic. "And this is the material for the kitchen curtains, over the sink and automatic dishwasher. Waterproof, and it wipes clean."
"It's darling," Anne said. "You have an automatic dishwasher?"
"Mmmmm?" Grace said, smiling at some distant horizon. "Oh —dishwasher? No, but I know exactly the one we want. We've made up our minds on that, haven't we, George?"
"Yes, dear."
"And someday…" said Grace happily, running her fingers over the contents of a file drawer.
"Someday…" said George.
As I say, two years have passed since then, since we first met the McClellans. Anne, with compassion and tenderness, invented harmless ways of keeping Grace from spending all her time at our house with her magazines. But we formed a neighborly habit of having a drink with the McClellans once or twice a month.
I liked George, and he grew friendly and talkative when he'd made sure we weren't going to bait his wife about interior decorating, something almost everyone else in the neighborhood was fond of doing. He adored Grace, and made light of her preoccupation, as he had done at our first meeting, only when he didn't know the people before whom she was performing. Among friends, he did nothing to discourage or disparage her dreaming.
Anne bore the brunt of Grace's one-track conversations as sort of a Christian service, listening with tact and patience. George and I ignored them, and had a pleasant enough time talking about everything but interior decoration.
In these talks it came out bit by bit that George had been in a bad financial jam for years, and that things refused to get better. The "someday" that Grace had been planning for five years, George said, seemed to recede another month as each new home magazine appeared on the newsstands. It was this, I decided, not Grace, that kept him drinking more than his share.
And the filing cabinets got fuller and fuller, and the McClellan house got dowdier and dowdier. But not once did Grace's excitement about what their house was going to be like flag. If anything, it increased, and time and again we would have to follow her about the house to hear just how it was all going to be.
And then a fairly sad thing and an awfully nice thing happened to the McClellans. The sad thing was that Grace came down with a virus infection that kept her in the hospital two months. The nice thing was that George inherited a little money from a relative he'd never met.
While Grace was in the hospital, George often had supper with us; and the day he received his legacy, his taciturnity dropped away completely. To our surprise, he now talked interior decoration with fervor and to the exclusion of everything else.
"You've got the bug too, now," Anne said, laughing. "Bug, hell! I've got the money! I'm going to surprise Grace by having that house just the way she wants it, when she comes home."
"Exactly, George?"
"Eggs-zactly!"
And Anne and I were willingly drafted to help him. We went through Grace's files and found detailed specifications for every room, right down to bookends and soap dishes. It was a tough job tracking down every item, but George was indefatigable, and so was Anne, and money was no object.
Time was everything, money was nothing. Electricians, plasterers, masons, and carpenters worked around the clock for bonus wages; and Anne, for no pay at all, harassed department stores into hurrying with the houseful of furniture she'd ordered. Two days before Grace was to come home, the inheritance was gone, and the house was magnificent. George was unquestionably the happiest, proudest man on earth. The job was flawless, save for one tiny detail not worth mentioning. Anne had failed to match exactly the yellow square of cloth Grace had wanted for her living-room curtains and the cover for the couch. The shade Anne had had to settle for was just a little bit lighter. George and I couldn't see the difference at all.
And then Grace came home, cheerful but weak, leaning on George's arm. It was late in the afternoon, and Anne and I were waiting in the living room, literally trembling with excitement. As George helped Grace up the walk, Anne fussed nervously with a bouquet of red roses she had brought and placed in a massive glass vase in the center of the coffee table.
We heard George's hand on the latch, the door swung open, and the McClellans stood on the threshold of their dream house. "Oh, George," Grace murmured. She let go of his arm, and, as though miraculously drawing strength from her surroundings, she walked from room to room, looking all about her as we had seen her do a thousand times. But this time of times she was speechless.
She returned at last to the living room, and sank onto the plum-colored chaise longue.
George turned down the volume of the phonograph to a sweet whisper. "Well?"
Grace sighed. "Don't rush me," she said. "I'm trying to find the words, the exact words."
"You like it?" George asked.
Grace looked at him and laughed incredulously. "Oh, George, George, of course I like it! You darling, it's wonderful! I'm home, home at last." Her lip trembled, and we all began to cloud up.
"Nothing wrong?" George asked huskily.
"You've taken wonderful care of it. Everything's so clean and beautiful."
"Well, it'd sure be a surprise if things weren't clean," George said. He clapped his hands together. "Now then, you well enough for a drink?"
"I'm not dead."
"Leave us out, George," I said. "We're leaving. We just had to see her expression when she walked in, but now we'll clear out."
"Oh, say now—" George said.
"No. I mean it. We're going. You two ought to be alone—you three, including the house."
"Stay right where you are," George said. He hurried into the dazzling white kitchen to mix the drinks.
"All right, so we'll sneak out," Anne said. We started for the front door. "Don't get up, Grace."
"Well, if you really won't stay, good-by," Grace said from the chaise longue. "I hardly know how to thank you."
"It was the most fun I've had in years," said Anne. She looked proudly around the room, and went over to the coffee table to rearrange the roses slightly. "The only thing that worried me was the color of the slipcover and curtains. Are they all right?"
"Why, Anne, did you notice them too? I wasn't even going to mention them. It would certainly be silly to let a little thing like that spoil my homecoming." She frowned a little.
Anne was crestfallen. "Oh dear, I hope they didn't spoil it."
"No, no, of course they didn't," Grace said. "I don't quite understand it, but it doesn't matter a bit."
"Well, I can explain," Anne said.
"Something in the air, I suppose."
"In the air?" Anne said.
"Well, how else can you explain it? That material held its color just perfectly for years, and then, poof, it fades like this in a few weeks."
George walked in with a frosty pewter pitcher. "Now, you'll stay for a quick one, won't you?"
Anne and I took glasses hungrily, gratefully, wordlessly. "There's a new Home Beautiful that came today, sweetheart."
George said.
Grace shrugged. "Read one and you've read them all." She lifted her glass. "Happy days, and thanks, darlings, so much for the roses."
(1951)