A Stranger's House (24 page)

He stopped, startled at himself, it seemed. He pushed himself off
the counter, and he was the adult again, shaking back that hair, tucking a lock behind one ear. He blinked several times, coughed into his hand, and I wondered what was going on, what had caused this, and then I realized that, of course, he'd told me something he didn't want known, some small piece of story that had slipped away from him when he was only the boy he was, that teenager.

His grandfather had had Martin put away.

“Keep going,” I said.

He kneeled and tied his shoe. He coughed again.

“Your grandfather had Martin—” I said, but Tom and Martin came into the kitchen.

“Speak of the devil, here he is,” Grady said, turning and standing as they came into the room.

They were filthy, their faces and arms and hands streaked with dirt, mud ground into the knees of their pants. Cobwebs dusted Tom's shoulders and hair, and the first thing I did was to brush them away, the delicate threads disintegrating at my touch.

Tom said, “You should have seen us before we brushed off in the pantry,” and laughed. He kissed my cheek, and I could smell the cold, musty crawl space on him, a smell like old, abandoned furniture. I quickly leaned back from his kiss, made a face.

“Yep,” Martin said, smiling.

“So,” Grady said, and put his hands in his back pockets. He started moving up and down on the balls of his feet. “What did you see?”

Tom said, “A few floor joists are cracked where the foundation, those fieldstones, are loose. No big deal, at least nothing, I don't think, we can't repair. A couple of bad ones, dry rot, that we'll have to replace, too.”

Martin, behind him, was rubbing his hair now, trying to get rid of those cobwebs.

“It's beautiful down there,” Tom went on. “Rough-cut oak. The support beam's in great shape, too. The mortar on the fireplace base needs a little work, though. That's not stuff I know much about, and so I'm not too sure I'll want us on that. We may just want to hire that out.” He was looking at me. “That's money we'll have to put out.”

I said, “We knew that going into this.”

Martin, still behind him, grinned at me, and then at Grady.

Grady said, “You'd be surprised at what this guy can do with a trowel and a sack of cement,” and nodded at Martin. Grady laughed.

Tom and I turned to Martin, who, still grinning, only shrugged. He said, “Upstairs is next,” and gave Tom's shoulder a hard pat. He moved past us and into the front room. A moment later I could hear the moan of the stairs beneath his weight.

Tom said, “We could hear you two talking up here. Martin, I think, kept hearing his name, because he'd stop and listen a second every once in a while, then start hammering a floor joist again.” He dusted off his hands, looking first at me, then Grady.

“We were just talking about him, about his fixing things,” Grady said. He stopped bobbing, and glanced at me.

I said, “He's a savant. With wood. With building and repairing things.” I reached up and dusted off Tom's shoulder again, though all the cobwebs were gone.

He said, “I can believe it.” He started through the kitchen, but paused just before the doorway into the front room. “He's a good man,” Tom said, and disappeared into the room.

I looked at Grady. His mouth was open, but he smiled, closed his eyes for a moment before heading after them.

Martin was squatting on the hearth in our bedroom, the marble already coursing along the linoleum toward the far corner of the room, once again rolling around bubbles before it made it to the baseboards. But this time, once the marble had stopped rolling and was sitting there at the wall, Martin went to it, picked it up, and walked over to Tom. He held it out to him.

Tom, who stood next to me just inside the doorway, looked at Martin, almost bewildered, his eyebrows high. Slowly he reached out and took the marble from Martin's hand. He held it up to the light for a moment, the sun falling in from the one window to fill the glass ball.

Martin, his movement as stilted and awkward as ever, let his hand drop to his side. He turned and walked back to the hearth, where he squatted again. He looked up at Tom, then pointed at the bricks next to him.

Tom smiled. He walked across the room to the hearth, and kneeled. Slowly, gently, he placed the marble on the floor, let it roll. A few feet out it hit a rise and rolled away.

Martin nudged Tom with his elbow, and Tom looked at him. Martin nodded toward where the marble had rolled out, and then Tom said, “Oh. Bubble.”

Martin burst out with laughter, slapped his thigh hard so that the clap of his palm shot through the room. He laughed, his eyes nearly closed, his shoulders heaving.

Grady was laughing, too, his arms crossed in front of him. And I laughed, too, Tom smiling and shaking his head, looking at the floor.

“That's funny,” Grady said.
“He's
teaching
you.
That's what's so funny.”

“That's what's so funny,” Martin managed to choke out, his eyes wet and full with laughter.

When we were done in that room—Martin had tapped out the paneling, cracked back a corner to show bare green wall, opened and closed the window several times and touched and poked and prodded the mortar of the fireplace—I went down the stairs to the landing and up the other set to my room.

I was first in. We were all having fun by that time, Martin and Tom laughing and making jokes about bubbles, Grady with his arms crossed, saying “That's funny” every once in a while, and so I entered the room, the others behind me, and I raised up my arms as if to touch the ceiling. I said, “This room is
miner!”
and then let my arms fall around me so that I was holding myself in the room. I turned in a circle, my eyes up to the ceiling, and I stopped.

Tom was behind me, and put his arms around my waist. We were facing the window now, the barn outside in shadows that had shifted as the day moved on, shadows lighter now that the sun was directly overhead, shadows more buoyant, moving with the breeze that had picked up, the branches nearly empty of leaves, but still filled with color this autumn.

Tom said, “All yours.”

“Excuse me,” I heard from behind us, and Tom let go of me. We turned to see Grady standing just inside the doorway.

“Excuse me,” he said again, and moved to one side. Down on the landing stood Martin, his hands clasped in front of him. His eyes moved up to us and down, up and down, and the sunlight from the window cast a white sheen over his skin as he stood in the near-dark of the staircase. His skin looked gray and shiny, and I knew he didn't want us to see him.

Tom said, “What's wrong?”

“It's just,” Grady said, and stopped. He held out a hand palm up as though to explain, but let the hand drop. “It's just that he won't go into this room. That's all.” He shrugged, blinked. “He just won't He never has, either, as far as I can tell. Just look at that window. It's not nearly half as clean as old Martin gets them. That's because I'm the one who does this room.” He smiled, shrugged again, and moved back into the doorway so that we could no longer see Martin. “So I guess you're on your own with this room. You got the marble?” He put his chin out, squinted and nodded toward Tom.

He put his hands in his pockets, brought from the left one that marble. “Right here.”

“Okay,” Grady said, and the two of them went down the stairs.

I turned to Tom. “What's going on?”

“You know as much as I do,” he said, his attention on the floor, sizing things up, I imagined, trying to guess where a bubble might be. He went to the hearth, and squatted once again. He held the marble an inch or so above the floor, the linoleum battleship gray with brown flecks scattered here and there. “Except,” Tom said, still looking at the floor before him, “that when we were down in the crawl space and I mentioned his helping work on the barn next summer, Martin froze. He nearly died. He dropped his hammer as though someone had stuck a gun to his head. All he said was ‘No' one time, nice and loud so he knew I wouldn't ask again. And I didn't. So it's no surprise, really, that he doesn't want to work up here. Or there.” He placed the marble on the floor. “He's got his idiosyncrasies, maybe superstitions. I don't know. It's his choice. He can do what he likes.”

He let it go, and for some reason I held my breath, listening to the surprising quiet in the house, the only sound the calm, sonorous roll of the marble coursing toward the wall.

 

The appointment for signing the papers was set for eleven at Mr. Blaisdell's office, and so both Tom and I had had to take off from work. We took, in fact, the whole morning.

It was about to happen. We were about to own the place.

To celebrate we decided to have breakfast out Tom went down the stairs to start the engine and scrape the windows of frost while I finished putting on my makeup, and then I went to the door, and paused a moment

I looked back at the kitchen, at what I could see of the living room through the doorway. Though the rooms were filled with our furniture, with us, suddenly things looked different, changed: the table, chairs, those gingham curtains and potholders on magnets on the refrigerator and the coffee machine seemed out of place, alien in this room from which we would soon be removing ourselves. The walls, pale yellow, seemed strangely barren, though there were pictures hung and a shelf with antique plates we'd collected and a counted cross-stitch of a lighthouse I had gotten when we'd gone down to Mystic one time. But the walls still seemed lonesome, all these furnishings, signs of life, ready to go, to move out to Chesterfield.

I opened the door. The cold air outside broke into the room, and sent a shiver through the bottom edge of the tablecloth, minutely moved the stack of papers—bills, flyers, coupons—piled on the counter.

Though we would be back later today, wouldn't be moving from here until the house was nearly finished sometime early next year, we had figured, I said, “Good-bye, good-bye,” and pulled the door closed behind me.

We went from the apartment first to the newspaper, where Tom had to stop in and look over his desk, more a symbolic gesture to his editor than any real devotion to the job. Then we went for breakfast at the Miss Florence Diner, a brick-and-oak Deco place left over from the forties or fifties, we could never decide which. Above the restaurant was a neon sign, the name spelled out in orange and set against a large green chevron of sorts.

Inside, construction workers sat at stools along the counter, buffalo-plaid shirts and down vests and scuffed workboots on, cups of coffee in front of them. Most of the booths were full, men and women heading to work, tabletops covered with plates of food: eggs, sausage, waffles, bagels. Where each table met the wall was a miniature jukebox, above each a glass case with a knob on the side. Inside the cases were pages and pages of song titles; when you turned the knob the pages fell forward or back to reveal more songs: tunes by Elvis and Linda Ronstadt and Bob Seger and the Beatles and most anyone else.

We walked to the left along the booths, moving toward the back where we liked to sit. At one booth sat two Smith girls, black turtlenecks on, pale faces and chopped hair, cigarettes out. At another booth sat a businessman in a three-piece charcoal gray wool suit,
The Wall Street Journal
in one hand, a coffee cup in the other. At one other booth sat two old men, both wearing flannel shirts, one bald, the other with a full head of white hair. Both had their hands wrapped around their cups, and were staring out the green-tinted window onto Route 9 and the cars heading into town.

We-slid into our booth, and the waitress was there with two cups and a pot of black, black coffee.

She didn't even ask, but went ahead and poured us each a cup; then pulled from her apron a handful of half-and-half containers and dropped them on the table. We'd had her before, and she always looked like this, always had the same hairpiece on, a coffee pot in hand. The only thing that ever changed about her was the addition
or subtraction of her sweater, depending upon what time of year it was.

“It's a nice frost today,” she said, and smiled, nodding as if in agreement with her own observation.

“Not long before snow,” Tom said, and broke open a container, dumped it into his coffee.

She said, “But then that's when winter really comes on, and I can wait for that. These frosts don't do anything other than make you drape your bushes at night and scrape your car in the morning. That's fine by me. That snow, though,” she said, and scowled, shook her head. She hadn't yet looked at us, but held the glass coffee pot and stared at the cups as though they might move. She was waiting for us.

I said, “111 have pancakes and sausage. Short stack.”

“Same here,” Tom said. “And o.j.”

“Me too.”

She gave a short, hard nod, turned and stopped to fill three more customers' coffee cups before she made it back to the cook station.