The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (18 page)

The house, which was painted a dark brown, stood at the end of a short grass-grown drive, its front so veiled in the showering gold-green foliage of two ancient weeping willows that Vance could only catch, here and there, a hint of a steep roof, a jutting balcony, an aspiring turret. The facade, thus seen in trembling glimpses, as if it were as fluid as the trees, suggested vastness, fantasy and secrecy.

Everything about the front was irregular, but with an irregularity unfamiliar to him. The shuttered windows were very tall and narrow, and narrow too the balconies, which projected at odd angles, supported by ornate wooden brackets. One corner of the house rose into a tower with a high shingled roof, and arched windows which seemed to simulate the openings in a belfry. A sort of sloping roof over the front door also rested on elaborately ornamented brackets, and on each side of the steps was a large urn of fluted iron painted to imitate stone, in which some half-dead geraniums languished.

The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. Walking south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot. The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long ago darkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda ; oak trees kept the sun away.

There was a drive, always covered with gravel, that swept around in a beautiful curve and brought you up under a big porte-cochere, which reminded you of horses with fly-nets, and shiny and black closed carriages; and the house, which was yellow and covered with shingles that overlapped with rounded ends like scales, was an impressive though rather formless mass of cupolas with foolscap tops, dormers with diamond panes, balconies with little white railings and porches with Ionic columns, all pointing in different directions.

In front were the dark green glassy waters of an unvisited backwater; and beyond them a bright lawn set with many walnut trees and a few great chestnuts, well lit with their candles, and to the left of that a low white house with a green dome rising in its middle and a veranda whose roof of hammered iron had gone verdigris colour with age and the Thames weather. This was the Monkey Island Inn.

The university capped a then bleak hill, its buildings evoking the cultural aspirations of a faraway Europe of a distant past. The centerpiece was the baroque Hall of Languages, built of stones of two colors and partly covered with ivy. Behind it, a bit to the west, stood the gymnasium, as Gothic as a temple of sweat could hope to be, of dark brick, with high windows. Also to the west was the university library, later to become the administration building. Farther still to the west and south, on another rise overlooking the city, was the dark Gothic cathedral-like spire of Crouse College, in which Fine Arts were housed. Wooden walkways, some of them dilapidated, ran between these buildings.

It sat on a shelf between our lane and the creek, a little higher than the rest of the bottomland. Its board-and-batten sides and its shake roof were weathered silvery as an old rock. To me it has an underwater look—that barnacled sil- veriness, the way three big live oaks twisted like seaweed above the roof, the still, stained, sunken light.

At the far end of a scrubby courtyard was a sooty brick building, the shape of Monticello on the back of the nickel, a domed roof but with one difference: this one had a chimney at the rear belching greasy smoke. It was too squat, too plain, too gloomy for a church.

The outlines of the house of Dr. Trescott had faded quietly into the evening, hiding a shape such as we call Queen Anne against the pall of the blackened sky.

She was right about the guest house: it wasn’t to everyone’s taste. It was stubby and ill-proportioned, made of stucco in a pale shade of pinkish-gray, with the wooden trim and shutters at its windows painted lavender. Upstairs, at one end of it, French doors led out onto an abbreviated balcony that was overgrown with leafy vines, and from the balcony a frivolous vine-entangled spiral staircase descended to a flagstone terrace at what proved to be the front door. If you stepped back on the grass to take it all in with a single searching glance, the house had a lopsided, crudely fanciful look, like something drawn by a child with an uncertain sense of the way a house ought to be.

The architects of the Knox Building had wasted no time in trying to make it look taller than its twenty stories, with the result that it looked shorter. They hadn’t bothered trying to make it handsome, either, and so it was ugly: slab-sided and flat-topped, with a narrow pea-green cornice that jutted like the lip of a driven stake.

Through trees, Jeremy saw the facades of houses, all new, almost all in good taste—elegant and witty pastiches of Lutyens manor houses, of Little Trianons, of Monticellos; light-hearted parodies of Le Corbusier’s solemn machines-for-living-in; fantastic adaptations of Mexican haciendas and New England farms.