Dream House (34 page)

Gina felt at ease with Annie now and knew she wouldn't hold back her questions. “Annie, why do you think Mom never talked about Bill Holloway being Sid's father? And how did Bill end up with Fran, anyway? Cassie and I were sure it was Mom who was in love with Bill.”

The admission seemed to suck up what little air was in the garden. Annie turned abruptly, apparently forgetting she was holding the hose. It soaked the front of her skirt, but she seemed not to notice. “Well, yes. She was in love. With Bill. Bill and Ellie were great pals and sailed together every weekend. But . . . Bill was with your Aunt Fran, and when she got pregnant . . . Oh golly. I feel like the town crier.” Gina smiled to let her know it was okay to go on. Annie shifted around the garden, keeping her back to Gina. “When your grandpa found out Fran was pregnant, he told her he'd give her Lily House if she and Bill got engaged. Then, when she was five months along and Bill's plane was shot down, the stuffy Holloways, who never approved of Fran, asked that the whole affair—meaning Sid—be kept unattached to their family name. So, Fran had to invent a runaway father for her own baby. Your mother must have been devastated by Bill's death, too, but what could she do? She'd been in love with her sister's man. She just stowed her sadness away somewhere, I suppose.”

Gina pictured Bill Holloway, who'd shown up so often in her
mother's photograph collection. Even until recently, her mother's feelings for Bill had surfaced with a discomforting freshness, as though her love for him had been flash-frozen, preserved at its peak by Bill's untimely death.

“So do you think Dad was just sort of a port in the storm for Mom, after Bill died?”

“Oh, no. Well, let's see. Honestly? I can't say. But . . . it wasn't like your parents had a shotgun wedding.” The words themselves popped like gunfire. “Cassie wasn't planned, but I'm quite sure your mother and father were headed for the altar anyway.”

Gina was so taken aback by Annie's candor that she almost laughed. Her parents had never discussed Cassie's unplanned birth; it'd been only a murmur between Cassie and Gina—The Legend of Cassandra the Witch, To Be Born on Halloween! Annie must not have realized Gina's mother had never told her and Cassie the truth.

Annie said, “Ellie had a thing for Bill, it's true, but Bill was . . . well, for lack of a better word, a
playboy.
I like to think there came a time when your mother understood that he wouldn't have made the best family man. But you know, when someone dies young, tragically like that, it's easy to romanticize. Your mother moved on with her life for the most part. But Fran . . .” Annie shook her head. “She was
stuck
and no one seemed to be able to help her.”

Silently, Gina tried to piece together the parts of the family story she
hadn't
heard through the walls of houses.

“Annie, how did Fran die? How'd she do it?”

Annie had put down the hose and began fastidiously snipping the blades of grass that leaned into her flowerbed. “Pills,” she said. “Quick and painless, not messy.” She smacked a mosquito on her leg. “That poor kid. What a life. You know that Sid lived with your parents for a little while when he was a boy?”

Gina nodded. “Cassie told me. But Mom never mentioned it.”

Annie shook her head. “So much shame back then. Fran took too many pills that time, too. Sid found her on the kitchen floor after school.” She sat back on her heels and wiped her brow. “Anyway, your parents loved having Sid living with them. He was very upset about having to leave your place when Fran came out of the hospital, which of course made things between Ellie and Fran just terrible. You'd think Fran would have been grateful, but she was very jealous of Sid's affection for Ellie. Sid was a born sailor, like his father Bill, and Ellie took him out every chance she got.”

She stood to turn off the hose and brushed by Gina, giving her a pat on the head. “Be right back,” she said, going inside.

Gina felt glued to the stoop, weighted by all she'd learned. She pondered how shared feelings could pull people closer, or, left unaddressed, like a misplaced or forgotten line in a drawing, could change the course of lives. There were no blueprints for a human life, no architect to pore over details that would ensure a sound and enduring structure. When a house was designed, it was imperative that every line tell the truth: the thickness of plywood, the width of a beam, the spacing of rebar. Since each dimension affected every part of the structure, one wrong line in a drawing would send a ripple of error through the entire project, resulting in a cacophony of complaints from contractors, clients, building inspectors. Everything would have to be adjusted to accommodate the untruth; otherwise, a costly correction would later have to be made.

When it came to human lives, corrections were only occasionally made; life grew around a secret like skin around a splinter.

How might everything have been different for her mother had Fran not become pregnant with Bill Holloway's child? Sid's birth and secret paternity had torn up the landscape of her mother's, Fran's,
and Sid's lives. Her mother's own unplanned pregnancy had spawned a marriage, a child, then another child, followed by a lifetime of wondering how things might have been different.

Gina had been her mother once, both blessed by and chained to her body's potential to conceive. That August, every day she didn't bleed felt like her future burning down like a matchstick. Like her mother and Fran, she'd hidden the injury of a mistake to avoid shame, never telling Cassie or anyone else about Mark's pressing her into Cassie's bed. The day before she left for school, she awoke with her period. She sobbed and put on a sunny yellow halter top, as if to reclaim her imperiled girlhood. She imagined she was lucky—that her fear and pain had been carried away in her blood, and she never stopped to think what she'd have done if she'd been unlucky.

After Mark, there were more Marks—cocky, mysterious, unreliable men, never
nice
enough to remind her of her father's passivity and weakness. Eventually, in Paul, she found the qualities her more mature self craved in a partner, and the passion, too. Perhaps she'd finally learned, or had just been lucky again.

But what if she'd been
unlucky
that summer and like her mother and Fran, hadn't had the choice of ending her pregnancy? She couldn't have lived in disgrace under her parents' roof and couldn't have stayed with Mark. Perhaps under the circumstances, she would've reconsidered the spark she didn't feel with Kit, would've decided his passionate feelings for her and kindness were enough. Would they have built a family together only later to find out that Kit preferred “being on my own?” Or, would they both have discovered that family life was fulfilling, even without mutual passion?

Perhaps this was what Annie and Lester had been saying to Gina: that love had many faces and formulas and could be built even on an uncertain foundation; that although Cassie was unplanned, there
was nothing accidental about the way Eleanor and Ron had raised their girls. Through hardship and mental illness, they'd nurtured their family—imperfectly, but with determination and pride. And love, albeit a love that was wrapped in thorns and stewed in tears.

When her parents dropped her off for her last year at Andrews, Gina got out of the car and her mother stared at her wistfully, as if taking her in for the first time, or the last, or as if presaging that Gina would never live at home again. Gina shut the car door gently so it wouldn't feel like a slam. Still, as they drove off, she saw her mother hang her head.

How would it feel to have one door after another slammed in your face? Perhaps, after a while, if one were a fighter—and her mother surely was—one would punch at anything that looked potentially harmful. Even or maybe especially, the love of a good man or the voices of independent daughters.

Now, it was Gina who rested her head in her hands. Perhaps compassion, even when it came too late, was close enough to forgiveness.

Annie pushed through the screen door with two glasses of iced tea. She handed one to Gina and sat on the step next to her. “I wonder what Sid will do to the house,” she said. “All the things your mother always wanted to do, probably.”

This prospect was painful for Gina. “It should be a basic human right to change your living space as your life and family change. Mom and Dad never had that chance.”

“Yes,” Annie said. “They changed it in little ways. But your mother had such dreams for the house. ‘Our little piece of heaven,' she called it. She would never have survived not living on the water. She and your dad wanted to buy it, you know.”

Surprised by how happy Annie's words had made her, Gina asked, “Why didn't they?”

Annie sighed. “Money. Your mother never gave up hope that they'd find the Washington letters here and then they'd be able to sell the house and everything in it. When she finally sold it to the Historical Society, there wasn't enough money to buy your house and pay your school tuition, too. Ellie and Ron knew what their priorities were! Well, and they were able to buy that beautiful boat,
Homeward.
”

Annie stood and turned on the hose, directing it at her bare feet. “Ahh, this is just what I needed,” she said. She turned it off again, and the plumbing whined. Taking the shears from her pocket, she leaned to cut a bouquet of zinnias and handed them to Gina. “Happy birthday!”

“Annie!” Delighted, Gina stood and gave her a big hug. “How did you know?”

“A little birdie told me. Zinnias are your favorite, right? You used to come and pick them at our old house when you were very little—before you were even in school, I think.”

A gust of wind, like a stranger, entered the garden. Annie craned her neck to look at the sky. “I don't know why I even bothered to water,” she said. “It smells like rain.”

Annie left for the hospital at noon. Gina ate lunch and called Paul to tell him she was delaying her return by a day, but she couldn't get through; she supposed he was already on his way to Point Reyes with the kids, and out of range. She stripped all the beds and put the sheets in the washing machine. Moving slowly in the heat, she did a thorough cleaning of the kitchen. Then, she drove Lester's car to the big supermarket in Riversport to stock up on groceries.

When she returned to Lily House, Annie wasn't yet home. She tried Paul again, but still no luck.

At last, she seemed to have a window of time to finish the drawings of her family's house. She had a snack and went to the desk, where she laid out a sheet for the second-floor plan. From her measurements, she drew the four bedrooms and bathroom, then stood back to evaluate. Something looked not quite right. Usually when she made as-built drawings, there were a few conflicting measurements that required some head scratching or a second visit to a house, but she hadn't expected this with a house she knew so well. She untaped the plan from the table, spread out the drawing of the first floor and aligned the second-floor plan over it. There was a knot of disagreeing lines in the area where the maid's stair connecting Cassie's room to the kitchen had been removed and the pantry added. She tried to recreate in her mind the inches of space that weren't accounted for in her lines. Once, she remembered there had been a door to nowhere in Cassie's room that she'd opened as a child to discover a slot of leftover space in front of the wall studs framing the bathroom. Now, she recalled the feeling of her hand stretching into that cavity, a question forming in that dark, hidden place.

She sprang from her chair. She would need a hammer! She searched the drawers in Annie and Lester's kitchen, finding no tools. Remembering Annie's gardening equipment, she ran out to the garage only to realize she'd locked the padlock on the door before going to the hospital with Lester. She wandered through the rooms of Lily House, finally spotting a brass fireplace poker—it would be awkward, but would no doubt do the trick. She stuffed her measuring tape and pad of paper into her bag and was headed out with the poker when a car door slammed outside.

It was once thought that the physical environment determined the character of life. When that view collapsed, the natural reaction was to insist that environment had no consequence whatever. But each view rests on the fallacy of the other. Organism and environment interact; environment is both social and physical. One cannot predict the nature of a man from the landscape he lives in, but neither can one foretell what he will do or feel without knowing the landscape.

Kevin Lynch,
Site Planning

Chapter 14

Gina froze. She looked at her watch: six-thirty. Would the car be Annie, coming home for dinner? How would she slip unseen out of the house? She darted into the dining room to replace the poker, then peeked out the window at the driveway. There, wrinkled and sleepy, stumbling toward the porch from a rental car, was Ben. Gina dropped her bag, dashed outside and intercepted him on the porch.

“Happy birthday, Mom,” he croaked, throwing his arms around her waist. “We're here! That's your present!”

“You guys! I can't believe it!” Gina cried, struggling to shift gears.

Esther trailed behind Ben, waiting for Gina to greet her. Gina gently extricated herself from Ben's hug and wrapped her arms around her, taking in her bubble-gummy smell. How she'd missed her family's touch, their voices! So much had happened; three days had felt like three weeks.