The Tell (44 page)

H
OWARDS
E
ND
, by E. M. Forster, begins with a letter describing the house at center of the novel: “It isn't going to be what we expected. It is old and little, and altogether delightful—red brick.... From hall you go right or left into dining-room or drawing-room. Hall itself is practically a room. You open another door in it, and there are the stairs going up in a sort of tunnel to the first floor. Three bed-rooms in a row there, and three attics in a row above.”

The descriptions have a clipped cadence like excited footsteps that take me into this “altogether delightful” house, rushing me from room to room to get the layout. Now I stand outside for a full view as the letter continues: “Then there's a very big wych-elm—to the left as you look up—leaning a little over the house, and standing on the boundary between the garden and the meadow. I quite love that tree already.” With this, a picture of the setting, inside and out, begins to build in my mind, and becomes the vivid physical world in which the characters—and readers—live.

When I am writing, my senses are on alert. A certain light falling over my desk becomes the light coming in through a character's bedroom window, and the smell of cooking from my kitchen uncovers a memory for another. Because much of
The Tell
occurs within Mira and Owen's spectacular and problematic Victorian, I found myself, in writing the book, returning to novels in which houses have the power to assure, unsettle, and reveal character. In Kazuo Ishiguro's
The Remains of the Day
, Stevens, the austere and scrupulous butler of Darlington Hall, recalls “distinctly climbing to the second landing and seeing before me a series of orange shafts from the sunset breaking the gloom of the corridor where each bedroom door stood ajar.” In this moody and unusual light, he accepts the fact of his father's decline.

    “Because much of
The Tell
occurs within Mira and Owen's spectacular and problematic Victorian, I found myself, in writing the book, returning to novels in which houses have the power to assure, unsettle, and reveal character.”

In Richard Ford's
Independence Day
, Frank, a realtor, visits his on-and-off-again girlfriend. When he arrives at her house, he finds that “Sally's is a place of peculiar unease on account of its capacity to create a damned unrealistic, even scary, illusion of the future …” He sees in the details of “bulky oak paneling, pocket doors and thick chair rails” a “false promise.” He understands the ability of houses to fulfill or deny our expectations—when his continue to waver.

The structures in which we live—and have lived—reflect us. Their walls are what we wake and fall asleep within. Their closets hide us; their windows give us a view to the outside world, and let the world view us in return. Their history exists before we move in and continues after we move out. The paint spill, like something from a crime scene, on the back stairs of the house I grew up in is still an enticing mystery to me. The way the wind slams my office door in summer thrills me. I trip over the hall rug but never move it. I imagine who sat where I am sitting now, who looked out this same dusty window onto the yard.

On first seeing Tom's house in
The Great Gatsby
, Nick says, “A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.” Illumination and levitation reflect Nick's exhilaration. Houses are indifferent to the lives within them, but in how we love, hate, care for or ignore them, they are reflections of ourselves—and our characters. They hold and recall lost time; they are for all of us estates of memory and intention.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.

A
LSO BY
H
ESTER
K
APLAN

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Cover design by Archie Ferguson

Cover photograph © Gary Buss © Getty Images

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THE TELL
. Copyright © 2013 by Hester Kaplan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-218402-3

EPub Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780062184030

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