Houses retain traces of the people who have lived in them and I feel those traces immediately whenever I step into one. When Susan and Kate and I looked at the few houses within our price range in Enon, there were times when my stomach soured and my head ached before I had walked through two rooms. A given house would seem like a repository of misery, a deliberate prison in which successions of families had huddled and cowered from one another for decades. It seemed criminal for the real estate agents to talk up such miserable wrecks, as if they could ever be homes again for reasonable, peaceable souls, as if they should not have been demolished and the land on which they stood rededicated in special, purgative ceremonies. The agitation I felt in those tomblike buildings felt like contagion, as if the frequency and amplitude of the woe vibrating through the boards and pipes and wires of the house immediately began to affect the synapses in my brain and interrupt the beat of my heart. Susan experienced this, too, and the two of us passed silly, exaggerated looks behind the real estate agent’s back as we allowed her to give us the complete tour, having agreed after the first time this had happened that we were too self-conscious to stop the agent short because the house had bad vibes. Susan would squinch her nose, as if she smelled turned milk; I’d hunch my shoulders and limp like Quasimodo; she’d put her hand to her mouth and nod a couple times, miming laughter; I’d raise a fist and tilt my head, roll my eyes back and loll my tongue, mimicking the hopeless father who had hanged himself in the basement.
KATE AND I SOMETIMES took walks along the Enon Canal. We reached the canal by a dirt access road that ran between my old friend Peter Lord’s house and the estate of a widow named Hale. I had met Mrs. Hale twice. The first time was when Pete and I were boys, maybe eleven or twelve, and had been sledding down the hill on her property, which was called Hale’s Hill and was the third-highest hill in the village, and the highest down which a sled could be run. We had not asked permission to be on her property. She must have seen us from one of the third-story windows of her mansion, just visible over the east slope of the hill. When we saw her marching across the deep snow toward us, we thought she was coming to scold us. Being brought up in Enon, neither of us had the inclination to run away. We were well used to taking scoldings from elderly women. Mrs. Hale was tiny, barely five feet, and as lean as rope.
When she was within a few yards of us she said, “You sled like girls.”
She reached us and grabbed Pete’s sled from him.
“This is how you do it,” she said. She dropped the sled, knelt, and lay belly down on it, face-first.
“Push,” she said. I leaned down and took the sled by the backs of its runners and inched it toward the brink of the hill.
“A real shove,” she said. “Shove me right down the thing.” So I gave her a heave and down she went. The snow was packed and hard where we’d been making our runs, so it was like an ice chute. Mrs. Hale went down the hill as fast as if she were on a luge. There was a swamp at the bottom, full of trees and shrubs, and we always bailed off our sleds before the ends of our runs, so that we would not be dashed against a tree or shredded up in the briars. Mrs. Hale must have seen us flopping off our sleds before we hit the swamp and been galled by it because, when she hit the bottom of the hill at near-Olympic speed, she simply rocketed ahead. We lost sight of her past the tree line, but we heard the racket of the sled as it clattered among the trunks and frozen tules. We ran after her, convinced that she lay broken and dead, headfirst among the bulrushes and alders. But before we were halfway down the hill, she staggered out of the swamp, dragging the sled behind her, hat askew. She stomped up to us and handed Pete the tether.
“That is how you sled,” she said and limped away back to her big house behind the hill.
The second time I met Mrs. Hale I went to her house with my grandfather to fix one of her clocks. Her house was the sort about which I have always had dreams. Maybe hers is the house that prompted them.
When my grandfather was alive, and whenever I had a hard time during college making enough money to pay rent or bills or to buy groceries, he paid me to help him with his clock-repair business. He had been a machinist at a shoemaking factory for years when he’d been young and then taught mechanical drawing at the vocational school the next town over. He cut new gears for broken clocks in his basement workshop and used a slide rule. I had no aptitude for numbers and was useless when it came to making real mechanical repairs. But I had a pretty good feel for taking the works apart and finding out what was wrong and then putting them back together and oiling the pinions after my grandfather had done the skilled work and I had cleaned everything in an ammonia bath in the ultrasonic cleaner.
Whenever I worked for him, my grandfather made me get to his house by seven in the morning. I’d find him at his kitchen table reading The Wall Street Journal, because he had a few shares in a couple of utility companies, and my grandmother clearing his breakfast plate and coffee cup.
“Behold!” he cried when he saw me. “The flower of Enon village!” I groaned, sleepy, and tried to smile. He folded his paper and rose from his seat and said to my grandmother, “Well, never mind the wood, Mother.”
I finished, “Father’s coming home with a load,” and we all laughed and my grandfather and I went down to the basement and went to work, him at his old school desk that, in order to get it into his basement, he’d had to cut into pieces and reassemble, and me at the workbench, puzzling out the guts of a carriage clock.
One morning I found my grandfather already dressed in his windbreaker and Greek fisherman’s cap.
“Leave us go, Lucky Pierre,” he said.
“Where?”
“We are going to Mrs. Hale’s house,” he said. “She has a tall clock she wants looked at.” Whenever a customer had a grandfather’s, or tall, clock that needed repairing, my grandfather made a house call to see if he could fix the problem at the home, so the clock’s works would not have to be removed from the case and transported.
My grandfather and I drove to Mrs. Hale’s in his station wagon. We brought a stepladder and a tackle box and an old leather physician’s bag full of tools. As we came around the last turn in the driveway, the house rose and spread across the view in front of us. My grandfather whistled.
“I guess you know what she spends her time doing,” he said.
“What?”
“Counting her money.” I pulled the stepladder and tackle box out of the back of the car, and my grandfather took the physician’s bag. We walked to the main door and my grandfather lifted the brass knocker — a pheasant — and tapped the rhythm to “Shave and a Haircut.” One of the things of which my grandmother remained most proud her whole life was that my grandfather had never used the service entrance to any home where he did work. “He always used the front door,” she said many times.
Mrs. Hale, as slight and lean as I remembered, with her white hair pulled back, appeared in one of the sidelights. She did not acknowledge us and vanished from the window. A moment later, she appeared around a far corner of the house off to our left.
“Come through here,” she called.
She showed us into a hallway that seemed to connect two wings of the house. “Good morning, Mr. Crosby. Haven’t had that front door open in years. This one is closer to the clock anyway.”
Mrs. Hale led us into the main part of the house, past elegant, dimmed rooms and long hallways to a broad, uncarpeted wooden stairway. The clock stood on a landing halfway up the stairs. It was seven feet tall and wholly without ornament. Its hood was a simple, beautifully constructed box of wood and leaded glass. Its dial was ivory white with slender Arabic numerals painted around its circumference and nothing else, no illuminations, no decorations. Its case was narrow and plain, the wood seasoned and dull with age.