Mrs. Hale said, “Master Crosby, you may turn the handle once or twice if you’d care to.” I looked at my grandfather.
“That means you,” he said. I stepped forward and grasped the handle.
“Clockwise,” Mrs. Hale said. I turned the crank and there was a pleasing resistance against it and as I found the right amount of pressure to use, the wheels and gears began to revolve. The machine was nearly silent. Its precision was such that the planets tilted and turned on their axes and their moons spun around them and all of the arms revolved around the diameter of the disks with a fine, low whir so apt I thought I could hear it harmonizing with the roar of the real universe. The earth and moon turned on a third disk, into which had been etched the seasons and night and day and the moon’s phases. As the arms and disks and spheres turned, I looked at my reflection in the brass sun and thought, This is a part of it, too — the ember in the pit, the clock’s lead heart, the brass sun in its corona of wires and gears and ivory moons.
“I suppose Harvard or some such place would like this someday,” Mrs. Hale sighed. She seemed about to say something else but left off. “What do I owe you for the clock?”
Every time I hiked past the house I imagined the old clock and orrery and the fantastic rooms. With Kate or by myself, I imagined sun-drenched salons with open double casement windows of leaded glass, some panes stained to pale summer tints that took up the tendrils of light twirling through the draperies of the linden trees outside; walnut libraries with first fires lit more against the idea of autumn frosts than their actual nick, in order to please and add comfort to the contemplation of books; hibernal innermost parlors at the heart of the house, with deep chairs set before small, hot fires, the heave of winter winds and piling snow telegraphing through the timbers, pointing up the good fortune of well-being; bare, clean, cold, high white rooms filled with sun and wide views of crocus beds and back lawns greening in the rain; the massive orrery, oiled and polished and potent, ready to replicate the symphonic whirlings of the pale minor bodies around our pale minor star.
That was the thing about Mrs. Hale’s house. It loomed so suggestively in my imagination and my dreams that its essence changed almost every time I thought about it. It seemed as if its nature, its architecture, had been made to accommodate those very whims, as if its very construction in fact required that, for example, the notion of the jeweled orange ember at the center of the house be transformed into the brass and ivory orrery, and that in turn converted into the next dream, all somehow having to do with the heart of my home village.
Mrs. Hale’s house prompted my deepest desires to provide for Kate, as well as my deepest resentments about wanting such material wealth. There were evenings when, returning from an afternoon walking along the canal, tired, hot, sweaty, thirsty from our hike, Kate and I would cross Mrs. Hale’s cracked and weed-shot tennis court and sit in the grass on the side of a rise overlooking the estate, a copse of darkening fir trees looming at the top of another rise to the right, and the house half sunk behind another rise on the left, beautiful in the oncoming dusk — dim, solid, so white it glowed blue in the gloom, huge, one or two windows lit and glowing the color of the wood of the floors and walls, the colors of the Persian carpets, the colors of the glass lamps that lit them. We’d sit and recline next to each other and the shadows would advance over our heads like a canopy and clouds would spread out over the sky from the west and Kate would braid stalks of grass and I’d watch the sky and point out the evening star and the crescent moon as it arced up from behind the dark firs and the bats would begin fluttering after insects and we’d each take one last sip of the last of the water in the canteen, tepid and metallic, holding some of the day’s earlier heat in it, and we’d cool off and rest a little beneath the wide pavilion of night before setting out for home. And I’d tell her about the secret clock and the secret solar system deep in the house, the solar system elegant and outrageous almost, almost indecent in its elaborations, almost, I could hear Mrs. Hale saying to my grandfather and me, ornamental, and the secret clock, elegant and simple and enduring and itself also almost ornamental, or worse, but worse because it was secret, because it was hidden away from everyone, but preserved, too, because it was hidden away from everyone (almost secret, I thought, because I know about it, and my grandfather did, and Kate knows about it now, too, but hasn’t seen it, hasn’t been into the inner rooms, the sanctum of the temple, and seen the ark, seen the actual wooden case hung with the simple mechanism and fitted with the simple, clear dial painted with the simple, clear unadorned black Arabic numbers and nothing else) and not donated to some Harvard and degraded to being another anonymous plank in its hoard of bric-a-brac, stuck in a corner of a room where faculty members and committees meet in order to resolve on more meetings and committees and faculty members and so maddeningly exclusive and precious both and incurably so. And the incurable pull inside me that Mrs. Hale’s house and the clock and the orrery exerted was impossible and yet so and sometimes even made me want to sob and I felt ashamed to be taking my daughter back to our little house, which seemed those times dingier and more poorly kept than ever, its table-tops piled with newspapers and bills and shoes and laundry and crumbs on the counter, its cheap, hand-me-down furniture, more like a den for little animals than a house for humans, and hot and stuffy instead of cool in the summer, and freezing and drafty instead of warm in the winter. And sometimes on those nights I lay awake in bed haunted by Mrs. Hale’s house, there in what felt like the dead center of the village, almost Enon’s essence itself but not quite, more its trope, its idiom, its veil, prosperous and merciful, bland and trivial, wicked and fallen, and I across the way in my little shack, alien, native, insomniac, and enthralled.
3
I USED TO WAKE UP BEFORE KATE AND SUSAN ON SUNDAY mornings. I’d get a pot of coffee going and fetch the Sunday paper from the end of the driveway, wondering each time why the delivery guy couldn’t just chuck it farther toward the back door. When it was warm, I’d pour a cup of strong coffee with some milk and sit outside at the table on the side deck, under the umbrella, in one of the cheapo, stackable green plastic chairs I’d bought on sale at a hardware store. I’d smoke a cigarette and flip through the paper, looking at the sports pages first, then the book section, then the real estate listings.
Kate would usually come down half an hour later, in sweat shorts and a three-quarter-sleeved baseball shirt, her hair snarled, her eyes a little puffed, with a sleepy half-smile. She’d plunk herself into the chair across from me and swivel sideways in the seat and dangle her legs over one armrest and lean her back against the other.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Hey, kid. How you doing?” She made little swimming kicks with her legs and yawned. I stopped myself from warning her about how tippy those crummy chairs were. She knew and I’d told her a hundred times and anyway she never once toppled in one.