“Are they gonna make a movie out of your book?”
He talked about that, too. Only then could he try to bring the conversation back to Evan Parker, though even as he did he wasn’t sure it was worth the effort. These two might live in the Parker house, but so what? It wasn’t as if they’d ever met him.
“So my old student grew up here,” he finally said.
“That family was in this house from the time it was built. They owned the quarry. You probably passed the quarry, driving here.”
“I think I did.” He nodded. “Must have been a wealthy family.”
“Back then, sure,” said Betty. “But not for a long time. We got a little grant from the state to help with the restoration. We just had to agree to put it on the Christmas house tour when we were finished.”
Jake looked around. There was nothing he’d seen since coming inside that merited the word “restoration.”
“That sounds fun!”
Sylvia made an unhappy noise.
Betty said, “Sure, a hundred strangers stomping through your rooms, trailing snow. But we took the money, so we kept up our side of the bargain. Lot of people around West Rutland were dying to see the inside of this house, and that was nothing to do with the work we’d done. People knew this house their whole lives. And the family.”
Sylvia said, “That family had the worst luck.”
There it was again, that phrase, only by now it didn’t strike Jake as all that surprising. By now he had the relevant information: all four of them had died, Evan Parker and his sister and their parents, three of the four of them under this very roof. He supposed they were collectively deserving of the term “worst luck.”
“I didn’t know he’d died, till recently,” said Jake. “Actually, I still don’t know how.”
“Overdose,” Sylvia said.
“Oh no. I didn’t know he had that problem.”
“Nobody did. Or at least that he still had the problem.”
“I shouldn’t say this,” said Betty, “but my sister was in a certain anonymous group with Evan Parker. It met in the basement of the Lutheran church in Rutland. And he was a longtime member of that group, if you take my meaning.” She paused. “Lot of very shocked people.”
“He was in trouble with his business, we heard,” said Sylvia with a shrug. “That kind of pressure, it’s probably not surprising he picked up again. And owning a bar when you’re sober, that couldn’t have been fun.”
“People do it, though,” Betty said. “He managed it for years. Then I guess he stopped managing.”
“Ayuh.”
No one said anything for a moment.
“So you bought the house from Evan’s estate?”
“Not exactly. He had no will, but his sister, the one who’d died earlier, she had a kid. Her kid was the heir. Not the sentimental type, that one.”
“Oh no?” Jake said.
“She must’ve waited all of a week after her uncle died to put it on the market. The shape the place was in.” Sylvia shook her head. “If it hadn’t been for this one, nobody’d have come near it. Fortunately for her, Betty always loved this place.”
“I used to think it was haunted, when I was a little kid,” Betty confirmed.
“We made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.” Sylvia got up to lift another cat off the kitchen counter. “Or I guess we did. We never met her in person. Just dealt with the attorney.”
“That was no cakewalk,” said Betty. “He was supposed to get all the crap down in the basement cleared out.”
“And the attic. And half the rooms had stuff in them. I don’t know how many times we wrote to that joker, Gaylord.”
“Gaylord, Esquire,” Betty rolled her eyes.
“That guy,” said Sylvia, grinning. “He put that Esquire on everything. Like, we get it. You went to law school. Insecure much?”
“Finally we told him we were having it all sent to the dump if she didn’t come and take it away. No answer! So that’s what we did.”
“Wait, so you just threw everything out?”
He had allowed himself to imagine, for one tantalizing moment, that there was a box of Evan Parker’s manuscript pages, still somewhere beneath this roof. But that was quickly dashed.
“We kept the old bed. Beautiful four-poster. Probably couldn’t have gotten it out if we wanted to.”
“Which we didn’t!” Betty said with satisfaction.
“And there were a couple of nice rugs we sent out to get cleaned. Probably for the first time in a century. The rest, we got in a hauler and sent the bill to Mr. Gaylord, Esquire. I bet you’ll be shocked to learn it never got paid.”
“I mean, if my family had a house for a hundred and fifty years I’d be going through every inch of it. Even if she didn’t care about, y’know, the ‘antiques,’ you’d think she’d want her own things. Everything you grew up with? Just throw it all away, sight unseen?”
“Wait,” said Jake. “The niece grew up here too? In this house?”
He was trying to understand the order of events, but it all seemed to resist him, somehow. Evan’s parents had lived and died here, and then his sister had lived here and raised her own daughter here, and then, after his sister died and his niece departed—out of there, as Sally the barfly had put it—Evan had moved back in? It might be slightly confusing, but he supposed none of it was greatly surprising. At the end of the day, this house gave Jake a visual backdrop for Evan Parker’s irrelevant childhood, and, he supposed, for the final years of his life. But it didn’t explain anything else.
He thanked them. He had them write down their address for the signed book. “Should I send one for your sister, too?”
“Are you shitting me? Yes!”
They were behind him when he walked back down the hall, toward the front door. He stopped to put his coat back on. Then he looked up.
Around the inside of the front door was a clarion call from the old house’s distant past: a frieze of faded paint depicting a chain of pineapples. Pineapples. It caught him and let him go, then it caught him again, and held. Five above the door frame. Ten at least on either side, descending almost to the floor. They had been preserved in a strip of negative space, around which the rest of the wall had been repainted that Pepto-Bismol pink.
“Oh my god,” he said out loud.
“I know.” Sylvia was shaking her head. “So tacky. Betty wouldn’t let me paint over them. We had the biggest fight.”
“It’s a stencil,” said Betty. “I saw the same thing once at Sturbridge Village, just like this. Pineapples all around the door and up around the tops of the walls. It goes back to when the house was built, I’m positive.”
“We compromised. I had to leave a strip unpainted. It looks crazy.”
It did look crazy. It was also one of the only things left under this roof that might have deserved the word “restoration.” Had it been, in any sense, restored.
Sylvia said: “I’m going to touch it up, eventually. I mean, look at the colors. So faded! If we have to keep it at least I can overpaint them. Honestly, every time I look at my door I think, why would anybody put pineapples on their walls? This is Vermont, not Hawaii! Why not an apple or a blackberry? They actually grow here!”
“It means hospitality,” Jake heard himself say. He had not been able to look away from them, the faded chain of them, because he was reeling. All of those disparate pieces spun around him, refusing to land.
“What?”
“Hospitality. It’s a symbol. I don’t know why.”
He had read it somewhere. He knew exactly where.
For a long moment, none of them said a thing. What was there to say? And why hadn’t it occurred to him, way back in his office in Richard Peng Hall, that Parker’s first attempt at a novel would probably describe the people he’d known best, in the house they’d once shared? It was the biggest cliché of all that a writer’s first book was autobiographicaclass="underline" my childhood, my family, my horrible school experience. His own The Invention of Wonder was autobiographical, of course it was, and yet Jake had denied Evan Parker even this token courtesy in the fellowship of writers. Why?