Page 6 of Upstate
Looking up at the towering barn with its thousands of books, it occurs to me that tackling an insurmountable task after a tragic loss perfectly fits the playbook of my life. My distress was so acute after Mom died it drove me to self-harm; somehow, though, I kept putting one foot in front of the other until I looked up from my misery to realize I’d graduated high school at the top of my class. After my father passed away, I finished all the projects he’d left undone in the house even though nothing mattered in a world without him. I started writing Dad’s Apprentice the same month I sold the house he left me, doggedly transforming my private pain into a praised publication. The enormous task of dragging this dormant business into the ecommerce age just about matches the size of my grief over losing David.
“I’m up for seeing the house, at least.”
“All right, then,” Rhonda says. I follow her up the slope from the lower barn and across the lawn to the house. She pauses outside the screen door to the kitchen. “The house was winterized when Evelyn went to the nursing home, but I had a handyman come over to get the well pump restarted. He checked the plumbing and tested the furnace, too. It’s not fancy, Audrey, but it’s a charmer.”
To say the kitchen isn’t fancy is an understatement. A porcelain sink is dropped into a wood counter that looks like it was built as a shop class project. I assume the vintage stove connects to the rusty propane tank I saw outside. An olive-green refrigerator is inconveniently hidden in the pantry. When I flip the light switch, a sconce flickers on, then sputters out. There are no wall cabinets, no dishwasher, no vent hood, no overhead lighting. I spent enough summers apprenticed to my dad’s contracting business to know that the kitchen needs more than an update. It needs to be gutted.
On the other hand, the floors are wide-plank pine, their pumpkin patina intact. The antique glass in the six-over-six windows is authentically wavy. Hand-hewn beams crisscross the low ceiling, while a steep back staircase evokes New York’s old Dutch days. At the far end of the kitchen, there’s a wingback chair on the bluestone hearth of a huge fireplace. I can see myself sitting there as the logs blaze.
I trail Rhonda into the dining room, where floor-to-ceiling shelves sag under the weight of even more books. Below a pendant lamp with a schoolhouse shade, prints and maps and catalogs are scattered across a harvest table. Rhonda tells me this is where Evelyn conducted her business when it got too cold to sit out in the barn.
“Did customers come to the house?”
“No. Like I said, Red Barn Books was a mail-order shop in the offseason. Evelyn was an exceptionally confident woman, but she was cautious about inviting people into her home.”
Next, Rhonda shows me a living room with fancy millwork and tall windows dappled green by the trees out front. There’s a secretary desk, the drawers of which I imagine are stuffed with secrets, and a marble-manteled fireplace flanked by built-ins filled with books. With a squint of my eyes, I can picture the Christmases of years gone by, a tinseled tree just there in the corner and a row of knit stockings at the ready for ol’ Saint Nick.
In the foyer, beside the front door with its big brass hinges and egg-shaped handle, a formal staircase with delicate balusters curves upward. As we ascend, an image comes to me of a woman in a whalebone corset and bustle skirt, her lace-gloved hand gliding along the rail. The fantasy continues in the front bedroom, where Emily Dickinson would have felt at home with its floral wallpaper and iron bed frame. Next, we walk through what Rhonda calls a second bedroom, though it’s really more like a wide hallway—perfect for an office, with paired windows offering a bright view across the lawn. A gate keeps us from tripping down those steep back stairs on our way to the third bedroom, which is over the kitchen wing. With its slanted ceiling painted sky blue, I figure it must have once belonged to a little boy.
Rhonda claims the bathroom was installed around 1960, but the fixtures must have been salvaged, because the clawfoot tub with its retrofit shower looks more Victorian than midcentury. The taps all gush clean water when I turn them, though, and the toilet flushes just fine, too. I climb a stepstool in the linen closet, lift a hatch in the ceiling, and poke my head into the attic, where slats of light filter through a screened gable vent. The vermiculite insulation is dotted with bat droppings, but the water stains on the underside of the roof look like they dried out decades ago.
Back in the foyer, I twist the thermostat before Rhonda and I clomp down to the basement. The floor is hardpacked dirt and the air is musty, but there’s no mold or rot in the beams. I see a flame burning through the inspection window of the furnace, then place my hand on one of the metal ducts to feel the whoosh of warm air. Rhonda points out the water heater and the pressure tank for the well pump and a washing machine that she admits is broken. There’s a limestone utility sink that looks as old as the house’s foundation, but instead of the knob-and-tube wiring I feared, neatly stapled Romex leads to a modern electrical panel.
Emerging from the basement, I understand why the listing was kept off Zillow. A house like this would have been snapped up in a second by someone with plans for an Architectural Digest–inspired renovation, the kind where the clawfoot tub is replaced by some jetted monstrosity and a cathedral-ceilinged addition is built for a gourmet kitchen with Carrara countertops and a six-burner stove. Anyone can see the bones are good, the historic charm intact, the design perfect in its simplicity. I may be looking at it through rose-colored glasses, but there’s no faking how the house makes me feel: like I, too, could travel back in time to a spring morning when my mother was still alive, a summer afternoon before my dad passed away, a winter month before David died.
Rhonda opens the front door. Outside, we stand far enough apart to remove our masks. “So, what do you think of the house, Audrey?”
Looking up at the façade, it’s obvious the exterior could use a fresh coat of paint, but the Doric pilasters are elegant as ever and none of the dentils along the frieze are missing.
“I think it’s a fine example of a Greek Revival farmhouse, Rhonda.”
“You seemed to know what you were looking for in the basement,” she says.
“My dad owned a contracting business, so I’m pretty familiar with old houses.”
“That’ll come in handy. You’re a good candidate as far as the bookshop goes, too, being an English professor and a writer yourself.”
I don’t recall mentioning my profession; it makes sense, though, that Rhonda would have vetted me as a potential buyer. Between my socials and the college website and the online reviews of my memoir, I’m pretty much an open book.
“You mentioned having a lot of interest?” I ask, trying not to sound too interested myself.
“I showed the place twice yesterday, I’ve got a virtual showing this afternoon with a buyer in Los Angeles, and two more appointments scheduled for tomorrow.” Rhonda raises an unruly eyebrow. “Tell me, Audrey, what do you want to do?”
When I first saw the listing, this whole place—house, barn, business, acres—seemed like a steal for three hundred and fifty thousand. Now I know why it’s priced within reach. The house needs a complete overhaul. The state of the business is a mystery. The land is mostly wild. It’s ridiculous to even consider tackling it all on my own.
I force myself to be realistic for a minute. Yes, I’m desperate to get out of the city, but what I should be looking for is a little place in the Hudson Valley close enough to commute to the college. The campus where I work may not be what I envisioned for myself, but the promise of lifelong academic employment is the golden ring every literary writer with an MFA is grasping for. Instead of impulsively buying an abandoned business, I should focus on finishing the sequel to my memoir. Promotion applications are due in September. Without a new book in print, my journey toward tenure will run out of track, like one of those silent movies where a chugging train falls into a canyon after villains have dynamited the bridge.
What I ought to do is as clear as a newspaper headline, but I know in my gut that forcing myself to write about my mother’s suicide while grieving my husband’s death is more likely to lead to a breakdown than earn me a promotion. The future I was building with David has already imploded. I might as well light the fuse on my last link to the past.
“Well, Rhonda, I think I’d like to make an offer.”
Chapter 5
January 1, 2015
Schuywich, New York
My darling Evelyn,
