Stories in the Old House, Part One

My mother’s house stands in the middle of the Awbury Arboretum, a 55-acre park at the edge of the Germantown area of Philadelphia, part of the inexplicable northwest section of the city that juts out from the rest of the metropolitan area like an axe handle. Riding the R7 train to the Washington Lane stop, one passes through North Philadelphia, with its sudden blank patches like exposed gums, crossing Wayne Avenue, until the line runs roughly parallel to Germantown Avenue, the arterial that connects Germantown with Mt. Airy before rising into sleepy, whitewashed Chestnut Hill.

Passing the Germantown stop, the train glides by a baseball field – dramatic at night, with the soft haze of lights on green grass – the stone steeple of the local Catholic church, and a couple of large lots rimmed with barbed wire. Then, suddenly, a stone wall edges against the tracks, and from the right side of the train passengers can see a line of green over the top of the weathered masonry. As the train begins to slide to a stop, the wall tapers down and then turns to the northeast, and the scenery opens up to reveal the rolling hill of a park.

After the squeal of the air brake and the settling of the stopped train, passengers disembarking get their first unobstructed view of the Awbury Arboretum, its open southwest section, with a pond at the near corner that sends out the round, throaty sounds of frogs. Once the train creeps away, the lights from the other side of the tracks lie across the entrance to the arboretum, two wooden poles with a chain across them to keep cars away. There are no lights inside the park, except for the orange lights of the houses at its center, sometimes visible through the tree line.

To get to my mother’s house, you walk into the park, go a few feet up the main arboretum road, and then turn off onto a poorly paved side path that rises up the southwest hill, sticking closely to the tree line on the right. Eventually the patchy asphalt disappears completely into the grass, leaving you to pick your way up the hill, bending around patches of brush.

The arboretum staff mow a circular path through the southwest portion of the park to clear the way for dog-walkers and other visitors, but otherwise the grass is left to grow as high as possible, blocking the view of the road and the bottom of the hill. As you pick your way up towards the houses on the top of the hill, the only hints of the city are occasional car horns from the street below, and the orange glow that hangs above you. You rarely meet anyone on the path, but if you did it would be in the kind of space one tries to avoid in the city: a spot without eyes, just two people meeting each other in the dark.

The actual path through the tree line is difficult to find; though the path itself opens up into a clear mouth, the darkness and the encroaching brush make it hard to make out on a night with less than perfect moonlight. Once you find the path, you still have to contend with the low, overhanging branches, a sudden, half-hidden gate, and a series of jutting rocks that can catch your feet. The path itself is narrow, only about two feet wide, and it curves right, toward the lights of the arboretum’s houses.

Over the last ten years or so of living in this house on and off, I’ve come and gone thousands of times, and I’ve come to believe that this way- rising up to the lawn from the southwest park, on a relatively moonless night – is the best way to arrive. Not that there isn’t something to be said for the curving road that passes the other Awbury houses, especially when riding with people who are coming up to the house for the first time. That way, the bulk of the house reveals itself only gradually, from behind the facades of the other houses, from the southeast side. The car slides in directly past the front door, so that the full height of the facade is hard to see; stopping in front of wide double doors of the entryway, the front light hangs over the stoop and casts a sickly, yellowish light. If ever a car ride up to a city house could feel gothic, this one does.

But riding in a car, and having the recent memory of Chew Avenue, with its delis and pizza places and Chinese restaurants full of stoned kids buying Phillies, takes something from the whole experience, and in the end I prefer the walk up through the Arboretum from the train for preserving the illusion of entering a Victorian ghost story. The southwest route – dark woods, a winding path, and finally the gentle roll of the lawn upwards to the front facade of the house, gray stone and myriad windows that sometimes resembles a spider’s face – usually makes me stop for a second at the final end of the wooded path, next to my stepfather’s sunflowers, just to look. Considering that the city is close enough to dimly hear the roll of traffic, its a weirdly cloistered piece of land, crowned by the most imposing house I have ever lived in.

When I came up the path to the house last month, I felt a double sense of strange isolation, stepping out onto the long unmowed grass and looking up at the wide windows of my old house. My parents moved out months ago, and since I’ve been transient recently, waiting for my apartment to open up and for my job to begin again after a summer lull, I decided to move in for a month and look after the place. I had been warned that the place would be more or less empty, with certain rooms totally free of furniture, and even from the bottom of the lawn, looking up, it looked like a place that nobody lived in. Not only did it look like an uninhabited house, it looked as if being uninhabited were its natural state. It has always been a house that seemed more fitting for ghosts than living residents.

Without a key, the only way in was through the cellar storm entrance, lifting up a big wooden door and stumbling down the steps, picking my way through the cobwebby basement with its piles of boxes, and then rising up the inner cellar stairs into the first floor. Turning on the hall light lit up the entryway, the foot of the main stairwell that connects all three floors. The entryway itself is giant, with the shaft of the stairwell rising up to the roof and the actual ceiling itself twice as high as in your average house. It dwarfs you. So I stood there, hand on the switch, and felt very small. The stairs themselves led up to darkness.

I crept through the house, room by empty room. Some of them looked more or less as they used to, walls covered by my stepfather’s agit-prop paintings of Socialist leaders, furniture more or less intact. Others had been re-arranged to approximate normal living quarters, so that potential buyers wouldn’t feel too overwhelmed by emptiness. In one large room at the top of the house, two small chairs and a coffee table had been placed in the middle of a bare wood floor, facing a TV, seeming to shrink in the face of all the excess space. In another a twin bed stood shoved against a blank wall, the only light a bare, hanging bulb.

Other rooms, like my mother and stepfather’s bedroom, were completely empty. Out of their bay windows I could see the fence that edges the rest of the arboretum, and beyond it a light from the Cope House, the heart of the park, where people somtimes have weddings or other parties. That night it was empty, another wide stone edifice with dark windows.

There have been times, obviously, where I’ve lived in this house without my parents, housesitting for them during summers, watering the plants and watching the place. But always there was the sense of human habitation: dogs to be watched, my stepfather’s massive Lego structures, leftovers in the fridge. People had lived there before and would be coming back.

Without these signs, the house seemed swept clean, and the full power of the ridiculous scale of the place seemed to hang on every unseen corner and intricate edge of the many empty rooms. I walked into them and clapped to hear the echo respond, large and crisp. Everywhere I went, my shoes clapped once and then again, the house responding.

Long before my family lived in this house, the owner was an eccentric, a recluse. As well as I understand it, he lived exclusively on the top floor. He had a dumbwaiter built so that his servants could send food up to him, and a tube rising from the ground floor where they could place their ears and receive instructions. The dumbwaiter is gone, but the listening stations are still there, fixtures sprouting from the walls like white mouths, hanging half-open.

The owner, half-crazy to begin with, grew more and more reclusive as the years went on. The house itself was neglected. Ivy started to climb up the stone on all sides, and the wide veranda porch started to rot. Servants, I assume, must have quit. Finally, the owner died, alone, somewhere on the top floor.

I lived on this floor during my high school years, and I spent more nights than I care to admit wondering about the old owner, the eccentric recluse; specifically, I wondered about the circumstances of his death. How long had it taken his servants to find him, and in what condition? Had they gotten used to not seeing him for days, had they gotten used to living more or less on their own on the bottom floor, sending up meals twice a day, sometimes recieving nothing but silence in return?

The scenario I ended up imagining went more or less like this. The final faithful servants – many of them had quit, in response to the growing eerieness of the place and its reclusive owner – would be sending food as usual up to the third floor. Only after a few days, maybe even a week, when no plates were returning in the dumbwaiter, and no sounds at all were heard from the third floor, not even the slight creak of barefooted pacing that usually came from overhead, did they decide that somebody ought to break the usual ban on disturbing the master and go survey the situation.

The oldest servant, having known the master even in his infancy, assumed the burden. He crept slowly up the stairs, keeping his ears trained for the slightest noise that might tell him that no more was necessary, that everything was as it should be. Still, nothing stirred.

At the turn from the second floor up to the third, the oldest servant began to notice the unmistakable smell of the roast beef they had served the night before, and under that the overripe smell of old fruit. He turned his nose a little at some other, more rotten smells that lingered underneath those first two, growing worse the higher he climbed.

There was one thing I wasn’t sure of, that I debated as I lay in bed in my room, east of the main room on the third floor, just a dark hallway removed from where the old servant must have climbed, playing out the scene. Where would he have been, the old servant, I argued with myself, before he started to notice other smells beyond rotting food. It would depend, I supposed, on the season. If it was winter, maybe there would have been no smell at all. Maybe the house, hard to heat and always a little chill after November, would have preserved everything. But summer, the kind of balmy summer that defines Philadelphia, would have sent up an unmistakable stink, even after a few days. Would he have opened the door and smelled it? Or would he have already felt a dim premonition, padding carefully across the third floor hallway, fingers just touching the knob?

These were the sorts of things I wondered about, in the earliest morning when I couldn’t sleep, a morbid high-schooler with an overactive imagination. Brewing coffee in the newly empty house, with my parents almost as distant a presence as the old man who had died on the third floor, I sat at the kitchen table and ran through the story again. Occupying the lower floor, leaving the upper floors dark to save electricity, I felt like the one remaining member of the staff of a house with an absentee owner, a caretaker of ghosts. As the night settled into the arbitrary hours after midnight, I walked into the entryway, ready to climb the stairs to my bed, and passed close to one of those strange fixtures the old owner had installed to carry his commands. I ran my fingers over the aperture. What kind of whispering would I hear, I asked myself, if I just pressed my ear into that tiny opening and stood there, listening?