House Next Door Read online

  He gave me a sidewise look out of long light-gray eyes. “It’s my first house, but it’s not my first project. I had a couple of others while I was still in school, but they were never finished. That’s one reason I’m hell-bent on getting this one up. Does your husband like the house?”

  “Yes, he does. Very much.”

  “That’s good. It’s got two friends in the neighborhood anyway.”

  “Indeed it has, and it’ll have more. Just wait till it’s up and all the dust has settled.”

  We sat quietly for a while, drinking and looking at the Harralson lot, and out into our woods, dusty and used-looking now in the early autumn heat. Foster Grant and Razz joined us, sedately, as if by appointment. Foster draped his length along the brick wall of the patio, and Razz arched himself once or twice against Kim’s boot, and then put his leg over his head and began to lick the base of his tail with the loving self-absorption that drives me wild. I poked him with my toe.

  “Playing the cello,” said Kim, and I laughed again, with a certain joy, because that’s exactly what Walter and I call it. I thought we had always known each other, Kim Dougherty and I.

  “Aren’t you awfully young to have an office and a partner?” I asked. “I thought young genius architects were supposed to starve in a garret and refuse to accept commissions that weren’t true to their art and suffer in big firms till they could go out on their own.”

  “And blow up their first big project when it’s defiled by Philistines. I know, I read The Fountainhead when I was in first-year architecture. Howard Roark I’m not. He was a first-class schmuck. If I insisted on people worthy of my houses—house—I’d have to shoot the Bobbsey Twins over there and go around like that old Greek with the lamp, searching the world over. Present company excepted of course.”

  “Coy and modest you’re not, Mr. Dougherty.”

  “No, I’m not.” He looked a little startled, as if the thought had just occurred to him for the first time. “Do you think I should be?”

  “No. I’d think you were a schmuck if you didn’t know what a great house you’d done. I just wonder what’s going to happen to you when you get rich and famous and start to mingle with high society.”

  “I am already, aren’t I?” he said seriously. “This street, I mean. You all. The guy up the street there is some kind of honcho at a big bank, isn’t he? And I heard the guy down the street owns half the town, and the Coca-Cola bottling company to boot.”

  I wrinkled my nose at him. “If we represent high society, God help the writers on the women’s pages. There’s some money around, but none of it is Walter’s and mine. And none of us are very exciting.”

  “Real money usually isn’t,” he said.

  “Spoken like a true Boston Brahmin.”

  “I guess I am, sort of,” he said.

  I looked at him, red and loose-jointed and large-knuckled. He caught the look and laughed.

  “I know. I look like I ought to be slogging in a peat bog or shoveling sheep manure in Oklahoma. And for all I know, I should be. I’m adopted, and I don’t have the foggiest idea who my real folks were. But my old man’s as dug-in, fifth-generation New England as you can get and richer than hell. Although the family bread comes from manufacturing, so I guess they really aren’t strictly above the salt. I think my dad’s grandfather was one of the great robber barons; the rumor is that he worked women and infants fourteen hours a day for two cents an hour, by candlelight, or some damn thing. But Dad is as straight-arrow and full of the milk of human kindness as any guy I’ve ever known. He really is. He passes out the dough like it was going out of style, as long as it’s for underprivileged minority groups and stuff like that. He won’t part with a cent of it for what he calls highbrow shit—excuse me, Mrs. Kennedy.”

  “Colquitt,” I said.

  “Colquitt, then. Yeah, his fondest ambition was to be a lawyer, and he’d probably have been one of those storefront, legal-aid-type cats who starves happily all his life and does no end of good. But his old man died early and there just wasn’t anybody else to take over the mill.”

  “The mill?”

  “Mills, rather. Seneca Mills, in Massachusetts.”

  “Good Lord,” I said. “You weren’t kidding about being rich, were you? You’re on every floor in my house. Every house on this street, probably.”

  “Well, to get back to your original question, that’s why I’ve got an office and a partner just out of school. Dad set me up. I guess it ought to embarrass me, but it doesn’t. It just means I can start building that much earlier. Poor Dad, he was hell-bent on me being the lawyer he wasn’t, but when he saw the handwriting on the wall he gave in and sent me to the best architecture school in the country and then shelled out for the office. Plus enough to carry me till the clients start coming in. The only thing he said about it was that he’d cut my balls off—God, excuse me again—if I ever designed an opera house or a culture center.”

  “And will you?”

  “Probably not, though not because I think he’ll cut my—he’ll disapprove. Residential architecture is just my thing. It knocks me out. From the very beginning it’s all I’ve wanted to do.”

  “It doesn’t pay all that much, does it?” I asked.

  “I don’t have to worry about that right now. Don’t look shocked; I’m not a mooch. I have no intention of living off Dad’s money any longer than I have to. My houses are going to make me as much money as I need. And make him glad he drew me instead of some other homeless waif.”

  “I guess they will at that,” I said. “Isn’t that your load of sand coming in over there?”

  “Yep. Thanks for the beer. And the talk. I’ll come back tomorrow afternoon for more of the same if you’ll have me,” he said with the unselfconsciousness of a child or an animal who has found a friendly house.

  “I’ll have you, though I don’t know why. You’re a cheeky young whippersnapper who doesn’t know his place.”

  “Wrong. I know exactly where my place is. And I’m a genius, remember?”

  He gave me a cheerful, wolfish leer and went shambling across the patio to meet the sand man.

  4

  WE MET PIE HARRALSON’S father when she lost her baby in November of that year, at the beginning of her seventh month.

  We had not seen as much of the young Harralsons during the course of construction as I had feared. They were usually there on weekends, early on, heads together as they peered into the hole that would be the foundation or clambered gingerly around the framing after the flooring went in. They would wave at us, and Pie would call, “Come see how my nest is looking,” and we’d walk over and admire the latest bit of structural alchemy the carpenters had wrought. Buddy would alternately beam at his emerging kingdom and mutter at Pie and catch at her arm as she chattered and scrambled among the piles of lumber and sheet rock or hung dizzily out over a level where the steps were yet to come. She seemed to need to be reminded of her pregnancy, though her expensive maternity tops jutted further out and she had lost much of her pep-squad bounce.

  “I hate looking like a tacky old cow and waddling like a duck,” she pouted once when Buddy had darted at her and jerked her back from the still-unrailed height of the third-floor balcony. The baby’s treetop balcony. “I’ll be so damned glad when it’s born and I can dance again. I haven’t been able to dance at any decent party all fall.”

  “Pie is a fabulous dancer,” Buddy said fondly. “But I don’t think she realizes that she’s not going to be able to hit the dance floor two days after the baby comes. It’s going to be hard to make a little mama out of her.”

  Walter grimaced showily at me in the deepening dusk, and I said hastily, “I bet she’ll make a great mother,” and was annoyed at myself again. These two had a way of wrenching hypocritical platitudes out of me which I would not countenance from anyone else.

  “Oh, sure, I didn’t mean she wouldn’t. We want a bunch of kids, four at least,” said Buddy, and Walter grimaced again. This time
I said nothing.

  “Well, I’ll be a mother, but I sure won’t be a prisoner,” Pie said, putting out her pink underlip over her sharp baby teeth. “And for all you know, Buddy Harralson, I will be out on the dance floor two days after the baby comes, because I’m going to have a live-in nurse. Daddy’s giving me one, Colquitt. Isn’t that just the sweetest thing you ever heard of? He says it would be a shame for me to spend the best part of my girlhood tied down to a baby, and besides”—she dimpled—“he says he wouldn’t trust his first grandchild to me for all the tea in China. Buddy just hates the idea, though. And so does his mama.” She dimpled again, at her husband, who flushed deep red.

  “She just doesn’t think it looks right, is all she said,” he mumbled. “I don’t either. Nobody else at the firm has live-in nurses. It’ll look like we’re throwing money around, or something.”

  “He cares more about that silly firm than he does me,” Pie said, mock-sulking. “It’s all I ever hear about. And they’re the stuffiest people you ever saw, Colquitt; you just ought to go to some of those firm parties. Everybody sits around talking about business, and all the women wear shoes that match their dresses and have blue hair and are older than God.”

  I grimaced at Walter this time; some of those older-than-God people were our good friends.

  Buddy’s face seemed to swell and tighten. “Those are senior partners, Pie,” he said. “I for one am very grateful to be invited to their parties. Not many of the junior members are.”

  “You must be a real comer,” said Walter, more to break the tautening wire of tension than to observe a fact. It did not seem likely that this earnest, round-faced, conventional youngster was a brilliant lawyer in the making. Later, though, we asked one of our older-than-God friends in the firm about Buddy, and he verified that, indeed, the boy did have a startling streak of brilliance in him. “Steady as a rock and a tiger for work too,” our friend said. “We have real hopes for him.”

  At any rate, though we saw them on weekends, they seldom appeared at dusk when Kim ambled over and showered and settled in for his ritual hour before he went back to his office or wherever he went. He kept a change of clothes at our house by then and had unquestioned access to the guest-room shower, and I never felt intruded upon. I was surprised to find that Walter did, a bit.

  “It’ll be his shoes under the bed next,” he said one evening after Kim had gone. I looked around to see what he was talking about and saw him picking up a damp, discarded work shirt Kim had left on the floor of the guest bathroom.

  “What time does he get here in the afternoon, anyway?” he went on, his back to me.

  “Oh, about two. We have hours and hours of mad, brutal sex before you get home. All architects are alike; remember The Fountainhead?”

  “I’ll have to start knocking off earlier,” he said, and something in his voice made me walk around to look at his face. It was smiling, but only just.

  “You’re kidding,” I said finally.

  “I am. But he sure is here a lot, and he’s a good-looking kid, and you’re a dynamite lady, whether or not you realize it.”

  “I’m your dynamite lady, whether or not you realize it. Come on, Walter. This is me. He’s not here that much.”

  And he wasn’t. He did not come every night; he seemed to have a sort of radar about the evenings when we had plans or just wanted to be alone. And he never stayed for dinner, though we invited him. I’d asked him where he lived and if he had a crowd, friends, a girl friend, and he’d named an unfashionable but rather grand, fading old apartment house near his midtown office, and said that he had a few friends he drank beer with, and saw a little lady-type action every now and then. But he did not volunteer much about his private life, and we did not ask. He seemed realest, somehow, in proximity to his house.

  The Harralsons he dismissed with an “Oh, well” or “Who gives a happy rat’s ass?” We knew that he would not see them again after the house was done, and he said that he did not see much of them while he was on the site.

  “Condition number one, before I even gave them an estimate,” he said. “I’m an architect, not a baby-sitter.”

  “Are you going to be that high-handed with all your clients?” Walter asked. “How did these happen to find you, anyhow, if you’ve never done a house before?”

  “It depends, to answer your first question. And to answer your second, they didn’t find me. I found them. Frank—my partner—was at some party with them and came back and told me there was a little old rich gal whose daddy was going to build baby daughter any kind of house she wanted, and she was going on about how she wanted the most knocked-out, far-out, spit-in-your-eye—I believe those were her words—house in the city and maybe the world, and I got him to find out who she was and called her the next day. And then I went over there and came back with her in my pocket.”

  “What did you do, put Spanish fly in her pink lady?” Walter asked.

  “Is that ethical?” I asked.

  “Nope, to both. I showed her some sketches and working drawings from school, and told her I’d build her a house that would put Daddy in his grave.”

  “You didn’t!” I exclaimed.

  “Sure I did. That’s what she really wants to do, isn’t it? That or marry him, and since her mama’s already beat her to that, I guess she’ll have to kill him.”

  “Well,” I said, “whatever you said, they really are crazy about the house. We don’t see much of them, though. Hardly ever at night when we’re home.”

  “No doubt she’s home in an apron over a hot stove whomping up a peanut butter sandwich for ol’ Buddy-baby,” Kim said. “He may act like a wet cornflake, but I bet he insists on wifey being there, with his slippers in front of the fire and the swill a-simmering on the hearth when he gets home from the jungle. A place for everything and everything in its place. I bet he’s up to his ass in insurance policies and has the kid in Harvard already.”

  “Oh, God, no,” Walter said. “The state U was good enough for her daddy and her, and it’s good enough for whatever-Harralson the third.”

  “Have you ever met her father?” I asked Kim.

  “Once. When he came up from South Wiregrass or wherever it is he lives to close the deal and dish out the bread. He looks just like ol’ Miss Pie magnified about fifty times, if you can imagine. Little squinky blue eyes and a pug nose like hers, only bald as an egg. With a purple face. He’s either got the bluest blood or the highest blood pressure south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Called her “Punkin-pie” and me “son” and that poor sonofabitch Buddy nothing at all. Laughs a lot and whacks you on the back and looks like he raises rattlesnakes for a living.”

  “What does he do?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Clips coupons, I’d say. Raises some cows, he said. Has a little land, he said. Does a little contracting, he said. I heard he’s been in the state legislature for about a thousand years. He’s probably got state-built roads all over his land, which I hear takes in roughly the southern half of the state. Or awards all the contracting to himself. Isn’t that the way the legislature does things here?”

  We laughed, because it is sometimes.

  “Well,” said Walter, “I guess baby daughter meant it when she said she wasn’t going to let him see the house till it was done, because we haven’t seen hair nor hide of him, and I think she’d have told us if he’d been up. She seemed to derive considerable enjoyment from anticipating his reaction.”

  “Sure. Like I said, she wants to put him in his place once and for all. Like six feet under the green, green grass of home.”

  “I don’t really think that’s very funny,” I said.

  “I don’t either,” said Kim Dougherty.

  On the seventeenth of November, when the shell was up and the interior finishing work begun, Pie fell down an unrailed flight of stairs leading into the basement of the house and miscarried. It was a Thursday, and Walter and I were at work. Claire Swanson came over with the news when she saw my car pull into
the driveway. Her face was ashen, and she was holding her upper arms with both hands, as you do when you’re cold.

  “That poor little dimwit neighbor of ours has had an awful accident and lost her baby,” she said. “Oh, God, please give me a drink, Colquitt. I can’t stop shaking.”

  I made one and brought it to her in the den. She looked awful, stricken. I thought it was odd, because though Claire’s own children are the core of her heart, she is usually rather philosophic about birthings and dyings and what she calls, with her charming triteness, rites of passage. Besides, she hardly knew the Harralsons, and did not seem to wish to.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Because I was there! I found her! Lord, Col, it was terrible. I was walking Buzzy by there, early today because we’re going out—and he stopped and cocked his head and put his ears up like he does when he hears something, so I listened too, and I heard a sort of…high, mewing sound. I thought maybe a cat had gotten trapped in the house and couldn’t get out, so I walked up in their yard to see if I could hear where it was coming from, and then I realized it wasn’t a cat, it was too continuous for that. It literally made the hair stand up on my head. So I went in through that side door frame where they haven’t hung the door yet, and I walked around calling out, and it got a little louder, and then I realized it was coming from the basement. So I went to the top of the steps and looked down there, and there she was, lying all hunched up on her side. Just blood all over. I never saw so much blood.”

  “Oh, my God, Claire!”

  “Yes. And I just ran like a demon over to Virginia Guthrie’s and almost knocked the poor maid down when she answered the door and called an ambulance and grabbed a comforter off Virginia’s bed and ran back over there. By the time I got back she’d fainted, and I swear to God I thought she was dead. I really did. She was so damned white, and all that blood, and the baby—”

  “Don’t, Claire!”

  “Oh, yes, the baby, you could see it was—oh, God!—just…mashed and lumpy…and bloody—”