“So you were telling me about this house.”
I was not following his train of thought and was still at the station when he was miles down the track, but I sputtered and started. “Well, I know it’s not quite the house you’d expect of an architect.”
From the bathtub, Dolly chimed in, “I had no idea you were an architect.”
“Would we know,” Jane added at once, “any of your designs? A house of cards, perhaps?”
The sad truth was that nothing I had planned had ever been built. “I guess I should say I work in an architectural firm, but I’m kind of a finishing man, doing the small details of big plans. Home offices, day care playrooms. I once did a prototype of the office of the future …”
Dolly and Jane giggled like schoolgirls. “Frank Lloyd Wrong,” Jane muttered to her friend.
“We bought this house when the market started going up, an investment really. My brother and I—” My own sentence stopped me. For the life of me I could not place my brother, not his face nor his name nor anything about him, though he must exist, for how else could I have afforded to buy this house? Brushing the matter aside, I continued. “There’s nine rooms in all, your standard center hall colonial, built around 1922. The master bedroom and the nursery, which as you know, I converted into a study. I put in that archway myself. And then the bedroom upstairs in the front, which was my brother’s—” What had become of my brother? Where had he gone, like my mother, like my father? Like the woman I love? “And downstairs, the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Then there’s the basement and the attic, not a room proper, but nine spaces in any case. If you count the bathroom we’re in, which at the moment seems to be the heart of it all. Cozy, not much, but home—”
The old man cleared his throat and set down his empty bowl, the spoon clattering against the sides. “Very trenchant, but I was referring to the one distinctive architectural detail of the place, the unusual feature you earlier mentioned.”
Like a four-year-old, Dolly leapt to stand and raised her arm, waving her hand like a butterfly. “I know, I know,” she said. “Tell us about the singing windows. You said you came home last night and heard singing coming from the windows.”
“The bicycles heaped on the lawn,” the old man said, “like an orgy of chrome and rubber. And the house with singing windows. Verdi, I believe you said.”
The beginning of the story seemed so long ago and longer still the events it narrates, so that I had trouble, momentarily, remembering where I had left off. “Not the house itself, but a person inside the house singing that could be heard through the windows. And not Verdi, but the ‘Laughing Song’ from Die Fledermaus, to the best of my recollection.”
“You’re absolutely sure it was the Strauss?” Dolly asked.
The old man simply ignored my uncertainty. He gaped at the mirror over my shoulder and flicked with his fingertip at a spot on his forehead as if trying to remove some fleck on his skin which he noticed in the reflection. Facing him, I saw nothing but a deeply furrowed brow, free of all dirt or blemish.
“There was a piano playing,” I said. “And a woman singing that very distinct song—‘Mein Herr Marquis’—with the laughing chorus, and she rode the register with such delightful inflection that it was, well, infectious, and I found myself laughing, too, as I came to the door, despite the fact that the presence of someone inside the house was both puzzling and disconcerting. I followed the melody up the stairs and into my brother’s room. My former brother’s room …”
Jane offered her help. “Your brother’s former room?”
“That one,” I answered. “Opening the door, I was taken aback by the sight of a recital going on in that space. A woman, the mezzo, stood next to the piano, her hands folded under her breast as she sang, and another woman played the piano, her back to me and the audience, which itself was composed of a number of other women seated in two rows of chairs arranged in a semicircle. A span of a few seconds intervened between the moment I entered and when everyone noticed me and stopped what they were doing. Stuck in the threshold, I was simply stunned. It seemed like they were putting on a show for my benefit. Elaborate stagecraft, fancy costumes, and the striking beauty of every woman onstage.”
“Sir, you are too kind,” said Jane.