Frederick's house, gray-shingled, late-Victorian, had been in his family for almost a hundred years. He and his sister, Felicity, had both grown up in the warren of oddly shaped bedrooms and parlors and pivoting stairways. When their parents died suddenly (Arthur Barrow in 1980, Mary the year after), the house was all they left behind. It seemed fitting--two sickly, cranky, frail old people, stranded in the wrong era, leaving behind a house as sickly, cranky, frail, and outdated as they had been, a wood-framed earthly shadow, a leaky memorial. On the day of their mother's funeral, Frederick and Felicity had gone back to the house to accept the condolences of the surprising number of people who attended the funeral. Felicity had prepared sandwiches the night before--small, ceremonial, and now quite dried out. She took the tray out, set it down on the mahogany dining table that had always reminded her of an outsized coffin, then returned to the kitchen. She found her mother's big "festivity" percolator, the one dragged out for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter dinner, turned on the faucet, and tipped the percolator clumsily into the sink.
The ancient pipes hemmed and hawed, then sputtered to life. She heard a toilet flush, loud, surprised, exasperated. A family of squirrels had gotten into the attic and worked their way down the walls. With their tiny, verminous claws, they scratched out muffled, secret sounds. Felicity had never liked the house. She disliked the fog, the mournful foghorns, the sound of the ocean, the smell of the ocean--its filthy odor of rotting seaweed and rotting shellfish. She hated the smug insularity of the summer people, and she hated the mirrored smug insularity of the year-round people. It had not been until she made her college escape from Cape Cod to Manhattan that Felicity experienced what felt like fresh air. In New York, she felt as though she could truly breathe for the first time.
She filled the percolator and turned the water off. The pipes gave a strangled sigh. The house was constantly sighing. Structural self-pity.
She had tried to talk Frederick into selling the house even before their mother died. But he was stubborn in his flimsy, easygoing way. "I love this house," he said in response, as if that were a response.
Felicity lugged the percolator out to the dining room and plugged it in. A spark flew from the electrical outlet.
The house's revenge, she thought. Trying to kill me before I can kill it.
But later, she realized that this had been exactly the spark she needed. The spark of an idea. For there she had stood, looking at the frayed cord of the percolator in her hand, at the yellowed plate that surrounded the outlet, at the wood floor that creaked even when no one stepped across it, as if it were a ship struggling through the sea, and the idea, so simple, so obvious, hit her.
She took Frederick by the arm and guided him back into the kitchen.
"You love this house," she said.
Frederick produced one of his looks, the clear dark-eyed expression of a rogue trapped helplessly in his own sincerity, the look that drew so many women to him.
"I'm agreeing," she said. "Christ. I said, You love this house, okay?"
"Okay."
"And I don't want this house."
He sighed and said, "Felicity, it's the day of the funeral. Can we . . ."
"Buy me out," she said. "It's so simple. Buy me out."
Frederick gave her a fair price, or so she thought at the time. She'd immediately invested the money in the stock market and had done fairly well with it. Still, as time passed and she thought it over, the whole thing didn't seem quite fair. It was almost, well, not exactly shady, but . . . Over the years, the house had increased in value far more than her stocks had, and that value had then fallen far less than her stocks'. If Frederick sold it now, he'd make a fortune. And wasn't half that fortune really, by rights (maybe not by law, but by rights), hers?
"Well," she was often heard to say to Frederick, "you certainly got a bargain."
"Well," she said to Joseph as they settled into the guest bedroom that had once been her parents' bedroom, "he certainly got a bargain."
The whole family had gathered in the house for Christmas. Gwen, her husband, Ron, and the twins had adjoining rooms on the second floor. Evan was across the hall from them in the smaller bedroom next to Felicity and Joseph. Frederick's room was on the ground floor. He had long ago converted the east parlors, front and back, to his own use--the front parlor with the bow window was where he worked, the back parlor his bedroom. It was there that he stood at the window this Christmas morning watching the insipid winter dawn.
Felicity, lying in bed with a frown on her face, was also looking out the window.
"Joe," she said.
Joseph gave a round, trumpeting snore, followed by a series of liquid burbles.
"Joe," Felicity said again. She turned and pushed his shoulder gently, then more forcefully.