You could get at her mother, she remembered now. Her father was always out of reach, overhead.
She had known for a long time that her childhood was over, but now it was also lost. No museum. The house torn down. She told herself it had been good as torn down all those years she was away. The city could raze it and take the land—no, that’s right, they were worried about the birds. All right. Let the birds take it over, fill every floor with nest.
Then she heard the pounding on the door.
“The neighbors called,” said the woman behind the door. “Oh, my Minna.”
Minna Sprague recognized Margaret: her brown hair in its childish bowl cut, her little hooked nose, the way her hands clutched at each other, the printer’s ink purple of her clothing. “My baby,” she said to Minna, very seriously, and then she folded her arms around her. It was an odd feeling, a powdered milk embrace, something like actual love but reconstituted from a packet.
“Minna-bean,” said Margaret, a phrase so inane it unraveled the embrace. “How is it? The house.”
Minna shook her head.
“Let me see.”
Inside, Minna found that porous Margaret Vanetten absorbed some of her terror. It helped to have company as she said goodbye to the house. “This is the front parlor,” said Margaret. “Just over the milk room. The kitchen. Oh! The sewing room!”
“Who sewed? Not my mother.”
“I did. You did, too.”
“Not anymore,” said Minna. “I pay people to sew for me.”
“Good for you, sweetheart,” said Margaret. “I was so happy here.”
Margaret Vanetten Truitt opened the door to her room and there it was: the little single iron bed, still made up, the quilt she’d sewn herself grayed with dust. The hairbrush on the dresser top. “And through here—” She opened the door: Minna’s room. Another single bed, though grander, with an Eastlake headboard. A good bed. The blue coverlet had been kicked down, the pillow. Margaret remembered making both beds up the morning they left for Canada. Who’d slept here since? “You were happy, too,” she said, feeling Minna’s doubt. This house went on and on. She still dreamt of it, too. She straightened the covers on Minna’s bed. “Do you have children, sweetheart? I should have asked that. I should have asked that first thing. You married?” She’d worshipped that child all along and now she saw how right she was to do it.
“Divorced,” said Minna. Margaret clucked her tongue. “No children.”
“You’re young yet,” said Margaret. “Let’s go upstairs.”
“Oh, it’s too sad.”
“I’m already sad,” said Margaret, in an improbably cheerful voice. They went through: the softness of the plaster, the holes in the roof.
“Shame,” said Minna. “They didn’t build it right.”
But Bertha Truitt had followed every direction. Fowler’s advice was just so damnably bad. The wooden houses he scoffed at still stand everywhere in New England, but the gravel and lime octagons have fallen to rubble.
“Where are the birds?” asked Minna.
“Sleeping,” said Margaret.
“Margaret,” said Minna. “Come with me into my father’s study. I want to look in the desk. See if there’s anything in there.”
They walked onto the wooden floor as though it were ice on a pond. Little steps. They clung to each other as though that would do any good. The desk was leather topped, gold edged, though you could not see the gold for dust. Minna remembered the pleasure of writing on it, the way the leather gave under the pressure of a pencil tip.
The desk drawers were empty save one: in the bottom drawer, a bird’s nest, three perfect celadon-green eggs snuggled in.
“Are these the eggs?” asked Minna. “The seabirds. They nest in drawers?”
“Oh, no,” said Margaret. “These are ages old. Your father collected them. He had dozens. He shut them away from the cats.”
How do you disturb a thing like that? Minna wanted to own it and to leave it alone. Her father’s hands, a doctor’s, had moved it from its first location. You could do that with human houses, too, she knew. It was the eggs that shook her. Inhabited, haunted. Little mausoleums. She took the nest away.
It was among her effects, when she died in New York, fifty years later. Or maybe that was a different nest. All nests look as though they were built in the nineteenth century. She had become, like her father, a collector.
“Somebody stole the stairs,” said Margaret. “The iron ones, to the cupola.”
“That’s where I was born,” said Minna. “On the stairs.”
“Not quite. Overhead. That’s where your father worked, mostly.”
They gazed up at the hole in the ceiling. Maybe it was the seabirds themselves who sold it for scrap.
Minna looked down at the nest balanced on her upturned palms. She’d always thought of nests as round, but this one looked polygonal, like the house itself. She’d come to Salford to get the last scrapings of her father’s life. Here it was, overhead, in her hands. Unhatched eggs, but beautiful. A former hired girl as a guide. You could hear the wind through the cupola overhead, whistling at a strange pitch. Her father—his private thoughts, his bad habits, his actual self—was above her, no way to get at him. Maybe better that way, to not know our parents, to love them as we move away from them—they’re on the shore and we’re on a ship, moving away; later we will switch places as they sail away from us, and we say to them, a little longer. There were poems above her head, and the corpses of cats, empty bottles, peanut shells, the smell of heartache, a small stack of hate letters sent to the house, which Dr. Sprague had intercepted (not realizing that most such correspondence was sent to Truitt’s Alleys: all on the subject of their marriage, written by strangers, which Truitt threw in the furnace). One carpet slipper. A photo of a beloved baby.
Minna looked at the nest in her hands and decided a nest was sufficient. Let everything else rot. Here were her father’s intentions.
“Let’s go,” she said to Margaret.
She remembered Margaret as a cabinet of a woman, functional, extra, but nervous, cedar scented, lavender tinted. A graspingness. You will always, always, always be my baby, she said to little Minna. Or was that her mother? The sad truth: she could not fully untangle Margaret and Bertha. One baked inedible cakes. One sang a song called “After the Ball.” One carried her around the house long after she was too old and when Minna had said no, that’s enough, had burst into tears.
It was hard to walk down stairs while carrying a bird’s nest. The fresh air stirred up Margaret’s fire. “See?” she said. “Still standing after all this time.”
“It’s not safe.”
“We’ll make it safe.”
“I’ve already given it to the city.”
“You give away too much!” said Margaret Vanetten.
“I have enough.”
“You do.” Margaret sat down on the lawn as though she might need to be removed with dynamite. She was the one who mowed the grass, as a kind of a promise and a prayer. The house looked like a prison. You could not judge houses or people from the outside.
“Well, I can’t keep it,” said Minna. When they’d left all those years ago, she hadn’t known she would never live in Salford again, never see her parents, never hide in the wedge-shaped closet in her room to listen to the house from inside the house. The closet had smelled of herself, mown hay and milk, a hint of hairdressing. That smell was gone, and Minna—though she stood here in the city limits with her old baby nurse—was gone, too. The Octagon, the Wedding Cake, Superba, Supersum. Within a month the city would raze the place. There was no way to save it, not even for ornithological reasons. It was as though she were seeing the house from a great distance as it moved away, goodbye, goodbye. She said to Margaret, “What would I do with a house like this? I have a career I need to get back to. I leave for New York this afternoon.”
“Oh,” said Margaret, then, “Take,” then, in a childish voice, “Why did you even come here?”