Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley, again.
But I didn’t stand by the iron gate to the drive. I stood on the porch shadowed by the cherry tree growing in the front patch of garden, surrounded by bush hedges, with a trellised red rose bush sweeping in the breeze against the porch railing. The front door was the same wooden door with the large glass pane in the middle. The same net curtain, patterned with blue diamonds still blocked the view in. The door wasn’t closed all the way. My mother would have been angry to see that. “Can it be so difficult to close the door properly?” she would complain. Behind me, cars whooshed by on the busy street, and I pushed the door open.
On that ground floor landing, there was a small table next to the apartment door. The ground floor neighbors would leave old newspapers there. Once they accumulated a few, they would take them out to the trash. Whenever I walked by, I would riffle through them and take upstairs with me the funnies and sales brochures. I would then cut up the brochures to make paper dolls, or I would dream about wearing some of the peasant style dresses and make up stories for the models.
In my daydream, I walked up the stairs to the second floor American, first floor European. That was the apartment where we lived the first years after buying the triple decker in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. When I was about twelve, and the top floor became free, my parents moved house up one flight. They were tired of renters banging on the ceiling above us. The move was both good and bad. We had no noise above us, but it was colder in the winter, and warmer in the summer under the black pitch roof.
In my daydream, I slipped the key into the door and stepped into my memories. The little entrance hall had a little table at the end, with a vase of plastic flowers and a toy elephant with its tail facing the door, to keep luck in the house. To the left, a door led into what was originally a room in which to greet strangers, from when the row of triple deckers were built as apartments for new couples setting up house in 1915. That is why there is a bedroom off the kitchen, for the live-in servant.
But the welcoming room had long been a small bedroom with a twin bed and a wardrobe we had brought with us from the apartment in the North End. It served for a long time as a storage room.
To the right was a door that originally led into the living room, but which we kept permanently closed. Next to it was an arch that led into the dining room. Here, the last owners left behind a sideboard with mirror and a round table and chairs. Here, I would take four of those chairs, and set them up so the backs of two of them would face the backs of the other two, and drape a blanket over them. This would be my particular club house I would people with imaginary characters. This was MY Mickey Mouse club house, just like the one I would watch the reruns of. (“Who’s the leader of the pack that’s made for you and me? M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-u-s-e!”)
To the right was an archway into the living room. Here, memory becomes a bit fuzzy. My mother’s armchair, also inherited with the house, was in front of the closed door from the entryway. Next to it was a gold colored vinyl sofa we had brought from the North End. At the end of the sofa, an end table with a very sixties lamp, and the black and white television between two of the three front windows. Another end table and lamp were by the last window, and on the opposite wall was a smaller red sofa that had also been left behind, and a turntable with speakers that had been a house-warming gift. We had a few LP’s, most of them gifted. I remember one of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with Mickey Mouse, and another of the Disney movie, Cinderella. These narrated the stories with music, including the original music by Paul Dukas, while I followed along in the story books. We brought an LP back with us when we came here on vacation in 1974. It was called Vacaciones ’74 and was a medley of all the most popular music in Spain that summer, including Abba’s Waterloo. Also, we brought back single LP’s of Ana Kiro and Xoán Rubio, Galician singers who sang in Galician. (Catro vellos mariñeiros, catro vellos mariñeiros, todos metidos nun bote…..)
Back in the dining room, I would turn left, and stop at my desk with my manual typewriter that was a Christmas present when I was 6, because I wanted to write words quickly. Thanks to that typewriter, and some manuals on touch typing, I learned how to type. I just wish kids would learn to do so today, especially since they are being weaned off pens and onto keyboards.
On the wall next to the arch from the entryway was a built in china closet. It had an open space in the middle, with drawers below, and glass cabinets above, where our best china was stored on shelves and hooks. That is also where we kept first our Kodak 110 camera, and then our Polaroid Instamatic, then our Kodak Disc camera, and then my parents bought me my first SLR Canon camera, and that was put away in a nice camera bag. I would pull up a chair to stand on, open the cabinet, and play with the china, carefully. I forget now what stories I imagined there.
Stepping into the little square hallway next was stepping into the private part of the apartment, or that was what the original builders had in mind. When we bought the house, there was a door from the living room, a door into the bedroom on the left, a door into the bathroom on the right, and a door into the kitchen facing the dining room. My parents took off the dining room and kitchen doors and opened up the hallway. Hanging on the wall next to the door of my room was our telephone. Next to it, my father made a decorative box out of wood to put cards and phone lists in. I was the one who covered it with pretty stickers.
The bathroom was tiny. It had a tiny window above the old fashioned claw bathtub, the one in which I poured half a bottle of aftershave and some nail polish pretending to create a witch’s brew. My mother took her hand to my bottom over that (I must have been 5), and I never did that again, but the red nail polish adorned that bath tub until we sold the house. My mother, brought up in a different time, didn’t know there was a product to remove nail polish.
My room was across from the bathroom. On hot sultry summer nights, the bathroom window and door would be open, and so would the door and both windows of my room, in an attempt to create a cross current. My room had pink and white wallpaper, while the dining room and living room had beige panelling, which my father had installed. The bed had its headboard against the wall on the right as I entered, with a small nightstand. At the foot was a black and white television. A chest of drawers stood between my bed and one of the closets, and a bureau with mirror between the windows. There was another closet across from the foot of my bed.
I don’t remember if my incident with the devil involved the second closet in my bedroom, or the one in the little bedroom, but I was wary of both. I had books of English literature gifted to me by a coworker of my father’s. Among them a high school anthology of American short stories. One afternoon I read The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving. I must have been 8 or 9. Or younger. The chill of the atmosphere in the story became very real. My mother was downstairs in the cellar and I was alone. I thought I heard a sound from one of the closets (mice, of which we had an abundance since the train tracks across the street had been lifted up), and I immediately imagined the Devil might be waiting. I didn’t read that story again for years, the anthology collecting dust on the shelf. I also tried to avoid getting anything from the closet for a while, though I quickly lost that fear.
The kitchen was a square kitchen. There was an old table in the middle which we also inherited. Our table from the North End went out to the back porch to put things on. To the right as I entered there was a gas stove and oven, and the sink and cabinets, which my father installed shortly after moving in. There were two windows looking across the driveway to the next house, and looking south, so there was plenty of light. It was a happy kitchen, especially after my parents painted it a creamy yellow. Along the left wall from the entrance was another door, that led to the last bedroom, my parents’ bedroom. Here there was a window across from the door, and another on the right wall looking out over the back yard. There was a wardrobe here, and my parents’ bed, which had a shelf on which they kept a radio. In my earliest years I remember my mother would turn it on, put it on a channel in Spanish, and listen to a soap opera while stretched out on the bed on her stomach. Sometimes I would join her just to play with her, but I never paid attention to the radio.
Back in the kitchen, in the middle of the wall opposite the door leading from the dining room, was the back door. It opened onto a stair well, and opposite was the door to the back porch. Going downstairs, we could go to the ground floor back porch, off which there were stairs that led to the backyard, where I almost never played. The stairs also continued down into the cellar, just behind a door.
I loved to play on the back porch in summer. That was where my mother would hang the clothes, on the line that stretched from the center beam of the porch to one of the maples on the high area of the yard (the street behind us was higher than we were). It was a leafy, green, shaded spot that felt nice on a hot day.
Next to the back door in the kitchen was the pantry. Here, my father had cut away some of the shelving, and the fridge was tucked away here. Beneath the small window that gave onto the porch was a built-in cabinet with some drawers. To the sides, above that, were shelves. My mother sometimes made sausages, and she would hang them here, brown shopping bags on the floor beneath to catch the fat that would drip until the sausages were cured. She also sometimes cured entire hams in salt. They would also be hung here, and whenever we wanted some ham, we would go with a knife and cut off a few slices. I played here, too. I remember some stickers that came with something, that were pictures of locks. I stuck them on some shelves, and the wall, and I played at having a store and selling things, moving around cereal boxes, and other food stuffs my mother kept in the pantry. I had no brothers and sisters, but I had playmates, all the same.
The reason I daydreamed my way around my childhood home was because, out of curiosity, I tried to find it on the internet. I did. It was sold back in the year 2000, for over five hundred thousand dollars. Now, it’s worth over a million. Apparently, it was sold to some sort of housing corporation, that turned it into leasable condominiums. No longer is it family owned. The second floor, where I spent my early years, is on the market to lease for a year at $2,500 a month. And there were pictures accompanying. Gone is the panelling, the wallpaper, the chandeliers we had in the living and dining rooms. The bathroom has been updated, though the kitchen remains much the same, except for the back door, which is new, and the cabinets and linoleum, which have been changed.
Nostalgia came flooding back, remembering the corners of the apartment, and all that they once held. I searched for pictures, and found one of me on my brand new bike in the dining room. It must have been taken one Christmas, when I got my shiny blue bike I would ride up and down the sidewalk in nice weather. It was a stark contrast to the picture of the dining room as it is now, the radiator and the layout of the wall the only similarities.
Another picture I found that I could match was one of my mother and I. It must have been on a birthday of mine, probably when I had turned six, and we had been in the house for a year. It was taken in the living room that looked out over the street.
There is a saying that you can’t go home again. You can, but only in dreams. So, slowly, I go up the stairs to our old apartment some nights, and wander as a ghost, contemplating a past life of which there is little more than memories and photographs left.
Life continues.
Spanish Views from a Small Town. 