The House I Used to Live In

By Joseph Glass

This story begins when I was much older, worlds away from those early years, and I had a daughter of my own.

Im Miranda, and Im living a life Ive prepared myself. But that life never came. My parents worried about me. So did my teachers. Though the safe path was always right in front of me, I kept veering off it into something which did not seem unknown or perilous until it was too late to prevent the damage.

My aunts and uncles referred to me as a free spirit and exchanged glances, which suggested in an adult way that they were a little worried about how I was going to turn out.

Despite my mothers many attempts at reeducation, I never quite got over that impulse toward wandering and adventure that got me into so much troublenot until the events which form the basis of this story, anyway.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524649333

Joseph Glass

Joseph Glass has written four distinguished novels, EYES, BLOOD, THE SECRET DIARY OF MAX T. ROBINSON and THE HOUSE I USED TO LIVE IN. Under other names he has written seventeen bestselling novels, some of which are now cult classics. He has also written an influential book of philosophy entitled DISSYMETRY (Martinus Nijhoff, “Phaenomenologica” The Hague, Netherlands). Joseph Glass holds the Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He lives with his wife and daughter in Connecticut. Of THE HOUSE I USED TO LIVE IN he has said, “This book can stand as my epitaph. The title, the characters, the tragic fate of Miranda, the protagonist, are closer to my heart than anything else I have written.”

Book preview

PROLOGUE

W hen I was two and a half years old I stepped on a beehive that had fallen from a tree and was stung sixty-one times.

I have never been able to recall the pain, or even the hive itself. All I remember of the incident is the stillness of the kitchen as I sat having salve applied by the doctor while my mother looked on nervously. And I recall my childish pride swelling as the number of stings was counted up. I don’t remember whether my father was there or not. Perhaps he had already been called at work and told there was no danger.

Then, of course, I remember the incident being referred to in later years, always with a rueful smile from my mother. Curiosity killed the cat, she would say. And we would repeat the number, sixty-one times, sixty-one times, as a reminder of my wild youth.

My waywardness became a fact of life within the family. At some point prior to the bee episode I ran naked out of my bath into a party my parents were giving. I created quite a stir. My father was the one, I think, who swept me into his arms to take me back into the bathroom. There were some affectionate jokes at my expense, mingling embarrassment with admiration for my innocent exhibitionism.

There were apparently many times when I wandered too close to my parents’ bedroom at inopportune moments. I don’t remember any of these, but I do have a distant recollection of the dark hours of the night as a time of forbidden or dubious events—wetting my bed, talking in my sleep, waking up in my parents’ bed or even downstairs on the couch at three in the morning. My childhood nights were filled with troubling dreams whose effects could only be soothed away by the warm arms of my mother or, once in a while, my father.

My nocturnal wanderings ended by the time I was five or six, but by then my approach to the daytime world had itself become suspect. I was unpredictable and accident-prone. I fell off our roof once, dislocating my shoulder, and overturned a pot of boiling water another time, scalding myself seriously.

I got lost more times than I can count. I was always getting separated from our group at school or on a field trip, always returning from solitary expeditions covered with cuts and bruises whose origin I couldn’t recall. Disasters, my mother called them. I can still see her kneeling before me, shaking her head as she cleaned blood off my hands, my knees, my chin or cheeks. That won’t go away, she would murmur when one of the wounds was deep. That will leave a scar. The fresh rubbery smell of bandages was a familiar acquaintance during my youth. Yet somehow I cannot remember the pain.

My parents worried about me. So did my teachers. Though the safe path was always right in front of me, I kept veering off it into something which did not seem unknown or perilous until it was too late to prevent the damage.

My aunts and uncles referred to me as a free spirit, and exchanged glances which suggested in an adult way that they were a little worried about how I was going to turn out.

Despite my mother’s many attempts at re-education I never quite got over that impulse toward wandering and adventure that got me into so much trouble—not until the events which form the basis of this story, anyway.

But I am ahead of myself. Or, more precisely, behind myself. This story begins when I was much older, worlds away from those early years, and I had a daughter of my own.

We were at odds. Daria was a senior in high school, and had fallen in love with a musician, a man of twenty-seven who played the bass in a country band. His name was Sam. He was a nice young man, kind to Daria and scrupulously respectful to my husband and me. He was serious about the band, wrote many of its songs, and did most of the work arranging bookings. He sang in a husky baritone that could be quite affecting at times, especially when the song was a ballad.

But he was divorced, and seemed far too experienced for Daria, who, until she met him that spring, had been fighting senior-itis, working disinterestedly at her final high school courses, and trying without much enthusiasm to choose a college. Now she was talking about putting off college and going to work as Sam’s road manager and accountant. I was dead set against this plan and, despite my better judgment, had allowed myself to be drawn into open conflict with Daria. We had been fighting over her sudden decision for two months, and neither she nor I had shown signs of weakening.

What’s so bad about him? she asked.

It’s not him, it’s you, I replied, not quite honestly. You’re not old enough to be making this kind of decision.

How would you know that? You’re not me.

This exchange had been repeated countless times already. Each time Daria dug her heels in a bit deeper. I knew my resistance was only increasing her stubbornness, but I couldn’t help myself.

We lived in a suburb of Atlanta. My husband Dan was an architect. He had designed banks, office buildings, and a couple of local churches that had attracted a lot of attention. In recent years he had begun receiving commissions from other states, and his professional future looked bright. We now lived in an almost too beautiful suburban house on two and a half acres, designed by Dan.

People used to drive by every Sunday morning, families out for a weekend drive to see how the other half lived. Always they paused by our house, ogling the dramatic angles, the high windows, the clever flagstone and brickwork, the abstract weathercock designed by a sculptor friend of Dan’s. Whether I was on the lawn gardening or inside the house, I turned away when I saw the cars slow to a stop. The eyes of strangers made me uncomfortable.

Perhaps this feeling was sharpened by the fact that the house was so flamboyant. With its upswept contours it proclaimed a kind of aspiration or daring that we, its owners, did not really feel. When people came to gawk at the place, I could not help thinking that it advertised our lives falsely.

Dan and I had long since settled down to a lifestyle that could be described in a variety of critical or apologetic ways, but that is best summarized as suburban. We worked hard, though the lean years were now behind us. We associated with people like ourselves, successful people who were rising in the social and professional hierarchy of the city. It was an uphill climb. We were seeking admission into a structure which reluctantly made room for people and then embraced them almost too reassuringly—like a finished jigsaw puzzle that hugs its individual pieces as firmly as it once rejected them.

We had chosen this path consciously. We both felt that one has to put food on the table before one thinks about higher truths. If we had left something behind along the way—a sense of risk, perhaps, or the impulse that drives a person to discover himself, to explore his own fate—we felt that the sacrifice was worth it. Whatever we had lost we would recapture, if need be, when time and spiritual energy permitted.

We were not alone in this, of course. We were living in a difficult era now, an era in which financial security could no longer be taken for granted, no matter how qualified or educated one was. The memory of previous decades, when idealism had flowered turbulently before being eclipsed by fear, was just that—a memory. One didn’t think too much about deeper yearnings. One made do, and confined one’s hopes to what seemed realistically attainable.

I was, if anything, more committed to this view than Dan. Like everyone else, I had had my share of stresses—Daria’s childhood sicknesses, the death of her sister as an infant, my subsequent miscarriages, a brief marital crisis after that which led Dan into an affair and me into therapy. I felt that this was more than enough trouble for one family, for one woman. Thus I didn’t think there was anything overly conservative about our lives or our choices. I thought we were surviving in a difficult world. My own character, I felt, had been formed by the adversity I had endured, the happiness I had fought for and earned.

Dan’s affair had taken place when Daria was nine. I believed at the time that she had known nothing about it. But when she hit her adolescence, four years after our reconciliation, it was she who brought out the contrast between our lost past and the present.

As a child she had been bright, affectionate, full of energy. She looked like me even as a little girl, and I felt a strong bond with her, the more so because she had turned out to be our only child. But the minute she finished eighth grade, it seemed, she closed herself behind a harshly energetic demeanor, and shut me and Dan out. She fought hard to make the varsity swim team her freshman year, and was always in practice thereafter. Her private life seemed to hide behind the screen of the constant swim practices. We knew almost nothing about her real feelings.

Daria was already a tall, pretty girl with burning green eyes whose expression of intent curiosity sometimes crossed an invisible borderline into insolence. It often bothered me to see her stride quickly through a room, on her way to her own destiny, without glancing at me. Or to see her flop down on the couch in front of the TV in the family room, curling her long legs underneath her, only half-watching the show we had turned on.

She was no longer part of us. The spritelike virulence of her energy kept reminding me that she was bursting to get away from us. This made me feel abandoned and sad.

She earned high grades and was popular with her peers, but there was a wild streak in her. Sometimes she went places she had not told us she was going, or did not come home from parties until dawn. Once she got into trouble at school by helping to paint a crudely satirical and somewhat obscene mural in which some of the most important teachers figured. She and her cohorts were caught and forced to repaint the wall themselves, reimbursing the school for the paint they used.

Another time she stole our car when we were out to dinner and drove with some friends through the most dangerous downtown neighborhoods, calling out taunts to boys she saw on the street.

Her closest girl friends were misfits, each in her own way. But none were outright rebels, except Daria. She made it a point not to think, dress, or act like other people. She shunned the various social groups available to her at school, and prided herself on being an outsider.

Dan took the worst of her adolescent moodiness. She could barely stand to see him come home from work. Everything about him irritated her. She resented his most innocent questions about school, about boys, about the swimming which took up so much of her time. At the dinner table she kept her eyes on me, never once looking in his direction. When I went into the kitchen for something I could hear their silence behind me.

As for me, I managed, by showing a lot of motherly tact, to remain in contact with her during those years. We had conversations when she came home from school. I would sit on the kitchen counter while she ate a snack at the little table in the nook, and she would talk to me. She talked about the swim team, her friends, the boys,—but not in a confiding way. There was a distance between us even when we laughed together.

By senior year she had become a National Merit Scholarship Finalist and a member of the Cum Laude Society, but she took no pleasure in her intellectual achievements. She bluntly refused my encouragement to go to an Ivy League or Seven Sisters school. She said she would never fit in there. They’re a bunch of social jerks. This hurt me, because I had gone to Smith, and I felt that my education had helped me to avoid suffering even more disasters than I had already faced in life. She talked about an athletic scholarship in swimming at a Big Ten university, but even in this plan there was no real enthusiasm. She was drifting. A normal enough condition at her age, I told myself.

Then she met Sam. Her attachment to him was made instantly, and deepened at a frightening pace. She spent every Friday and Saturday night at the club where his band performed, a place called the Wild Side, and resented our refusals to allow her to go during the week.

Within a month she asked permission to invite him home to dinner. Despite our misgivings Dan and I agreed so as not to aggravate the situation. Sam brought us a bottle of wine—a gracious enough gesture, but hardly calculated to reassure us about his romance with a girl well below the drinking age—and told us all about himself. He was soft-spoken and gentle, and there was intelligence in his eyes. Long ago, when he was living in the midwest, he had had a teenaged marriage that had ended in divorce after two years. He had no children.

He wore slacks and a sweater that night, but I could see he was uncomfortable in them. There was something soft about his shape—he was a bit thick in the middle, and round-shouldered—yet very masculine. The kind of man who could make a woman feel safe in his embrace. It was obvious he would be more comfortable in the jeans and denim shirt he wore at the club, and I almost wished he had worn them.

He sat respectfully distant from Daria, but I could feel their intimacy pulling them closer. Even when he asked Dan about his work, showing a genuine interest in architecture, his body seemed aware of Daria behind him.

When he gestured to her and said, You didn’t tell me your parents were so nice, she blushed. I knew at that moment that she was sleeping with him.

I also sensed that he was a good lover. It was in Daria’s eyes, and in his calm demeanor. He would not be aggressive in bed, but would know how to give a woman pleasure in a slower, gentler way. His warmth, combined with the confidence of his age, would be irresistible to a girl like Daria.

He was not very well educated. He had failed to finish his second year of college, and was already working as a musician at the time he left. He had drifted south for reasons which were never made clear to us. He was not very ambitious. He seemed satisfied to play the local clubs and tour our part of the state rather than to work toward some sort of major professional success.

I went to see him perform at the club that weekend. He looked impressive on the bandstand. His bass seemed to propel the group, and his leadership among the musicians was obvious.

I closed my eyes and listened to him sing. In his voice I could hear the sensuality, the maleness, that had seduced Daria. He had written a love song to her, and he sang it that night. The lyrics were simple and not very polished, but they left no doubt of his feelings for her. I blushed when I heard them.

I walked out in the Georgia rain

I made my way alone.

I lost myself in wandering

And never found a home.

But Georgia rains are many,

And rainbows saw me through

A long road back the way I came

To bring me home to you.

I was touched by his commitment to my daughter. But this did not reassure me. I felt more convinced than ever that he was too old for her, that she had made an enormous mistake in getting involved with him.

I could not help making my feelings known to Daria. Too much was at stake for me to keep silent, I thought.

What’s so bad about him? Daria asked harshly. You’ve met him. You’ve heard him sing.

And she sat back on the couch, as though those two things left nothing more to be said. She had read me correctly. Meeting him, hearing him sing had made a big impression on me.

He’s not educated, I said. He never will be. For the rest of his life he’ll be what he is today.

What’s the matter with that? Daria asked, more aggressive now. I like him just the way he is today.

I sighed. A mother’s exasperated sigh. Experience shaking its head at innocence.

You’re at the beginning of your life, sweetie, I said. You’re just at the threshold of yourself. There is a whole future waiting for you. You can’t close all the doors to it now.

I’m opening a door, Daria said. Maybe it’s your problem that you can’t see that.

I looked away. I had seen something familiar in her eyes, something I couldn’t quite place. It was a look of rebellion, and of something stronger or deeper than rebellion. It unnerved me. I got up and walked away from her. Then I turned suddenly.

You’re making a mistake, I said, And you’re too young to know it. Too immature. It makes me feel sick to be unable to warn you, because you don’t have ears to listen with.

It’s you who don’t have ears.

I could feel my temper rising. One more sentence and I might provoke her beyond forgiveness. But I could not hold my tongue.

You’re choosing something that is convenient for you now, I said. Something that seems attractive and protective. But the world is a hard place. In five years, ten years, you’ll want to grow. And it will be too late. You’ll be locked in.

Like you? she asked, vicious and confident. In this house?

I turned and hurried away. As I did so I saw the skylight, yawning toward the heavens, the beautiful angular room closed upon us and our conflict. I realized painfully that Daria saw through me. I had spent my whole life trying to protect a future that never came. She was determined to live now, because she knew the long-term danger of my attitude was far greater than any risk she might run by living for the present. Perhaps this was why she had chosen Sam in the first place.

That night I tried to sleep and couldn’t. I went down to the family room at around two. Dan was asleep. So was Daria. I felt alone, exiled from both of them.

I saw the cabinet where we kept our photo albums. I opened it and picked out the album that had photos of Daria as a little girl. I was driven by a self-serving desire to evoke the happy years before she started giving us trouble. To wonder how such a bright and affectionate child could have grown up to disappoint me so.

But as I saw the first image of her—a second-grader on a field trip to a nearby farm—I paused. Her face reminded me of my own. I found it impossible to muster the disapproval I sought. My heart went out to her. At the same time, an obscure intuition told me that my problem was not in my daughter, but in myself.

After turning a few more pages I closed the album and put it away. I got down on my hands and knees and rooted through the other albums toward the back of the cabinet. I had to pile some of them on the rug in order to make room for a deeper search. At last I found, dust-covered and long-hidden, the old album that contained my own girlhood pictures.

I don’t think I had looked at it for at least a decade. It was not very thick—I was the youngest of three children, and by the time I came along my parents had lost their energy for photo opportunities—and the last pages were devoted to my courtship and engagement with Dan. The album made my childhood seem like the forgotten preamble to a marriage that now defined my life.

I looked at the pictures, most of them in black and white. I saw myself as a baby in a stroller outside our apartment in Connecticut, as a toddler with my neighbor Susie. Then as a third-grader in a Christmas pageant at school in Ohio, where we had moved. I saw my fifth-grade class picture, taken just before we moved again, and tried without success to remember the name of my teacher. There was a picture of me as a junior high student in public school, and then my first and only year at The Spencer Academy for Girls, a private school in Colorado.

Then the pictures resumed at Rosemary Hall, where I went after Spencer. The postcard-pretty playing fields and buildings of Wallingford had taken over for the older, more eccentric Spencer campus.

Something made me pause. At Spencer I was far younger than Daria was now. I was thirteen going on fourteen. But the resemblance between us was much stronger than later on, when I graduated from Rosemary Hall and went on to Smith. This caught my eye. I sat back in my chair, letting the album slip forward in my lap.

Something fell out onto the floor with a soft rustle that echoed in the silence of the night. I did not immediately look down. Consciously I felt nothing, but underneath my fatigue and my worry I knew what had fallen.

At last I looked. There were two photographs at my feet. The first showed me with my two best friends at Spencer, Jane Gillette and Didi Pennington. Jane, taller, was laughing as always, mischief in her eyes along with something more shrouded. I could see her freckles, the auburn curl of her hair, and even the slight gap in one of her eyebrows that I had often noticed in that long-ago year.

Didi was smaller, blond, and visibly shy. She was a delicate girl, a little overweight, framed by her two taller friends. Something in her eyes held back, as though she needed the hilarity of Jane and myself to bring her into the game. Only now did I notice something I had never been aware of in the old days—the sadness behind her quiet little smile.

It was quite a trio. And not the least complex of the three was myself. I was tall, like Daria. I had long curly hair, strong-looking shoulders, and that same sprightly air that Daria has now. My eyes showed an eagerness for adventure, and a clear desire to match Jane in recklessness.

I had seen that look in Daria’s eyes today, and when Sam came to dinner. But I had not seen it in my own eyes since that picture was taken at Spencer Academy. Not in any snapshot or portrait photograph, and not in the mirror.

The other picture was lying upside-down on the rug. A long moment passed before I dared to look at it. It was the yearbook portrait of Gabrielle Hastings, our freshman history teacher. How I came by it I could not imagine, for I had never seen the yearbook from my one and only year at Spencer.

The portrait was posed and stagy, in the style of that bygone time. The outlines were soft, the background nondescript. Miss Hastings’ hair, now three decades out of style, was smooth and dark. Her eyes avoided the camera somehow, though she looked calmly into the lens. She kept her mystery in the studio, as she had done in the real world.

It occurred to me that in this photograph she was only twenty-three or twenty-four, perhaps younger. A beginning teacher fresh out of college. So much nearer in age to Daria than to me! So much closer to Daria’s dreams, Daria’s stubborn hunger for the future than to my own more settled view.

I looked more closely at the picture, wondering in memory which side Miss Hastings was on—that of risk or of carefulness. Her face would not answer the question. This was, I realized only now, the profoundest secret of her charm.

It was because of Miss Hastings, what I got from her and dared for her, that I brought upon myself my last and greatest disaster. And because of that disaster that I retreated across the line from adventure into caution, from plunging into waiting, and never went back. Because of Miss Hastings, and because of Joel MacAllister, whose name came to my lips at this moment, though his own picture, for obvious reasons, was nowhere to be seen.

I closed my eyes, already welling with tears, and held the album to my breast. I felt my heart constrict. Then I looked again at the photograph. With the aid of memory, and of something else inside me, I approached a door that did not want to open. Miss Hastings’ pretty eyes dropped their veil of time and looked out at me. I felt their smile, and heard the old voice in my ear.

You’re a special person. I expect special things from you.

I looked toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms where my husband and daughter slept. Then quickly back to the picture.

The tears on my cheeks felt good. Like the album, they had been hidden far too long. It was a relief to let them come. I knew I would not sleep this night. My worries for the future and my battles with Daria had distracted me too long from myself. The past was claiming its due now. With a sigh I opened my eyes to it.

PART ONE

Fall

CHAPTER ONE

T he Spencer Academy might as well have been a prison or a covert military installation as a girls’ school. It was nestled secretively in a deep forest in southern Colorado, within sight of the Continental Divide, but far from the well-traveled roads used by tourists in search of Rocky Mountain vistas.

The school was located a good five miles from the center of the provincial town of Hebron, which supplied it with its needs. This town was famous for its two factories, one of which made fine china and the other a small but crucial part used in every washing machine in the United States. The town was divided between the wealthy families of the factories’ management, and the blue-collar class, which included a large Hispanic population living across the tracks in a ramshackle ghetto.

The school was much older than the town, over a hundred years old in fact. It had been built when this forested landscape went on for fifty miles in every direction. Girls had come here by train and carriage from all over the country even then, the journey taking weeks.

Spencer had been through several incarnations. It began as a Methodist citadel under its original founder (whose bronze