Houses

The life they lead while waiting for their owners to come home.

Help spread your support of my writing by pressing the little heart above. It might also get Substack to recognize how great America Eats! is.

---

Thirty years ago, I decided we needed to leave the home we loved. We adored it from the moment we stepped inside, all its faded beauty, its shattered ceilings, smashed walls, and sagging floors. We moved the kitchen from the dark bottom floor up to the parlor floor so it would be next to the once elegant dining room. We repaired ceilings, painted walls, and stripped 80 years of grime from the woodwork. Our second son was conceived there. We became a family inside this house.

440 57th Street, Brooklyn, as it looked when we moved into it. Credit: New York Public Library Building Research Photography archive.

Twelve years later, though, our neighborhood was suddenly taken over by a flock of young men up to no good. Their swagger and street smarts attracted our 15-year-old son. He began to sneak out late at night and skipped school, returning home high and drunk. After a whole year of trying to catch his fall, I convinced my husband that we would have to move. There was no other way to bring him back to us.

My search concentrated on a neighborhood only 20 blocks away but separated by a highway underpass. It was in our oldest son’s school district and our youngest son’s bus route. We were sort of financially solvent by then, but we could barely afford even the smallest house. We’d have to forgo what we had come to believe was essential to our lives: three bedrooms, space to carve out two writing areas, a good kitchen, and a generous garden.

A whole fruitless month passed before our agent called to say he might have found something. The house had been on the market for two years because the elderly owner, the last surviving child of the original family, kept rejecting offers. Now his heirs were handling the sale and had just reduced its price.

The agent and I pulled up to the two story house. Built in 1908, it was the only one on the block that looked tired. There was a rusting metal awning over the front door and squishy moss-covered outdoor carpet buckling on the porch and steps. Before the agent unlocked the door he turned to me and said, “Just warning you, it’s selling as is and there’s stuff all over the place.”

644 77th Street, Brooklyn, as it looked the first time I saw it. Credit: New York Public Library Building Research Photography archive.

I started laughing the minute we walked in. The hall and living room were strewn with the detritus of 90 years of the family’s life. Most of the big furniture had been removed but everything else remained. The elderly man was a Jesuit priest who had used the house as a sort of weekend retreat from his parish. The glow-in-the-dark light switches were embossed with prayers. The living room was decorated with vividly colored paintings of the Virgin Mary, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and individual portraits of the last nine popes—Leo XIII to John Paul. His vestments hung on the doors of the built-in china closets and two small leather boxes on the mantlepiece contained the liturgical instruments needed for the last rites and the Mass.

I followed the agent into the kitchen, six and a half foot wide by twelve feet long. The huge sink left no room for a counter. A wall cabinet with its doors taken off was wedged awkwardly beside it. A wooden hutch hung on the opposite wall, narrowing the space before the broken oven. The floor’s linoleum was curling. A medical bed had been squeezed into the back beside a small window. The elderly man’s last sibling had died there four years before. The window looked out on the backyard: a small concrete square surrounded by tall brush. The rooms on the second floor were filled with the many beds once needed for a large family. The basement was a time capsule of 20th century Americana.

We put a bid in the next day. If the elderly man didn’t agree to sell it to us, I feared that we would be out of options. The agent called his family. His family called a meeting. One of his cousins took him out to dinner. My husband talked endlessly to the bank. Our sons hated me. Three weeks later we moved in.

664 77th Street, Brooklyn, today.

People ask me now how many more years will we continue to live in the house. It’s a common question asked when children have grown and rooms stand empty.

What are your plans? they ask.

I mutter a reply, something about the house being a perfect size for two old souls to rattle around. Our sons hold on to the truth that the house did everything a house could to keep them safe from harm.

I tell myself it would be easy to move on. I am not much for clutter and few of our possessions are worth fussing about. Eventually, someone will walk in and find themselves a new home.

---

Note: I began to think about the history of our house after my brother sent me a Zillow listing for our family’s home in Philadelphia. The current owners bought it from our parents more than forty years ago. They were the third family to live in it. The 31 photographs accompanying the listing seemed to show that it was hastily vacated. It appeared that an elderly person was the last to leave as many of the family’s possessions still occupied every room. The interior was nothing like what it looked like when our parents moved out. My brother and sister and I exchanged snotty texts pointing out details that were horrid to us, especially the kitchen, remodeled in such a way that left no space for a crucial family table like ours did.

But two of the pictures of the attic rooms where my sister and I slept showed there was something of ours still intact. In the first was the desk where I began to write stories. In the second was my sister’s decoupage mural she created above her bureau.

I asked my brother and sister if they wanted to go see it. My brother thought his son might buy it. Sue and I wondered if we could get the mural and desk back. But by the time we reached the agent the house was in contract. We had to let it go.