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THIRTY-SEVEN

Never rent, buy—if you can. This bit of antebellum lore I learned from my grandparents. Around 1946 while traveling through Guatemala I found a sixteenth-century monastery in the earthquake-ruined city of Antigua. For something like $3,000 I bought it with my meager earnings from a first novel. An American architect who lived in the town agreed to restore the building if I allowed him to live in it. This proved to be a successful arrangement. But after two or three years I was ready to move on; and did. Europe had, as they say, opened up again and I started traveling seriously. But I knew that sooner or later I’d be obliged to buy another house. Why? The books I kept accumulating—in which I resembled Senator Gore whose houses in Washington kept getting bigger as he acquired more and more books. I was the same. In due course, I sold the Guatemala house. Later, back in New York, I was invited to lunch by a transatlantic lady Alice Pleydell-Bouverie. She had spent the war years in London and then came back to New York with her children. She was to the end more English than American and lived in a sort of English manor house near the village of Rhinebeck on the Hudson River not far from her endlessly irritable and irritating brother Vincent Astor who owned much of New York City. Meanwhile, Howard and I settled in a small apartment over the Dover food shop in Lexington Avenue where I started to write plays for television. Alice lent us the odd chair or two. We also visited her at Rhinebeck where she was assembling a life for herself much like the one she had known in England, centered on the ballet, where she had been a considerable patron thanks to her friendship with Frederick Ashton. She resumed much the same role in New York but never ceased to long for prewar England. She had stored away a vast amount of furniture to be used when it came time to furnish her English house but, like a Chekhovian heroine, she never went back to live in England. Happily, a stream of British friends came to visit her at Rhinebeck or stayed in Manhattan at her brother Vincent’s hotel the Saint Regis.

On one visit to Alice’s house she took us for a drive through the countryside to see a beautiful Greek Revival house built in 1820 with columns and an octagonal library, the work of A. J. Davis. A lawn extended from portico down to the Hudson River. There were also three acres of willow and locust trees as well as a small island in the river. My television work paid, barely, for the house—some $16,000. On the other hand, I had no money to furnish the place. Alice allowed me to use some of the furniture intended for the London house that she was never to live in. She died far too soon in 1956. Howard and I continued to live on at Edgewater until the 1960s when the books seemed to have moved, all on their own, to Italy and so we moved with them until now; as I write, they are headed for California where I shall finally live in our fourth and final house, whose endless library seems to have been assembled by the sorcerer’s apprentice.

My obsession with houses is the result of my mother’s habit of marrying and divorcing. No sooner had she restored a house than she’d either leave a husband or he her. Since I was away in school or the army, I never, as they say, settled in. So, eventually, I had to buy my own houses.

Howard and I lived at Edgewater for twenty years then sold it to a rich businessman who collected Greek Revival houses which he usually made museums out of and then gave to the public, enjoying no doubt a considerable tax deduction from a grateful nation. I’ve only set foot in the house once since the sale. It is now a sort of museum of nineteenth-century furniture.

Edgewater, the house I intended to live in to the end, with the spaniels Billy and Blanche. This is the autumn day when, after nearly twenty years, I sold the place and moved to Rome with the dogs. Howard had got there before me. Edgewater was built in 1820. The octagonal library is the work of A. J. Davis.

I do dream about the house. In the dream I have somehow bought it back and I am about to move in. As I cross the tracks of the adjacent New York Central Railroad, I run into John Navins the postmaster of Barrytown who also kept a small general store in what had been the old Barrytown station house. Whenever we meet in this particular dream, he always says, “I knew you’d come back.” But back to what? In the dream the lawn has vanished. The river is almost even with the columns. The island is large and stony. Inside the rooms are unfamiliar. And, of course, there is no one there. Plainly I, too, am a ghost as I wander through the empty rooms. Only old John Navins seems to be among the living. Yet in all his years beside the tracks he only took the train down to New York City once. Dutifully, he got off at Grand Central Terminal and walked out into the crowded street. He was so horrified by what he saw that he hurried back into the station and sat down in a waiting room where he remained until the next train took him back to Barrytown and his pre-ghostly existence. I’ve not seen him for several years now. Perhaps he’s retired from haunting. To my distress Howard does not make many appearances in dreams other than the frustration ones where one cannot find the door to a flat. My father makes the odd appearance, as serene as ever. But I think of those as death dreams: he comes only at times when my own death is on my mind. Several times he has led me up a mountain to some wild landscape into which he disappears. Mercifully, I am spared visits from my mother. Sadly I never see the Gores anymore. My grandmother Dot had told me what horrendous dreams she was having in her last days. The Senator did not tell me about his dreams but he’d answer questions that interested him. He was totally blind by his tenth year. So one of my first questions to him on the subject was: “Are you able to see again in your dreams?” He found that an interesting subject. The answer was, yes, he sometimes could. But as he pondered this “restored” vision he came to the conclusion that he could only see things which he had seen before the second accident blinded him. He could see green grass. Blue sky. But, no, he could not even imagine his wife or children or political colleagues. He sensed that they were present in certain dream-dramas but he had no faces to put to them. Voices? He thought that he must have heard voices in a lightless void. Could he visualize the color red? I was relentless but he was patient, even a bit curious. I learned that his father had taken him to a famous eye specialist in New Orleans when he was about twelve and the optic nerve in one eye (the other was missing) still registered light and dark and vague shadows but then all that faded away. Had he lived in our time he could have recovered a good deal of sight in at least the one eye. I recall a woman journalist telling him that, of course, there must be compensations. “There are none,” was the hard response and he later referred to her as that Christian Scientist, not a compliment from someone atheistically inclined who had survived a youth in religion-mad Mississippi. He liked to confront his more devout cousinage with contradictions in their Christian faith. Early in life his own family had split on religion. The Gores belonged to a long line of Methodist preachers but by the time of his father many of them were splitting off into Baptist groupings. His father, Thomas Madison Gore, the county clerk, became a Cambellite, an interesting sect of fundamentalists that wanted to prove every word of Gospel to be scientifically true. When my grandfather was asked to which church he planned to go, he said, briskly, “I’m going to the Senate.” He got through Lebanon Law School with the help of a cousin whose tuition his father had paid. Still an adolescent, he helped several adult members of his family to organize the Party of the People in Mississippi. He developed early as an orator and was known to contemporaries as Guv. In due course, he moved west to the Indian territories and helped organize Oklahoma as a state where he was elected their first senator in 1907 and served until 1937. His last years were spent working as an attorney for several Indian tribes that had been cheated of their land by the U.S. government. Not long after his death the tribes got a considerable settlement. There is a city named Gore in the state; he always threatened to go live there when its population was under a hundred but thought better of it when it became a city. I have never seen his house in Lawton if it still exists. It is somewhere near those ubiquitous railroad tracks on whose other side the future Joan Crawford was growing up at the same time as my mother, Nina, who was forbidden to play with her young contemporary because her mother was deemed a scarlet woman by the pious folk of the town.