The House With The Golden Door Epub

[Frederic Laureano]

She leaves the small creatures in tortured juxtapositions. Her mother and I find them on the porch steps, in the garden, drowning in small puddles, the green hose dripping water from the copper nozzle, guilty as blood. For a few weeks we are able to believe that these tragedies have nothing to do with our little girl whose smile breaks each morning like the sun. We scrape them up, gently, with the edge of leaves or blades of grass (once I cut one in half that way, a horrible accident and it bled while Sheilah laughed, I thought at some imaginary play) but we save none. Sometimes, we have to take them out of their misery, the slow agony of dying they suffer, we step on them, hard, and later scrape their squashed remains from the soles of our shoes.

It has been a long, hot summer. The flowers wither on exhausted stems. We almost regret our stance against air conditioning. We place fans throughout the house; the hum is as annoying as the insidious hum of hornets that occasionally circle over us in the garden, like a threat.

Sheilah runs through the summer days in her nightgown, pale pink and ethereal, her white limbs and moon-white face protected by slatherings of coconut-scented sunscreen. At night, when she finally falls asleep, tiny beads of sweat dotting her pink lips, heat emanates from her blonde curls as if she, herself, were a season.

This is a difficult time for all of us. Anne makes jewelry in the basement studio, which Sheilah is forbidden to enter, while I work on my second book (The Possibilities for Enchantment in a World at War with the Self, the Other, and the Infinite) in my upstairs office, also forbidden. Sheilah follows this rule so completely that, one morning, I find her lying curled against the door, like a good dog.

Many nights, after Sheilah falls asleep in mid-protest, Anne goes outside, only to return streaked with dirt and grass, her blue eyes bereft of even the memory of joy. She does not invite me to join her, but one night I follow, allowing myself the freedom we must deny our daughter. Anne sits in the garden on a rock large enough, just barely, for one. She does not acknowledge me. Once my eyes adjust, I see what she has done. Miniature tombstones stand in neat rows, flowers in acorn cups arranged before them. I glance at Anne, then lean closer. Each stone is carved with a symbol: a star, a moon, a little shoe, a feather, a clock.

Bright light streams through the lace curtains of the humming room, and I awake to the sound of Anne weeping. I wrap her in my arms. She tries to explain, but the words are swallowed by her tears. I pat her gently on the back. Over her shoulder I see Sheilah standing in the doorway in her favorite nightgown. She watches with a cold, calculated expression, holding in her dimpled fingers a fairy, so small it is almost invisible. Careful to cover the tiny mouth with her pinky she pulls one wing off the poor creature, and then the other. I take a deep breath and hold Anne closer.

It is disturbing, how eagerly she leaves. Sheilah and I wave from the open doorway, the scent of summer dying in the morning air, the brown lilacs withered on the bush, the squirrels scampering wildly through the yard, which is overgrown and dried out. Anne waves from the open car window, the graceful arc of her hand the last we see of her as she turns the corner. Sheilah starts walking across the porch, she turns and looks at me, wonder and fear in her small face. I nod. She breaks into that brilliant smile, and with a shout, runs free, a wild thing released. Later, I lay the quilt under the tree, and bring out a thermos of lemon aide, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She gulps the lemon aide, and tears into the sandwich. With her mouth full, she looks up at me, smiles, and plants peanut butter kisses all over my face.

She plays outside all day, and into the evening. When I call her in, she comes, tired and happy. She sits at the kitchen table and stares at the macaroni and cheese, her favorite food, but she cannot eat, instead she slumps forward, falling asleep, right there at the table. I carry her upstairs, and put her to bed in the clothes she played in.

Finally it comes undone. I shove it away, approximating a throw, it crashes to the ground, followed by a sound of brush scattered, twigs broken. I have frightened some creature down there, a deer, or perhaps something more dangerous.

As the amber evening closes in around us, and the night fairies come out, carrying their tiny lanterns, whispering their dark thoughts, Sheilah continues playing, even when a parade of them crosses the patches of her blanket, even when several fly right past her, she pays them no mind at all. Anne and I have begun to suspect she no longer sees them, which is sad in a way, but given the choices we had, and what life made of us, we think we have done well by Sheilah. Now that we have a normal child, she will be safe in her normal world, and we will be safe in ours. We can hope, we can dream, we believe.

I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.

But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then-not enough of them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown. I think of how useless the Dresden -part of my memory has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has been to write about, and I am reminded of the famous limerick:

I had the Bell Telephone Company find him for me. They are wonderful that way. I have this, disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.

As a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations, I had outlined the Dresden story many times. The best outline I ever made, or anyway the prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper.

The end, where all the lines stopped, was a beetfield on the Elbe, outside of Halle. The rain was coming down. The war in Europe had been over for a couple of weeks. We were formed in ranks, with Russian soldiers guarding us-Englishmen, Americans, Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen, Canadians, South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians, thousands of us about to stop being prisoners of war.

An idiotic Englishman, who had lost all his teeth somewhere had his souvenir in a canvas bag. The bag was resting on my insteps. He would peek into the bag every now and then, and he would roll his eyes and swivel his scrawny neck,, trying to catch people looking covetously at his bag. And he would bounce the bag on my insteps.

I thought this bouncing was accidental. But I was mistaken. He had to show somebody what was in the bag, and he had decided he could trust me. He caught my eye, winked, opened the bag. There was a plaster model of the Eiffel Tower in there. It was painted gold. It had a clock in it.

And we were flown to a rest camp in France, where we were fed chocolate malted milkshakes and other rich foods until we were all covered with baby fat. Then we were sent home, and I married a pretty girl who was covered with baby fat, too.

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

While I was studying to be an anthropologist, I was also working as a police reporter for the famous Chicago City News Bureau for twenty-eight dollars a week. One time they switched me from the night shift to the day shift., so I worked sixteen hours straight. We were supported by all the newspapers in town, and the AP and the UP and all that. And we would cover the courts and the police stations and the Fire Department and the Coast Guard out on Lake Michigan and all that. We were connected to the institutions that supported us by means of pneumatic tubes which ran under the streets of Chicago.

And the first story I covered I had to dictate over the telephone to one of those beastly girls. It was about a young veteran who had taken a job running an old-fashioned elevator in an office building. The elevator door on the first floor was ornamental iron lace. Iron ivy snaked in and out of the holes. There was an iron twig with two iron lovebirds perched upon it.

This veteran decided to take his car into the basement, and he closed the door and started down, but his wedding ring Was caught in all the ornaments. So he was hoisted into the air and the floor of the car went down, dropped out from under him, and the top of the car squashed him. So it goes.

I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on.

The Second World War had certainly made everybody very tough. And I became a public relations man for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and a volunteer fireman in the Village of Alplaus, where I bought my first home. My boss there was one of the toughest guys I ever hope to meet. He had been a lieutenant colonel in public relations in Baltimore. While I was in Schenectady he joined the Dutch Reformed Church, which is a very tough church, indeed.

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