The Listening House Read online

  Right then, standing there, I had a moment of doubt. I’d read Les Misérables once, and laughed at the frequency with which its characters hung on the brink of an abyss. But 593 Trent Street hovered too closely to an abyss for comfort. Who could say, if a wind should come, that its bricks wouldn’t waver like cards in a card house, clatter and rattle down that concrete cliff, shatter and stun and kill and heap in a gigantic trash pile on that huddle of houses below, so far below?

  Mr. Gangan once said I had “too God damn much imagination.”

  I shook myself, walked around to the front of the house, up the steps, and twisted the decorated iron triangle that stood out from the door casing.

  A jangle sounded inside, but almost before it had begun the door opened.

  * * *

  —

  I USED TO THINK, afterward, that I’d never depend on my judgment of people again.

  Because my first impression of Mrs. Garr, as she stood there blocking her open door, was pleasant.

  It was her hair.

  Her hair was white, and the first time I saw her I saw nothing beyond it. It was beautiful hair. She talked, I answered, but instead of watching mouth and eyes as I usually do, I looked at her hair.

  White.

  If you’ve seen cleaned white goose feathers, sleek and shining, you know something of the color and the texture, too; it looked that soft. Her way of wearing it was old-fashioned: a curled pompadour in front, like a fluff of soap bubbles, and a soft knot of the back hair on top of her head.

  “Didn’t I just see you walking around the house, miss?” was what she said.

  I didn’t pick up on the suspicion, or the fact that she must have been watching me through a window. I was looking at her hair.

  “Yes,” I said in my pleasantest voice. “I walked back to see the drop. It’s steep, isn’t it?”

  “Did you ring my bell to say it was steep?”

  “Oh no.” I laughed and hurried to say it. “I rang your bell because I saw your ad in the paper. About the rooms. Could I see them?”

  “Oh, cer’n’y, cer’n’y, you can see the rooms.” She stepped back. Her voice was slurred; not a Southern speech, more a careless speech, eliding sounds.

  I stepped into the hall. And thought I should step out again.

  The hall wasn’t inviting. It smelled of old gas. It smelled of animals confined to cellars. The ghosts of long-fried dinners, the acridity of long-burned cigarettes haunted the air, which was a thicker, foggier dark than the gray day outside; a murk that might have been the grime of the outside walls floated loose and suspended in the hall.

  Ahead a rectangle of lighter gray outlined the door of a room on the right; farther ahead on the right glowered a doorway into pitch-blackness. The only window, shrouded in musty red curtains, was far ahead on the left.

  “Oh,” I gasped, turning. “I’m afraid I made a mistake. I—”

  “No, no, miss.” The woman took the sleeve of my coat in a light grasp. “This is the house. And the rooms are right down the hall. First-floor rooms. Very fine rooms. Very clean rooms.”

  There was urgency in her voice.

  “Well . . .” I said uncertainly, thinking: She’s poor, she needs the money.

  She limped a little as she went down the hall. It seemed heartless not even to look at her rooms. She was a big woman; heavy bones showed through her sagging flesh, but from the back she looked very old, her head hunched forward so that her black crepe shoulders rose above her neck. She limped straight down the hall, stopping at the blackened double doors at the end, lifted a key from the casing, threw the doors open, and stood there in the opening, nodding, smiling, beckoning, in some odd way furtive.

  The hall, as I went toward her, didn’t improve.

  The walls were hung with thick red paper. Red? It was again the red-brick black of the walls outside. Against the left wall stood a davenport and chair upholstered in black leather; huge things, such as you still see sometimes in old hotel lobbies. A bookcase of grimed golden oak stood next; behind its dirty glass I could see book agents’ sets of unreadable authors, shelves of cheaply bound novels.

  As I stepped past the door on the left I had an even stronger whiff of cellars. Suddenly a slack gray female alley cat shot out from that door, across my feet, flattened herself, and crawled under the bookcase.

  “What the . . . ?”

  “Kitty, kitty?” asked the woman fondly. “That’s my puss. I’m very fond of cats.”

  “I’ve never known any intimately.”

  “You’d like ’em. Show me a person likes animals, and I show you a good person.”

  Stairs rose beyond the room from which the cat had come; then I was at the doors to which the woman beckoned me.

  I had a surprise.

  The room into which I looked was nice.

  The woman—she hadn’t told me her name yet—had sense enough to close the double doors behind me quickly. And this room didn’t smell. Not after the hall, anyway. It ran the entire width of the house and was extended at each side by bays of three windows. The back wall, opposite the doors, was filled with shelves and drawers; it was an old-fashioned built-in buffet, but it was exquisitely done. It, and the rest of the woodwork, had been ivoried; the paper was soft rose; the rug had been a deeper rose, its flowers long stepped into their background. A new brown studio couch, a good one, along the wall beside the doors. White curtains. Gateleg table and dining chairs in one bay; green upholstered chair, table, and lamp in the other.

  More astounding—it was almost clean.

  “This is really nice.” I hoped I didn’t sound as surprised as I was.

  “Oh yes, yes, indeed. Very nice. And you have to think about the neighborhood. An exclusive neighborhood. Only the best people live in this part of town. It’s a privilege to live in this neighborhood. And walking distance. You could walk downtown, a healthy young girl like you.”

  She laughed ingratiatingly, a high, sharp, old woman’s laugh.

  “And the other room?”

  “Yes, yes, indeed! The other room!” She limped toward a door beside the buffet, swung it open.

  The kitchen made me forget the hall.

  The good old American kitchen, celebrated in song and story, reminiscent of pumpkin pies, stuffed chickens, applesauce, and gingerbread. Cupboards around the walls, bright linoleum on the floor, a big table against the back window, green rag rug in front of the table, a family-size gas stove, a cavernous icebox. This was a kitchen still holding the furnishings of its heyday, when a dexterous cook had ruled over the feasts of some early great.

  It was no dirtier than a little scrubbing would remedy.

  “Where do the three doors on this west wall lead to?”

  “This middle one, that’s a lavatory.”

  I hadn’t expected that. Chalk one up for a private toilet and washbowl.

  “The first door’s locked. It goes down cellar. We don’t ever use these back cellar stairs anymore.”

  “I see.”

  “You wouldn’t ever use that. And this here door . . .” She paused, and her eyes seemed to focus on a point three inches east of my face. “This here is a closet I keep some of my things in. There ain’t any closets in the front of the house, and seeing the back has so many, it seems like the people back here don’t need it. I used to live in this part myself. I used to live on this whole floor, but now I rent out the back, except I always keep this closet.”

  It was true I wouldn’t need that closet; the short passageway from the kitchen to the other room had drawers on one side, a deep, narrow closet on the other.

  I stood uncertain. The place was surely better than I could have expected, from the price. But that hall!

  “I’d like to think about it—” I began.

  “There’s a many comes and looks at this place.” The woman stoo
d beside but a little behind me again, her soft voice urging me over my shoulder. She never seemed to stand where I could look at her. “But there’s a many I don’t want. Chillern, now, I can’t stand chillern around. I’m a middle-aged woman, and my nerves ain’t as good as they were.”

  She was sixty-five if she was out of the cradle.

  “You any chillern?”

  “No. There’s only myself. I’m divorced.”

  “Oh. You give parties?”

  “Not very many.”

  “One or two quiet men friends, now, I don’t object to. I know how girls are; they got to have men friends. But I don’t like my furniture broke.”

  “I’ve never had any furniture broken.”

  “You a working girl?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I shan’t be working all the time. I’m taking most of the summer off.”

  “Oh.” I’d expected suspicion there, and got it. “I like my rent paid in advance. A week advance. And them as don’t pay up, I only give a day notice to vacate. I’m an old woman alone in the world and I got to pertect myself.”

  “I have money in the bank . . .” I tried, again, to face her, but she again edged around so she kept her view of my half face.

  “That’s fine, that’s fine,” she said. “But you oughtn’t to trust banks. I’d never keep a penny—” She stopped there, seemed to come to a decision; she came closer, took her light grasp of my sleeve. “You’re a nice girl, I can see; it would be lovely to have a nice girl in the house, almost like a companion to me. I don’t get so much chance to rent over summer, so many goes to the lake. For a nice girl like you, dearie, having a little trouble with her job and all, I could maybe let you have it for four dollars a week for the summer. Till September, maybe.”

  Four dollars a week! That would leave me almost eighteen dollars a month to eat on. Heavens! I could almost go to movies! I took a breath.

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  We went back to her parlor for the receipt for the first week’s rent. As we passed the stairs I chanced to look up. On the wall of the landing was a shadow cast by some hall light upstairs, a shadow with a head on it, perfectly still.

  Someone was standing there, listening.

  Curious, I thought, and thought no more about it.

  2

  IT WAS MARCH TWENTY-NINTH when I lost my job, when I paid my first visit to Mrs. Garr’s house; it was April fifteenth that I moved. I’d picked up a couple of days’ work as a salesgirl at Chapman’s, so it was eight o’clock in the evening before I loaded my suitcases, my steamer trunk, my cedar chest with the china packed in it, my sewing cabinet, my aluminum kettles and copper frying pans into a taxi. My precious furniture was safely in storage. As it was, the taxi was so full I sat on top of a suitcase with my feet on the box of kitchenware, and the driver had my trunk upended on the seat beside him.

  “Why don’t you put the steamer trunk in back and let me sit with you?” I asked him, with an eye to his own comfort.

  “Lady, that’s against the rules,” he reproved me. “You stay in back.”

  We started off. I looked in my handbag mirror to see if I looked like a seducer of taxi drivers, but I didn’t, so I just took my foot out of the teakettle every time it jounced in, resigned.

  The driver evidently felt sorry for me when he saw what I’d come to. In front of 593 Trent Street, he helped me out of the kitchenware with a flourish. He even carried things into the house.

  “You leave these boxes to me, miss; I’ll take ’em in.”

  Mrs. Garr—Harriet Luella Garr was the name she’d signed to that first rent receipt—opened the door quickly; she must have been watching again. She hovered near the double doors, taking a good look at everything that went in. I tipped the driver three dollars, which made cheap moving, and he said, “Thank you, miss,” as if he meant it.

  Mrs. Garr said approvingly to me before he was halfway down the hall, “I like to see a body be generous to servants,” and I saw him hesitate at the door as if he wanted to come back and kick her in the shins. But he winked at me instead and went back to his sacred front seat.

  Mrs. Garr trailed me, back and forth, as I began pushing the kitchen boxes toward the room where they were to go.

  “I’ve got some rules for this house all the people in it have to go by,” she said. “A young girl like you don’t realize, now, the expense you can run up in gas bills, running a lot of hot water. The gas heater, that’s terrible dear to run. If you want to take a bath, you let me know, and I’ll be respons’ble for turning it off. I don’t want any more turning on the hot-water heater and then forgetting it, like I’ve had happen. And if you want any water for washing dishes or such, I’d thank you to heat it on the gas stove in your kitchen. The big gas heater is more expensive. That’s your sheets and cases I got laid out on the table there. They go in a place in the studio couch if you want, but I can see you’re going to have plenty of drawer room to keep ’em in the buffet. You going to unpack that trunk?”

  “Not now. That’s mostly filled with summer clothes I won’t need for some weeks yet.”

  “I could help you move that. That’s heavy for a young girl like you.”

  I’m short and stocky, as a girl with Scotch peasant ancestry has a right to be; I’m perfectly capable of pushing around my own steamer trunk. I’d just been lugging to the kitchen boxes that were twice as heavy as it was. If she was going to be Mother’s little helper, why hadn’t she volunteered before?

  I looked around at her and had a shock. It was the first time I’d had a good look into her eyes. They were black and little and hard and hot, set deep in puffy eyelids like little lumps of hot coal pushed deep into bread dough. Evil eyes. Evil eyes under that lovely white hair.

  “Why, certainly,” I said, to cover my own startled recognition. “That’s kind of you. I wonder where—”

  “In that closet is a place this trunk would fit. You take that end.”

  She breathed with gasps, carrying her side. I hadn’t been into the closet before; it had no light, but a way back at the far end was a raised platform perhaps six inches high that the trunk just fit on.

  “They’s stairs under here.” She looked at the trunk with satisfaction. “That’s a good place for a trunk. Most apartments, you’d have to keep it in a basement.”

  After that she just watched me again, her eyes like spyglasses on every movement.

  F’heaven’s sake, I asked myself, is she going to stick like the old man of the sea?

  I asked: “Are there many other people in the house?” I hoped I wouldn’t have quite all her time.

  “I got only high-class people in my house. Except them Tewmans. I let them live in the basement for helping around. In front upstairs, I got Mr. Kistler; he’s a newspaperman, a fine young man, two rooms. And back of him I got Mr. Buff’nim, one room, and Mr. Grant, one room, and the bath on one side, and Miss Sands on the other, and the Wallers in back. Mr. Buff’nim is a drugstore man; he gets me my med’cine. Mrs. Hall’ran, that’s my niece, keeps on at me I should go to a heart specialist—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry! You shouldn’t have lifted that trunk if your heart bothers you.”

  She said short and sharp, “It’s no matter,” then went quickly to a new tack. “Mr. Grant’s a gentleman, a retired old gentleman. So’s Mr. Waller. He’s a policeman, retired. Nice people,” she lipped to herself. “All nice people. Gentlemen.”

  I hinted. “I haven’t the keys yet, do I? I’m so tired, I won’t unpack tonight.”

  She limped out to the dark room in the hall, came back with a new Yale key.

  “I had a new lock put on my house,” she said impressively and lowered her voice. “I tell you, I didn’t like the people who used to have this apartment. I had my suspicions of those people. They went nosing around in my things. So I said to them . . .” Her eyes licked at me.
“So I asked those people to get right out of my house. I won’t stand for any nosing around my things. That’s why I was glad to get a nice girl like you, dearie. I knew you’d never go snooping in my things.”

  “It’s nice to know there’s a good lock on the front door.” I ignored the last of her remarks. Water Street, below the drop-off, has a bad reputation, and there’s a flight of stairs coming up from there, a block nearer the capitol, where the drop is less steep. I went on about the doors.

  “What about the back doors, and the double door to the hall?”

  “That back door bolts inside. There ain’t no key to it. And the door to the back cellar stairs, it’s never used, like I told you. See, the bolt’s on your side, all rusted in; you can’t even move it. On the other side it’s nailed shut. You don’t need to worry about anybody comin’ in there.”

  “And the double doors?”

  “Well, those double doors, now, dearie, I like to have the key of the double doors hanging on the outside on that nail in the casing when you ain’t here. In case you would be gone and there would happen to be a fire, and I’d have to get my things in the closet.”

  “But I couldn’t do that! Why, then anyone in the house could walk in!”

  “There ain’t anybody in the house would hurt anything.”

  I felt it was time to make a stand. “I’m sorry,” I said firmly. “But I’ll want to keep the key to the double doors, too.”

  She handed it over.

  For a minute or two more she stood there, and I did, too, obviously waiting for her to go. She finally mumbled something and limped slowly out.

  Of all the tiresome old women! Had I moved in with a deranged old semi-lunatic with delusions of persecution that might make her throw me out any minute under suspicion of snooping?

  If the old woman could have known the amount of snooping I was actually to do in that house, and what I was to find—well . . .