Back in the boom times of the early 1950s, middle-class Texans sometimes designed and built their homes in collaboration with an architect and a contractor. In urban Fort Worth, the farther out you built from center city, but not so far out that you were rural, the better. My parents had lived for a while on a street called Norfolk, an embarrassing name when pronounced in Texan, and the street they moved to had a princely, yet misspelled, name: Ranier. The Norfolk house had its charms, like a giant magnolia tree on either side of the arrow-straight walkway to the front door and a glassed-in back porch, but to look at it, you wouldn’t think it was the abode of one of Fort Worth’s preeminent obstetrician/gynecologists. So the Ranier house had to be something more palatial but with a modicum of humility. In '50s Fort Worth, this meant a sprawling ranch style on a minimum of three acres. Ours was a 3,000 square foot red brick glorified shotgun, but on its horizontal axis. Theoretically, if you shot a bullet from the foot of my parents’ bed toward the other end of the house, it might lodge in the tail fin of my dad’s Cadillac parked in the garage. If a house could be a low-rider, this was it. It was so long from end to end that intercoms were absolutely necessary to communicate. Person A (Mom) in the kitchen could tell Person B (Dad) in the master bedroom that dinner was ready without having to lose her voice from screaming. And Person A in the kitchen could listen in on Child B (me) in her bedroom who was supposed to be napping but was really curled up in her chair, discreetly turning the pages of The Black Stallion Returns.
Architecturally, the house was a little ho-hum, with its long hallway and rooms predictably branching off in bi-symmetrical fashion, but the architect included both quirky and elegant embellishments that made it special. Like the mysterious miniaturized replica of the house, which was supposed to be the birds’ quarters, installed over the garage on the tiled roof. The doorbell that chimed Big Ben’s melody. The camera closet that over the years acquired an old leather and darkroom chemical smell. And the library with its mahogany paneling and bright green shag carpeting, a room that really functioned as a den but that over several decades had accumulated hundreds of Book-of-the-Month Club editions. As a toddler, I stood on the brown leather couch framed by a huge picture window, digging the heels of my Mary Jane shoes into its soft leather, giving it that scuffed, rustic look popular now but not in the '50s. Observing the cattle grazing on the plains directly across from our hilltop compound was endlessly entertaining. The one architectural anomaly was the living room. From the picture window in the library, you could see a piece of it jutting out, looking like it might belong to a different house. (Of course, we were never allowed access to that room unless company was present.) The black New England slate mantle in the living room was the cause of endless consternation for my mother. Like the monolith in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, it was smooth, black, and irresistible to touch, and showed every single greasy fingerprint. Mother would instruct the help in how to clean it, but invariably someone would use Windex or silver polish on its surface, ruining its patina and, in one instance, creating broad, white streaks across its black surface.
In the spirit of manifest destiny, we lived at Fort Worth’s western outskirts at the end of a cul-de-sac, and our house occupied the biggest and best lot in the neighborhood. Our expansive front yard was intersected by a circular drive making a perfect 90 degree arc that would have stretched the entire length of a football field if straightened out. The land enclosed by the half-circle was planted with teeny live oak saplings that became magnificent sprawling creatures needing wooden, cane-like stakes to support sagging limbs in their maturity. The back yard was a perfect combination of an ideal play area for us kids and in-your-face nature, when and if you wanted it. Civilization and Safety, which amounted to a vast expanse of perfectly manicured Bermuda grass, was divided from Nature and The Unknown—an area Dad let grow wild—by a long, low, dense hedge. The hedge was the intermediary in a constant struggle for supremacy, and as long as we had a gardener, Civilization won. For years I loved jumping over that perfectly trimmed hedge, pretending I was riding in a steeplechase, trying to stay suspended in the air over the “jump” as long as I could. After Mom died, nature gained the upper hand, and eventually the hedge became one with the tangle of bushes and feral trees that grew behind it. My two favorite pet German Shepherds, Lassie and Mickey, are buried somewhere out there.
In another sector of Civilization and Safety, my parents wisely had built what amounted to a very large, fenced holding area for us and our friends to play in that included a sand box, a sturdy two-seater metal swing set with a trapeze bar, a small cement wading pool that could hold about ten inches of water, and a medium-sized tree for the tomboys to climb. They would lock us in there, but unless we were hungry or had to go to the bathroom, we didn’t care. The fence was made of sturdy wire fabricated into a grid pattern and was about eight feet tall, so there was no possibility of escape. To disguise the fact that we were in kiddie prison, colorful cartoon characters were painted on the wide wooden rim that topped the fence. Sharing part of the fence was a huge and wildly overgrown dog pen where Lassie and Mickey lived and ran the same worn paths every day. Being an obstetrician, Dad didn’t have too much time to spend with them, or with his three children for that matter, so he compensated the dogs with a luxury, two room canine condo (again, a miniaturization of the main house, but larger than the one for the birds), lots of running room, and lots of fresh horse meat garnished with raw eggs for dinner. Since our German Shepherds were the friendly variety, the kind you could jump up and down on and still be graciously tolerated, we would sneak into the pen and hang out with them in their condo, which was usually full of nasty wet hay and partially eaten horse femurs. When I was four years old, Lassie birthed ten puppies in there, and I was the attending physician. Dad wasn’t the only OB in the family. Eventually, he annexed two small dog runs for some Fox Terriers we owned for a little while, and after they died, it was back to German Shepherds. Dad was always true to his biases: shepherds, Cadillacs, pretty nurses.
As an active, athletic child, one of the benefits of living in a shotgun ranch style house was the fact that you could get lots of exercise without ever needing to go outside, which was a plus in the Texas heat. Starting at my parents’ bedroom, I could pretend I was competing in a triathlon, first leaping over chairs I had set up in the carpeted hallway, then broad-jumping over the cork-floored entryway, landing heals-first onto the carpeted dining room floor, continuing with a hundred yard dash through the wet bar, the kitchen, and the laundry room. Then I would turn around and run it in reverse. The wet bar, also floored with cork, seemed like a real specialty item; nobody else’s parents but ours had one, to my knowledge. Plus, a narrow, cork-lined hallway paralleled the dining room between the kitchen and the entryway, probably so that the help and/or children had easy access to the kitchen from the rest of the house, and vice-versa, so as not to disturb the hypothetical dinner party that could be totally self-contained by closing a set of pocket mahogany doors on the north side of the dining room and a split Dutch door, the door that led to the wet bar and the kitchen, on the south. Nice designs overall, but the architect hadn’t asked whether my folks were sociable people.
During the weeks before Halloween, my favorite holiday, I would close all the doors that led to the rooms off the hallway and stuff towels under the doors to block light leaks, making the hall as dark as the mid-point of a long train tunnel. At various places along the hallway, I left creepy, rubbery, slimy things for my older sister to discover and be grossed-out by. The house transformed into something ancient, womb-like, and awesomely terrifying. Which wasn’t too far off the mark, actually. Years of disturbing recurring dreams (to be discussed shortly) and the decline of my parents’ relationship transformed the house into something ominous. For a long time, I had thought of the house as a beneficent personality of sorts, a kindred soul of the inanimate variety; a wise übergeist whose loving red brick arms sheltered what ultimately evolved into a profoundly unhappy family. My parents’ expression of their supreme discontent with each other often took place on the other side of the wall that their bathroom shared with my bedroom: the wall that my bed, my pillow, my head, and my ears, were pushed up against. Obviously they were not aware that their tiled, cavernous bathroom acted as an amplifier and echo chamber, and that I could hear everything they said with great surreal clarity, even with a pillow over my head. Their bathroom became a sinister, evil pit of malevolence, and year by year, the rest of the rooms assumed that status, except for the library, which I considered my domain to everyone else’s exclusion. And one of the greenhouses, which I have yet to mention: “his” and “her” greenhouses, although they weren’t conceived as such originally. Years after the house was built, Dad had the contractor erect a spacious aluminum-framed brick and glass greenhouse that was tucked away in one of the farthest reaches of the property; hence, isolated from the house and from Mom.
The greenhouse was accessed by walking down a little hill and descending two steps, and it sat in the center of a large, brick deck that gradually began to heave and surge from tree roots pushing it up from underneath. The stability of the greenhouse suffered too, and Dad had to install aluminum flying buttresses on the side facing downhill so it wouldn’t lose its moorings and slide into the neighbor’s yard. In true southern gentlemanly fashion, Dad grew camellias in his greenhouse, and between that, his relationship with Mom and various other women, and being an ob/gyn, I couldn’t help but think he had problems with the opposite sex. Birthing envy or, on the other hand, even something sinister, like misogyny. Mom never wanted to be upstaged by Dad, so she made him build her a greenhouse, too. She grew succulents and cacti, the opposite of camellias. Since her greenhouse was an afterthought, I never really connected with it much. Plus, every summer it was infested with a confederacy of yellow jackets, which never seemed to bother her but terrified me.
The library may have been my territory, but the greenhouse was my sanctuary. I loved the smell of peat moss, which was the camellias’ preferred dirt, and I loved the dark green, waxy leaves of the camellia plants. I loved the way Dad collected spent blooms and tossed them into a white plastic bucket, making camellia potpourri. Although camellias don’t smell. They don’t have to; their beauty is sufficient. I loved the idea of a glass structure, even though annual hail storms destroyed sections of the greenhouse roof in late summer. Its vulnerability and impracticality were appealing somehow, and with all those sheets of glass hanging precariously over your head like guillotines at the ready, the place suggested a danger-in-the-midst-of-beauty theme. Once Dad was bitten by a rattlesnake coiled around one of his camellias as he bent down to pick up the pot; there goes Nature encroaching on Civilization and Safety again. The greenhouse was a Garden of Eden analogue that could have inspired some Biblical author, or Carl Jung, or Joseph Campbell, or perhaps Lewis Carroll. It occupied its own dimension, space, and time and inspired its own mythology. Over the years, I photographed it at different times of the year and through its changes and iterations, as lovingly as parents photograph their children. Each season of blooms was carefully documented, all the way up to the year Dad couldn’t make it down those two steps anymore.
Mom died young, and the house went to hell. And after her death, my recurring dreams mentioned earlier intensified. Here’s the scenario: it’s dusk on a hot summer night, and my extended family of twelve or so is busy making dinner inside and working on various projects outside. Usually I am in or around the greenhouse with Dad when I become aware of The Thing, an evil presence crawling down the circular driveway toward the front door of the house. Running in slow motion through the garage to the back door, I coerce everyone to come inside with me; I lock the doors, pull down the window shades (we had curtains and louvered shutters in real life), turn out all the lights and tell everyone to keep a low profile. Gaining everyone’s cooperation is next to impossible, because no one believes in the imminent danger. BUT I KNOW IT’S REAL. The Thing rattles the front door, and I wake up. Long story, but after many years of this tormenting dream and lots of reflection, I finally identified The Thing: it was the Terrible Mother, Jung’s “Shadow,” a wrathful avenger, the destroyer of my childhood innocence. The Thing was challenging my reluctance to become an adult myself and, with the acceptance of maturity, to come to the realization that we are all terribly flawed and we all need forgiveness.
The persistence of this dream compounded with decades of my parents’ vicious bickering created a negatively-charged atmosphere clinging to every surface in the house, like decades of dust accretions mixed with my mother’s chain-smoking exhalations and greasy emanations from the kitchen stove. Still, I loved the house; it wasn’t its fault that it had fallen on hard times. As Dad lay dying in the hospital bed installed in his bedroom, in a moment of razor-sharp clarity, I realized that the house had been utterly ruined. The only place that ever felt like home. The library. The greenhouse. As I took a break from my vigil in Dad’s room, standing in the front yard enjoying the beautiful light of a late October afternoon, two vultures appeared and perched on the roof directly over his bed.
Fourteen months after his death, I received a Christmas card from the family who bought our house: mom, dad, older sister, younger brother, and a prize-winning heifer the boy had raised through 4H. I didn’t know kids did that kind of thing anymore, and didn’t he understand that his pet was heading for the slaughterhouse? There was certainly enough room in the back yard for the beast, but aren’t there zoning laws banning livestock from residential neighborhoods? I hadn’t met the family, nor did I intend to. I never wanted to lay eyes on them, and fortunately my older sister took care of all the estate details, so I didn’t have to. Had I known the card was from them it would have gone straight from the mailbox to the recycle bin. So opening the card delivered a little jolt of reality that I wasn’t prepared for. They didn’t look like they deserved the house; they weren’t movie star handsome like Mom and Dad had been. There wasn’t a scrap of glamour about that family at all, and I really studied the photograph hard, trying to allot them some. I tried not to dislike them. I tried not to condemn my parents, posthumously, for losing half a million bucks in the 1980s savings and loan scandal; money that might have kept the house in the family.
Several weeks after the card arrived, my younger sister called and said the new owners were really enthused about restoring the house. Restoring it? They must be okay after all, showing respect for a classic midcentury modern home that had seen better days. Then another couple of months passed, I moved to New Mexico and became a family of one. One afternoon, my younger sister called with grave news. They changed their minds, and the house was slated for demolition. I didn’t ask about the greenhouse. A few weeks later she texted photos, from the inside of the house, of a front loader crashing through one of the library’s mahogany-paneled walls. It looked like a war zone, and I nearly fainted from the shock. I thought I could hear the low, throaty screams of the live oak trees and the growls of Mickey and Lassie challenging these interlopers.
Maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe “childhood home” is only an ideal that never survives our growing up. Maybe the absolute comfort and safety that mine provided was only a projection of my need. Sometimes in the middle of the night, The Thing rattles the door, and I wake up. I’m in a state of panic, not knowing where I am. I try to shape the strange room I occupy into the one that is familiar; I try to force the doors and windows into the places they’re supposed to be, but it just doesn’t work. My childhood home, the indispensable, forever only a memory.
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