House of Windows Read online

  (Although, during tonight's dinner, whose conversation had almost inevitably been taken up with the merits or lack thereof of the war in Iraq—whose one-year anniversary was later this week—Veronica had been oddly quiet, refusing to engage the topic in any but the most cursory fashion.)

  Veronica's intelligence had caught Roger Croydon's notice right away. Roger was the resident Victorian scholar; he also was one of our more accomplished members, having published upwards of fifty articles and half a dozen books, one of which, Dickens and Patrimony, was standard reading for students of Dickens. Why a man of his achievements hadn't been snatched up by one of the major universities was something of a mystery—until, that is, you met Joanne. She and Roger were like a pair of minor characters from one of Dickens's longer novels. Her face was long, its most prominent feature her large, liquid eyes; his face was more square, marked by a nose that had been broken some time in the past. Where she was tall, broad-shouldered, lean, he was short and slender. She sported designer outfits; he favored plain white shirts and chinos. Where she delivered her sentences in the broad accent of old Manhattan money, he spoke with the nasal twang of the South Carolina mountains. Theirs was a famously unhappy union—according to Roger, at least, who rarely missed the opportunity to drink too much at the parties they held at their large house and complain to whoever would listen. He never drank enough to name the specific cause of his general unhappiness, but the looks he cast at Joanne, standing across the room serenely ignoring him, left little doubt. The Croydons had one child, Ted, who I understood from older members of the department had been "wild" as a teenager, but who had calmed down considerably after enlisting in the Army on his eighteenth birthday.

  Although Roger was by far the more flamboyant of the pair, given to expansive gestures and loud exclamations, Joanne was in charge of the marriage. She liked Huguenot. It was close enough to Manhattan—an hour and a half down the Thruway—for her to keep in easy contact with her family and the life of playgoing and gallery browsing with which she'd grown up; yet far enough away from the City for her to indulge the notion that she was living "in the country." (I've noticed that, as a rule, the inhabitants of New York City consider everything beyond Westchester "the country" and "upstate.") Anyone who saw the Croydons' house, however, an enormous, three-storey stone and wood edifice on Founders Street just shy of being a mansion—anyone who saw the house the Croydons called "The Belvedere House," after a minor painter who had summered in the place a half-century prior; much less walked its wide, polished hallways, stood in its high-ceilinged rooms, looked out its tall windows to the mountains behind the town—that person might have thought, If this is country living, then sign me up. It didn't require much imagination to understand why Joanne would be reluctant to leave such a house, and when you learned that the place had not always been in such condition, that she and Roger, newly married and arrived in town, had found the house for sale and in a state of almost total disrepair, borrowed the money from her father to purchase it, and then spent literally years restoring the place to its former glory, you understood how deep her attachment to the place ran. Belvedere House was where the Croydons had raised their son; it was where Roger had written most of his articles and all of his books; it was where Joanne had entertained the half-dozen charity and social groups to which she belonged.

  The house was a striking, even peculiar structure. Its first storey was built of the same gray fieldstone as the other houses on Founders; its second, third, and attic storeys constructed of wood painted dark brown with forest green trim. Its upper storeys were full of windows, most of them long rectangles, with a few circles and half-circles in amongst them. The first time I had seen the place, I had thought of it as the house of windows—the phrase had come unbidden to me—and that name had lodged in my memory. I understood that its architectural style was more properly referred to as Queen Anne, but I'm not sure what of its features—gables, portico, eaves—that description encompassed. From that initial encounter, the house had had the strangest effect on me. There are many houses whose fronts suggest faces—windows for eyes, door for a mouth—but Belvedere House was the only residence I've seen whose front suggested a face hiding amongst its windows and angles, just out of view.

  I glanced with impatience toward the downstairs bathroom, from whence I could hear, faintly, the continuing hiss of the shower. So much for being right back. For a second time, I considered climbing the stairs and leaving Veronica and her story. Had it not been for the fact that she was only going to be here for a day or two—over dessert, she'd told us of her plans to visit Provincetown tomorrow, and possibly Boston the day after—and had this not been perhaps my only chance of hearing this story, I might have done exactly that, and felt self-satisfied at having taught her that she couldn't take advantage of me. As it was, however, my curiosity still outweighed my annoyance, so I stood and wandered out of the living room, back through the dining room, into the kitchen. Retrieving a glass from the cupboard, I filled it with seltzer, adding a slice of lemon from the plastic bag on the refrigerator's top shelf.

  Glass in hand, I turned to the kitchen's wide open space, which morning would fill with sunlight through the windows over the counters. With its open floor plan, its expansive rooms, its plenitude of windows, the entire house was friendly to the sun, and if that same abundance of windows meant that now night pressed in on us from all corners, the house was decorated with sufficient cheer and charm to balance it. It was hard not to compare it to Belvedere House, whose excess of windows never seemed to admit sufficient light to dispel the shadows cluttering its high ceilings. That said, Ann and I would have traded our undersized house, whose eight hundred square feet had been too small for one person, let alone two adults and a baby, for Belvedere House's expanses, however shadowy, in a heartbeat. If I could have had my dream house, though, it would have been the Cape House. "It's next to a cemetery," I had said to Ann on more than one occasion. "What could be more fitting for a guy writing horror stories?"

  Belvedere House had witnessed many of the Croydons' most significant moments, including the beginning of Roger and Veronica's affair, and the subsequent end of Roger and Joanne's marriage. Roger was well-known in the English department for his "crushes": younger, usually attractive women whom Roger took it on himself to mentor. You would see them in one of the local bookstores, Roger expounding on this or that novel his mentee should have read; or in the Main Street Bistro, Roger proclaiming this or that opinion on literature, music, or art while the mentee sat silently sipping a cup of tea; or in Roger's office, Roger recounting his jousts with this or that critical rival as he passed his mentee copies of articles to read. So far as anyone knew, these relationships had been strictly Platonic, at worst affaires de coeur. Certainly Joanne always treated them with good-humored irony. When Roger started popping his head in my door, asking me how I was doing and then launching into rapturous descriptions of this new student before I had supplied an answer, I was almost comforted by the return of a familiar ritual. Roger's last crush had graduated the previous spring; he was due to find someone new. My reaction was, by and large, typical.

  This latest crush of Roger's, however, was not. I'm not sure when it became apparent to the rest of the department that things between Roger and this latest mentee were different, but for me the revelation came shortly after my first meeting with Veronica. While browsing the Poetry section at Campbell's, the used bookstore on Main Street, I overheard a pair of whispered voices engaged in a furious debate. After a moment, I recognized one of the contestants as Roger, and after another, Veronica. Leaning around a tall bookcase, I saw the two of them standing in the midst of General Fiction, Roger's arms flailing like a man scything wheat, in constant danger of sending books tumbling from their shelves, Veronica's hands propped on her hips, an openly skeptical expression on her face. Roger was vigorously extolling the virtues of Melville, the sole American contemporary of Dickens who could hold a candle to him, if only in Moby Dick. Veroni
ca overrode him to insist that Melville was verbose and overrated: there was more value in The Scarlet Letter than in all of Melville. To which Roger replied that Hawthorne had been so constipated by the puritan guilt that was his principle diet that he'd been incapable of squeezing out any but the most trite and conventional of sentiments.

  And so on. I withdrew and resumed my browsing, unable to avoid eavesdropping on their argument as its volume steadily increased, then did my best to leave the bookstore unobserved—not difficult, really, as the two of them were still in the thick of their debate. That night, over dinner, I recounted the scene to Ann, who raised her eyebrows and said, "Well. It looks like Roger has finally met his match."

  It appeared he had. The sound of him and Veronica disagreeing, so close to outright argument as to be indistinguishable from it, became familiar, and to Veronica's credit, she held her own. I had known Roger long and reasonably well-enough to be acquainted with most of his opinions and ideas, and I don't think I heard one of them with which Veronica agreed. What was more, her disagreements were usually cogent. You might have thought Roger would grow tired of such constant contradiction—as the rest of us did of having to listen to it—but he thrived on Veronica's challenges. His eyes alight, his step light, he looked less like a man at the far end of a distinguished career and more like one whose star has just started its rise. A new mentee always brought about some measure of regeneration in Roger, but this was the most dramatic example of it I had witnessed. Roger's enthusiasm carried over into his classes, where his students were more impressed and inspired than they had been in some time; and into his writing, where he was halfway through a new essay on the role of young women in Dickens's life and works.

  As for Veronica: if what all of us overheard was any guide, then she was eminently up to the challenge of Roger. Indeed, after one afternoon of her and Roger's voices echoing up and down the English department's corridors, I recalled my first conversation with her and my thought that she had been living out her ideal of what English students and professors discussed: with Roger, she had found that ideal made real.

  Given the intensity of their relationship, it shouldn't have come as that much of a surprise when the heat of their intellectual engagement sparked other fires. If every profession is accompanied in the popular imagination by two or three stereotypical images, then that of the (male) professor's affair with the younger (female) student must be among ours; the advent of feminism and sexual harassment legislation has blunted the stereotype only slightly. That said, Joanne's suddenly leaving Roger the following spring caught everyone off-guard. Ann called me from the office to share the news. Supposedly, the cause of Joanne's departure was her having discovered Roger and Veronica in flagrante delicto, but that I could not credit.

  When Roger left Belvedere House to move in with Veronica less than a week later, however, the rumors were confirmed. While I've heard of quick, even friendly divorces, I've never actually seen any, and Roger and Joanne's split was among the most bitter. The scholar of the great melodramatist had enrolled himself in a modern variety of the form, the soap opera, and not an especially original one at that.

  Throughout the two years it took them and their lawyers to work through their divorce, Belvedere House stood first empty and then rented. It was perhaps the only point on which Roger and Joanne were able to agree: their reluctance to part with the house. Eventually, they rented it to a young heart surgeon and her family.

  Veronica continued taking classes, working toward her Master's. I was more than a little surprised at this. Given the storm of gossip that continued to swirl around her, I would have expected her to withdraw from the program and seek another, preferably in Manhattan or Albany. But she decided to brazen it out, completing her coursework during the first year of Roger and Joanne's divorce, then writing a thesis during the second year. What was more, she attended the department's social events with Roger, walking into whatever house it was at his side with a nonchalance that suggested she'd been doing this for years. Many of the senior faculty were as scandalized as Roger and Joanne's old friends had been; though in several instances, it was a case of the kettle calling the pot black. Unlike those friends, however, they had no choice but to continue to see and deal with Roger, so, in the end, an effort was made, if not exactly to welcome Veronica, then at least to acknowledge her. By the time Roger was officially divorced, Veronica had earned her degree and had been hired to adjunct back across the Hudson at Penrose.

  I finished my seltzer, and shot another look over at the bathroom door. At least I could no longer hear the shower; though Veronica seemed no closer to reappearing. The second I started up the stairs, I knew, she would emerge. In for a penny, I thought.

  This current visit was not Veronica's first to the Cape House. She had come here with Roger a year and a half ago, in the week or two immediately preceding his disappearance. Roger had been, to put it mildly, in a bad way: Ted had been killed while serving in Afghanistan earlier that year, and his death had undone his father. In an instant, the excess of vitality with which his affair with and marriage to Veronica had endowed him disappeared, drained out of him by the wound of his son's death; indeed, if anything, Roger appeared even older than he was, the poet's tattered coat upon a stick. He sagged inward, the way an old house whose frame and foundation are failing does, and though Veronica did her best for him, it was the equivalent of splashing a fresh coat of paint in some garish color across the façade of a dilapidated old house: hiding nothing, it instead calls attention to the structure's decay. The fires that had burnt in Roger had been blown out by the gust of his son's death, leaving only ashes and gray smoke. He and Veronica held a memorial service at the Dutch Reformed Church on Founders Street, but it was sparsely attended, most of his former friends having chosen to be present at the service Joanne arranged in Manhattan. Ann and I went, as did Addie and Harlow, and it was painful to witness. The worst moment was Roger's attempt to deliver the eulogy, a speech that began with his memories of a much younger Ted breaking his arm in an attempt to scale the wall of Belvedere House, drifted into his attempt to read Dickens to Ted when Ted was more interested in Spider-Man, and dissolved in his effort at reciting Houseman's "To an Athlete, Dying Young."

  After that, reports of Roger's continuing downward slide reached us in stages, like bulletins from the site of some distant and ongoing disaster. He was missing classes and, when he was present, either obviously unprepared for the subject at hand or silent for extended periods of time. Finally, the President of the college had him up to her office. Grief-addled though he was, Roger recognized the lifeline that was being thrown to him and took it, turning over his classes to a couple of adjuncts and locking the door to his office behind him.

  Until we saw Roger's face on the evening news, that was about the last word any of us had of him, except for one, final piece of information: he and Veronica had moved into Belvedere House. Apparently, Joanne hadn't contested the idea; and Dr. Sullivan and her family had been given one month to locate suitable replacement lodgings. At the end of that time, Roger and Veronica had left her small apartment behind for the spacious house. For a week or two after they moved in, a rumor circulated that Veronica was planning a house-warming party, but it proved unfounded. I don't believe anyone saw Roger for any length of time before the broadcaster was saying, "Police are investigating the disappearance of SUNY Huguenot professor Roger Croydon . . . "

  I'm not sure what the consensus was on Roger's fate. From the start, I had a bad feeling about it: it seemed to me the last act in what was emerging as Roger's tragedy of dissolution. Ann was of the opinion that Roger had taken off for a time to parts unknown in order to rest and regroup himself. After the initial searches for Roger—for his body, really—by the police failed to turn up anything, the possibility of his death—and, lurking behind it, of his suicide—receded; though I don't suppose it ever disappeared entirely. The scenarios Veronica reported being forced on her were valid enough, but they were also i
ndexes of the lingering resentment towards her harbored by Roger's old friends, who traced the origin of all his troubles to his move from being one half of Roger-and-Joanne to one half of Roger-and-Veronica.