Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [117]
Father had called it the Lodge, and although Mother had complained that the name made it sound like the gate-house to a manor, the name had prevailed. In this basic summer house on the lake, we had been Family. When we were in San Francisco, my father had worked long days, appearing in our lives briefly in the evenings, generally granting us one whiskey-and-soda's worth of time in the parlour or library before he wished us a good-night and sat down to dine with Mother. Week-ends were better, but often he and Mother were taken away by social obligations—either that, or Levi and I were dragged along for social obligations thinly disguised as family events, such as one memorable picnic at the beach that ended with me bloodying the nose of the snobbish son of the bank's vice-president, who had dared to make a remark about my little brother's Jewish features. Family museum trips were better, but too highly organised to be much fun.
Here, however, Father had been himself. Which was only proper, since he had built the Lodge with his own hands.
The original building had comprised four spacious rooms: an all-purpose sitting room at the front, a grand fireplace and dark-panelled walls, and beside it a smaller room that had served as my father's bedroom in his bachelor days, converted into a billiards and smoking room after my mother came. Behind these rooms were the kitchen, with the table at which we often took breakfast, and the dining room, opening onto a broad stone terrace that nestled between the back of the original Lodge and one side of the two-storey sleeping addition. The newer wing, five bedrooms and two baths, had been added (along with electric lights and hot-water heaters) when he had brought civilisation, in the form of Mother, back from England.
Father had lived in a tent among the trees for the better part of two years during the construction of the Lodge, which coincidentally amounted to the time it took his parents to withdraw their demands that he return to Boston and assume his responsibilities there. He had chosen the trees, helped to cut and haul them, milled the boards, and stacked them to dry. He had learnt a score of trades in the course of the building, become a brick-layer and a glazier, a carpenter and a plumber. He'd rebuilt the fireplace chimney three times before he was satisfied that its draw was clean, and spent a solid month experimenting with the decorative wood-work on the porch railing.
Despite the later additions, this house was his from foundation stones to roof-tree; every time he walked in, he looked around and made in the back of his throat a small sound of profound relaxation. It was, it now occurred to me, the precise equivalent of my mother's touching of the mezuzah as she entered the Pacific Heights house.
“Do you want me to open the door?” asked Flo at my shoulder.
“No,” I said sharply, then softened it to, “Thanks, but I was just remembering how lovely it was to come here, and get away from the city.”
“Really?” she asked dubiously. I laughed, suddenly seeing the rustic building through the eyes of Miss Florence Greenfield, and she hastened to add, “I mean, I'm sure it's a very nice house, and I know a lot of people have summer places or hunting lodges or things, especially with Prohibition and all, but it's just, well, I'm not really a briars-and-brambles kind of a girl.”
“Not to worry, Flo—the plumbing works, there are no bears here, and I'm sure we'll find it clean and tidy. It's only for a couple of days, and if it's too dreary you two can always go back early.”
But as I stepped forward with the key, it occurred to me that Flo was the one responsible for the transformation of the Greenfield house, and that to a woman with Deco sensibilities, the rusticity of the Lodge might prove a challenge.
The key moved easily in the lock; I stepped across the threshold: no trace of mustiness in the air. The house was cool, certainly, but as we moved into the rooms I was relieved to find it as tidy and dust-free as it had ever been—clearly the interdiction against