The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [120]
Four years ago, when Leonard had been officially diagnosed with manic depression in the spring semester of his freshman year, he hadn’t thought much about what the lithium was doing to him. He’d just wanted to get back to feeling normal. The diagnosis had seemed like one more thing—like lack of money, and his messed-up family—that had threatened to keep Leonard from getting ahead, just when he was beginning to feel that his luck had finally changed. He took his meds twice daily, like an A student. He started therapy, first seeing a mental health counselor at Health Services before finding Bryce Ellis, who took pity on Leonard’s student poverty and charged him on a sliding scale. For the next three years, Leonard treated his manic depression like a concentration requirement in something he wasn’t much interested in, doing the bare minimum to pass.
Leonard had grown up in an Arts & Crafts house whose previous owner had been murdered in the front hall. The grisly history of 133 Linden Street had kept the house on the market for four years until Leonard’s father, Frank, bought it for half the original asking price. Frank Bankhead owned an antique-print shop on Nob Hill specializing in British lithographs. It was a terrible business, even back then, the shop a place where Frank could go during the days to smoke his pipe and wait for cocktail hour. Growing up, Leonard was made to understand by Frank that the Bankheads were “old Portland,” by which he meant the families who’d come to Oregon when it was still part of the Northwest Territory. There wasn’t much sign of this, no Bankhead Street downtown, not so much as an old signboard or a plaque saying “Bankhead” anywhere, or a bust of a Bankhead in the Oregon Historical Society. But there were Frank’s three-piece tweed suits, and his old-fashioned manners. There was his shop, full of things that no one wanted to buy: lithographs not of the city’s early days or anything that might interest a local, but of places like Bath or Cornwall or Glasgow. There were hunt prints, scenes of revelry in London taverns, sketches of pickpockets, two prize Hogarths that Frank could never part with, and a lot of junk.
The print shop barely broke even. The Bankheads survived on dwindling income from stocks that Frank had inherited from his grandfather. Every so often, at an estate sale, he got his hands on a valuable print that he would then resell for a profit (sometimes flying to New York to do so). But the trajectory of the business was downward, in contrast to his social pretensions, and that was why Frank had got interested in the house.
He first heard about it from a client who lived in the neighborhood. The previous owner, a bachelor named Joseph Wierznicki, had been knifed to death, just inside his front door, with such violence that the police had said the crime was “personal.” No one had been apprehended. The story had made the papers, complete with photos of the blood-spattered walls and flooring. And that might have been the end of it. In due course, the house was put on the market. Workers cleaned and refurbished the front hall. But a statute on the books requiring real estate agents to reveal any information that might affect resale obligated them to mention the house’s criminal history. When prospective buyers heard about the murder, they looked into it (if still interested), and, as soon as they saw the photographs, they declined to make offers.
Leonard’s mother refused to even consider the idea. She didn’t think she could bear the strain of moving, especially into a haunted house. Rita spent most days in her bedroom, leafing through magazines or watching The Mike Douglas Show, her “water” glass on the bedside table. Every so often she became a whirlwind