Three Story House: A Novel (43 page)

Spite House owed its existence to the yellow fever epidemic that destroyed the city just before the turn of the century. As residents were streaming out by the thousands—either in coffins or in train cars—a handful of opportunists, including Frederick Linwood, swept in and purchased wide swaths of Memphis real estate for pennies on the dollar. Nobody knew where he came from. He had an unusually square chin that jutted to the left. Its aggressiveness made people avoid questioning him, so at various times, his accent was attributed by gossipers to Russia, Germany, and Turkey. Although his name was British, his accent was not. His own children claimed their father’s unusual speech pattern was a result of growing up in the colonies. They set their similarly strong chins and no one ever asked them which one. At that time, it didn’t matter where he was from, it only mattered that he had money. For ten dollars, he purchased a triangular plot of bluff a few hundred meters from the rail yard. The trolley driver ran his fingers through his hair and motioned for the woman to look across the empty lot to where landscaped grass and crisscrossed walkways laid next to the river. “None of that existed.”

The woman frowned and tried to imagine what the natural shoreline of the Mississippi would have looked like. What came to mind were the wild access points she knew from her own small town. “It was like a riverbank?”

“It was exactly that. All sand and the water eating at the banks.”

“Is it safe? The bluffs?” the woman asked.

“Is anything safe?”

She heard the echo of her earlier question in his response.

After purchasing the property, Frederick lived an unremarkable life, building warehouses that fronted the railroad tracks on the property and living comfortably off the rent money that came in. The warehouses had been located where the vacant lot now stood. The man, his wife, and their four sons lived in a large house near Overton Park only occasionally distinguishing themselves enough to be mentioned in the society pages. Frederick’s untimely death in 1915 was front-page news. “He drowned in the river.” The trolley driver gave her a hard look. “My sister drowned in the river. I find that most people know somebody who has drowned.”

The Mississippi looked impossibly wide to the woman. She allowed that she knew a few people who’d drowned. Most of them while trying to prove themselves by attempting foolish dares. In the back of the trolley, the men who’d gotten on earlier and not paid because they didn’t have change had lowered the windows and were leaning their heads outside. The driver ignored them until the next stop. He parked the trolley and opened the doors, waiting the men out. Eventually they got off, grumbling about the service and missed lunch hours.

Frederick’s sons split the property into fourths with each one taking a warehouse and each going about his life. However, a few years later (the driver thought it was 1926, but he wasn’t sure), a man with the Linwood chin showed up at the widow’s house claiming to be her husband’s only son from his other marriage. The widow had him arrested and escorted across the river back to Arkansas, where he claimed Frederick had kept his second family. She didn’t tell her sons about the encounter, but a few months later the bastard son showed up at the oldest son’s house with proof and, more than that, a lawyer.

The woman sensed that this unexpected brother, who was called Roger, was the reason that Spite House was built. He was all of eighteen when he showed up in Memphis. Three of his half-brothers paid him a cash equivalent of one-fifth of the value of their warehouses, but the oldest brother, Thomas, refused. Instead, with precision befitting a sculptor, he carved off one-fifth of his own property and deeded it to Roger. The plot appeared impossible to build on and what everyone expected was that he’d go back to Arkansas with his money and take care of the second family.

The driver shook his head as if he’d been personally cheated. “That’s what people always want when they manage to give you what you’re due but not a drop more.”

The turn of the conversation toward obligations troubled the woman. So many people wanted things from her now. She’d been invisible in her small town before the television show and now she felt like a walking neon sign. “It’s like the genie’s trick—wish for peace and you find yourself alone in the world.”

The driver shrugged and explained how Roger, working against failure, had cursed his family, his luck, and the Memphis heat, as he leveled the dirt and staked the footings. The house, wanting nothing more than to exist, strived to be malleable. In his hands, scraps of discarded wood worked together to fill the strangely shaped plot of land as water seeks the path of least resistance. At the end of the first week, he reached the edge of the property and looked back to find the visage of the river in his foundation’s framework. What sort of omen was it that the footings had taken the shape of the Mississippi emptying into the delta?

The driver opened his window and spit onto the ground next to the tracks that bound the western edge of Spite House. After the concrete had been cured, the man built floor after floor with materials he had pulled from the trash or had lifted from his brothers’ warehouses. Two years after nailing down the first board, he laid the threshold, sanded and mitered with his own hands. The figured grain of the salvaged black walnut licked at his feet in welcome as he crossed into his house. After that day, he never slept under any other roof. When he died, his widow even hurried the cremation to ensure that his remains returned to the house before nightfall. She set them in a pewter urn on a mantel crafted from the same piece of salvaged wood as that of the threshold. Ever after, when people spoke of Roger, they said that he died having gotten what he deserved.

“And they always called it Spite House because he screwed over his brothers?” the woman asked, tapping her fingers against the wooden bench. The trolley turned a corner and left the riverfront behind. They were halfway around the loop now, and the woman thought that the story might be coming to an end.

“Yes and no,” the driver said. The house hadn’t chosen its name. Might the stories of its inhabitants have taken different paths if they’d lived in the Overlook, or Riverplace, or Bluff Bungalow, or Hathor Hall, or Chickasaw Manor? The driver frowned at her, as if trying to judge her ability to understand Southern etiquette. “Memphis would never allow such names. Southerners don’t let pigs wear lipstick.”

“There are no second acts south of the Mason-Dixon line,” the woman said, thinking of her small town and how everyone she knew still saved their bacon grease for her to cook with. She hadn’t had so much as a slice of ham since leaving the show.

“But there are other reasons, other occurrences”—the driver rubbed the small of his back—“of spitefulness.”

The woman shifted against the hard seat. She didn’t know why, but as soon as the driver had started speaking of this strange house and its past, she felt as if she were hearing her own life’s story. She knew Roger in a way others could not.

For most of his life, Roger lived next to his brothers’ warehouses and worked as a manager at the brewery just up the street. He became part of the background and most of the family forgot about him. However, Thomas, the brother who had given him the land, had a particularly troublesome daughter, Melanie. “You know about the plane crash?” the driver asked, the rails of the track squealing as the trolley rounded the corner.

“I’m not from here,” the woman said.

“I know where you’re from.” The driver stopped at a red light. Three pickup trucks, all different colors, drove past them. Each had men sitting in the beds. “You were on that television show. My wife watches it with her friends, and sometimes she sees other people’s successes and stops cooking with oil or buys broccoli.”

The woman hadn’t ever been on a plane until she was cast in the show. In her experience, flying was a lot easier than driving. The heat had warmed the interior of the trolley and it had made the woman sleepy. She asked the driver about Melanie as the light turned green.

“People called her Mellie,” the driver said before continuing his story. She grew up with the sorts of advantages that keep a person from realizing the difference between luck and money. Roger finished the exterior of Spite House the same year Mellie had been born. She’d grown up with it as history, when in fact the structure and the wounds it represented were still quite raw in her family.

The trouble started in the spring of 1944 when, despite the war, Mellie felt as if the world was ripe with possibility. When the driver spoke of Mellie, the woman became her. She imagined every detail of her story. Despite being in the hot trolley, she felt Mellie’s father’s heavy aluminum lunch box pressed against her knee, reminding the woman of why she’d been sent downtown. Once Mellie had dropped lunch off, she’d have the afternoon to herself, which considering she was the youngest of nine children felt like a rare luxury. Turning her back to her family’s warehouses on the other side of the tracks behind her, Mellie gazed at the Mississippi. In the late morning sun, it winked at her. She took a breath and held the boggy smell of the river in her lungs. In the distance, she could see the shacks built on floats on Mud Island and a few people, as small as grasshoppers, working in the ragged fields. Around her, the sounds of industry filled her ears—even on Saturday the rail yard clanged and steamed with work. Her father, unlike every other adult she knew, thought that war was a good thing. People said it was because he didn’t have any sons to send off to the front lines.

Knowing that the quicker she dropped off the pail, the more time she’d have to explore unsupervised, she threaded her way through the railcars being unloaded into one of the warehouses and tried to find her dad. Storing stuff was a funny business. Here they were in a time of rationing and privation and her family had an entire room filled with sugar. None of it would stay for long. All the sacks would be evenly divided among the dozens of trains going east or west or north. Not finding her father, she slipped around to the back of the buildings and unlocked the small room he shared with his brothers. Each of them owned one of the four buildings, but they operated them as if they were one entity. Better efficiency, her father said. He used that word too much. Kept trying to get Mellie and her sisters—those who remained at home—on an efficient schedule for the bathroom. She kicked over the odd turtle-shape rock where they hid the key and opened the office, putting the lunch box on the long table that held an assortment of her uncles’ possessions and smelled of cigar smoke.

Then, in a flash, she was off toward the end of the row of warehouses to Roger’s house, entering the back door without knocking. “I’m going up to the cupola,” she said as she bounded through the narrow hallway and up the three flights of stairs. Nobody answered and she figured he must have picked up a Saturday shift at the brewery. The house, with its strange rooftop room, was her secret place. Not one person in her family knew she went there—well, Roger technically was her family, although she didn’t ever consider him to be. She yanked on the metal pull that concealed the stairs to the cupola. Roger might have put the last shingle on Spite House the same year Mellie had been born, but he hadn’t really finished. The interior work—plumbing, electrical, plastering—was only finished on the first two floors. The rest of the house, except the cupola, which he’d finished for her, had tar-paper walls and holes in the floors for pipes that hadn’t been laid. She climbed the rough ladder.

Mellie had grown several inches since the last time she’d been in the space. At fifteen, she was as tall as she’d ever be. Emerging in the small box, she found she could, by stretching her arms, touch all sides of the cupola. She slid her hands over her body, cupping her breasts, which had also finished growing. So much could change in just a few months. There was a second room attached behind the telephone-like booth that was larger. It had a sliding door—more like a barn door—set on wheels at the top of the frame and seats along three glass-panel walls.

This glass room, with its dozens of imperfect glass rectangles, scavenged from discarded rail loads, had been Roger’s gift to Mellie. When she was small and visiting her father at the warehouses, she thought that fairies and gnomes had built the strange house. None of her family dissuaded her from this belief—partly because no one wanted to tell her about her father’s half-brother and partly because she was the youngest and according to the doctor the last child her mother could have.

Mellie placed her hand flat against one of the rectangles until the outline of her hand appeared. The bull’s-eye glass was her favorite. When she was eight she started sneaking into the house and exploring. At first she’d been disappointed to find so much of it unfinished, but on her third or fourth visit, she’d discovered the glass room on the roof and took it as proof that fairies existed.

She’d been visiting the house for nearly six months before Roger found her out. He had the advantage, she now realized, of knowing who she was and had listened quite seriously to her explanation of how the house had been built and who owned it. Opening the window seat, she pulled out her diary, a box of crackers, and one of Roger’s detective books with a picture of a large-breasted woman backing away from two hands that cast shadows as if they were strangling her. She checked her watch. It was a little past eleven, which meant she could hide out at Roger’s house until three and then hightail it back home with no one being the wiser about where she’d been or what she’d been up to. Within an hour the box, which because of the windows heated up like a greenhouse, had grown too stuffy to sit in. She opened a few of the panes and stretched before stepping out onto the roof.

The air smelled cleaner at that height and she had a clear view of the rail yard to the south and her father’s warehouses to the north. In the distance, Arkansas lay on the other side of the Mississippi River like a wild place. She imagined, squinting her eyes at the trees sunk deep in the river, what the land looked like before industry had shown up—when the bluffs were home to Indians with arrows pointed at their enemies. She tossed the empty box of crackers off the roof and down onto the bluff, watching it fall toward the water.