“They made an offer on the house.” my mother said excitedly into the phone fifteen hundred miles away. They is the development company that was building the “largest Pro Bass Shop in Texas”, among other things including a Nordstrom and an Outback Steakhouse, in the old rock quarry on the other side of the hill from the house where my mother, my sisters and I grew up. They planned to build an avenue-wide driveway leading into the acres of parking lot that would, and now does, surround structures that give new meaning to the term big box stores. Their plans were grand: a huge archway to welcome the endless stream of SUVs and luxury cars of the locals to a new Mecca of hyper consumption in a cultural axiom which demands big, big, BIGGER. The only thing in their way was a limestone house that German immigrants had built there some one hundred and thirty years earlier.
When we were kids we could feel the blasting from the quarry. It would shake the walls and make the roof creak. My mom would tell us that it’s what an earthquake felt like. She knew since she’d lived in California during her first disastrous marriage that had soured her on the world before we were born. They had earthquakes all the time, tremors anyway, she told us. Now on the phone, twenty-five years later, I was trying to figure out how she was feeling so that I could modulate my reactions in a dance we’ve been dancing my whole life. Me, attempting to strike a balance between provocation and empathy, she, doing whatever it takes to not let her world grow beyond what she can manage. “Can you believe how much they’re offering?!” she exclaimed. It was three times what the house had been appraised for the previous year by the county tax office. “Have you accepted?” I asked. “Not yet.”
“Well I hope you’re planning on making a counter offer.” I replied in the snarkiest voice I could muster.
The truth is I was happy for her. That house had been a headache for the entire 50 years our family owned it. The repairs were endless. Whenever it rained parts of it had started flooding because the back half had sunk below ground level and the stone walls had become too porous to keep the water out. The house was finally winning and we could no longer maintain it. But still, it was ours. No payments. No bank. It was where the entire extended family gathered at holidays. It was the house where my newborn younger sister had been brought home. Our family did not believe in nursing homes so it’s also where a great-great aunt, two great-grandmothers and both of my grandparents had all died in my mother’s care; one, my great-grandmother, in her arms. At this house the family dog once saved my younger sister’s life. She had tripped and was tumbling down the stairs that led up to the front porch. In what seemed like a single, split-second movement the dog, a mutt my dad had found in a parking lot, jumped from one end of the porch to the middle of the stairs, planted herself and stopped my sister from falling all the way down. That dog along with dozens of other family pets that came and went through the years was buried there. I loved that house. I loved the five hillside acres on which it sat with its rocky soil, dense brush of Cedars and Mesquites and towering Spanish and Live Oaks. The house, nestled into a somewhat manicured one-acre corner on the back edge of the property, was massive but not fancy. Sprawling but far from luxurious.
It was originally built in the late 1870s as a three-room cottage. The builders had used white limestone extracted from the property itself. They stacked them together in an old-world way of making the rocks fit however they came out of the ground and filling in the difference with thick mortar. The entry hall was long and narrow with a crooked turn about halfway in. It was lined on both sides by three iron-framed windows each containing sixteen eight by eight inch panes of glass. The two outer sections of the frames opened outward with little levers at the corners. They were rusted with chipped green paint and never quite worked right. We would have to push the window open while holding the levers up to keep them from stopping in one of the grooves designed for just that purpose when they used to work. The stones one saw on the outside were the same stones one saw on the inside constituting one-foot thick walls that acted as a natural coolant in the summer and heat trapper in the winter, such as it is South Texas. That is to say, about 4 weeks long. Their asymmetrical patterns gave the place a warm feeling that new houses today have trouble replicating. The walls felt like someone had built them with his or her hands instead of with machines.
Just inside and to the right of the oak double entry doors, to which I have never owned a key, as they were never locked, were three wooden steps that ascended into a formal dining room. Its cathedral ceiling met in the middle of the room with a thick wooden beam. From the beam hung two Spanish-style iron chandeliers with little yellow twisting glass shades. The chandeliers spaced about ten feet apart, cast a warm glow over Thanksgiving and Christmas meals year in and year out. The rest of the time they glowed over accumulated storage or anyone looking for a little privacy. When we got our first cordless phone it became the room-of-choice for taking phone calls; it was the only room not shared or in regular use. It was a catchall for objects as well as secrets.
The end of the entrance hall opened to a large combination living room, dining room and kitchen. In this room many a Saturday football game served as competition for conversation. As the TV grew progressively louder so did the voices at the oak table my grandfather built until everyone was shouting and laughing and cheering depending on which part of the crowd you were paying attention to. In this room countless Friday night dinners were eaten where the whole family would come, including cousins and friends of cousins and their friends too. The long-leaf yellow pine ceiling held a massive white fan that could make your skin goose-pimple in even the most stubborn heat of South Texas summer nights. That kind of ceiling does not exist anymore except in very old buildings because all the trees that once provided it have been cut down. I suppose no one stopped to think in those days that it takes hundreds of years for those pines to grow and that eventually they would run out.
At any given time there were at least ten, sometimes thirty or more people in the house and the coffee pot never stopped brewing. In this room probably about half a million cups of coffee were consumed under that yellow pine ceiling by friends and family sitting around the table. In this room, at that table, nights of domino games and continually recycled stories told and retold often ended no earlier than 3:00am.
One Christmas Eve, decades earlier, my mom’s sister Susie ate all the heads off the freshly baked gingerbread man cookies in the middle of the night. The following morning, as everyone filed into the living room to open presents my grandfather was so upset that he threatened to cancel Christmas. Only the confession of who had eaten the heads could bring it back. My mom, devastated at the thought of not having Christmas admitted to her sister’s crime. As punishment she had to watch everyone open their presents before she could open hers. Years later Susie came clean during a late-night domino game to uproarious laughter. To this day we eat the heads off the gingerbread men on Christmas Eve. Even now when I am not home for Christmas I make a point to get a gingerbread man and start eating it at the head.
Another time in the mid-eighties, my grandmother’s mother Dorothy, who had come to live with us, was arrested and brought home in a squad car for sailing her Ford Granada through a traffic light as she waved politely to a traffic cop. The problem was that he was motioning emphatically for her to stop. It was the final sign that she had entered the early stages of Alzheimer’s—she thought the cop was waving Hello, have a nice day. That was also the last time she ever drove. As the family aged and sagged under its own weight so, too, did our house.
When my grandparents purchased it in 1957, a generation before the land was annexed into the city limits of San Antonio, when the closest neighbor was a mile down the road, the three-room cottage had already become a four thousand square foot sprawling fantasia of architectural confusion. What started as a new side porch added circa 1945 became a bedroom for grandfather’s mother circa 1973, which became a full suite in the early eighties when her sister came to live with us. What had been a utility closet at the turn of the century grew and grew until it was part pantry, part storage and part laundry room. Worn wooden shelves filled to the brim with dry food on one side and piles of cookware on the other lined the long narrow room. At the far end of the main room, to the left of the entrance to the pantry, the central hallway, with its pale walls and threadbare imitation Persian rugs over an ancient wood floor, turned and snaked through the center of the house navigating addition after addition.
As time went by the house became a repository for the old women in our family whose husbands had died. The house ballooned to six thousand square feet with additions to accommodate them and the contents of the homes they left behind. Clutter was in every nook and cranny leaving not one square inch of unused space. Open a closet and what do you know, a fully stocked bookcase from Great-Great-Aunt Meta’s old house downtown next to a gun cabinet next to a pile of blankets under a shelf with countless hats—none of which were ever actually used—and so on. Go into the backroom and what’s there? A stack of mattresses from former guest rooms because my grandmother refused to throw anything of any value whatsoever away. Pack ratting seemed to be in the Gordon DNA.
I can still smell the mustiness that saturated every room of the house and the sound feet made down the main corridor. It was a hollow thump that, in my memory, feels like the very heartbeat of the house. I could tell, including pets, who was moving outside my bedroom door by the cadence and weight of their feet thumping, or shuffling, scurrying or tiptoeing down that long, empty hallway pumping life into its every twist and turn.
It happened on more than one occasion that newcomers would ask to use the restroom, say, and were told to follow the main hallway all the way to the end. Five, ten minutes would pass before they returned utterly dazed at having gotten lost. To the uninitiated the main passage was a maze of hallways and doors that would lead to one room that would lead to another hallway on the other side of the house entirely. Then they’d try and retrace their steps and end up on yet some other side, or outside.
Ours was the perfect example of how not to expand. One should always consult an architect. If an aerial outline had been drawn it would not display wings as one might expect of a house that size. It would depict a bunch of squares and rectangles with no clear pattern cobbled together. Upon viewing the sketch one might think to themselves that’s a house?
Even though I knew the money from the sale would round out my parents’ under-capitalized retirement and get them out from under what was too much decaying house for two people, my mom sounded a little too happy on this phone call. It had only been a few weeks since we’d talked about the new construction over the hill and how many families, life-long friends, on our road were selling their properties and moving away and she had broken down in tears. It had only been a few years, after the area had been rezoned for Commercial development and we saw this coming, that I had begged my parents to have the house listed as an historical landmark so that, at the very least, it could not be torn down. They ignored my pleas and she was now explaining how they, the developers, had mentioned that they’re going to try and save the house and maybe set it up as an office or some shops. “Uh-huh. I hope so.” I replied.
“I mean really, it’s an awful lot of money!” she exclaimed again. “It’s going to set us up.”
“Mom,” I said, “do you even know where you’d want to live? You’ve lived in that house your entire life and you rarely ever leave the property.”
“We haven’t really thought about that yet.”
I could hear a frog growing in her throat as her breath grew short. I had pushed too hard. “First we want to see how much we’re going to get. Steve’s looking over the details and is going to come up with our counter-offer.”
“Okay. Well, keep me posted. I’ll come and help if you like.” I said heart-heavy knowing that she would not like. We finished up and made plans to talk later in the week.
Steve Aaronson is my dad’s friend who also happens to be an accountant. When his counter was rejected the real estate agent told my parents that this was the best offer they were going to get. If they wanted to hold out they could but the offer was likely to decrease. Whether or not this is true is irrelevant really. They wanted out. It was a great offer. They caved.
On a trip home later that year, well after they’d moved to small town on a large plot into an appropriate four-bedroom bungalow, I drove out to the old place. Even though we had learned a few months earlier that the house had ultimately been demolished I was not quite prepared for what was there in its place: a brand new avenue-wide street that cuts directly over the site where the house had stood. One of the two brick pillars that stood at the end of the former driveway, the last artifact indicating that this place used to be something else, had yet to be torn down. Knowing every inch of the property I could tell exactly where the house had stood and where Isaac, the sister-saving dog, was buried. I took a quiet walk around, let out a little tear then a laugh. Progress! What a ridiculous paradox in a world that is so very old. It’s destructive and creative at the same time. I got back into my rented car and drove on the new road up the hill, over the ghost of our old house and onto another new road that leads to the highway.
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