Where the House Was
I was adopted September 3, 1950. Born early and with a stillborn twin, at first I didn’t pass muster among those looking to adopt, not after the war when there were so many. I had heart and lung problems, requiring surgeries to correct the flaws and then to correct the surgeries, until I was six, when a childless couple took over both me and my bills. We were a handful.
They were good people, but they frightened me. After growing up in the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Children’s Home with a plastic gun as my only toy and fifty other kids for playmates, I was suddenly the only act in town, stripped of the anonymity of numbers and smothered with kindness. I had no idea how to act in a real home; I’d never been in one. The first time my new parents visited friends, I spent the entire evening going through their kids’ chest, one toy at a time. I don’t think I said ten words to anyone.
“Which did you like?” Carol asked when we got home—that’s what I called them, Carol and Don. I shrugged. It hadn’t occurred to me to like or dislike.
About my brother, I knew almost nothing—his name was Bart, and he died. As an adult, when I gained access to my old medical records, his were included. Our infirmities, too, had been identical, but I was born first and that had doomed him.
It was my biological mom who obsessed me, and her name I did not know. Strange women visited that Home all the time—out of kindness, I guess—and I invested them with my fantasies. All of us were that way, puppies at the pound. I lived on invented memories, and fought, cursed, threw things if anyone contradicted. That we lived for months in barns and abandoned houses, that the hospital wouldn’t let her have me because she couldn’t pay. Of course, I knew they weren’t true. That made me fight all the harder.
Later, when I studied history in college, I found that historical memories, like personal ones, are creatures of desire. Important events disappear from consciousness, while others, bordering on fiction, take their place. Later, when I taught high school, it was something I emphasized. We “Remember the Maine,” if we remember it, because there is so much else we would like to forget, and we require a Boston Massacre because war demands atrocities.
Adults in our extended family tended to bypass whatever came before Carol and Don. Not so their kids. Childhood, like war, requires drama, and they loved to speculate on my former life. Maybe my mother had died; maybe she couldn’t handle the shame. One cousin, years older than I, said my mother had dropped me in a dumpster at the A&P. “She knew trash when she saw it.” Oddly, that cousin was my favorite. He gave me my first cigarette and my first taste of whiskey and called me “Little Indian,” because of my olive skin. The name lasted, in one form or another, throughout my childhood.
Their fascination didn’t offend me. What they imagined didn’t matter. The fact that they imagined anything kept my mother real and possible.
Later, I demanded my new parents find her—accused them keeping her from me Carol told me all they knew: that she was young and poor and her boyfriend had gone overseas and hadn’t come back. They didn’t know who she was or where she was. Somehow that made me feel my abandonment as I hadn’t before. I threw myself on my bed and wept, and when Carol tried to hold me, I hit her. I was maybe eight, it had to hurt, but kept holding until I fell asleep. When I woke, hours later, we were curled together like spoons, and there was a blanket over us. Never again did I strike either one of them.
Still, I was a strange kid—moody, hyperactive, mouthy. Kids didn’t like me, parents didn’t like me, so naturally I gravitated to the neighborhood’s other malcontent, Frankie Frisch. Our mothers knew each other. Both, during the war, had worked in the same factory, and now they worked in the same grocery. They spent hours on the phone, especially after Mr. Frisch, as Carol put it, skedaddled.
Frankie went to public school and I to Holy Savior, so during the school year we didn’t see much of each other, but in summer we were inseparable. Back then, children were sent out to play as soon as the dew burned off the grass, like cows let out to pasture. Sometimes there were troops of ten or twelve, sometimes just us two. When Carol worked, I stayed at Frankie’s house, where his grandmother watched TV instead of us.
Without any supervision, we turned wild: stole from stores, stole from cars, got into fights with other kids, walked the IC track for miles. No one wanted us in their yard.
I called him Dutch, he called me Chief. He was a year older, eleven to my ten, when we broke into Winifred Johnson’s shed, and by then maybe four inches taller, with shoulders like a linebacker. At that age, our play had begun to evolve from Marines in foxholes to Playboy in the basement. We played basketball schoolyards and driveways, made soapbox cars and model planes, and spied on the sunbathing wife of an Air Force master sergeant. She was blonde and wore a two-piece suit that became a one piece when she lay on her belly, and she liked to read propped on her elbows.
As Marines, we’d often played in a deep cavity in a nearby abandoned lot, imagining last ditch stands. There’d been a house, but it had burned, and while the wood had been carted away, the hole remained only partly filled. A shed stood in what had been the back yard, grey with weather, a combination lock on the door.
One hot day, toward the end of my tenth summer, after we’d knocked around plastic balls with the golf clubs Frankie’s father had left behind, I suggested we break into the shed. It wasn’t hard. The nails holding the hinges were loose; we just pried them off. Inside, a clutter of household items: pots and pans, blankets, clothing, lamps; two overstuffed chairs, one upended atop the other, and in one corner, a box of black-and-white photos. Everything, we thought, smelled of smoke. In the pictures, a pleasant cottage with a porch and a porch swing and louvered windows, and a stone walk we could trace beneath the half-dead grass now that we knew where to look. Like most houses in the neighborhood, except for one thing: the people in the photos were black. Or Negroes, if one spoke respectfully, which we didn’t. “Black” was considered bad taste. We sat in the hole and did Amos and Andy impressions of the people in the pictures.
Though Negroes were in the news, they were not in our neighborhood. Downtown—a different story. The elevator operator in my father’s building was black, as was the custodial staff, plus a healthy percentage of gardeners, tailors, cooks, porters and cabbies, who lived, as far as I knew, in the ether and appeared at work supernaturally. In the pictures, they looked terribly formal: men in dark suits sitting on the porch, kids standing straight in front of women who looked like they’d been lined up for a firing squad. This confirmed an impression I’d got visiting my father’s office and on train rides to Chicago: that Negroes were serious people, severe but kind to children.
Many of the unposed shots featured a mildly hunchbacked woman at varying ages: standing behind a dinner table set for six, planting flowers, in a laughing group with other women. She was small and thin and wore glasses thick as goggles, and smiled in every picture.
After a while, we tossed everything back, taking a souvenir apiece (mine was a brass medallion with a strand of rawhide looped through a hole at the top; Frankie took a vase for his mom) and leaving the door on the ground. Don took the medallion. It was a slave tag with a man’s name on it, Clancy, and the name of an estate in South Carolina. He’d never seen one. He put it in a drawer and told me if we found the owner, I’d have to give it back, and explain how I got it. Then he fetched Frankie and made us screw the door back on.
Later that week, Don took me to visit Mrs. Rupp, who lived across the street from the empty lot, in a house she refused to paint lest it raise her property taxes. She remembered the fire and the woman who had died in it. They would, she said, wave at each other across the road, but she couldn’t recall the woman’s name. “Black? Oh, yes. Black and shriveled like a prune, and humped—Lord, she could hardly walk toward the end. And no one to help, that I saw. She should have stayed with her own.” The fire was so bad, she said, they’d called in trucks from two stations. No clue as to why the lot remained vacant.
“Somebody must be paying the taxes,” Don said.
She laughed. “Not me.”
Later, Don and I had our first and only conversation about race. I asked why black people were janitors and elevator operators, and he said, “It’s what they prefer.” Even at ten that didn’t make any sense.
After dinner, my parents quarreled over Frankie. Don said he was rude and disobedient; Carol said we were both rotten. Then they moved on to Frankie’s parents, Don saying, “She should have kept her knees together,” and Carol countering, “What’s good for the gander is good for the goose.” It sounded like fighting, but all the time they were touching each other in ways that embarrassed me.
A couple of days later, Frankie broke into the shed and left wads of stuffing, pots and pans, and the whole box of pictures on the ground. I tried to put the pictures back, but he took them from me and threw them in the hole. “Nobody gives a shit,” he said.
I told him about the fire. “It was the space heater. They couldn’t get to her in time.” I imagined smoke and flames and the woman trying to get out.
Frankie punched my arm. “Couldn’t have hurt too much. She was black already.” When I didn’t laugh, he chanted, “Burnt to a crisp,” all the way to his place.
We made sandwiches, and he pulled the brown crust off his bread and waved it at me, “Crispy.” He showed me their new lawn mower, which his mom had bought so he could earn money. I asked when he was going to start, and he said, “Never.”
Then we got his basketball and headed to the grade school, where the hoop was in the parking lot and had no net. Four kids were playing, and we joined them, one on each side, and for a while it was even—I had my spots and when I got to them I could be good—but then Frankie muscled me out of my game.
Walking home, he wouldn’t let up. “Your mom should have shacked up with a spook instead of an Indian. Teach you a few moves.” Then he pinched my arm. “Crispy Critter.”
As the little guy, my role was to take it and say something cutting in return, but this time anger swelled up like air inside me—I couldn’t breathe for the pressure—and when it came out, it threw me at him, swinging fast and hard. Surprise was my friend. Frankie backed away and my blows drew blood, which made me frantic for more. I wanted to lay him on the ground. I wanted him dead. Then he found his balance, stepped to one side and landed a hook to my eye, but I didn’t stop. Another blow decked me, but I got up and made him do it again. Twice. He had to sit on my back and hold my arms down before the anger drained away.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?”
I didn’t answer. Hell, I’d been asking myself that question my entire life.
After he left, I eased myself up. Some woman in a car stopped and asked if I needed help, and I ran.
That was it between Frankie and me. While our mothers fought on the phone, Don took me aside and asked if I’d given as good as I got. I said, “For a while,” and he squeezed my shoulder.
“Best you could do.”
With Carol, I’d let the bruises tell the story, but to him I told what Frankie had said. He started a roundabout lecture about self-control, but gave up. Said it didn’t matter who my parents were, then he let that go, too. “People like that,” he said, “they never rest.” He didn’t explain what he meant.
Next day, he boarded the shed with 2X4’s. Two weeks later, it was gone. The city got rid of what wasn’t worth saving and put the rest in storage somewhere. They also promised to fill the hole, but ran into opposition somewhere. Someone thought the ownership had to be worked out first. My father claimed that was government in a nutshell: some say one thing, some another, and you end up with a hole in the ground. Still, he felt pretty good about what he’d done. To me, with the stuff gone, Frankie had won.
By then the summer break was over. I had looked forward to middle school, because it meant no more nuns, but things didn’t go well. In grade school, I’d been good a math, best in the class, but now they hit us with pre-algebra—x’s and y’s and negative numbers and powers to the God-knows-what. I liked facts. I wanted to be a scientist, but algebra seemed like the world I’d been born in: plug in this, it means one thing; plug in that, it means another. Abstractions bewildered me.
One night, a few weeks into the term, I woke around midnight and instead of going back to bed, slipped outside. Our house was bleached by moonlight to the color of bone, and the car lay on its carpet of gravel like a sleeping buffalo. I stepped from stone to stone across the black water of our lawn to the safety of the sidewalk. There were lights at each end of the block, but the rest was darkness.
I wandered without plan, over the creek and back again, down alleys and through back yards, and eventually came to the vacant lot—its collapsed ground like the opening to a cave. Whoever had gotten rid of her things had done a good job. You couldn’t tell a shed had ever been there. I crawled in where the light didn’t reach and sat on a lump of cement blocks, three of them mortared together with a bit of a fourth, and tried to think my way into a life where so many people could just disappear—my mother, my father, the lady in the house. You had to make them up as you went along. Had to. Or you couldn’t live.
Despite the shadow, Don found me. He climbed down and sat beside me, and after a while he said, “Shitty, isn’t it?” and I threw myself into his arms.
Even before he spoke, I felt safe—Don hated stains on his clothes, but there he was with his butt scrunched in the dirt. Later that night, when I awoke and saw Carol’s outline in the doorway to my room, I knew I was loved.
But it didn’t change anything.
I was still me, and I still didn’t know who that was. As I grew older I took on personalities from novels, from movies, from stories people told just to see how they fit. It was like turning the barrel of a kaleidoscope.
In my junior year of high school, when the pastor of our church joined a Freedom Ride to Jackson and got beat up for pissing in a “Colored Only” toilet, the people of our community discovered, as if they’d just migrated North, that black people lived among us. That year, also, the city filled in the hole, and a builder raised a duplex on the site.
It got me thinking about the woman, and the fire that had taken her life. Given what was happening down South, I had some pretty melodramatic suspicions, but I came to realize that her fate, even without the burning crosses, was just as terrible. In a neighborhood where I couldn’t pass unnoticed, she had been both exotic and invisible. In a neighborhood where every yard was a playground and every house a refuge, she had been alone. Yet her strangeness touched a cognate strangeness in me—it seemed that we both looked at the world through thick lenses.
Occasionally I’d run into Frankie, now firmly Frank. We laughed off the fight and blamed our estrangement on the over-reaction of our parents, but in truth we didn’t like each another. Never had. It amazed me that I’d spent three summers with a boy I didn’t like.
The last year of high school, we had to write three research papers in History. I liked history; it gave the same false sense of certainty I’d once found in math. I’d done papers on the Lincoln/Douglas debates and Roosevelt’s muted response to the Holocaust, but for the third our teacher wanted something related to our lives, so we’d have to use primary sources. She was tired of paraphrases. I wanted to research my birth parents, but she scotched that—not enough history—so I suggested the woman who died in the fire. I showed her the slave tag, and she let me try.
For plat maps and court records and property tax records, I tried the courthouse, a massive building with a great brass dome and marble halls, and very little space. Old records were kept in an annex a mile away, in a defunct grocery. Old newspapers were supposed to be at the library—one of those Carnegie monsters with Corinthian columns and spiral metal stairs—but that too had an annex, in what was once a dime store. Old phone books and histories of the town were in the county historical society, located in an abandoned church. Thus, my introduction to the peripheral nature of history, which seems to live mostly in boxes found in somebody’s attic.
The genius loci of the historical society was a white-haired woman who had once been an English teacher at my high school, and she asked one simple question: why. Out came the whole life story, with flourishes and amendments and, to my embarrassment, tears.
She raised a finger and pressed it against my lips. “Would you like to know your name?”
I told her my birth certificate listed Don and Carol’s names, and she smiled, crooked that finger and led me down an aisle, then another aisle. The Soldiers and Sailors home no longer existed, but its records did. Ten minutes and she had found me, in a file listing adoptions. “Gianelli.” She tapped the name with her finger. “Whether it’s your father’s or your mother’s, I have no idea, but it is yours.”
There is no way to convey the magic of that moment. One word, and I became an historian. Because I remembered roll calls and learning to write and kids who called me by my last name. Memory upon memory, they flooded back. That had been me for six years. How could I have forgotten? How could anyone forget their own name?
We tried phone books from that time. No Gianellis.
“They took kids from all over,” she said. “She could have been from St. Louis. Or Chicago.”
So we turned our attention to house on the corner. 1200 block of Laurel Street, almost certainly 1201, and a woman at that address on the tax rolls. Her house was on the plat map, and her phone number was in an old reverse directory with a soiled white cover. Winifred Johnson, a Welsh name for an African-American lady. The listings taught me squat; she’d had a phone and a house and paid taxes. Nothing in the microfiche at the library, but there was a newspaper clipping, not under her name but under “fires.”
Five lines: 1) House fire at . . . , 2) Brought under control after . . . , 3) Owner found . . . , 4) Cause believed to be . . . , 5) Use of kerosene heaters . . . . We looked for an obituary, but there wasn’t one.
I asked a couple of my black classmates—by then I had black classmates—but none had heard of her or the fire nor were they happy with my research. Most had genealogies like mine, a few generations back. Why did a white boy want to bring that crap up? I got the names of a couple of ministers, who also knew nothing, but one, a Rev. Arthur, asked me my purpose, and I told him the truth. “It bothers me.”
“Lord,” he said, “I hope it never stops bothering you.” Then he thought a bit. “I can tell you what happened. If no one claimed the body, she had a county funeral and was buried in the pauper section of the cemetery. There may be a marker or there may not.” It would be W. Johnson, he said. There were three W. Johnsons. I checked.
The paper wasn’t any good: a list of searches that led nowhere and a summary of the Great Migration thrown in to take up space. My teacher wrote, “More a personal odyssey than genuine research—C.” I still have not forgiven her. At the end, I inserted a blank sheet with four black rectangles pasted on it: “The pictures that weren’t there.” Because in all those newspaper files, I’d found very few pictures of black people.
I asked my mentor, “What did she want?”
She laughed. “My Father’s Memories of Iwo Jima, What My Grandmother Did During the Depression, that sort of thing. You explored a mystery and found a bigger mystery. Many people consider that failure.”
I told her I was one of them.
“Think like a scientist,” she said. “To them, failure is just a step in the process.”
At least it wasn’t X and Y.
Three months later, I packed up my parents’ Olds, which was my graduation present, and drove off to college.
Which lasted a little longer than I anticipated. In college, you are whatever you claim to be, and the chameleon in me tried every color in the rainbow. It took five years of less than stellar work to learn one thing: There’s not much difference between being anybody and being nobody.
On those few occasions I thought about Winifred Johnson, I wondered mostly about the community, the black community. I had cheap apartment in a black neighborhood. Everyone knew everyone, and that included me. Where were her friends? Didn’t she have a church, a job? What about those people in the pictures?
And on our side of the divide, why had there been no stories? She was an outsider, a lone black woman in a white neighborhood, and she died horrifically. If that had happened to us, or to Mrs. Rupp, there would have been lots of stories, competing stories. People would remember things they’d never seen. No one would forget.
The day after Martin Luther King’s assassination, I asked my father to send me the slave tag, and I wore it for a while as a kind of phylactery—under my shirt because some, black and white, would have objected. The girl I was living with, who rejected the label “girlfriend,” used it for some kind of class presentation, and later, when she moved out, refusing to admit we were breaking up, she took it.
I got married, had a couple of kids, became a principal, got divorced, gave up administration and went back into the classroom. I asked my wife why she left, and she said, “You keep looking for something that’s not there.”
True enough. I used to ask my students, “What’s not there?” In the Constitution, in history books, in the President’s latest speech. They hated it.
In all those years, I never once mentioned Winifred Johnson.
When Carol died of a stroke, among the many people at her funeral was Frank’s mother, who wept on my shoulder. “She was my best friend!”
I thought, “So we destroyed that, too.”
Later, I helped Don move into a condo in what had once been a hotel downtown. In the gift shop on the ground floor, I bought Karen, my ex, a silly romantic card. Neither of us has remarried.
The day Don died, he was helping paint a house with a bunch of Habitat people from his church and fell off a ladder. The doctor said he might have had a heart attack, but since he’d broken his neck in the fall, there was no reason to check. His pastor, Rev. Navarro, had been born in the Philippines. In his eulogy, he said how much he’d liked and respected my adoptive father, how much Don had done for the community. It hurt that I’d known so little about that, but then I’d never asked.
Frank came to the funeral and shook my hand and told me Don had been like a father to him. I wanted to say, “You hated him, you son-of-a-bitch. What’s more, he hated you.” But with the eulogy in mind, I kept my mouth shut.
At the gravesite, Karen and I stayed for a while watching a backhoe shovel dirt in, the kids already on their way out of town. The place didn’t look like a cemetery. There were no monuments, just flat stones flush to the ground with brass plaques screwed onto them—it makes mowing easier. I thought of my birth mother, one child dead, the other in a glass box with a bandage over the scar on his chest. She couldn’t take it, and I didn’t blame her.
Toeing the clay soil at the edge of Don’s grave, I said, “It’s shitty.” Karen, who knew that story, put her arm in mine.
• • •
Richard Spilman is the author of two books of short fiction, Hot Fudge and The Estate Sale. Hot Fudge was a New York Time Notable Book; The Estate Sale won the George Garrett Prize from Texas Review Press. He was born and raised in Normal, Illinois, in a house that backed onto Sugar Creek, half a block from Main Street. He’s been trying to escape ever since.