It was his and his brother’s house, by contract, inheritance and memory. Its leaks and other infirmities were his responsibility. It was he who had broken the vase on the mantelpiece and burned a hole in the sofa. He did not believe in ghosts, shades, spirits or any other forms of unquietness on the part of the dead. He was a man of twenty-eight, happily married, the father of a son. He weighed one hundred and thirty-eight pounds, enjoyed perfect health and had eaten some chicken for dinner. These were the facts. He took a copy of
He went on reading. There was noise from the dining room. He said something loud and vigorous to express his impatience with his apprehensions but the effect of this was to convince him overwhelmingly that he had been heard. Someone was listening. There was a cure for this foolishness. He went directly to the empty room and turned on the light. There was nothing there and yet the beating of his heart was accelerated and painful and sweat ran off his palms. Then the dining room door slowly closed of itself. This was only natural since the old house sagged badly and while half the doors closed themselves the other half wouldn’t close at all. He went through the swinging door on into the pantry and the kitchen. Here again he saw nothing but felt again that there had been someone in the room when he turned on the light. There were two sets of facts—the empty room and the alarmed condition of his skin. He was determined to scotch this and he went out of the kitchen into the hallway and climbed the stairs.
All the bedroom doors stood open, and here, in the dark, he seemed to yield to the denseness of the lives that had been lived here for nearly two centuries. The burden of the past was palpable; the utterances and groans of conception, childbirth and death, the singing at the family reunion in 1893, the dust raised by a Fourth of July parade, the shock of lovers meeting by chance in the hallway, the roar of flames in the fire that gutted the west wing in 1900, the politeness at christenings, the joy of a young husband bringing his wife back after their marriage, the hardships of a cruel winter all took on some palpableness in the dark air. But why was the atmosphere in this darkness distinctly one of trouble and failure? Ebenezer had made a fortune. Lorenzo had introduced child-welfare legislation into the state laws. Alice had converted hundreds of Polynesians to Christianity. Why should none of these ghosts and shades seem contented with their work? Was it because they had been mortal, was it because for every last one of them the pain of death had been bitter?
He returned to the fire. Here was the physical world, fire-lit, stubborn and beloved, and yet his physical response was not to the parlor but to the darkness in the rooms around him. Why, sitting so close to the fire, did he feel a chill slide down his left shoulder and a moment later coarsen with cold the skin of his chest, as if a hand had been placed there? If there were ghosts, he believed with his father that they kept low company. They consorted with the poorhearted and the faint. He knew that we sometimes leave after us, in a room, a stir of love or rancor when we are gone. He believed that whatever we pay for our loves in money, venereal disease, scandal or ecstasy, we leave behind us, in the hotels, motels, guest rooms, meadows and fields where we discharge this much of ourselves, either the scent of goodness or the odor of evil, to influence those who come after us. Thus it was possible that this passionate and eccentric cast had left behind them some ambiance that made his presence seem like an intrusion. It was time to go to bed and he got some blankets out of a closet and made up a bed in the spare room, nearest the stairs.
