by Terese Svoboda
Built in 1958, the father designed the house along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright, with a flat roof, lots of full-length glass windows, old brick, patios instead of porches, and a sunken garden with a St. Francis birdbath surrounded by ivy beside the entrance. The door had a starburst handle in the middle. Actual prairie abutted the house, as it was situated at the edge of town, population five thousand, not the best place to show off architecture unless there were parties of out-of-towners. The entrance hall where the guests arrived was covered with irregular big pieces of flagstone broken by a wall of amber ripple glass girded by mahogany. The flagstone continued on the other side under a circular wrought iron glass-topped table and chairs and a bar. An expanse of an oatmeal-color-carpeted living room met the flagstone just past the powder room and master bedroom, which was situated as far as possible from the children’s sleeping quarters.
Very soon the sunken garden was sacrificed to the plethora of children. Enclosed, it became a bedroom for whomever was about to escape the house. The occupant had to go through the father’s office, where he lounged behind his desk after hours, usually asleep, farm boots beside the chair. His labors on the land had produced this house meant to keep his wife happy so she would not miss the other end of the state where all things architectural happened.
The rest of the children had to find a place in the basement that was never quite finished, or occupy the TV rec room where ostensibly guests might sleep, if the parties went late. This room was soon converted into a bedroom for more children. It had what is known as a dry sink, an anomaly of a closet, really just a half-closet. The definition is a cabinet with a recessed top where one could put a pitcher of water but this one had a door and a lock that eventually the father’s caregiver used to conceal things she was stealing. The youngest was molested in that room by a friend of the family.
Eventually an indoor swimming pool was built off the kitchen, cutting into the view of the pony that the neighbor kept in his backyard. The pool perfumed the house with chlorine until the father pulled a half acre of plastic sheeting across the surface. The molester brought lilacs instead of booze to a pool party one night, and jumped in with the bouquet.
The only concession to the children was an intercom between their rooms and the parents’. It must have been the contractor’s idea: the parents never responded. Mostly it was used by the children to harass each other, and it soon broke. Help, help was not heard.
Mid-winter, snow drifts covered the floor-to-ceiling glass doors, darkening the house, and the children had to dig holes through to make a path to walk to school. Their parents didn’t coddle them by driving in bad weather. When the snow on the roof melted and trickled through the roof’s flatness and no amount of pitch could save them from putting out pails in the living room, the lines of the house were destroyed by a hump built for runoff, and then the drive-thru driveway was cut in half to provide more storage. An abstract owl flew across the face of the driveway’s covering, an omen.
After the wife died, the eldest son harassed his father into signing the deed to the house over to him, rather than the caregiver who was providing certain services, and then took his father straight to a local rest home. The father begged to return but his son was adamant. He took his I.D. and wallet and money and left him behind. The father sat in his ten-by-ten green cement block cell and wept.