Dear Georgia,
I heard you again last night. Woke up to hear footfalls above me and in my half awake state, I thought that Bing was up on the roof. I remember drowsily thinking, "What the hell is she doing on the roof in the middle of the night?" I came awake enough to check my bedside clock. It was 2:26. I sighed and lay back down, finding Bing's foot with mine, always warm against my cold one. Bing snuffled and moved her foot away, annoyed in sleep of the cold rock in the pond of her dreams.
I wondered how I always do, about why you are still here. What makes you stay? What holds you here in this house? Why haven't you moved on yet?
What I know of you is pitifully little, really. Stories mostly gleaned from our neighbors who knew you. This is what I know:
I know that your father had this house built for your mother. That he was a wealthy banker who had lost his first wife in childbirth with their fourth child. I know that he was nearly 50 when he married your mother and that she was barely 20. She was just out of her teens and suddenly, she was the new mother for four children, ages 9, 6, 3 and 4 months.
I found the newspaper clipping about their wedding. It was dull, but did make mention of the fact that they were planning a brief honeymoon to Hot Springs, Arkansas and then would return to their newly built house in Dundee with his four children.
What isn't said is that your father married your mother only four months after his first wife died. I imagine that was pretty common back then, though. The clipping says that your mother was the "cherished daughter" of another local banker, so I am guessing that they must have met at a bank function. Perhaps your mother's parents saw the chance for her to have a suitable new husband, albeit a little...um...old.
Apparently the marriage worked out well. Your mother gave your father five more children. You were the last of nine children. The house that he built her, first your home and now mine, was built in 1918. You were born in 1924. Your four siblings were all within one year of each other.
I've seen early photos of the house and it looks surprisingly very much the same as it does today. I have tried hard to keep it true to it's time. There are a few changes. The attic bedroom is no longer a maid's room. It is now an extra bedroom. It is lovely, though no matter how cheerful I try to make it, the room holds a sense of melancholy. I know that your house servant was a young Irish woman. That her name was Bridey and she lived with your family for nearly ten years before she went off with the coal man and married him. It must have been sort of lonely for her, though. She had a nice big room, though, with a tidy little bathroom with a claw foot tub.(I must admit that we now use the bathtub to house Liv's turtle. He loves his big house.) But the staircase going downstairs is very narrow and dark. After the Irish girl, I'm not sure how many house servants you had. Bridey was the only one listed on the census until the late 1960's. Then, I do know that your mother had a woman who looked after her who lived there. There are buttons all over the house, that when pressed, used to sound up in the attic room. How annoying that must have been for her. Maybe she just got comfortable with her knitting or a novel and then...BRIINNGGGGG. Duty called. We found buttons on the wall next to our bed, in one of the other bedrooms and in the living room. Another button in the dining room, under the table was placed on the floor in reach of the head of the table. This button, when pressed, sounded in the kitchen, probably to summon the cook. I don't think that a cook ever lived with you, though. The only servant ever found is one house servant.
Bing unarmed the buzzers on the walls and the floor. This made Liv unhappy because she LOVED pressing those buttons. We unarmed them after we had weekend guests and I discovered that Liv, then four, had been pressing the buttons willy nilly, waking up our house guests who were staying up in the attic, at the eye scrunching hour of 6 a.m.
I often wonder how you managed to fit two parents, a servant and NINE children in my home. But, I suppose it was worked out. There was the attic room for the servant. There are five bedrooms upstairs, but we now use one for an office and another for a combination library/study/movie room. The other three bedrooms are still in place. One is a guest room, the others are used by Liv and Bing and I.
The downstairs is almost exactly as it was when you lived there. We put the Christmas tree up on the sun porch every year. Our neighbors say that you did the same. It is a gorgeous place for it, with ceiling to floor windows on three sides. What you used for a parlor is still a parlor, but it is used primarily as a music room now. The piano is in there, as well as Bing's marimba and vibes, her bongos, congas and assorted percussion. Bing's three guitars sit against the wall, along with Liv's violin, guitar and a cello that someone gave to us that Liv noodles on now and then.
There is another guest room on the first floor. We call it the
blue room because it has that dark blue flowered wall paper that has been there since the house was built. I love that room because the rose bushes are right outside the windows and in the spring and early summer, the smell is almost too wonderful to stand. Too often, we use that bedroom to store things, though.
The dining room still is exactly the same with the gorgeous pie safe built into the wall. The kitchen is probably not much the same, Georgia. We have modernized it a great deal. But the sink still looks out over the back yard and in July and August when the garden is growing, you can smell the delicious scents of vegetables. The garden is in the exact same place that it was when your family lived there. When we moved in, Liv was barely two years old and when we inspected the basement, we found a whole section devoted to gardening tools, tables and little incubators for growing seedlings. We have gotten SO much use out of that room, Georgia, and it is, hands down, my favorite in the house. It smells like moist soil, growing things and warm dampness.
The living room has changed, although we still have the same beautiful stone and green marble fireplace there. The fireplaces in the basement and upstairs are intact as well, although we seldom light them. Too dirty and Bing has this worry over fire.
The basement is still like something out of
The Secret Garden with all it's tiny hidden rooms. Bing ran herself ragged when she moved in with Liv and me, by installing iron bars on all the basement windows and putting in a whole house alarm system. She kept saying that the basement reminded her of something out of a scary movie. Too many places for intruders to hide and jump out, she said. I disagree. I love the basement. One room is our rec room. We have a television down there and a deep comfy couch and a good wooden table that is perfect for putting together puzzles. It was Liv's play room when she was little. It is still the favorite place for her when friends visit. There is a big wooden quilt box that houses dress up clothes, mostly purchased at Goodwill. It has some pretty spectacular hats and purses too! The shelves house Liv's games and she keeps all of her books on the book shelves.
The other room is a laundry room. I like the giant white porcelain sinks down there. Just perfect for tie dying. All of Bing's work out things are in there too, her punching bag, her bench press, the stationary bike, the treadmill, the rowing machine. We will never get fat if we use those regularly.
And then, yes, the garden room. There are tiny rooms all over too, like rooms for fairies or elves, Liv tells me. They are small and we have no idea what they would be used for, none are much bigger than a closet. One room, we can see was used for a darkroom. It still holds the smell of chemicals for making film. But, I will never know who in your family was the photographer.
I take perhaps, the most pride in
your my garden. More on that later.
I know that your siblings all must have moved away. There is no record of them left in our area. Your four sisters married and moved away, far away. The closest one was in Las Vegas! Your four brothers did the same eventually, although it looks as if two of them stayed in Nebraska for several years. Most of them ended up in Florida. You, as the youngest, stayed with your mother. Your father died when you were still in high school and your mother lived with you and your husband, Mike,in our house, until she died in 1967. After that, the house servant left and you and Mike lived in the house alone.
You never had children, Georgia, and I have often wondered about that. Mostly because you have always shown such kindness and respect for Liv. You, being a ghost, could have scared her half to death if you wished, but you never have. Instead, you alert me when she is getting sick by making the medicine cabinet door swing open over and over. It took me a long time to figure this out, but finally I put it together. And you have never been wrong. When that cupboard door starts to come open by itself, I know that Liv is coming down with something and needs medicine. Thank you for that.
I wonder if being a part of a big family made you yearn for privacy. Maybe that is why you didn't have children? I will never know. The neighbors moved in to their home right after your mother died and they said that you and Mike never had children.
This is what little I know about you, Georgia:
I know that you married Mike when you were 27 years old. I know that it was a small wedding and that Mike was 32. You went to Niagara Falls for your honeymoon and then came back to live with your mother in the house that you grew up in.
I know that you loved a good party. The neighbors tell me that after your mother died, you and Mike had almost weekly summer parties and that they went late and while they weren't loud and raucous, they often went until after midnight and it was not uncommon for guests to dance in the back yard. I know that Mike was co-owner of a steak house and that you often helped by hostessing.
I know that Mike was Italian and was described as a "little bandy legged man with dark black hair and eyes." You were taller than him by several inches and the neighbors tell me that you were actually pretty damn good looking. Two of them compared you to
Vanessa RedgraveTim, our neighbor, and his wife, Pansy, both described you as "vibrant, very funny, but very sharp tongued too, you didn't want to get on her bad side."
They tell me that you and Mike seemed very happy together. That you often sat outside with your dog and two cats and smoked cigarettes and drank wine. Mike was the gardener and I am still enjoying his green thumb, Georgia. My yard is full of old fashioned flowers that I adore: bachelors buttons, bleeding hearts, poppies, lilies of the valley, calla lillies, and most incredible, several rose bushes that have such incredible white and pink blooms that one woman in the neighborhood offered to buy some from me for her wedding. Those flowers are hardy and I try gallantly to keep them healthy and happy. The rose bushes can be troublesome, they are persnickety and fragile. I prune with great care and baby them outrageously and they thank me every year by being so lovely that my throat catches when I look at them. I cut bunches of them for our dining room table and in the summertime, under the soft chandelier over the dining room table, they make us all look dewy and beautiful too. I can't tell you how many times I put my face in them and inhale deeply. They can divert a sad mood with ease.
Mike died in 1989. You were 65 and he was 70. It was stomach cancer. And it took him quickly. The neighbors tell me that he was diagnosed in February and was dead by May. Their last memories of him are of seeing him wrapped up in blankets in the adirondack chair in the back yard in early May while he tried to guide you in planting the vegetable garden.
Tom says, "He always looked so robust, like that guy who played that detective with the raincoat, what was his name?
Columbo?"And then it seemed as if he was just gone.
The neighbors say that this was when it all went downhill for you. That you'd always been a big smoker, a big drinker, a big personality. But, after Mike died, you seldom left the house. The parties stopped. No one even came over to visit. Once, when a young neighbor child came over to try to sell you Girl Scout cookies, you shooed her away and told her that cookies rotted teeth.
And then you started to walk around the neighborhood drunk. In negligees. See through negligees.
Tom and Pansy say that the whole neighborhood tried to step up and help, if someone saw you out wandering, often in a slip or less, they would guide you home. Offers were made for you to come to dinner. You declined. You called Tom and asked him if he wanted your dog and your cats. You said that they were becoming too much work. When you couldn't get anyone to take them, you arranged for the Humane Society to come and get them. You were diagnosed with emphysema and given an oxygen tank but the neighbors said that you would not give up your cigarettes, that you wandered around the back yard, sniffing your roses and dragging along the oxygen tank, with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth. The neighbors were afraid that you would blow up yourself and the house.
Tom said that he went to Wendy's and bought you chili a couple of nights a week. It was the only thing that you seemed to really like anymore. One night, when he brought you your chili, you told him that you had been diagnosed with lung cancer. You told him this with a cigarette in your hand. Tom pointed to the cigarette and said that maybe you should take it easy with those. You told him to fuck off, that you were dying and it gave you license to do whatever the hell you wanted now.
You done told him, Georgia.
Hearing these stories made me like you even more. I like it that you were you all the way. So many of us become what we think we should be or what we others think we should be. It seems to me that you stayed you. All the way to the end.
Finally, on a cold day in March, the postal carrier stopped at Tom's house to tell him that you hadn't been picking up your mail. Tom went over to your house but it was all locked up and there was no answer to his door knocking. He called the police.
When the police broke in, it was evident that someone was dead in the house. Tom said that when they walked into the foyer, the smell was overpoweringly awful. A dead body smell. They found you dead in your bed. In what is now my bedroom. A bunch of photos were on the bed next to you. Photos of you and Mike. Wedding photos. Vacation photos.
You had been dead for almost a week, they decided.
The only relatives that could be found were a few nephews and nieces who did not really know you. Had only seen you a handful of times. The house was fumigated, put on the market and sold. The money was split between the nephews and nieces.
That is where I come in, Georgia. I bought the house because it was advertised as a dirt cheap fixer upper. Part of the deal was that the house was to be sold as it was. No repairs would be made. I got it for a fraction of the cost it should have gone for.
I was half charmed, half terrified when my realtor walked me through it. It was well within my price range, but this surprised me since most houses in this area went for twice as much. The house was beautiful, I could see that. It had oak floors throughout, no pesky carpeting. The banisters and woodwork were all beautiful oak and maple. A cleaning company had made the windows sparkle under their hurricane blinds. The long heavy drapes in the living room were the only window coverings that weren't hurricane blinds. The house was spotless and smelled like chocolate chip cookies. I later found out that the realtor's wife baked cookies every weekend and put them around at the houses so that they would sell faster.
I walked through the house with Liv on my hip or toddling next to me. It was much too big for us, but it was so cheap and I was in love with it. I could see that it had a story. I liked the idea that only one family had ever lived in it. I loved the basement, the attic, the buzzers, the pantry and the big farm sinks throughout. I loved the old fashioned toilet on the first floor with it's huge wooden box and chain flusher hanging down. It had radiator heat and a big red boiler that took up an entire room of the basement. No central air conditioning, but several large window units that came with the house. In the kitchen fridge, there was a single bottle of champagne.
I bought the house even though friends advised against it. It would be a lot of work, they said, and I was not a handy woman. I saw past that and saw a big yard with room for my garden. I saw a play room for Liv in the basement and the huge clawfoot tub in the master bathroom. I saw the garden room in the basement and the built in pie safe.
I loved the wooden floors and the heavy black and white marble floors in the bathrooms.
We moved in early December. There was no smell of death anywhere in the house.
I didn't see you, Georgia, until we had been living in the house for more than a year. But, I knew that we had a ghost. There was that door in the office upstairs that seemed to swing open and shut for no reason. I often smelled cigarette smoke in the middle of the night and as an ex-smoker, I found it comforting after I walked around and made sure that nothing was on fire. I had figured out early on that a smoker had lived here. I had the heavy taupe colored drapes taken down in the living room to be cleaned. When they came back and were re-hung, I was amazed to see that they weren't taupe at all, but gleaming white. Cigarette smoke. The same went for the hurricane blinds, I had a cleaning service come and clean the house top to bottom before Liv and I moved in and the woman who was the head maid showed me how after they had taken down the blinds and washed them in bleach water, that they were not an off white color as I had first thought, but a nice clean bright white color. Cigarette smoke. Not much was left in drawers, etc. or in the attic closets, but I often came across packs of matches in the backs of drawers. Smokers need their matches.
I sometimes heard noises in the middle of the night. Once, I swore I heard a woman's laugh downstairs in the parlor. Many, many times I heard footsteps in the attic. The first time it happened, I called Bing who was living across town. She came over at 4 in the morning and accompanied me while we checked the attic. Nothing. After Bing moved in with us, we both heard those footsteps so often that we stopped commenting on it. Once, when I woke up and thought the footsteps sounded especially restless, I lit a candle and went up to the attic myself, and sat down on the bed and waited for several minutes. Nothing. I whispered, "Anyone here? You can talk to me. It's okay." Still nothing.
I caught the flu and Bing took Liv with her out to dinner one night as I lay on the sofa in the living room, burning with fever. I fell asleep and woke up slightly when I felt a woman's hand gently running through my hair. I opened my eyes and thought I saw something, some misty piece of watercolor out of the corner of my eye. And then it was gone. I told Bing about it later that night and she said it was probably the fever talking.
I noticed the medicine cabinet seemed to open on it's own accord sometimes and then had the odd thought that it seemed to only happen only when Liv was getting sick. I started documenting it, writing it on the calendar. I was right. It coincided.
Bing refused to believe that we had a ghost. She is a die hard realist, not much of a dreamer in her. Liv had never mentioned seeing anything out of sorts, and not wanting to frighten her, I didn't say anything to her. But, I felt in my heart that there was someone with us. I started doing research about the house and talking to the neighbors about you and Mike. I kept all my clippings in a love seat drawer.
One day, I woke up early in the morning to find the medicine cabinet open again. I went in to check on Liv and sure enough, she had a bad sore throat. I brought her some hot tea with honey and baby Tylenol and went back to the cabinet to get the thermometer. When I shut the cabinet, I was startled to see a face behind mine in the mirror. A smiling face. And then it was gone. Shaken, I looked into that mirror over and over as that morning passed. Nothing.
A few evenings later, I got up in the middle of the night and went downstairs for some ice to put in my water as I had managed to catch Liv's cold. I looked out the kitchen window and for the first time I saw you. A golden blondish red headed woman in a long white night gown was standing in the snow by our garage. You were smiling at me. I put the glass of water down too hard and it broke and my gaze moved for a moment to the crunching glass. When I looked up, you were gone. But, I had seen your wedding photo in my research and I knew it was you, Georgia.
Now, we have all seen you. Even Liv. Socks will suddenly wag his tail and smile at nothing and I just know it is you, Georgia. You are a part of our family, but well...not really. We only see you a couple of times a year and there never seems to be any rhyme or reason to it. The first time that Bing saw you, she was down stairs in the middle of the night getting a glass of milk and you scared her silly. She turned and saw you standing by the bathroom door. Bing, naked, ran up the steps quickly and made a leap on to our bed that woke me up. Shivering, she told me that she had seen you. The next day, there was Bing's glass of milk, undrunk, sitting on the counter. I like to think that you had a good chuckle over that, Georgia.
As time goes by, though, I worry about you. I wonder why you are still here, why you haven't passed over. I vow that if you are still a ghost when I die, that I will grab your hand before I pass on to wherever and take you with me. Why shouldn't I? You feel like my family now.
Thank you for all those warnings about Liv. I like knowing that I won't be completely alone when Liv and Bing leave this summer. If there is ever anything I can do to make your presence easier, just let me know. I will respect your privacy as you are so good about respecting mine. But, I am curious, Georgia. Why are you still here? One day, I hope I will know that answer to that one.
I like to imagine you as a little girl, growing up in your big happy family. I like to think of you falling in love with your Mike and marrying him, bringing him home to live in your big childhood house. I like to think of you and Mike, side by side, working in our garden and then having a cold glass of white wine sitting on the adirondack chairs that I found in the garage. I repainted them. They used to be red. I re-painted them white. I hope that was okay.
Georgia, I'm glad that you are here, but please don't feel obligated to stay. If some light calls you, follow it, okay? Because we can always talk when I get to the other side.
Your friend,
Maria
