Lakewood

Chapter 5

I am housesitting for my history professor, Dr. Laighles, and his wife, Emily. He said his name is Irish and is pronounced Lawless, which was the first thing he told my class on day one of World History I.

It’s a few minutes after nine a.m. They left an hour ago for Buffalo for a connecting flight to New York City, then they’ll be on to Dublin to spend the summer with Emily’s sister, Jillian. I’m housesitting the entire summer until a week before the fall semester begins.

“I’m on sabbatical in the fall, so we might not ever return,” Dr. Laighles joked before they left.

He told me to be prepared in the event they stayed in Ireland through Christmas. Be Prepared. He obviously doesn’t know that I’m an Eagle Scout, Troop 370.

Be PreparedHe’s writing a book about Ireland’s neutrality during World War II and Hitler’s plans to invade Ireland had the war continued. In class one day, he talked about this for the entire hour.

“If Hitler had invaded Ireland, it would have been a huge mistake,” he told the class, “because the Irish are fierce warriors. They’ve been a pain in the Brits’ a*s for over a thousand years. Do you think they’d allow Hitler to just roll through like he did in Poland?”

In his kitchen, Dr. Laighles said he still has a ton of research to do and pictures to take with his new camera, a Pentax ES.

“See here, the ES stands for Easy as Shit.” He showed me the camera, which was a marvel of technology. He also bought a tripod.

“I’ll be taking a lot of photos and I have these prepaid mailers so all I have to do is toss them in the mail. Then, when they’re developed, they’ll be mailed to the house. When they arrive, just pile them on the shelf. I’ll look at them when we get back.”

§

Terrace Avenue—this was my childhood home, before Kimberly died. Once Emily and Dr. Laighles left, I walked the halls of my old house to explore, opening every door, but I felt sacrilegious, as if this place is one of the Great Pyramids loaded with treasures and guarded by evil curses. Snooping is breaking a moral contract. I felt as if I was an intruder.

“Are you coming home for the summer?” my mom asked the last time we spoke a few weeks ago.

“I’m not sure.”

“Your father and I want to go on vacation to Yellowstone.”

“I’ll probably be working as an intern for a professor to earn extra credit,” I lied.

If I had mentioned the old house, she and my father would’ve had a conniption fit and been up here before I could have hung up the phone. They didn’t want me even applying to Chautauqua University, let alone attending it. Lakewood is the past. When we moved away, my parents buried our lives there to such a depth, no one could ever return. After time has elapsed, you don’t know where to dig, and if you do, you’ll only find heartbreak.

The Laighles’ furniture and decorations are dark and ornate, which is much different from what we had when we lived here. My parents had second-hand furniture that people had given them or things that they had bought at flea markets and garage sales. They cleaned up and restored most of it. In September 1962, my parents had a huge yard sale. I sat on the porch overlooking the lake, with paper and pencil, trying to catalog everything being sold, but the sheer volume was overwhelming. Plus, no one came over to my card table to talk to me. I was upset at first, but my parents assured me that they would buy new furniture in Atlanta. A lot of it was stuff that came with the house when my folks bought it. Of course, to me, it was just our stuff, since it was there when I was born, but they let it all go—sold everything that wasn’t tied down.

My parents did not sell my things. Nor my sister’s. Kimberly’s stuff is still packed away in cardboard boxes in the attic of our Stone Mountain house.

§

I’m sitting on the staircase, balancing Dr. Laighles’s typewriter on my knees. It’s manual, a Royal Quiet Deluxe. He was quite proud of this typewriter.

“In the event anything happens while we’re jet-setting across the world, I typed a new Will and Testament the other day. Both Emily and I signed it and had it notarized. It’s in the bottom drawer. We’re giving everything to the university.”

I didn’t really know how to respond to the idea of dealing with their will or the possibility that they could die while out of the country, so I said, “That’s an old typewriter.” I walked over to it while Dr. Laighles sat at his desk. The typewriter was next to his phonograph.

“My folks bought this for me when I finished my doctorate back in 1953,” he told me. “I was twenty-six. Two months later, I was hired by Chautauqua University. Teaching in my first semester, I met Emily. She was a new M.A. candidate. We were married the next summer, the same time this place became a university.”

It is a heavy machine. The metal is thick, but there is something authoritative about hitting the keys.

The house is quiet. Dr. Laighles’s Saint Bernards are here. Harry is lying down on the rug near the stairs, while Bess is curled up on the oval rug. A large shard of light is angling across her body. As I type, I’m watching specks of dust float through the light, moving in and out of the sun.

§

Now, I’m sitting in Dr. Laighles’s office where books line the deep walnut shelves, which have recently been oiled. There’s a lemon scent in the air, but it’s overwhelmed by the lingering smell of his cigar smoke. I have a stack of paper, several ribbons, and the entire summer to write a historical novel, like Hemingway, about World War I. But what do I know of history? I like the idea of researching an event, like what happened to the main characters in Lincoln’s assassination, but since I know how it ended, I’d like to write a novel about the week leading up to it, but this time, Lincoln survives the assassination. I would need to create a new outcome. To me, that might be interesting.

This is my childhood home. Eleven years ago, a stranger bought it. As it happened, this stranger turned out to be my history professor. I was born several blocks away in front of the Yacht Club. My mother went into labor on the lawn, and out I popped, right into the arms of a woman who was walking her dog. She was a surgical nurse who had been in the Korean War and stopped to help.

The ambulance arrived a few minutes later and rushed me and my mom to the WCA Hospital, where Kimberly was born minutes later. I’m eighteen minutes older, but of course, I don’t remember any of this. It’s the story my mom always told us and anyone who would listen. I think WCA stands for Woman’s Christian Association.

We moved away to Atlanta in September 1962, after Kimberly died.