All ten of us had moved into that huge house the year before. When I came home from my freshman year away at school, my older sister, ill at the time, together with her husband and their three little boys, were heaped like five puppies in a box, all of them living in my old bedroom in the house of our childhood. Since my two younger brothers, still in high school, were encamped in their rooms and my parents still in theirs, I spent my nights on a pile of cushions and blankets on the floor in the odd corner room we had always called the "library." And then, few weeks later, we all moved to The Belmont House.
Seventy-two hundred square feet of house. A barn of a place, built for entertaining, back at the turn of the last century. So huge only the two littlest boys needed to share a bedroom. The kitchen still needed to be remodeled, and there was no furniture for the main floor, and so the echoes of ten voices and twenty feet bounced off leaded glass windows and hardwood floors as we passed through, going from our rooms on the second and third floors, past the gargantuan fireplaces and soaring ceilings, on our way to the basement rooms where we ate and had some furniture for sitting on. Such camping out in such a gorgeously built house did not last long. Before I came home for our first Christmas in that house, my mother had found a decorator at Penney's to come and measure the windows for period-appropriate lace, scoured the estate sales and taken furniture to the upholstery school for recovering, and covered the floors with some sound-absorbing oriental rugs. The Belmont House was ready to serve its purpose in the world once more.
I sometimes wonder what conscious memories my nephews have of that time. They were very young, and apparently they felt a bit protective of things in general. Or, at least one of them did.
We called this kid The Baby White Whale -- which is who he had told us he was. It was the reason he needed to make such odd noises and such boisterous splashing in the tub. When he told the ladies in the church nursery that he was a Baby White Whale, they thought he said his name was Baby Willie, and so when my sister came to pick him up, they claimed not to have her child. She did not realize his actual name would be ineffective as a tag that day.
The Penney's decorator, too, was unequal to this kid's formidable imagination. The first time the poor man came to The Belmont House, he knocked on the heavy front door, and when it was opened, found himself looking down onto a stout, impassable little boy, a child refusing to let the man pass through the doorway and into the hall.
"Hello. Is your mother home?"
"No." (She was.)
"Is anyone else at home?"
"No." (They were.)
"No one is home but you?" (He began to be suspicious of this very serious little boy.)
"No."
"Well, who fed you your breakfast today?" (Poor man. He thought he could outsmart a Baby White Whale.)
"Nobody. I haven't eaten anything for eight days." (Had someone been reading stories of the old testament prophets to the kid?)
"You haven't?" (Is something really wrong at this house?) "Where is your mother?"
"I don't have a mother. She died."
No one could ever figure out why my valiant and unarmored nephew had said such a thing to what must have seemed a Goliath of an Interior Decorator, but say it he did, and the decorator went away without speaking to anyone over four feet tall that day. There was nothing left to do but to call my mother on the telephone and try to figure out what was going on. Apparently the man had either showed up at the wrong house or my mother was some kind of evil mistress of an orphanage. Either way, there is no commission in being felled by a slingshot.
* * * * *
A year later, the Baby White Whale, his brothers, and his parents had all moved to a house of their own, and when I came home from school, the Belmont House was properly decorated and already being used for large gatherings of people from the New Church. On a Sunday in June, it was announced in church that there would be a weekly study of the Doctrines of Grace throughout July and August. It was to be a time of fellowship as well, just for the high school and college aged group. It would be held at our house.
That was the Sunday Faye and George's nephew was visiting them. He had come to church with them. He was seated in one of the folding chairs when I walked across the front of the room before the service started, on my way to the piano. He did not say anything to Aunt Faye. She said he didn't need to. She watched him watching me. He says I was wearing a red dress.
That was the Sunday Faye and George's nephew was visiting them. He had come to church with them. He was seated in one of the folding chairs when I walked across the front of the room before the service started, on my way to the piano. He did not say anything to Aunt Faye. She said he didn't need to. She watched him watching me. He says I was wearing a red dress.
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