Copyright ©1987, 1989, 1991 by Richard Seltzer
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim electronic copies of this novel for non-commercial purposes provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. This novel has not yet been published in paper form. You can contact the author directly: Richard Seltzer, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. seltzer@samizdat.com
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August 1940, Silver Spring, Maryland
"Sarah, you did write the boys, didn't you?"
"Yes, Hank. Of course." Sarah poured him a cup of coffee. The kitchen was so empty it seemed larger than before. She had to stretch to reach the breakfast dishes in the cabinet and to put them in their proper places at the table. "You know I write every day."
Hank gulped his coffee. "Wyoming isn't on the other side of the world. How long could it take for a letter to get there? They should have started home when Sue first turned sick." His voice dropped. "Now she's been dead a week... Where in God's creation are they?"
Sarah stopped. She didn't need to put a plate at Sue's place. "Yes. Of course. In God's creation."
Hank looked up at his wife in surprise -- a delayed reaction to the bitter taste of unsweetened coffee. At that moment he realized her voice had changed. It was strange, but familiar -- like the voice of some older relative.
He looked at her more closely as she returned the extra plate to the cabinet, then adjusted her own plate, fork and spoon. A few streaks of gray in her black hair framed her face and gave it clear definition. If nature hadn't provided these streaks, a creative hairsylist might have. Hers wasn't the fragile beauty of youth that changed with a shift of mood, or the beauty of middle age that changed with fashions. She was who she was, and that shone clearly and serenely through the deep blue of her eyes. But now, her mouth was set in a thin expressionless line, and her eyes, which seemed darker than before, avoided contact with his. She had changed, and he had, too. This last month had been hell for them both. "Sarah," he said gently, "I was talking about Sue."
"Yes, Hank. Sue. Where in God's creation? And where's the sugar?" She stood up. "Nothing seems to be where it should be." She groped among the canisters and jars of preserves on the counter.
"It seems you spend your whole life straightening and cleaning," he said. "The house is just getting too big to handle."
She turned and looked him straight in the eye. "How does a house grow, Hank?"
"If houses really grew, I'd be out of business."
"In John 14 it says, 'In my father's house there are many mansions.'"
"I thought the word was 'rooms.'"
"'Rooms' in the Standard Revised. 'Mansions' in the King James. I always wondered how a house could have mansions, instead of rooms. But that's how this place feels to me now -- the rooms just seem huge."
"If a customer told me that, I'd take it as a compliment, but from you..."
"I love this house. You know that. There's nothing like it in the world. I could sit for days curled with a book on that bench in the alcove by the fireplace."
Hank slowly stroked his mustache. "Maybe it's time to think of building another smaller place that would be easier to care for," he suggested. "After all, Russ will be leaving for college next month, and then Fred. Then there will be just the two of us in this big old place. It's time to move on."
"Don't talk of moving," she said quietly, but firmly.
They heard footsteps on the walkway, and both grew tense with expectation. At this time of the morning, it could be either Rem Jones the mailman or the Reverend Schumacher. If it was Rem, chances were there would be another letter from their sons.
Their ten-year-old daughter, Sue, had died suddenly of pneumonia at home while her two teenage brothers were camping on their Uncle Harry's ranch in Wyoming. The boys wrote home often, with messages intended for Sue.
There was no telephone at Harry's ranch, so they couldn't call and tell them that Sue had died. And Sarah had insisted that a telegram would be too cold and cruel. She told them in a letter, but couldn't bring herself to mail it, though she let Hank believe she had. Instead, she added to it day after day, and her guilt at not sending it grew each day as Hank became more and more impatient with the boys for not coming.
Two days ago, Hank, who was normally cool-headed and practical, threw a screaming fit when another letter from the boys arrived. The unintended irony of their references to Sue pained him, and he lashed out irrationally at them.
Sarah found some consolation in that same letter. As long as the boys didn't know, to them, Sue was still alive.
The footsteps on the walkway had the light, quick pace of the young Reverend Schumacher.
Hank took a deep breath and sipped his bitter coffee. "Why did I ever let them take the car?" he asked rhetorically.
"It's the only way to get there. You said so yourself. The train would leave them a hundred miles from the ranch, and besides, we simply couldn't afford it."
"Then they simply shouldn't have gone."
"It was time they grew up and learned to go off on their own and rough it. That's what you said."
"And what's the point of their seeing Harry? I know he's your last living uncle, and we can't expect him to live forever. But he'll just fill their heads with war stories -- as if they don't get enough of that from the books he sends them every Christmas and birthday, and even the newspapers are full of that new war in Europe now. To hear Harry talk, you'd think that war was the greatest thing that ever happened to a man -- a chance to see the world and be a man among men. The less we hear from him the better."
At the outbreak of World War I, Harry, at the age of 39, had left behind his wife and children and volunteered to join the American Expeditionary Force under General Pershing. He received a field commission and, by the end of the war, rose to the rank of captain. After the war, he traveled for two years in Russia, the Middle East and North Africa, purportedly on important military-diplomatic missions. He loved to talk about those times and exotic places and to show off the coins, postcard, photos, and artifacts he had collected. But to any question of the official nature of his business, he replied with a confidential wink, "You must understand that I'm not at liberty to discuss such matters."
Now, at age 62, Harry lived with his second wife, Martha, age 33, and their three-year-old daughter Matilda, on a large ranch in Wyoming. He named the ranch "Cairo," and in addition to cattle, he raised camels, which he sometimes sold to circuses and zoos, but mostly kept for his own amusement -- holding endurance races across the barren plains.
"Harry's harmless," said Sarah.
"Harmless? The man's a dream-maker, and there's nothing in this world more dangerous than that. If it hadn't been for my grandfather and his sandcastles, I'd have never ended up a builder."
"And do you regret it?"
"No, but that's not my point."
The Reverend Schumacher, a Lutheran minister, was 25 and unmarried. At first, Sarah had found it difficult to turn for solace to a minister half her age, who had hardly known Sue. But he was so sincere and ardent, she couldn't turn him away.
Since the funeral, the Reverend came by nearly every morning to sit with her in Sue's old room, often in silence, but sometimes reading passages from the Bible and then talking about them.
Sarah admired his erudition, his familiarity with foreign languages, and his faith that the words of the Bible are the words of God Himself. It was refreshing to see a young man who felt he had an important mission in life. She hoped he would be able to keep that faith for many years.
Russ was planning to go into the ministry. He'd be starting at Gettysburg College next month, in pre-seminary. Sarah wondered if Russ would ever be this ardent, well-educated and informed. How could her little ragamuffin ever become a "man of God"? To her, regardless of his height (and now he towered over her), he was still a little boy -- wrestling with his brother in the backyard and teasing his sister.
The morning sunshine streamed through the window in Sue's room, surrounding the Reverend Schumacher's light brown hair with a halo-like glow. Sarah sat and stared at the miniature horses Sue had arranged on the windowsill, while the Reverend Schumacher considered all the possible meanings of the original Greek New Testament.
Sue had loved horses. She had nearly a hundred miniatures, and on her walls were dozens of pictures of horses, clipped from magazines. One picture, drawn by Uncle Harry, was a pen-and-ink sketch with a horse's skull large in the foreground, lying on a desert plain, with the Rocky Mountains and a herd of cattle in the distance. Sue had had it framed just before the boys went on their trip. She had been angry that she, who loved horses, wasn't being allowed to go on this amazing trip to Harry's wild west.
Today, Sarah surprised the Reverend -- it was she who had a passage she wanted to understand. "What does the word 'mansions' mean in the King James version of John 14:2, 'There are many mansions in my Father's house'? How can there be mansions in a house? A house is small. A mansion is big. It makes no sense. Why would one translator say 'rooms' and another 'mansions'? What did Christ really say?"
The Reverend Schumacher was delighted that Sarah had asked him. "Christ is speaking to his disciples at the Last Supper. He is telling them about life after death. He is reassuring them that there will be room enough for them in heaven, his Father's house. Perhaps it's meant as an echo of the Christmas story -- in heaven there will be room in the inn. But it suggests more than just space in which to live.
"The King James translation just anglicized the Latin, even though 'mansion' has a different meaning in English. The Latin is 'mansio, mansionis,' which means a stay or a sojourn, and, by extension, a halting place, a stage of a journey. Perhaps the passage means that life after death is a stage of a journey; that there are many such stages; that the journey through the house of God is a long one, requiring many rest stops. Perhaps our life here on Earth is just one such stage."
"And what are the words in the original Greek?" she inquired, expecting that the words of Christ would have magical power. He quickly consulted the pocket-sized Greek New Testament he always carried with him. "En te oixia tou patros mou monai pollai eisin."
"And what part of that means many rooms or mansions?"
"Monai pollai."
"You mean like 'monopoly'?" she asked.
"That word has different roots, but the Lord works in mysterious ways. Far be it from me to discount the suggestiveness of our living language."
"And the key word is 'monai'?"
"Yes, in the singular, 'mone.' The letters are 'mu omicron nu eta.' It's pronounced like the impressionist painter 'Monet,' or like the French word for loose change -- 'monnaie.' It's an unusual word. It's meaning is very similar to the Latin 'mansio.' But, to the best of my knowledge, it has no derivatives in English. Money, monopoly, and monastery all come from different roots. You might say it's a word that died without offspring."
"I often think of my father's house," Sarah said as she stared up at Harry's drawing of a horse's skull. "It was one of those wood-frame houses connected to a barn with a passageway, so you wouldn't have to go out in the snow to get to your horse and buggy. It's still standing -- painted blue now instead of white, and they've turned part of the barn into a garage. We lived in the few steam-heated rooms in the center of the house. But in the summer, I spent lots of time in the many rooms of the attic, the barn, and the basement and in the 'secret passageway.' That was what we called the crawlspace under the peak of the roof that led from the barn to the house. I hope that God's house has rooms like that -- rooms to go off and be alone in, rooms where you can cuddle up with a good book, big empty rooms you can fill with your imagination.
"These last few nights I've dreamt that there's this secret room where I stored my most precious things -- things that have been lost for years: a rusty iron ring a boy gave me in grammar school, a notebook of poems I wrote, and photos of Sam and Alma -- my brother and sister who ran away from home. And last night, it wasn't just their pictures that were there, but they themselves, and Sue, too. They had been playing a game of hide and seek. I just had to find the right room."
Russ and Fred drove up Georgia Avenue, down Blair Road, and past all their friends' houses before parking the olive-green 1938 Nash two blocks from home. They were savoring their final hours of freedom and working out the last details of their grand entrance. They were bringing home a horse's skull -- the very one Uncle Harry had drawn -- as a present for Sue.
"What if she's over at Nancy's?" asked Fred.
"No chance," answered Russ. "All her friends sleep late."
"I'd better check out those tunnels and caves she dug in the woods. That's where she goes lots of times on hot summer days to curl up with a book."
"Wake up, Fred. How many times do we have to go over this? It's 7:30 in the morning. She's in the house. There's nowhere else she could be. Believe me."
"You're sounding like a preacher already."
"Okay, buddy," said Russ, slapping his brother on the back of the head and parrying a counter slap.
"What if Dad sees me first?"
"Dad probably took the truck. He's probably on his way to a building site by now. If not, he's doing paperwork in the study. Mom's the one to watch for. She'll probably be cleaning up in the kitchen, but she could be anywhere in the house. Your job is to find Sue without letting Mom see you."
"Okay. Okay. Enough is enough."
"You know everything, right? So what are you going to do once you find her?"
"I tell her our coming back early is a secret, that we're going to surprise Mom and Dad. I bring her out the side door by the driveway. And you'll be hiding in the bushes with the horse's skull."
"Brilliant. Now go to it, buster."
Fred slipped quietly in the back door of the house and crawled under the diningroom table. From under the long white tablecloth, he could see and hear without being seen.
He heard his father's footsteps going from the kitchen to the study and then back from study to kitchen; pausing, then going back again and again. Fred had never known his father to pace like that. And where was his mother? She was the one he'd expect to be moving about. It seemed she was never still for a moment -- always cleaning and straightening something, even when reading a book or talking to a friend. Something was wrong.
Fred took a deep breath, waited until the footsteps returned to the study, then got up and tip-toed to the alcove by the fireplace. He could hear his father's heavy pacing even louder now.
Carefully, he leaned his head out of the alcove and looked around the living room. Something was missing.
The baby grand piano, the sofa bed, the two stuffed armchairs and the rocking chair were all in place, as before. But on the wall above the sofa, where once there had been a dozen small family photos, now there hung one large photo of Sue. He recognized the pose -- it was a formal professional shot, taken last Christmas. But this was an extremely large print -- nearly three feet by two feet. The matting and the frame were black.
Fred quietly walked over and knelt on the sofa to get a better look. Inside the glass, against the photo itself, were several small newspaper clippings. The headers were all cut off, except for the smallest, which was from the Washington Post. They were death notices.
Fred heard his own scream before he realized that he was the one screaming, and then he couldn't stop screaming, running across the room, through the hall, tripping over his father, and bursting out the side door by the driveway, still screaming.
Sarah was still upstairs in Sue's room, with the Reverend Schumacher. She had heard footsteps in the driveway and once again had tensed, expecting Rem Jones, the mailman. Smiling and pretending to pay close attention to the Reverend, she counted to herself. If there was another letter from the boys with no sign that they knew about Sue, she could expect her husband would once again roar with anger.
Instead, she heard a shrill unearthly scream, the sound of running and the side door slamming.
She and the Reverend raced down the stairs and bumped into Hank, who was getting back on his feet and moving toward the door.
Just then, they heard a second scream, almost as loud as the first, and a horse's skull loomed in the window, casting a dark shadow into the hall.
Frightened by Fred, Russ had let the skull fall on his own head. It stuck, blocking his vision; and when he tried to pull it off, the bone dug into his temples and ripped at his ears. He staggered around the driveway in pain, while Fred bellowed incoherently.
Meanwhile, Hank, Sarah, the Reverend Schumacher and Rem Jones watched in total shock.
Later, Russ kept asking, "What were the odds?" He, who had never shown any particular interest in math, became absorbed in statistics and probability. He found some kind of comfort in calculating the odds of Sue dying, the odds that all twelve letters their mother had written would get lost, and then that he and Fred would decide to come home unexpectedly.
Every time he calculated the likelihood of three such unlikely events happening at the same time (even if his mother misremembered and it was only ten or even five letters she sent), the probability was one in a number so huge it was beyond rational comprehension -- many times greater than the number of atoms in the known universe.
When Russ told him about these calculations, the Reverend Schumacher said, "The ways of God are indeed mysterious." Russ did not find that answer satisfying. His mind needed something to work on, to keep constantly busy. He didn't want a pat conclusion. He wanted a direction to focus his energy on. If he had been told to say "Hail Mary" a million times, he would have done that. But being a Lutheran, he could find penance and hope of salvation only in working with numbers.
As a freshman at college that fall, Russ found it difficult to focus on his course work -- even math, which dealt with calculus, rather than the statistics he hungered for.
Meanwhile, at home, Fred took full advantage of his parents' new attitude to him as the only child left in the house. He repainted the room he and Russ had shared and rearranged his furniture the way he wanted it. He ate what he wanted, stayed up as late as he wanted, and nobody hassled him about chores or homework. But after a few weeks of what felt like total freedom and self-indulgence, Fred felt restless and dissatisfied.
Before, Fred had always wanted to do things differently than his older brother, but had always buckled under to him when pressured. Now, there was no one for him to react to and define himself against.
One sleepless night, he moved to Sue's old bed and slept more soundly than ever before. Then he started visiting the Reverend Schumacher and spent a lot of time alone in the fields, staring at the sky and the horizon.
For years, he had been determined to go to a different college than Russ and pursue a different career. Now, to his surprise, he felt a growing bond of solidarity with his older brother. The following fall, he joined Russ at Gettysburg, intending, like him, to become a Lutheran minister.
Pearl Harbor and America's precipitous entry into the war came near the end of Fred's first semester -- a time when Russ was close to failing several of his courses.
The war news stirred up memories of Uncle Harry's tales of the Great War and the aftermath in Paris and Constantinople and Cairo. Russ tried to join the Army, but couldn't pass the physical because of flat feet. Fred, who was miffed that his brother had taken that step alone, tried too, and was rejected because of a dislocated shoulder -- an old basketball injury.
Russ wrote to Uncle Harry about their problem, and Harry let them know that people were getting into the service who were in far worse shape than they were. He gave them advice on how to get around the bureaucracy.
Sarah and Hank, who had taken some comfort in the knowledge that physical imperfection was likely to save their sons from a far worse fate, were outraged at Uncle Harry's intervention.
Around the same time that Russ and Fred left for basic training, Sarah found out that she, at the age of 50, was five months pregnant. She had gone to her doctor several times, and he had insisted that the discomfort and weight gain she was experiencing were due to change of life. Now, having heard the baby's heartbeat, he embarrassedly changed his story.
Hank rejoiced -- it was a blessing from heaven. Sarah considered it another unaccountable burden.
During the last months of her pregnancy, she reread the Old Testament, lingering long in the Book of Job. She also kept a journal, where she obsessively recorded everything she could remember about Sue, as if memory could resurrect her. On the fly-leaf of that diary she wrote: "Sue died while I was watching. All of a sudden, her body was there, but she wasn't. She -- whatever 'she' was -- left the body, passed away, passed from that room that was her body into another.
"I often dream of houses -- huge old houses with secret passages leading to hidden rooms.
"I don't believe in reincarnation. But I do believe there is something else, somewhere else, a hereafter.
"I live in my body. My body is a room I inhabit for a while. And then I pass to another room.
"It's as if Sue lived in a vast house, but she spent all her time in one little room, the size of a closet. And the door was shut. She didn't even know there was a door, until it opened, and she passed from one room to another."
When Charlie was born, he looked so much like Sue that it was painful for Sarah to look at him. Even though money was scarce, they hired a neighbor to help watch him for the first few years of his life.
Meanwhile, the private building market dried up as the war made building materials scarce and drove up prices. Hank reluctantly gave up his independence and took a job as a foreman on a government project. Around that same time, he found out he had diabetes and had to carefully watch his diet, which added to his growing depression.
For two years, the only good news was the bored and boring letters they got from Russ and Fred, who were stuck at Army camps in the swamps of Georgia and Louisiana. Fortunately, they were never shipped overseas. When they came home on leave, they looked at little Charlie as an unwelcome intruder, to be ignored, at best.
Charlie learned to talk late -- no one was listening closely enough to his first attempts to recognize and reinforce the sounds that came close to "mama" and "dada."
By the time he was three, Charlie often tagged along with his father to various building sites. He was tolerated as long as he didn't touch anything. He just stood there, patiently, and watched all day as they dug the foundations, poured the concrete and raised the framework.
Hank was both puzzled and pleased by this quiet, intense interest. Neither of his other sons had ever paid attention to his work. "I wonder what he day-dreams about when he's standing there like that," Hank told Sarah. "What kind of a mansion is he building in that mind of his?"
As soon as the war ended and gas rationing stopped, Hank took Charlie sightseeing around Washington, for the pleasure of seeing his wide-eyed reactions to everything he saw and heard.
Sarah mocked Hank, "You're old enough to be Charlie's grandfather. That's what you're doing, you know. You're not treating him like a son. You're just enjoying him like a grandson. Lord only knows where he's going to learn discipline and values, the way you spoil him."
That rebuke tickled Hank's fancy and encouraged him to take Charlie on more excursions, especially to the beach in the summer.
When Hank was a child, his grandfather had taken him to the beach at least once each summer. They'd go by train, from Lancaster to Philadelphia and Philadelphia to Ocean City.
Old Grandfather Arnold couldn't swim. The beach, for him, was a place for castles and dreams, and his were not ordinary sandcastles. He was a craftsman, a cabinetmaker. He could make wooden pull-toys -- crocodiles and bears and elephants that opened their mouths and wiggled their ears and tails when you pulled them. And he made wood and sand castles the like of which have rarely been seen.
All winter long, Grandfather made drawings based on pictures in books of castles in Ireland, Wales and Germany, where his ancestors had lived. He carved and warped pieces of wood until they were just the right size and shape, and prepared all the materials he would need to create those castles in exquisite detail, on the beach.
He didn't want to attract crowds. He'd look for a stretch of beach where there was almost no one around.
He didn't build them high on the beach, sheltered from the tide. He built them down close to the water, at low tide, and watched with glee when the sea came in and battered those magnificent towers and leveled them just as it did the crude little structures that three-year-olds made.
But that was the point of building on the beach -- to watch the waves come, to watch it all get swallowed up, time and time again. Grandfather and Hank would retrieve the wood when the waves started washing it away; and once again, they'd build -- the same one or a new one -- at least one for each tide, for as long as they were at the beach. As long as they had their dreams and their drawings, they could build a new one, as good as or better than all the ones that had gone before. And the sea was doing them a service by erasing them all. In washing the old ones away, the sea was just preparing the surface for more castles, and more again.
Now Hank took Charlie to the beach and built sandcastles for him near the family cottage on the Potomac. Hank had tried doing that just once before, for Russ when he was three; but Russ was so anxious about the outcome and so respectful of what his father had built that he took the fun out of it. Hank, like his grandfather before him, built that first castle close enough to the water so nothing could save it. But Russ tried desperately to protect it from the tide. And when the waves finally won the battle, he sat and cried.
Now, on the beach, Hank worked for hours, using all the bits of wood and cardboard he had carefully precut and shaped. Meanwhile, Charlie filled a bucket with sand and turned it over, and did that over and over again, until he had dozens of little towers all up and down the beach.
When Hank finally finished a huge castle with turrets, parapets, courtyards, and moats with drawbridges, he stood back, proudly, to show it to his son. At that moment, Charlie shouted, "Geronimo!" and belly-flopped right on top of his father's fortress, knocking it flat before the tide had a chance to get to it.
There Hank was -- a grown man building a sandcastle, and little Charlie by knocking it down showed him in one stroke that he was really doing all this work because that's what he wanted to do -- not just to amuse his son. Hank got very mad at Charlie for that, but he loved him for it, too. Charlie got under his skin in a way the other boys never did. They made many such castles together.
Links to the rest of Sandcastles
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