Home Beautiful

I seem to be confronted a little too often by the dazzling complexity of contemporary homes and furnishings. It may be chance, or it may be the work of malevolent spirits, but I have been forced to visit three shining, impeccable homes of good friends in the last few weeks. I have been pushed into a model home that is on exhibit at a fair here where I live, and I have casually thumbed through dozens of glossy magazines dedicated, to judge from the illustrations, to the principle that no one lives in a home, or possibly that a home consists of shining floors, waxed table tops, and flowers that never wilt, but certainly not of occupants.

The home I grew up in was a simple one and consisted mainly of inhabitants. Any one of our rooms, with the exception of the parlor, would have been listed as completely unphotogenic by any of today’s silken magazines. The dining room would have been impossible, because one or more relatives would be taking a nap on the couch while my mother was mending stockings at the table. If it were mealtime, things could have been even worse, for my father would be in one corner of the room practicing on the violin between the soup and the fish course while I would be using a wastebasket and a ball of yarn to improve my basketball eye. There would quite likely be coats thrown over a chair and ice skates hanging from the antlers of a stuffed moose above the brilliant sign that said, “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread.”

The kitchen would have proved an even worse bet for the magazines, especially in the winter. We lived in the kitchen in the winter, and that room was forever crowded with jars of preserves and jams; whole hams sitting tentatively at a table, waiting, I used to amuse myself by thinking, to be dealt a hand of euchre; an assortment of rubbers, snow shovels, toques, hockey sticks, and cooking pans; and someone always rocking in a chair that stood in the center of the room.

There were no chrome ventilators to clear the room of scents, so we had to suffer the odors of roast turkey, piccalilli, mince pies, red wine, and hot gingerbread. There was no escaping it, because all of us knew the windows must be kept shut, since winter air was bad for the lungs and brought on bronchitis.

Upstairs, the home magazines would have found little to preserve in garish color for their readers. Nothing immaculate, steely, bambooish, or plasticized and partitioned by painted screens there.

My parents’ bedroom was never completely straightened out, because my father used to sit there with his resin and violin and music paper composing fragments or rewriting the score for the week’s vaudeville acts while he dipped constantly into various boxes of chocolates set at strategic spots at all points of the compass and always well within arm’s reach.

No one had heard of sliding doors or closet space then, so that in one season the clothing of another was hung from hooks on the back of doors or pushed into boxes under the beds while current neckties and hair ribbons were hooked over the mirror on the bureau. Stacks of music formed a sort of snowy hedge from the door to the bed, so that one could easily stroll past Beethoven and Victor Herbert toward my parents’ bed, which was usually covered with a hobnailed spread, which, in turn, was covered with an old India print on top of which lay magazines such as Top-Notch and the Delineator.

Another feature of this room that would have made it instantly impossible for the chic magazines and smart exhibitors was the fuse box and light switch that had been, for some puckish reason, inserted into the wall of the bedroom, bulging out a foot or so, making it possible for my father to pull the switch and plunge us all into tense darkness at the first warning flash of summer lightning.

My mother’s sewing room had no panels that hid her machine. It was a noisy old White that stood in the middle of the room, and it had the most intricate wrought-iron decorative legs and pedal I have ever seen. Its drawers were filled to spilling with all sorts of odd sharp implements that always made me shudder, as if a mad surgeon had just thrown everything recklessly into the little drawers after performing some gruesome experiment. The floor was always littered with bright fragments of things on which my mother was sewing or about to sew. (She made all her clothes, and most of mine until I was about twelve.) The man from House and Garden would probably have cleaned them all up, but I loved to stare at a floor that looked as if it were stained glass.

This sewing room was just off the back stairs, a steep climb today’s architect would have swiftly traded for a ramp. My mother could get down those stairs as swiftly and surely as a fireman down his pole when duty called. If she sat sewing, with her nostrils, so to speak, cocked for the roast beef, and a stronger cooking scent than necessary climbed and curled upstairs, my mother would drop anything and scamper down to the oven. Today, of course, my mother would have had an automatic oven that she could set to cook her beef medium rare while she enjoyed a profitable afternoon at the movies watching some aging film actor make love to someone who could easily have been his granddaughter.

My bedroom was equally impossible. There were no bunk beds for the occupant, nor any collegiate banners or bronze footballs. There was just a bed, a chair, an old chest of drawers, and dozens of cardboard boxes, filled not with models of atom bombs or intricate miniatures of three-stage rockets but with baseball covers stuffed with yarn, Frank Merriwell paper-covered books, cardboard soldiers (many with heads shot off, but still gamely aiming at the enemy), bizarre creations made of Meccano sets, forerunners perhaps of Calder mobiles, and a hundred and one tops and marbles and tin toys and tiny trumpets.

Over the chairs were hung stockings and short pants and a shirt or two. Shoes were scattered about as if one brown had mated with a black and one sneaker with a slipper. Caps and toques and a fireman’s hat hung from hooks. In two corners tense mousetraps waited to capture the day’s quota, and this reminds me that never in all the model homes I have seen have I ever come across even one mousetrap. Is a house ever really a home without a mouse?

But for the lovers of the pure and unviolated, of the steel stems and plastic blossoms, of the floor forever shining and the piano keys eternally white, there was the parlor: locked and bolted, the shades drawn to prevent the sun from fading the wine coverings of the chairs. No Picasso or Miró reproductions graced the walls; only the bellying-out, glassedin photograph of my grandfather glaring at his descendants and of my grandmother smiling hopefully, and a framed copy of my father’s high school diploma, that began in broad, black, majestic Old English print, “Know All Men By These Presents. . . .”

Make the furniture leaner and the legs of the piano unflowered, destuff the overstuffed, raise Venetian blinds, and set up a bamboo parti, tion, and our parlor would be reasonably praised by the owners or builders or photographers of homes today, because the parlor was unused, never lived in, and as eternally ordered as the wax fruit in the bowl on top of the piano that no one ever played.

No one ever used the parlor, to my knowledge, but once. That was when it was discovered, shortly before my eleventh birthday, that, oddly and inexplicably, I had never been christened.

“How did that happen?” my mother, a devout Presbyterian, said, shuddering.

“We have been busy,” my father explained. My father never went to church. Sunday was his only day off, and he was determined to spend it his own way.

“The boy is still a heathen,” my mother proclaimed.

“Call the minister and open the parlor,” my father commanded. “There is still time.”

So the parlor was duly opened, the minister came and, using a bowl of water from an ordinary faucet, admitted me to a portion of grace and gave me a Christian name.

We all felt safer after that, and the parlor was promptly closed.

You would never have convinced me then that the future belonged to those who truly believed in such order and not to those who lovingly flung their coats over the chair in the dining room, stumbled over my toy wooden cannon, and after kissing my mother on the cheek, sank into a couch with a bottle of wine at hand.