Chapter 43: The People Who Used to Live Here, Part II
Location: A giant beige house at the end of a very long driveway
Hudson River, NY
Please read part I before you dive into part II.
In many ways, this is a true story.
In other ways, I’ll let you be the judge.
No matter what the word “truth” feels like to you in this particular situation, I want you to remember that the world can seem quite real inside the mind’s eye of your imagination.
So, allow me to show you a very real place, a giant beige house at the end of a very long driveway where I’ll let my childlike fantasy about its ancient wreckage take over and guide us both.
As to whether or not you believe that this story about the giant beige house at the end of a very long driveway is real or not, well…
I’ll leave that up to you.
She was very old, but not for her age. As far as years are concerned, she was in her early-70s, elderly, I suppose, to some, but not to me. To me, she was young in spirit, certainly, but old in soul.
She’d seen many things, had many lovers, fallen in and out of money, then further out of it until she fell back into it again. She’d lived many places, heard many voices, tried out many ways to be free, but ultimately, her heart always belonged in the shadow of the Catskill Mountains.
Years ago, I was called upon, by my father, to drive him to see the old woman, in mid-August, when the leaves slowly begin to stir with the chilled anticipation of the oncoming autumn, which was full of color and light in the area commonly known, elusively as “upstate.”
I always loved summer and never liked winter, and the same was true for Ms. Rebecca, according to my dying father, the day he asked me to bring him to her. While I stayed put in the car, Papa, as I once called him, disappeared inside, for half an hour or so, and when he emerged, he held a map with him, a detailed plan that would carry the map-holder up rivers and through the fading towns of northern Empire State, brushing up against the reservation of the Mohawk Traditional Government, full of charred and splintered buildings, brightly-lit casinos, desolate destruction, to a small, unknown bridge.
As I helped him back into my vehicle, I looked up at the second story and into the window where I saw the old woman, Ms. Rebecca, sitting there, watching us.
I could see tears in her eyes.
I saw her mouth, “It’s you.”
This was the first and last time I saw her.
The muggy summer of 2023 is charging forward in the middle of the ambiguous Hudson Valley, a geographical plot of land that’s the subject of intense debate among many New Yorkers. Some say that “upstate” or the “Hudson Valley” starts in Yonkers. They might be right. Others, however, would argue that it doesn’t start until Westchester ends. They might be right, culturally speaking, anyway. The great divide between NYC, Long Island, and the rest of New York State is a long-standing, substantially political and expensive battle, a notorious animosity dating back a century or so, possibly longer — at the very least, to the signing of the state constitution. All you have to do is read State Senate Bill S3093, which “proposes a constitutional amendment to divide the state into three autonomous regions.”
I’m sitting in my car in front of a giant beige house at the end of the very long driveway, a roller coaster of pebbles and sharp rocks, a single-lane road that ends at the murky waters of the Hudson, with unmatchable views of the Catskill Mountain reflections cast across the river. Like a lighthouse, the house squints out across the narrow body of water. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the exact location of this space because I am sworn to secrecy, but I can tell you that it’s beautiful, aristocratic, and invisible to the boats that make their passage up north to the industrial shores of Albany or down south to the banks of Governor’s Island, and ultimately, into the ancient waves of the Atlantic.
It is invisible to drones in the sky, covered by a canopy of Hudson Valley’s black walnut and sugar maple and river birch.
It is invisible to most of the world, except a select few, including the ghost of Rebecca, the old woman who used to live in this giant beige house at the end of the very long driveway, alone with her own ghosts, her own stories. She disappeared the same day my father died, and in his will, there were instructions for me to come to the house one last time, and I was encouraged to bring a friend.
I didn’t think you’d mind coming along.
When I was a child, my father, a cabbie, used to talk about a former client of his, people who used to live in a giant yellow house — on the other side of the river from the giant beige house at the end of a very long driveway. He described the giant yellow house as if it were out of a dream. He said it had two stories, with lots of sunlight upstairs, and little sunlight in a dark basement he’d never seen. Inside lived:
- An old man, a scoundrel and a cheat and a liar;
- His eldest granddaughter, with whom he had no qualms;
- His youngest granddaughter, who was different from the rest of them.
My aging father said that, many moons ago, the youngest granddaughter went missing in the middle of the night, never to be seen again. Folks in town used to say that she’d probably run away across the border into Canada, passing through the Franklin County corridor of New York and into Quebec though they could never prove it. From time to time, locals would take vacations up to the Thousand Islands and come back with reports, sightings of her standing on the opposite side of the St. Lawrence Seaway in Canada with a man in uniform and a young child, though, again, nobody ever brought evidence to substantiate their claims, only the stories of this ghost who up and vanished.
The giant beige house at the end of a very long driveway is swarmed by a thick summer haze, engulfed by the green woods that surround the estate which protects it from the world even when the trees are barren and the air is cold. It seems as if it’s been empty and silent for years. I find a hidden but open window on the backside of the main house, and due to my small stature, I manage to wiggle inside where I find pink walls and blue walls and cracked paint crumbling all around me. Every room boasts a medical pull-cord, an alert system that, at one time, could notify the house staff in a jiffy if something dire had happened to the old woman.
To be sure, Ms. Rebecca had a lot of money, though, based on the size of her property, one might already assume this. She was very quiet and kept to herself. As far as the folks in town could tell, she only ever spoke to the young boatmaker, Christof, who lived down the river and owned a small topography practice. Wandering through the empty house, I was able to confirm that, indeed, the two spoke often, and my ailing father had reported secret dealings of a boat that she’d paid Christof to build for her though he couldn’t figure out why since she could barely walk, let alone have enough strength to row a boat and face the tides of the Hudson River.
I remember the stories my sickly father told me about exploring the abandoned yellow mansion, where the old man, alongside his eldest and youngest granddaughters, lived, in a county at the foot of the Catskills. Today, however, those stories are stuck in photographs and memory, for the house has been totally flipped, renovated by untrained millennials looking to make a quick buck. I don’t trust their handiwork for a second. The house should’ve been condemned. Then again, county governments can be confusing. Some might even say-dirty. I know my county government certainly has a reputation, of sorts.
But no matter how hard Ms. Rebecca tried, sometimes the “apple truly doesn’t fall far from the tree.” She, too, like her sneaky grandfather before her, utilized her ownership of the Hudson River-facing estate house as a tax write-off even though she swore she wasn’t anything like them, her grandfather and sister, which is why she disappeared years ago, ran off to Canada, to meet the man of her dreams, who eventually left her and her unborn son penniless, nowhere left to go.
Tom was a high-ranking officer in the Canadian Air Force. He helped her cross the border at the start of the War of the States, the second American Civil War, to a new life in a land that was also on its way to their own civil war, but about 30 years behind. Their love lasted, until they had a child. A boy. And suddenly, their love was redetermined. He never wanted children, so he left. She carried the baby to term, and when the war was over, she moved back across country lines to her homeland, in the shadow of the Catskills.
Upon reentering the newly formed United Republic of America following the second Civil War, she learned that her grandfather’s second estate had been left in her name. He was friends with high-ranking officials on the winning side, and so, his family was allowed to keep both properties.
The locals called her The Mute, for when she and her son went into town, she spoke seldom to anyone, except the boatmaker Christof. Then, on the eve of his third birthday, the child, much like his mother all those years ago, vanished, disappeared without a trace. The state police searched far and wide but never found the boy. After a few years, they marked the case officially cold, and all investigations stopped. Ms. Rebecca mourned heavily until her last breath, having been driven that much further into isolation due to the immense grief and suffering she experienced from his disappearance.
Local legend states that, for years after her passing, townsfolk would swear that they’d seen Ms. Rebecca walking in and out of town, cloaked in black, but nobody ever took a photograph. All of the belongings in her house had been tucked away in the adjoining maid’s cottage in the woods behind the main house. She grew old there, watching, always watching, as her beloved home slowly crumbled in on itself, another modern ruin tucked away from the tyranny of time, hidden in plain sight but sun up to sun down under the eagle eye of the old woman.
Local legend also reported that her ghost often wandered the property.
Of course, there were the explorers, the searchers, the mischief makers who find the treasure among the trash, beauty among forlorn and forgotten structures, thousands of raptured buildings around the world, that, like the giant beige house or the giant yellow house, have also been tucked away from the tyranny of time, little Hamlets in their own minds, seeking revenge on society by outliving the human species, as if there were no trace of the people who used to live there at all.
The wanderers who seek these vacant and decrepit spaces choose an alternative approach to life, a slanted view of how things are, and they aim to make meaning of something forgotten.
It’s been said that the ghost of the Ms. Rebecca watches over these architectural bandits as they break into the window in one of the downstairs bedrooms, the one through which I just entered the house, and I’ve been told her ghost doesn’t mind guests. I can imagine that’s especially true for me, seeing as she knew me, gave me that look of familiarity from her upstairs window. Why should she be angry at the curious ones? Most of them are simply trying to figure out the people who used to live here.
I wander through the dusty hallways, tracing Ms. Rebecca’s phantom steps into a kitchen filled with empty pink cabinets, ornate tiled backsplashes, and a wrap-around bench that faces the Chambers Oven and imprinted list of recommended cooking temperatures: beef, ham, veal, lamb between 300–325, biscuits between 425–475, and so on. I stare up at the speakers in many corners of the house and imagine her calling out to her staff for assistance with any number of chores. I pass by yellow bathrooms with more tiled wall fixtures. In a cream-colored study, I discover piles of photographs of a young Ms. Rebecca and her infant son, his light blue eyes and pale skin staring wistfully at the camera.
It feels like he’s staring right into my soul. He even looks a bit like me.
I head to the top floor where I enter a blue bedroom with a perfect view of the river. I stare at the in-room sink and open up the cabinet above it. Inside, I find an envelope with a birth certificate inside of it. It belonged to her missing son. His name is Peter, born in 1987, the same year I was. In the attached bathroom, I find burner cell phone refill cards, an untouched bar of soap, and an old bottle of aspirin. I scour the shelves in the hallway and find blueprints for a boat.
A small boat. There’s a note on the bottom of the document. All it says is: “Make sure this boat can sail far.”
I begin to saunter back down to the first floor, but at the top of the stairs, notice a cassette, covered in dust on the top of the built-in shelving that’s jutted between the bathroom and bedroom. It’s labeled, “For Peter,” and though I don’t have a tape player, I grab it anyway.
I want to know what’s on it.
I remember the day Ms. Rebecca vanished. It was at the end of the summer, the same day my father died. As he took his final breaths, my father told me the news before I could read about it in the newspaper or hear the locals gossip. She was a well-known crone, and it came as a shock to the community. Rumors that the boatmaker Christof had killed her came and went like the Hudson River tides, and he declared his innocence the entire time.
As I walk into the master bedroom, I am flabbergasted by the sight of a small stereo unit sitting in the center of the room. It’s battery-powered — and it works. I stare at the tape in my hands and slowly insert it into the deck. I press play.
Peter.
You don’t know me, and I really don’t know you —
— though, in my dreams, it feels like I do.
I knew someday you’d find me.
The first thing I think about when I imagine you are your small hands. I picture that they’re much bigger now though maybe not. My father was short although I barely remember him at this point. He had small hands. Maybe you do too, but I have this feeling that you don’t. I have a feeling you have strong hands, hands that operate heavy machinery like your father operated his car, hands that mean what they say and say what they mean.
But these are just moments in my dreams. They come and go like wildfire in the Canadian summer.
I have to keep this brief because I don’t have much time. What I want to say: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for letting you down. I’m sorry that I couldn’t share my life with you. I was too young and foolish and had no choice but to abandon you. People may say things and think things about my choice, but it was the best choice — for both of us.
I know you might’ve wondered about me. Maybe you didn’t. What can I tell you? Well, my name is Rebecca. I am the missing granddaughter of the missing criminal Cade Lotus, only they never found my body floating up the St. Lawrence Seaway the way they found his, and my eldest sister’s. I married a man in the Canadian military, but we fought, and I wasn’t cut out for motherhood, the way he wasn’t cut out for fatherhood, so I left you in good care, with people who could raise you and teach you.
But the man I married — he wasn’t your father. The man you grew up with was your real father, the man who helped me escape.
I am your mother.
I could never have predicted any of this. I wish I could say that I love you, but that would be unfair — just know, I feel like I could, but that would be up to your discretion. Not that it matters anymore. I’m about to board a boat on the river, at the end of the dock, nestled up to the giant beige house at the end of a very long driveway, and I’m about to cross over. I’ve been sick for quite some time, and the boatmaker has prepared me for my journey.
The house is yours, if you want it, though if I were you, I’d leave it and let nature take it back.
If you think about it that way, the land, the property we may call ours in life never really belongs to us in the end.
I wish you all the happiness in the world.
The room is quiet as I turn off the tape. All these years, and this was the truth my father kept from me.
I stare out the window and wonder how small I look in its frame, just a passing glance inside the giant beige house at the end of a very long driveway.
It’s the last time I ever visit the house.
