The House on Jackson Corners Road

FICTION

by Leo Vanderpot

        An aunt of one of the previous owners (a woman and two men) sold the house to me. They were employed by The Juilliard School, and had used the house as a getaway—a hundred miles from Manhattan. I should have asked but didn’t, so I never learned how the aunt became the owner, or came to represent the owners at the closing.
         The response was immediate a few months after moving in when I advertised five free mirrors, eighteen inches by four feet, in frames enduring the dryness that wood and glue sustain. Two women who owned a painted-furniture shop gladly took them away.
          Two mirrors in frames remained, painted white, six feet by eighteen inches: one in the dining room (horizontal) and one (vertical) on the stairway landing, both wall-mounted so as to cause disfigurement if removed, and both well within my limited capacity to look at myself.
         And then my housecleaning chores revealed three wooden batons in the bedroom closet, setting off peekaboo fantasies regarding the musical vanities (conducting?) of the previous owners. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster tells us, but not how, and I failed completely to find any evidence that the three former owners were alive, or even what I would have been sadly satisfied with—an obituary.
         Not a word, after Googling their names, late at night, sitting up in bed in what had been their bedroom, in a house with only one bedroom. There was so much gossipy intrigue in that fact that I kept the three batons as a promise to myself to try and connect and to leave something behind before the time came when it was (for whatever reason) my turn to sell the house.
         I made a start in the fall by planting three peonies in the side garden: Two males, “Peter Brand,” a ruby-red that matures to purple, and “Jan van Leeuwen,” which is white; the female is a pink “Sarah Bernhardt.” In two years their blossoms will be looking out at the Roeliff Jansen Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River and a well-stocked trout stream.
         Not just a nice gesture, this planting of peonies; I take it now as a connection, until something better comes my way. When I drove past an abandoned farmhouse while looking to buy my place, I was heartened to see a healthy peony in the yard, its burdened white blooms bowing to me through that morning’s shimmering rain.