In My Father's House

I promised you a tour, and here it is.

Hello again! I missed you all in our little virtual room. I’m back today writing about physical and metaphorical spaces….

After he left my mother in 1970 my father had many homes: an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a Victorian summer home on Long Island, a loft in midtown, another loft in Brooklyn, and then, finally, a huge Victorian house near the Hudson River. He devoted a great deal of energy to each of them, and many of the same favorite objects moved from one to the next. But this last house, shown here, was by far the most his. It gave him the most canvas to work with and it’s where he spent the longest—thirty years.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the house was an extension of his eye and taste, but it was also more generally an expression of his whole self. At the end of his life, when he was being treated for brain cancer in an Albany V.A. hospital, he would whisper, “my house burned down,” as if acknowledging some physical deterioration beyond his control. I’ll take you inside.

Here he is in his living room, looking pensive. He carefully chose every visual element throughout his house: he bought a set of wicker furniture and spray-painted it white, he chose the floral pattern for the upholstery and had it made to his specifications. Even the glass of red wine at his right hand looks artfully arranged as he looks away from it. The painting overhead is one of his abstracts from the 1950s, and jumps out of this grayscale image with high contrast. I am not sure who took this photograph, but it catches Earle as master of all he surveys.

This was the front parlor in its glory days. The empire fainting couch that he covered in yellow brocade was included in the sale of the house. It’s still there. The pier mirror may be too. The rest of these objects we sold or gave away, except the painting over the mantel, a still life my father made in art school. Despite the opulence of the Empire antiques, my father was very frugal. The white curtains were twin-sized sheets from Walmart that he hung in every window. When he outgrew his attic painting studio he commandeered the double parlor. Furniture got pushed to the walls and a piece of plywood on two saw horses became his work table.

The dining room was dominated by an oversized portrait we always thought was based on our mother. (But why? Our mother wasn’t blond and she doesn’t remember sitting for it.) The other portrait on the right was one of my father’s “blue sky” paintings of people he had seen on the sidewalk and transplanted into a series he called his Human Comedy. He loved ferns, carnations, and flow blue china. The candy bowl on the mantel was kept full of wrapped caramels.

This upstairs bedroom was once my sister’s. He picked up vintage items like the patchwork quilt and hooked rug in local antique stores. The door on the right was kept closed to hide an abandoned room that had once been a kitchen when the house was divided for two families. My father simply ignored that extra room, which had chipped linoleum floors, broken cabinets, and a dark stairway down to a back door…. it was creepy in there! When we heard scratching, my father would say, “it’s the raccoons,” with a sigh, as if to imply “what can I do?” Now that hidden extra room feels symbolic of my father’s secret gayness— a part of his life he shut away. We knew it was there, but we never acknowledged it. I can’t even find any photographs to document that the room ever existed.

I got married in that house, but I was not sorry to sell it when my father died in 2011.

This summer when I was in the Catskills I re-visited the house and its new owners, who were kind enough to give me a tour of their renovations. I thought it might stir up grief, but the house now felt theirs, not his. They had fixed a lot of structural problems—rebuilding the rotting front porch, for example—and converted that extra kitchen into a large en suite bathroom with a walk-in closet. Still, it was hard to shake off the lingering taboo against opening that door.

my house, December 2023

I have been going through a renovation myself, inside and outside, this year. My house was stripped to its studs, a back wall punctured, an extension demolished and rebuilt. It’s almost finished, but never quite. We’ve been displaced for the last year and a half, and are still in some limbo. It has been harder than I expected, since we have a perfectly comfortable space to stay in the interim. And we chose to do this! Still, it shook my foundations, so to speak. I felt unmoored— where did I live? when we would we be done?

I am not sorry to see the end of this difficult summer. This fall, I hope, marks a restart, back home. As an academic, the real start of the year has always been September. I look forward to sharing more posts from my family memoir as well as some impressions of my reading (here on Substack and elsewhere) and art visits. I’ve queued up posts about my visit to The Campus in Hudson, New York this summer, more about teaching E.M. Forster essays, about finding a second cousin through this newsletter. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, here are some other recent house-related posts I’ve enjoyed and admired.

• Alexander Chee
  ’s adventures in buying his first home, starting with a leaf and ending with a peach.

• Eliza Anderson
  ’s lyrical thoughts on the wallpaper design in her family’s summer home. In another moment of Substack serendipity, Eliza and I discovered our artist-fathers worked together at Kulicke Frames in the 1960s.

What houses have been meaningful in your lives? Share memories in the comments. And please like and share and repost and all that stuff too…. Thank you for being here with me.