To Paradise

This morning, though, he was glad to have woken late, because he was still uncertain how to understand the events of the night before, and was grateful that he might have a clearer mind with which to contemplate them. He rang for eggs and toast and tea and ate and drank in bed, reading the morning paper—another purge in the Colonies, its specifics withheld; a windy essay by an eccentric philanthropist well-known for his sometimes extreme views, raising again the argument that they must extend privileges of citizenship to the Negroes who had lived in the Free States before its founding; a long article, the ninth in as many months, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge, and how it had remade the city’s commercial traffic, this time with large, detailed illustrations of its towering masts looming above the river—and then washed and dressed and left the house, calling out to Adams that he would have lunch at the club.

The day was chilly and sunny and had, it being well into the morning, that merry swinging energy to it: It was early enough so that everyone was still industrious and hopeful—today could be the day that life made a delightful and long-dreamed-of pivot, that there would be a windfall or the southern conflicts would cease or just that there might be two rashers of bacon at dinner tonight instead of one—and yet not so late that those hopes might be left unanswered once again. When he walked, he generally did so without a particular destination in mind, letting his feet decide his direction, and now he turned right up Fifth Avenue, nodding at the coachman as he passed, who was hitching up the brown horse in the mews in front of the carriage house.

The house: Now that he was no longer within its walls, he hoped he might be able to consider it a bit more objectively, although what would that even mean? He had not spent the first part of his childhood there, none of them had—that honor had belonged to a large, chilly manse far north, west of Park Avenue—but it had been there that he and his siblings and, before them, their parents had retired for every important family event, and when their parents had died, carried off by the sickness, it had been to that house that the three of them had moved. They had had to abandon every possession in their childhood home that was made of cloth or paper, anything that might have secreted a flea, anything that could be burned; he had remembered crying over a horsehair doll he had loved, and Grandfather promising him he could have another, and when the three of them had entered their respective rooms in Washington Square, there were their former lives re-created for them in faithful detail—their dolls and toys and blankets and books, their rugs and gowns and coats and cushions. On the bottom of the Bingham Brothers’ crest were the words Servatur Promissum—A Promise Kept—and in that moment, the siblings were allowed to realize that those words were meant for them as well, that their grandfather would fulfill whatever he told them, and in all the more than two decades they had been in his charge since, first as children and then as adults, that promise had never been disproven.

So complete was their grandfather’s command of the new situation in which both he and they had found themselves that there had been what he could only later remember as a near-immediate cessation of grief. Of course, that must not have been true, either for him and his siblings or for his grandfather, suddenly bereft of his only child, but so astonished was David by, he now thought, the confidence, the totality, of his grandfather and the realm he created for them that he could not now imagine those years any other way. It was as if his grandfather had been planning since their births for someday becoming their guardian and their moving into a house where he had once lived alone, its only rhythms his own, instead of having it dropped upon him. Later, David would have the sense that the house, already capacious, had cleaved new rooms, that new wings and spaces had magically revealed themselves to accommodate them, that the room he came to call his own (and still did) had been conjured out of need and not simply remade into what it was from what it had been, a little-used extra sitting room. Over the years, Grandfather would say that his grandchildren had given the house purpose, that without them it would have been just a jumble of rooms, and it was a testament to him that the three of them, even David, accepted this as true, had come to truly believe that they had provided the house—and, therefore, Grandfather’s own life—with something crucial and rare.

He supposed that each of them thought of the house as his or her own, but he liked to fancy, always, that it was his especial lair, a place where he not just lived but was understood. Now, as an adult, he could occasionally see it for how it appeared to outsiders, its interiors a well-organized but still-eccentric collection of objects Grandfather had collected on his journeys through England and the Continent and even the Colonies, where he had spent time in a brief period of peace, but mostly, what persisted was the impression of it he’d formed as a child, when he could spend hours moving from floor to floor, opening drawers and cupboards, peering under beds and settees, the wood floors cool and smooth beneath his bare knees. He clearly remembered being a young boy and lying in bed late one morning, watching a band of sunlight that shone through the window, and understanding that this was where he belonged, and the sense of comfort that knowledge had brought him. Even later, when he had been unable to leave the house, his room, when his life had become only his bed, he had never considered the house as anything but a sanctuary, its walls not just holding out the terrors of the world but holding together his very self. And now it would be his, and he its, and for the first time, the house felt oppressive, a place that he might now not ever escape, a place that possessed him as much as he did it.