Novelties & Souvenirs Read Online Free

change of season, fall of leaves, days like this one, raddled with dark, flying clouds; the flame of swamp maples, going out; April’s green. And yes, for there to be enough of it to go around, perhaps there would need to be only a few to divide it among; the rest of us, mortal, resigning it to them. She thought, suddenly, of an old convertible turning in at the stone gateposts of the long weedy drive leading up to the farm.
    Who could that be? her mother said. No one we know.
    The car, with orange leaves stuck beneath its windshield wipers, nosed into the drive tentatively, uncertainly.
    Just turning around, perhaps, lost, Phillippa said. They sat together on the porch, for it was quite warm in the sun. It was so utterly still and blue that the leaves fell seemingly for no reason, skating withslow agility to the ground. Their clicking fall among the rest was sometimes audible: it was that still.
    The car stopped halfway up the drive and a young man got out. He wore a wide fedora—every man did then—and smoked a long, straight pipe. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his pleated slacks, looking at the house, though not, it seemed, at them. When at last he began to walk toward them, he did so not purposefully, nor did he hail them; he might have been arriving at a deserted house, or a house of his own. When at last he did greet them, it was with a kind of lazy familiarity. He wasn’t a Vermonter, by his voice.
    He had been told, he said, in the village, that the ladies were thinking of selling. He was in the market for just such a place; a writer, he needed someplace quiet to work. Were they in fact selling? Might he see the place?
    It had been that very week that Phillippa and her mother had come to see that another summer in this house wasn’t possible. The people in the village had, apparently, come to the same conclusion; not surprising, really, but a little forward of them to put it up for sale without asking. Well, her look asked her mother, here he was: why not show him around?
    It’s kind of a rambling old place, she said as they went in through the straining screen door. He stood in the parlor, seeming less to see the place than to inhale its fragrance, of woodstoves and old furniture and cidery autumn air. Wouldn’t it be too big for you?
    Room to spread out, he said, smiling as though he didn’t really care. She showed him the kitchen, deprecatingly; there was no inside plumbing but a pump; no toilets; no stove but this iron monster. It would need a lot of improvement.
    I think I’d leave it as it is, he said complacently. It suits me.
    But the winter, Mother said. What would you do then?
    He shrugged happily. Hibernate, maybe. He touched the huge old sinks fondly. Soapstone, he said. When I was a kid I thought these sinks were called soapstone because you washed in them.
    It was difficult to move him through the house. Whatever room he entered he seemed to want to stay in forever, looking around dreamily. Phillippa found she couldn’t be impatient with him, because he was so obviously taken with what she so much loved. By the end of the tour she found herself rather wanting this stranger to have her house.
    And in the end he did have it, over her mother’s objections—she wanted to give it to the local real-estate broker, an old friend—and most of the furniture too, Victorian junk they had collected through twenty summers of auctions.
    “Junk,” John Knowe said. “It wouldn’t be that now, would it?”
    “No. Antiques. But of course we didn’t know that then.”
    “The fat horsehair sofa. Grandpa’s big desk in the den, with the brass paperweight, very heavy, and the letter opener like a sword. The old clock, with weights like pine cones…”
    “You remember that?”
    “Yes. Of course. All of it.”
    He said it simply, as though it were no feat; and so he would, Phillippa thought: not having seen it since he was eleven, his memories of it all must be very sharp, as though preserved