The House on the Hill

Perched on the shorelines of the Ohio and Little Kanawha rivers, my hometown of Parkersburg sits at the very edge of West Virginia. A no-man’s land at the intersection of Appalachian foothills, Midwestern cornfields, and Rust Belt factories, the town in my childhood was filled with people—including my parents and their parents—who had come from somewhere else.

My father had grown up on a farm in eastern Ohio. My mother had entered the world at Buckhannon, in the middle of West Virginia, raised by her grandparents in a tiny house on the side of a mountain.

My mother was as unlikely a presence, as in-between as the town, the neighborhood, and our house. In pictures from the first years of marriage, her dark hair nestled like the night sky around her face. Parted in the in the middle, it ended in curls that rested on her collarbones.

In those photos, her features now seem heavy to me, as if a sculptor had aimed for classic beauty but hadn’t quite finished the details. In motion, however, talking to people at a party or singing with me as we walked, she was elegant, electric.

She promoted the virtues of being a lady (“you can cross your legs at the ankle or the knee, or you can keep your knees and feet together”). But she also wanted to have fun, which sometimes put her at odds with her own advice.

Absent-minded, she was prone to losing things, which led her to tuck her most critical belongings—cash, housekey, driver’s license—into her bra. Getting gas for the car, she would fish between her breasts for a five-dollar bill to hand a startled cashier at a convenience store. I was an adult before I realized it was something other mothers didn’t do.

My father had blue eyes, a mane of brown hair, and a gift for baseball and golf. He was the first in his family to go to college. He met and married my mother after being expelled his freshman year for excessive socialization.

His first job had been in a grocery store; he later joined the Navy during the Vietnam War. After three tours of duty took him to Illinois, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico, he wound up back in Parkersburg, training to be an electrician with DuPont at the Washington Works plant.

The job paid good money. Without a college degree, he had managed to hit the jackpot. He had no way of knowing the plant was poisoning the water supply, already afflicting plant workers and generations of locals with cancers and birth defects that would in time lead to a settlement of more than half a billion dollars.

While he worked as an electrician, my mother left television news and went to night classes to finish a degree in social work. With little interest in my parents’ outside lives at the time, I was aware of these changes only to the degree that they affected me, my father’s naval career condensed entirely in my mind into a stuffed green rabbit he got me on shore leave in Puerto Rico.

***

We left our little house on Sixteenth Street while I was still in preschool, moving just a mile away. Our new home sat on a corner lot of Madison Avenue, a neighborhood I’d never seen before.

My mother and father both had aspirations. My mother in particular hoped to rise in the world—a wish fulfilled literally when we moved. Our new house sat halfway up Quincy Hill, one of the highest points in the city. The most elegant homes at the very top flaunted a steep drop at the back, with broad balconies giving way to empty space and views of downtown stretching all the way to the river. But our property belonged to a one-block, dead-end street farther down the slope, with a view of mostly trees and neighbors.

A handful of the dozen or so homes on Madison Avenue must have made an elegant lane when they were built, too. But by the time we moved in, one property had been converted to a boarding house. Three doors down, motel-style brick apartments had sprung up in an empty lot. None of the seediness caught my attention at the time—it all seemed like high society.

From the sidewalk, the house seemed a bigger version of our old one—still two stories, but wider and taller with a long porch that continued around one side of the house. I had the sense that my growing up meant a larger building was needed to accommodate me.

Peeking through the broad pane of heavy glass on the front door, I saw a fireplace and a carved wooden staircase. Once we stood in the entrance hall, double oak doors slid backward inside the walls to reveal the living room, which led to a dining room and a chandelier that seemed magnificent, even if, on closer inspection, some parts turned out to be plastic. A wide swinging door opened onto the kitchen, which had a small back stairwell made for children, I liked to imagine—though even then I realized it was surely meant for servants.

A short hallway connected the kitchen to the main staircase. Looking up, I saw a stained-glass window rising from the stairwell landing almost to the ceiling of the second floor. The image on the window had a cup in the center trailing ivy and flowers.

My brother and I ran room to room, counting fireplaces downstairs and up. Three, four, five, six. One of them belonged to my second-story bedroom—along with a view of the front yard. The room was bigger than I could have imagined for myself.

Another room on the second floor had tall shelves along two walls, like a library. A door in the upstairs hallway opened onto more steps, steep and narrow. An attic. Up the first flight and past the shoebox-size landing lay more stairs, leading into an open space where the angled roof stretched between gabled windows. A locked trunk sat in the middle.

Not far away, taller than me but shorter than my mother, stood a door with an oval porcelain knob. I went to turn it, and behind the door lay a tiny room. A single crutch for a child leaned against the wall.

Who was she? Was she beaten? Did she fall out the window? Did she almost die? It was clear we weren’t moving into any old house.

The first night on Madison Avenue, with only a mattress on the floor of my bedroom, the sound of trains kept me awake. Wheels clacked, and railroad crossing bells clanged, followed by the exhale of a horn, a long note sobbing simultaneously high and low. The streetlights cast a shadow forest on the walls of my room.

Listening in the dark, I imagined what lay down the hill from us. I could tell the tracks ran somewhere in the direction of the river. The trains were a wonder. I’d never noticed them in town before or heard them at night, but they must have been there all along.

My mother’s father lived hours away in the middle of West Virginia and worked as a railroad engineer before he became a conductor. He drank more than my mother thought anyone should, but his was the job I hoped to do when I grew up.

I imagined him rolling through Parkersburg—maybe every day, maybe this very night—without my knowing it. I thought about trains full of people coming and going, happy or sad over their lives, not quite ghosts but real people who were still alive.

In time, the whistle and rattle of cars coming and going would no longer keep me from sleep, but trains crossing the river valley at night remained the soundtrack of the house on the hill. Their call would become the sound of leaving or being left.

***

We carried habits of our old life with us into new territory, including my endless questions and more books from my mother to answer them. When I began to ask about babies, she bought Where Did I Come From? for my fifth birthday. The broad, thin book had cartoon anatomical illustrations that explained sex to children. If a man and a woman loved each other very much, they would get as close as two people can get and make a baby.

My parents had made two babies, I knew. But somehow I didn’t link the book to my own origins. It was as if the drawings were entirely hypothetical, a scientific treatise, a theory of babies. In my mind, it had nothing to do with the actual world.

Unlike books, the world had a way of insisting on its own reality. Over time, flaws in the house on the hill became apparent. Newels on the front railing were half-rotted; wood floors splintered; the plumbing was unreliable. Our new home was filled with beautiful and broken parts.

My parents had bought it with fantasies of fixing it up. Instead, despite our plans, the house—decaying, sorry as ever, and impervious to improvement—would work its ruin on us.

My mother later said that if she’d suspected what would follow, maybe we would have stayed in our home on Sixteenth Street, and life could have been simpler. But the promise of a bright future lured my parents in, only to flatten into an uncooperative present. The new house marked the quiet beginning of our dissolution.

[You can read another story in this series about my West Virginia childhood here, or find out more about me and this newsletter in my About page.]