the talking box tell its story. A boy of twenty, probably a guide-in-training, studies a stapled script underneath an ancient grapefruit tree. It’s a lot to remember.
You can see anything you want in Sarah Winchester. Craft a story from what bits and scraps you know. Her house is the primary document left to show us who she was, and it’s so easy to read it wrong. What was she trying to say? Was the house a letter to herself, or a cryptic message to the outside world?
Whatever the place is, it makes people uneasy. I heard it in the nervous banter of the other visitors. (“I think we should visit the firearms museum,” a man said to his son. “I think that would be interesting.”) (“She might have been too educated,” a woman said to our guide, who ignored her.) I can’t say whether the house is haunted or not, but it got under my skin.
Her naked display of long-term grief makes me flinch. Could I do any better? Could any of us? When her husband and child died, she mourned them the rest of her life. All that buying and selling couldn’t distract her. She did not hope for heaven—what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?—but let the world pass through her fingers: imported stone, brass smelted in faraway furnaces. Cared for none of it except as material bulk, something to make the house more than what it had been. Ordered the gardener to put in a new bed of daisies and hawthorn; paged through a catalog offering English yew and monkey puzzle, catalpa and persimmon, whose bitter fruit she craved.
For me, the stories about Sarah are the worst of it. All the easy myths, free of real life’s half-measures; the tour guide’s flip answers, and the dismissive chorus: She must have been crazy. In fact, in Sarah’s constant rebuilding of the house—an occupation with roots in the daily and domestic, but which she was able to take to new lengths because of her tremendous wealth—she looks a lot like an artist at work. If she’d been like her father-in-law, perfecting one object and mass-producing it, we’d remember her for her innovation and engineering. If she’d been like most upper-class women of her time, creating House Beautiful around her and then living out her life there, we wouldn’t remember her at all.
But Sarah Winchester did a bit of both when she created her house. Because she didn’t leave explanatory documents behind, all we have is the coded message of the house itself. Linger over its crabbed lines, fish-scale shingles, and old-growth redwood painted over to look like birch, and you’ll see she was doing what an artist does—leaving her mark and seeing what happened; working through an idea via metal, wood, and space; expanding the notion of what life is all about.
After we left the Winchester House, we stopped at an Army Navy store and bought a duffel bag to replace the battered coffee-pot box for the trip home—a step in the right direction. But long after I dragged the duffel through the door of our new place and started unpacking, I couldn’t let Sarah go. Dangerous, maybe, to take a big trip like that, when you’re between stages of your life, looking for work, unsure of who you are. I kept coming back to a postcard we bought in the Winchester House gift shop, a reproduction of the one extant photo of Sarah. She’s seated in a carriage behind a driver, and even though she’s at some distance, there’s a smile on her small, expressive face. She looks content, someone with work that needs doing. In that moment, she’s far away from the morning she buried her child, farther still from her husband’s rattling sickbed, and just like that she passes through the one safe exit into the realm where time shunts away and hours, days, thirty-eight years pass and she follows the unspooling line of her thought to its ragged end and looks up to see the marks she’s made. Floor, ceiling, wall; this covers me; this crowns me; this pushes me forward. Self-help is the best help: perhaps she believed it. But Sarah’s story ends not with a tidy moral but a dashed-off map. The movers, at least, would find that useful.
She could have filled scores of rooms with visitors. But in the end, the memory of her lost ones was enough for her. We are the crowd she never invited. (What are all these people doing in my house?) Now every day is filled with the tread of feet, the whisper of hands sliding along her banisters, the hum of conversations she can’t quite make out.
We signed a year’s lease on a brick cottage outside Apex. I spent my days running among libraries: an elegant domed one with a smooth marble floor, barrister’s tables, and an echo; the main one, eight stories and two sub-basements crammed with no-nonsense metal shelves; the zoology one, where I read Fabre in a cozy little carrel; the geology one, with maps of historic earthquake activity and potted succulents growing in deep-silled windows. I read an article about scientists feeding LSD to spiders to see how it affected their webs. I read that earthquakes leave coded messages in the earth around them, and that San Francisco politicians tried to deny the 1906 quake after it happened. That an old Roman myth tells of a gown made of moonbeams, and of the pages, with eyes sore and bloodshot, who carried it to Hera. That barbed wire used to be called “the devil’s rope,” and that you can tell the construction date of a house by the nails that bind it together.
At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I was obsessing over the details of someone else’s house even as I craved a place of my own. When our year’s lease was up, we moved to yet another state, where we’ve been ever since. Now we live in a tidy little bungalow with green shutters and a tight roof we paid for ourselves, with gleanings from those steady jobs we scoured the country to find. From this place of greater stability I see the Winchester House in another light: maybe an art installation, as I initially believed, or maybe just something to fill Sarah’s time.
Still, nights when I can’t sleep, I walk the halls of a darkened library, a place Sarah bequeathed to me. Her ramshackle house provided me plenty of work, paragraphs to draft and revise again and again, dry little suns to gnaw on, morsels sweet and tough by turns. Even now, telling these secrets, slick pages whisper beneath my fingertips and I smell marvelous old dust and glue. I breathe in air that carries with it words tucked between heavy covers, tales spelled out one letter at a time.
Remove this sheet and keep it with you until you’ve memorized it.
SURVIVAL UNDER ATOMIC ATTACK,
OFFICE OF CIVIL DEFENSE, 1950
Buddy Holly, View-Master, and the A-Bomb
OK. So then when you get sent out to the test site, first of all I’m curious what your impressions of that were, because you are now in the middle of a desert compared to a—
It’s damn cold.
Yes, the desert’s cold in the winter.
In February, it’s damn cold.
First impression: cold.
And it’s dry, except when it rains.
—Robert Martin Campbell Jr.,
atomic veteran (Navy), describing his initial
impression of the Nevada Proving Grounds, 1952
Click through the images, one at a time. VIEW-MASTER ATOMIC TESTS IN 3-D: YOU ARE THERE! reads the package. The set’s reels show the
