Let’s say, instead of whatever you’re actually doing, that you’re standing on the little wooden deck of my house. It’s off the kitchen, on the third floor, sort of — it’s hard to count the floors, really, because the house is built on a hill, quite steep, like all San Francisco real estate. It’s pretty precarious if you think about it, and you’re thinking about it, and so you say, ”What’s this house built on?”
I lean my arms on the railing of the deck. I own this place. I bought it with my own money. It’s not like when I lived in apartments, and something would break and we’d have to call the landlord. Nowadays everything is mine. If something breaks, I’m the guy who has to, you know, make the phone calls until we find a guy to fix it. Actually, I don’t usually make the phone calls myself. But still, the point is, my old landlords are not going to fix this place. The house is mine, and so I know some stuff about it.
”There was this woman, Irene Marsh,” I say to you. ”She was married to Mr. John (Jack) Marsh, but he was actually more interested in a woman named Miss Alice Murray. Basically, it was the tale of a wife who lavished all of her love and affection upon a man who repudiated her for another woman of greater charm. It’s a long story, but that’s how Herbert Carr got shot. He was a carpenter.”
You say something like, ”Did that guy build the house?”
”Oh, no,” I say, ”but he ended up in this whole scandal, you see? It’s a mystery, what this whole house is built on. It’s an unknowable mystery.”
By now you wish that you weren’t on my deck, and that you were just reading about this. But even so, in a magazine about real estate? Shouldn’t this guy know something about his house — like what it’s built on, for instance?
My house was built in 1907. That’s the only thing I know about my house, really, and I tell it to people all the time. ”It was built in 1907,” I say, pointing at something in the house when we’re walking around. I could be pointing at my CD player. It doesn’t matter what I’m pointing at, because then I make a little joke I always make: ”It was a very popular year to build houses in San Francisco.”
Everyone chuckles, because in 1906 there was the big earthquake in San Francisco that knocked a lot of stuff down. There’s going to be another big earthquake, everyone keeps telling us. It’s a public awareness campaign telling my wife and me that we should have a whole lot of water in our basement. I went out and bought a lot of big plastic things with water in them, and my wife later reorganized them.
Perhaps I should really start it this way: I write fiction for a living, and my wife is an illustrator, and these are basically nice ways of saying that we just don’t get anything about one single thing. I mean, I was way ahead of the curve on appreciating the work of Haruki Murakami, and my wife put up our hummingbird feeder, but basically we don’t get anything at all. When something in the actual world goes wrong, my wife and I look at whatever it is, and then we sort of sneak looks at each other. We have no idea whatsoever what is going on. We are both hoping one of our old landlords will come and fix it.
A few years ago, when my wife reorganized the water bottles in our basement, she stacked them all up in a corner, and over the next few weeks, every so often we would notice that the floor of the basement was a little damp. We thought maybe it was dampness in the air, or because of the rain — we didn’t get it, basically. It was a concern, though, because the floor of our basement was made of cardboard. Every time I explain to someone that the floor of our basement was made of cardboard, they say it couldn’t be so. But I tell you it was cardboard — wet cardboard. After a few weeks we looked in the corner and saw that all of the stacked kegs of water were empty. Stacking them had made them leak or something — I don’t really get it — and now our floor was ruined.
Our old landlords wouldn’t return phone calls, so we got someone to call a guy who came over to our house. I’ll say that his name was Geronimo, and I told him straight off, ”Geronimo, I know it’s going to cost much more and take much longer than you say it will, but could you estimate how much that really would be?” He told us five minutes and five dollars, and that if we called a painter in we could take care of that big, ugly rusty streak on the side of the house from where we put up the hummingbird feeder. We looked at a bunch of squares that a new basement floor could be made of and chose this really cool thing, sort of a rubber surface with a pattern on it that my wife really liked from a design perspective and I really liked because it reminded me of the floor of an underwater hideout.
We all got back to work — me making up stuff, my wife drawing whatever popped into her head and Geronimo pounding on things and then explaining very patiently that it was absolutely necessary to pound on things in order to take all the cardboard away and turn our basement into a cool-floored hideout. Geronimo and I didn’t make much conversation, on account of my not knowing, ever, what he was talking about, and also because of the time he asked me what I was listening to in my office and I told him that it was an album by the Aluminum Group that was produced by Jim O’Rourke, who maybe Geronimo had heard of because O’Rourke was pretty big in the avant-garde jazz scene in Chicago, where Geronimo was from, and Geronimo reminded me that it was actually the other guy pounding on the floor who was from Chicago, not him. And then one day he came upstairs and asked me something.
”What do you know about the foundation of your house?” he asked me.
”I told you,” I said. ”I told you to pretend that I was just a person walking by the house, because that’s how much I would know about anything at all in the house.”
”You must know something,” Geronimo said. ”You couldn’t just live in the house without knowing anything.”
”The house was built in 1907,” I tried, pointing at my phone.
”I think you should see this,” he said, so I followed him downstairs to the basement. He and the guy from Chicago had pulled up the cardboard and I could see what was underneath. Underneath was dirt — a few pieces of wood, and dirt, and in the dirt were some old newspapers. It looked exactly like what I would have thought offhand was underneath every house in the history of houses, but then he handed me one of the newspapers and I saw at once why he wanted me to see it.
”Wow,” I said.
”Yeah,” Geronimo told me, but I was already getting my wife, who was seven months pregnant with our first child. The newspaper page I was holding — I hope The Times is reprinting it here for you, because it’s beautiful — was from the year my house was built: 1907, a very popular year to build houses in San Francisco. It was the front page, focusing on the scandalous accidental shooting of Herbert Carr by the enraged Mrs. Irene Marsh, who was actually aiming for Miss Alice Murray.
”Wow,” my wife said, and read part of the scandal out loud. ”’The tale of a wife who lavished all of her love and affection upon a man who repudiated her for another woman of greater charm.”’
”’Both principals in the afternoon drama have figured prominently in the papers on previous occasions,”’ I said, ”’notably when Mrs. Marsh attempted to horsewhip her husband and Miss Murray at the Orpheum a year ago.’ I wonder if that’s the same place we saw Tom Waits perform?”
”You don’t get it,” Geronimo said.
He was giving me the look you are giving me now, on my own porch, because he was right. We didn’t get it. The worst thing about an unknowable mystery, like the foundation of a house or the scandals of years gone by, is that it’s not an unknowable mystery at all. It’s just that you happen not to know what it is. I mean, here’s the thing: apparently a house shouldn’t be built on dirt. Dirt is not the thing that belongs under houses, and so they had to dig up all of the dirt and put it in one of those enormous Dumpsters that appear outside people’s houses. Meanwhile, a bunch of metal things held up the house so it wouldn’t fall down the hill while they were digging up all the dirt, and then they pounded things into other things and poured things out of a cement mixer — it must have been cement, come to think of it — and of course it cost a gazillion dollars and took forever. They weren’t done by the time the baby came out of my wife — and boy, talk about unknowable mysteries. The baby not only got all the dust and noise, but it was old enough to make its preferences known for Kraftwerk and plain yogurt and ”Good Night, Gorilla” before Geronimo was done with us. The baby could walk, practically, before Geronimo walked out of my house for good. And all the while I still didn’t get it. O.K., our house was built on dirt, but I always thought everything was built on dirt. I’m told that if this were actually the case, then everything would fall down, but don’t you basically have to put a house on dirt? Isn’t dirt under everything? No one has been able to answer this for me, so it’s an unknowable mystery, like everything about my house, except for when it was built, and the newspapers have been able to answer that one in black and white: 1907, the year a woman named Irene Marsh tried to shoot her husband John (Jack) Marsh’s mistress, Miss Alice Murray, but shot Herbert Carr instead, and not only is this not an unknowable mystery, but it’s actually interesting.
”You know who else would be interested in this?” my wife said, holding up the newspaper. ”Who’s that Californian history guy, real nice guy, we met at that library thing?”
”Kenneth Starr,” I said.
”No,” my wife said, ”that’s the Clinton prosecutor.”
”Your whole house is built on dirt,” Geronimo said. ”You’re really in trouble here.”
”Dirt and newspapers,” I reminded him, and tried to think. ”Kevin,” I said. ”Kevin, not Kenneth, Starr.”
”Look at how they illustrated it,” my wife said. ”A drawing and a painting and a photograph. We should have this framed.”
”Thanks so much for showing us this,” I gushed to Geronimo, who was looking at me and my wife. Probably he was about to try again and tell me why a house can’t be built on dirt, and anyone who heard him — a person walking by the house, for instance — might have learned why that is so. But right now he was just looking at two people who bought a house with their own money and had just learned it was built on dirt with some newspapers in it, and who were looking at newspapers from 1907 in wonder and amazement. I like to think that Geronimo was looking at us in wonder and amazement, too, like we were a mystery hidden deep in the dirt of the earth — something he just didn’t get, something unknowable. nIllustration by Kristin Roskifte
photographs by Lars Klove for the New York Times# Key September 2006A House Built on a Broken Home
A scandal-filled issue of The San Francisco Chronicle from Jan. 30, 1907, that was
found under the author’s basement floor — along with dirt, wood and
other material unsuitable for anchoring a house to the hills of San Francisco.O.K., our house was built on dirt, but don’t
you have to put a house on dirt? Isn’t
dirt under everything? No one has been able
to answer this for me. Daniel Handler writes novels under his own name and also as Lemony Snicket.# Key September 2006# Key September 2006
