New England can be as stingy with its welcome as it is with its weather. But catch a New England town on a good day and there is a cozy uplift to the scene that takes the breath away. The sight of schoolchildren running through the town green on a perfect September afternoon will draw even the most confirmed West Coaster to the window of a local real-estate agent. Still, New England is an unforgiving place. Like a disapproving mother, it grips its children in the vise of its impossible expectations.
I grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, a town settled by Puritans in 1635. Concord is “America’s oldest continuously inhabited inland town,” an official Facebook page informs you. Here, for the glory of God, rich British Calvinists hacked their way through the wilderness, willing to risk freezing, starvation, and the loss of their scalps in order to be able to pray all Sunday morning and all Sunday afternoon. For a year, they slept in mud bunkers penetrated by heavy rains, and sang psalms of thanksgiving, even as they cut their flat Indian bread into thinner and thinner slices. The river overflowed the pastures, the cattle died, the horses and sheep couldn’t live on the land, and the wolves ate the pigs. But did the Puritans complain? No, they bottled it up, making “griping” a punishable offense.
Concord has always been a haven for conscientious people ambivalent about their money, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in the real estate they own. I recently heard about an older couple who sold their many-acred house well below market price because they were too embarrassed to list it for what the real-estate agent said it was worth. It’s always been this way in Concord. For the Calvinists, appearances were everything: they must look as if they had money (and therefore clearly belonged to God’s Elect) and yet they must seem to care nothing for it. The one luxury that Old Guard New Englanders continue to permit themselves is a well-proportioned house in the right part of town, shabby yet big enough for them to complain that they can’t afford to live there. For at the root of the tangled New England neurosis is a deep respect for the money it loathes.
In my childhood, moralistic conflict about money had pretty much taken the place of religion. I don’t remember if my parents ever used the word “God” in a sentence, but I heard plenty about the value of a dollar, on the one hand, and money as the root of all evil, on the other. “What this country needs is a good depression!” was the battle cry of the matriarchs of my youth—a landscape of no-nonsense women with nothing to earn and nothing to prove, mending their old swimsuits, buying sparsely at the A. & P., attacking their yards with broken bamboo rakes. These women spent their entire lives saving. They never touched the guest towels in their powder rooms, and would emerge shaking their hands dry. They saved on face cream, on Scotch tape, on Christmas wrapping, on demonstrations of affection. They served Cheerios baked in the oven as cocktail snacks.
I fled Concord at eighteen. I moved to Cambridge, to California, to New York. I was finally happy and married and living blissfully beyond my means and writing a novel, and paying too much for things and never wasting one paper towel when I could waste six. Then I had children. And suddenly nothing would do but to return to the cold heart of New England.
Pregnant with my third child, I moved back to my home town. “So the kids can have swimming lessons at Walden Pond!” I explained to my husband, Charlie. I was in my thirties, still radiant with the delusions that brighten the threshold of middle age. I had hated swimming lessons at Walden Pond almost as much as I had hated hearing about Henry David Thoreau. Lessons were always early in the morning, before either the water or you were warm, and I was so doltish athletically that I could never grasp how you were supposed to breathe during the crawl. But even this had become just one thread of a tapestried memory, with the morning sun glinting over the momentarily urine-free water, as Annie Atwater and I climbed off the bus at the trailer park across the street and walked barefoot down the steps to the grainy, old-Band-Aid-infested beach.
Nothing could have been more psychologically unsound than my return. But the truth is I was never happier. We moved in July, and the sun coursed through the old farmhouse we’d bought a quarter of a mile from the house where I’d grown up. We had delphiniums in the back, and the boys ran in and out of the house at will. With our new line of credit, we were no longer strapped for money. Things had been tight ever since Charlie had quit his job in New York to start his own business so we could move north, but we now had extra cash. “Enough to send a kid through college!” we might have cried, with not a penny put away for retirement. We poured bank-borrowed cash, like a roaring deluge, on our modest farmhouse. We painted and wallpapered and added a sunroom and an office and put up carved moldings, all in the space of six months.
In the afternoons, I invited over other mothers, visiting aunts, neighbors, whomever I could grab, and served them tea on the new second-floor deck overlooking the kids in the back yard, for an aerial view of my perfect motherhood. To a wealthy mother picking up her son, I bragged, like the mouse to the lion, about how much the bushes in my front yard cost.
My parents pitched in with the bragging, too. For twenty years, they had weathered the difficulties of their four children—who were always either dropping out, breaking down, or breaking up—and now, suddenly, around the corner, in the right house in the right part of town, was a presentable daughter, with three presentable children young enough to pass for perfect, and a presentable husband from a “similar background” (meaning he liked to drink).
A few years earlier, my parents had moaned, “Concord is just not the same anymore with all these young people moving in and adding onto their houses.” But now we were those young people, and although my parents worried that if we fixed up our house too much it would hurt the feelings of the former owners, they were proud of our endless renovations. They asked to bring people over for a tour so often that sometimes we had to deny them; and then I would catch sight of their brown K-car filled with the Hadleys from Chicago or Cousin Apples (related in some way past comprehension), my father driving slowly by the front hedge. My parents, as always, had been unable to resist buying the worst car on the market.
The thought of moving fills me with joy, and it always will. My heart soars at the sight of a moving van down a street. When I am ninety-five, I will be tottering across a nursing-home hallway to claim the still warm dead man’s room with the better view.
So it was not surprising that one morning, when I opened the Concord Journal and saw that the price on a house on Nashawtuc Hill had dropped to the top of our credit limit, I called the real-estate agent. We were very happy in the house that we had. We had fixed it up exactly the way we wanted it. That didn’t stop me.
Nashawtuc, as one of Concord’s recently translated road signs will tell you, means “between two rivers,” and it was along the flowering meadowland above the conjoining of the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers that the Indians had fished and farmed and terrorized their enemies. As a child, I had ridden my bike down Squaw Sachem Trail, with no idea that it honored a widowed queen of the Massachusetts tribe, a mother of five, who became so powerful that other tribes had sometimes sided with the English for protection from her. Not even the English would have dreamed of purchasing Concord’s six square miles from this formidable sachem, until smallpox struck in 1633—a sign, the Puritan settlers had decided, that God was on their side in the real-estate market.
Nashawtuc Hill has always been one of the prettiest, most convenient, and most expensive places to live in Concord—near the town center, with hundred-year-old houses overlooking long stretches of open land. This particular house had been on the market for nearly two years, and yet until that moment it had never occurred to me that I could live there. Usually, old houses abut busy roads, but the houses on the hill are insulated from the bustle of Main Street by a quarter mile of upward-winding road and stone bridges and wild meadows. The lawns bordered not only the rivers but the woods around Egg Rock, where canoe paddlers can read a plaque commemorating the native people of Concord, which, according to an 1835 history of the town, had been purchased from the Indians for “wampumpeage, hatchets, hoes, knives, cotton cloth and shirts.” Peaceful the transaction may have been; legal, I’m sure the Puritans assured themselves it was; but fair, even the self-appointed Chosen could not have believed.
In the woods behind the rock, Thoreau had scooped up arrowheads and the young Louisa May Alcott had run free, in the small time allotted her for happiness in her difficult life. Stretched in front of the rock lie the “bogs,” acres of purple-weeded wetland and river dividing the stately houses on Main Street from their richer, less formal cousins on Nashawtuc Hill. During cold, snowless winters, the river overflow turns the meadows into a Currier and Ives scene of after-school skating, with the sky streaked orange. Emerson and Hawthorne and Thoreau had skated together here in the winter of 1843, when the newlywed Hawthornes were renting the Old Manse. Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, had described the scene, with Thoreau executing “dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice,” while Hawthorne “moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave,” and Emerson “closed the line evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching head foremost, half lying on the air.”
But although I had biked and slid and skated and walked the environs of Nashawtuc Hill for twenty years, I had never been inside any of its houses. Even my parents, who knew everyone, had no friends who lived there: this was the neighborhood of Concord’s oldest Old Guard, the self-effacing Elect, who appeared in bank lines in old clothes with the dirt of Concord’s oldest gardens under their nails. When I first went to look at the house, trucks had yet to screech and hiss up and down the patched macadam road to build on additions or install central-air systems or roll down ready-made lawns and wood-chipped gardens. The gangly gardens were still gangly, begun with thirty-five-cent seed packets and a pound of sweat by owners who had lavished on their plants the gentle care they would have considered indulgent to lavish on their children.
Even before I went inside the house, I knew that I would buy it. I sighed as I drove up the hill to see it, because I knew in my heart that moving here would be an act of hubris, that I was the fake thing and the people here were the real. I sighed because I knew that if I were a good person at all, if I cared for my husband or the peace of my family, I would resist.
I looked at the dilapidated house leaning out over the hill as if it were about to fall flat on its face. I walked inside, where each room was a tired tribute to the nineteen-seventies, with recessed lighting, and a pebble-filled planter running along the wall of the Victorian dining room, and a stuffed parrot swinging on a string in the jungle-wallpapered powder room, and toilets with rusted bowls. But the staircase swept up gracefully past leaded-glass windows, and almost every room faced the ribbon of river below.
Thus it was that, after four storybook years in our first Concord house, we needlessly left it and moved a quarter mile up to the house on Nashawtuc Hill. “Change houses, not spouses,” Charlie and I joked weakly to each other. (And it was hard not to change houses in the nineteen-nineties, when the banks had suddenly become so nice about not requiring the old stickler of income verification.) I had loved our refurbished farmhouse, but now the glow was gone, and as I hastened to ditch the house of my happiest moments I was like an insensitive lover beating a fast retreat.
Within two months, as jaunty as a family in a nineteen-sixties comedy, we had packed up all the chapter books and baseball cards, and had swept the kiln-fired blobs off the bureau tops. We hired a small U-Haul a week before the official moving day, because we couldn’t wait to get started. With the wedding china in my lap and some of our slightly broken junk antiques breaking slightly more in the back, we rattled up the hill.
By the time we moved to Nashawtuc Hill, the real-estate agents in town had begun calling the woodsy section on its back side also Nashawtuc Hill, despite the fact that it was utterly flat. New houses had been cropping up there for years, but none was as splendid as the pillared mansion that one young couple had built there in the mid-eighties—with a groomed acre stretching out in the front and a small yard behind. The living room was a fairyland of cream carpet and pale silk curtains and glistening, virginal fireplace utensils and large treated-silver framed photographs of the kids, atop a new baby grand. No one I knew had ever set foot in this living room, except, presumably, the owners, helicoptered in once a year for the family Christmas-card picture.
Until my kids were in preschool, I had never known anyone who lived in such a house. But suddenly it seemed as if half the boys that my sons, Hunter and Teddy, played with lived in enormous houses in developments all over the West Concord farmlands. The farmers’ daughters who had been my childhood friends had lived in stark Victorian houses too close to the road. But, by the nineties, quite a few of those farmers had become millionaires by selling off their farms to developers, who covered the land with sprayed-on grass and fusspot bushes and giant houses built cheek-to-cheek. Whenever you turned at a road sign that had “Farm” in the title, you weren’t sure what you might find—a house that looked like a function center or a small castle or a Mediterranean villa—but you knew you wouldn’t find a farm.
The houses were spacious, with media rooms, and vaulted, skylit hallways where the sun hit your face like a searchlight, and glass kitchen walls overlooking turquoise pools. I didn’t want to like these houses, but what was not to like? No wonder the mothers and fathers in them beamed, so happy to see you when you trudged in to pick up your kids. They’d greet you in their Versailles foyer, ushering you in to take a homemade brownie from the plate on the gleaming granite counter, the fathers bounding forward in expensive new gym clothes, the mothers a little worn but pretty, perfectly made up, like aging country-and-Western stars, with long, wavy coiffed hair and a trace of Southern accent.
If these parents did not appreciate the charm of the large crack in my ancient front door, they were not alone. When my children first saw the new house on Nashawtuc Hill, their faces dropped at the sight of the old linoleum and the dirty shag carpeting. And my heart had been pierced when our insurance appraiser, walking through the house, had said in a worried voice, “So how’s Charlie’s business doing?” And I’d felt a pang when I heard the carpenters who had worked on our last house debating whether this house was a move down, as if they were as invested in our standing as I, and I had not kept up my end.
At least my parents thought that the house was a step up. Every few days, my mother would come by to drop a clipping on my kitchen table, entering my house, like the Indians of old, and just as annoyingly, without knocking. But I wasn’t so thrilled to see her anymore. Just as we’d moved to Nashawtuc Hill, Charlie’s freelance work dried up. We’d had no income for a year.
Yet up there on the hilltop that first summer and fall, with the river glinting below, with the old screen door on the shingled porch slamming so comfortingly behind us, Charlie and I could not help but still believe in our fantasy. Although the bank owned the house and we owed the bank, Charlie would stroll over for lunch from his office above the garage and sigh, saying he knew he should be worried, yet somehow sitting there on the hill, where the great sachem had once guarded her people, he just could not help but think that all was well.
Part of the hill still housed the ultra-nice people who felt guilty about their inherited money. Next to us, in a large house on three acres, lived an amiable couple and their children, the father, who had grown up on the hill, offering us the use of their old tennis court the first time we met them. The couple were so uncomfortable with the grandeur of their kitchen that they were spending thousands to reduce its size. And below us, in a prefab Acorn house, lived a lean, good-looking man of indeterminate age, who might be seen tending his large vegetable garden at ten on a Monday morning, or putting up a water-conservation notice. A mild, gently moralizing Yankee, this neighbor had given millions of dollars’ worth of his family’s land to the town without affixing the family’s name to any of it. When my son Hunter broke a window in this neighbor’s old shed, he had come running up the hill upset, and a little indignant, because the neighbor had suggested that Hunter, who had never even made his own bed, might work off the damage by doing a few chores.
One bone-chilling day, four years after we had moved to Nashawtuc Hill, I heard a new homeowner, standing in front of the lovely old house she was planning to raze, utter a phrase never before spoken in the town of Concord, Massachusetts: “Money is no object.” As the years passed, other changes became manifest: blond women in their thirties sprinted by with bare midriffs and jogging strollers, hastening home for meetings with landscape architects. “Used to be, a block party meant you walked your gin-and-tonic next door,” one of my Old Guard neighbors said. That year, the block party on Nashawtuc Hill had organizing committees and written invitations and an ice-cream truck and a hired magician. Surely, if not slowly, the new super-rich were taking over Nashawtuc Hill, pumping up the houses to twice, sometimes three times, their original size.
When I was growing up, the only resident who came near to being considered “nouveau riche” was a family friend who’d been very successful. This friend came from the same background as my parents and their crowd, but he had had the tackiness to earn a salary so huge that it got reported in a national magazine. When the family bought a large house on Main Street, many jokes were made about the uniformed maid and cook and the teen-age daughters wearing minks to Trinity Church. The youngest daughter couldn’t wait to come over to our house, where she was allowed to feed the dog. In the Concord of the fifties and sixties, no matter how deep your trust fund ran, you did not hire anyone other than the once-a-week cleaning lady, for whom you made lunch and with whom you ate it.
Concord had been discovered again, but this time the old Protestants were the Indians dying out, and the new settlers were the stronger breed, less guilty about their money because they had made it, not inherited it. Now the newest rich were plundering the old neighborhoods near the town center and laying waste to the old stores. The shop on Walden Street, where my daughter, Emily, had bought a neon yo-yo for six dollars, was now a boutique selling a nice top to teen-agers for three hundred dollars. As my mother had sniffed twenty years earlier, I sniffed, “Concord is just not the same anymore.” I yearned for the shabby millionaires refilling their cups at Dunkin’ Donuts to save forty-three cents. “Bring back the trust-fund people, they’re so much nicer!” my friend who worked at Mailboxes, Etc., said. The new money bred arrogance; the old money bred eager-to-please guilt—that great, undervalued neurosis.
When I thought of the migraines I had suffered fearing the disapproval of my mother’s frugal friends! It turned out that I hadn’t needed the old girls’ approval, because they were on their way out, their beautiful shabby houses soon to be bulldozed, sending their inhabitants to condos in West Concord, until their final move, to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. And I, the old new girl, was next in line for extinction. Meanwhile, the new new girls skipped to the head of the line, serving on Concord museum boards and writing thank-you notes to me for my fifty-dollar contributions.
Now when I went walking on the hill, monstrous machinery moved monstrous chunks of land; trucks ground and clanked, beeping to and fro; whole houses and hundred-year-old trees were lifted into the air. A beautiful Victorian had been under full-scale reconstruction for three years: it had been knocked down to the studs, the fine mahogany library panelling tossed into a dumpster. Next to this bomb site sat an expensive, pseudo-historic sign that read, “Please Pardon Our Restoration.”
But those owners didn’t need my pardon, because I am sure that I, also, would have spent a huge amount of money on that house, if the money had been made available to me. I would have gladly braved the old Concordians huffing disapproval. And then, assuredly, not too long after fixing up that multimillion-dollar Victorian, I would have sold it. In the same way that we, after four short years, sold our house on Nashawtuc Hill.
For some lucky reason, I never ruminate about the boyfriends I didn’t marry. But, from time to time, I like to tell myself that the Nashawtuc Hill house was the house that got away. I think of the late-afternoon sun slanting over the sledding hill where my sons showcased their suicidal feats to wide-eyed girls; of my parents’ ill-sourced pride in me; of the comfy kitchen we’d created when Charlie’s business had picked up. Unlike the moves before, the move from Nashawtuc Hill had not begun on an optimistic note. I had suffered a thirty-second wobble when Charlie told me that we had to sell the house, because even though he had work, we couldn’t meet the mortgage. But then I felt a fresh joy rising within—at the thought of moving.
“We don’t approve of you selling the house,” my parents said, even after Charlie had explained that it was a financial necessity. “What will we tell our friends?” Within a week, I had found a house, less expensive than the house on Nashawtuc Hill, but larger—a long, lovely, low-ceilinged antique Colonial, across the street from our first house in Concord. It was a warren of white-painted rooms with two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old crooked moldings and working fireplaces. “In the new house, we’ll have a sewing room!” I proclaimed to nine-year-old Emily, though neither of us sewed.
The pre-Revolutionary status of this house meant that we couldn’t plant a bush or put up a fence or do anything visible from the street without written permission from the Concord Historic Districts Commission. Nevertheless, after a bitter battle about mullion colors, I was allowed to change the color of my house. The history of the house was raging onward. Its first owner had written King George III an indignant letter from the town about its residents’ taxes which would have got him hanged if the British had won the war. And it was probably from this house, some seventy years later, that Thoreau had borrowed the shoemaker’s match that burned down three hundred acres of Concord’s woods. Our own contribution would be less dramatic. Now, outside this house’s old shoe-factory addition, where my sons slept and partied, a police car sometimes parked all weekend, waiting for departing prey. “Don’t let anyone leave the house!” I called out one night when I’d wandered down at 2 A.M. to find half the teen-agers in Concord in full swing. And it was from this snug Colonial, around the corner from one domicile of the peripatetic Alcotts (who moved more than twenty times), that my children’s activities entered the annals of the Concord Journal. Here I waited in limbo for my last child, Emily, to finish high school, before we could move again—finally, away from Concord.
In 2007, fifty years after my parents first moved here, I sold my last Concord house and said goodbye to all the Concord houses I have loved. Goodbye to lofty, spacious Orchard House, where I (and millions of others) had imagined the real Little Women had lived but where, in fact, the women were no longer little—Beth dead by then, and the workaholic Louisa May old at thirty, sickened by mercury poisoning. Goodbye to the yellow house on Main Street, where Thoreau, dying at forty-four, had asked that his attic bed be dragged into his mother’s parlor, where he wouldn’t miss anything. And goodbye to the strangely Ralph Laurenish replica of the no-fun, no-frills cabin where Thoreau had lived in the woods so economically, on his friend Emerson’s land. Goodbye to the Old Manse, where Emerson’s grandparents had likely watched the Revolution begin in their back yard, and from which Hawthorne had departed after three honeymoon years, ashamed and in debt, because he hadn’t been paid for his publications. Goodbye to Emerson’s grand white house at the mouth of town, which Emerson had enlarged in the mad dream that other families would move in and live communally at his expense.
And goodbye to the houses where my children played; to the house on Nashawtuc Hill, sold recently for four times what we paid for it, and now doubled in size; to our last house, whose interior I had so improved that my parents said, “We like this house more than the house on Nashawtuc Hill,” warming my shallow soul. Goodbye to the fancy assisted-living facility where my parents had blithely been told by a staff member, “There’s a turnover every five years.” Goodbye to my parents, now buried in Sleepy Hollow. And goodbye to my own childhood home on Main Street, which happened to be on the market as we left town, and where I stopped to take a quick look, resisting mightily the temptation to make an offer. ♦
