Free The Cat's Pajamas by Ray Bradbury

Yorker ?”
    But he was already up the walk. She came carefully after him up the moaning front steps. The house soared up, three mansarded, pillared, fluted, rococo flights of it, towers and peaks and bay windows pregnant with broken glass; a fine nicotine stain of years upon it. Inside there was a silence of moths and hung window shades and furniture draped like little white tombs.
    Again she felt everything sink within her. When you have lived in a big clean house on a big secluded street all of your life, with servants invisibly keeping the order, with a phone wherever you put out your hand, with a bathtub big as a swimming pool, and your only exercise is the energy it takes to lift an immensely heavy dry martini, then what is one to think when confronted by a rusty mountain, a haunted catacomb, a thing of gray work and utter chaos? Oh God, she thought, if Americans’ lives come to this, fewer houses, incredible prices. Why did people marry at all?
    It was hard to keep her face together, to make it look right, because William was shouting up and down stairs, walking swiftly, tall, through the rooms, proud as if he’d built it himself.
    â€œI am Hamlet’s father’s ghost,” said William, coming down the dim stairs.
    â€œâ€”father’s ghost,” said an echo from up the stairwell, at the top of the house.
    William smiled and pointed up. “Hear that? That’s the Listener at the top of the house. Old friend of mine. He hears everything you say. I was saying to him only yesterday, I love Maggie! ”
    â€œI love Maggie,” said the Listener at the top of the house.
    â€œA man of taste, that Listener,” said Bill. He came and held Maggie’s shoulders. “Isn’t this house swell ?”
    â€œIt’s big, I’ll give you that. And it’s dirty, I’ll give you that. And it most certainly is old.”
    She watched his face watching hers. And by the slow change of his face she knew that her own face wasn’t doing a very good job of loving the vast place. She had ripped her nylon stockings on a nail, coming in the door. There was dirt on the expensive tweed skirt she had brought from ’Frisco already, and—
    He took his hands from her shoulders. He looked at her mouth. “You don’t much care for it, do you?”
    â€œOh, it’s not that—”
    â€œMaybe we should have bought that trailer.”
    â€œOh, no, don’t be silly. It’s just I have to get used to this. Who’d want to live in a bread box trailer? There’s more room here.”
    â€œOr maybe waited another year to get married, with more money.”
    â€œPerhaps we won’t have to stay here long, anyway,” she said, trying to be gay. But it was the wrong thing to say. He didn’t want to go, ever. This was a place he loved and wanted to fix over. There was a permanence in the way he looked at it.
    â€œUp here is the bedroom.” At the top of the first landing, where a feeble bulb burned, he opened a door. There was a room with a four-poster bed in it. He had scrubbed and swept the room himself and fixed the bed as a surprise for her. There were bright pictures on the wall and new fresh yellow-print wallpaper.
    â€œIt’s nice,” she said, still forcing it.
    He did not look at her as he said, tonelessly, “I’m glad you like it.”
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    T HE NEXT MORNING he was all through the house, up and down the stairs, whistling and singing, full of breakfast vigor and ideas. She heard him ripping down the old shades, sweeping the hall, breaking the old glass shards from a broken kitchen window. She lay in bed. The warm yellow sun streamed in the south window and touched her idle hand on the coverlet. She lay, not wanting to move, incredulous at the sound of her resilient husband ricocheting from room to room with the momentum of his inspiration. Resilient was the word. You hurt or disappointed him one day, and the