Free Enon by Paul Harding Page B

small, hot fires, the heave of winter winds and piling snow telegraphing through the timbers, pointing up the good fortuneof well-being; bare, clean, cold, high white rooms filled with sun and wide views of crocus beds and back lawns greening in the rain; the massive orrery, oiled and polished and potent, ready to replicate the symphonic whirlings of the pale minor bodies around our pale minor star.
    That was the thing about Mrs. Hale’s house. It loomed so suggestively in my imagination and my dreams that its essence changed almost every time I thought about it. It seemed as if its nature, its architecture, had been made to accommodate those very whims, as if its very construction in fact required that, for example, the notion of the jeweled orange ember at the center of the house be transformed into the brass and ivory orrery, and that in turn converted into the next dream, all somehow having to do with the heart of my home village.
    Mrs. Hale’s house prompted my deepest desires to provide for Kate, as well as my deepest resentments about wanting such material wealth. There were evenings when, returning from an afternoon walking along the canal, tired, hot, sweaty, thirsty from our hike, Kate and I would cross Mrs. Hale’s cracked and weed-shot tennis court and sit in the grass on the side of a rise overlooking the estate, a copse of darkening fir trees looming at the top of another rise to the right, and the house half sunk behind another rise on the left, beautiful in the oncoming dusk—dim, solid, so white it glowed blue in the gloom, huge, one or two windows lit and glowing the color of the wood of the floors and walls, the colors of the Persian carpets, the colors of the glass lamps that lit them. We’d sit and recline next to each other and the shadows would advance over our heads like a canopy and cloudswould spread out over the sky from the west and Kate would braid stalks of grass and I’d watch the sky and point out the evening star and the crescent moon as it arced up from behind the dark firs and the bats would begin fluttering after insects and we’d each take one last sip of the last of the water in the canteen, tepid and metallic, holding some of the day’s earlier heat in it, and we’d cool off and rest a little beneath the wide pavilion of night before setting out for home. And I’d tell her about the secret clock and the secret solar system deep in the house, the solar system elegant and outrageous almost, almost indecent in its elaborations, almost, I could hear Mrs. Hale saying to my grandfather and me, ornamental, and the secret clock, elegant and simple and enduring and itself also almost ornamental, or worse, but worse because it was secret, because it was hidden away from everyone, but preserved, too, because it was hidden away from everyone (
almost secret
, I thought, because I know about it, and my grandfather did, and Kate knows about it now, too, but hasn’t seen it, hasn’t been into the inner rooms, the sanctum of the temple, and seen the ark, seen the actual wooden case hung with the simple mechanism and fitted with the simple, clear dial painted with the simple, clear unadorned black Arabic numbers and nothing else) and not donated to some Harvard and degraded to being another anonymous plank in its hoard of bric-a-brac, stuck in a corner of a room where faculty members and committees meet in order to resolve on more meetings and committees and faculty members and so maddeningly exclusive and precious both and incurably so. And the incurable pull inside me that Mrs. Hale’s house and the clock and the orrery exerted was impossible and yet so andsometimes even made me want to sob and I felt ashamed to be taking my daughter back to our little house, which seemed those times dingier and more poorly kept than ever, its table-tops piled with newspapers and bills and shoes and laundry and crumbs on the counter, its cheap, hand-me-down furniture, more like a den for little animals than