Free Bomber's Law by George V. Higgins

to be, right from the very beginning, a house that
you
really want. And this one that we’ve got, we never did. At all. But we’re stuck with the damned thing, just the same.”
    â€œCannon said it looks like a horror-movie set,” Dell’Appa had said. “He told me one day when he had to do something in Pittsfield and stopped by for a beer with me in Northampton on his way back here. He said you and Tory’d had him and Jackie to dinner and it’d been a hell of a bad night, thunder and lightning, all that shit, and he said when he first saw that house: ‘I thought I must’ve taken a wrong turn along the way, and I was at the Bates Motel.’ He said Jackie said to him: ‘ “Well, okay, but just dinner. That’s all I’m stayin’ for. Brian may claim this’s Tory’s mother’s house, but I have seen the movie there, and I’m takin’ no showers in
that
joint.’ ”
    Dennison had laughed. “Well,” he had said, “I wouldn’t argue with him. I don’t agree with him, but I wouldn’t argue with him. To me it looks more like a big Mediterranean-seaside villa designed by somebody, some architect, who knew exactly what the classic design of that genre called for, and understood that his client had a very precise picture of the finished structure in his head, exactly corresponding to the classic design. So the designer, quite prudently, followed it devoutly, and no doubt his client was delighted. And the architect certainly was not.
    â€œOh, as a professional he most likely felt a certain sense of satisfaction; it’s the pro’s job, once he takes it on, to carry out the client’s wishes, not his own, and there couldn’t’ve been any question but that he’d done that, in spades. Because there’s no mistaking what it is, or what it was meant to be: a three-story, mauve stucco villa, with claret trim around the windows and doors, and a maroon terra-cotta-tiled mansard roof—which is, not so incidentally, a hellishly-expensive bauble to maintain and repair, all those little hooks and wires holding everything in place like the guts of a Swiss chronometer, until the weather inevitably does to the whole arrangement exactly what New England weather would do to a Swiss watch if you left the guts of it exposed outdoors for a year or so. The first one or two hooks and wires let go so the whole thing starts to slide off and go crashing down piecemeal into the shrubbery.
    â€œIt’s perfect, you see,” Dennison said. “It just isn’t perfect for here. What it would be absolutely perfect for would be a choice site on the lower slope of a Côte d’Azur corniche with southeastern exposure to the ocean. An exact copy, in other words, of the mansion-house where the designer’s client had spent his halcyon, wealthyboyhood, the eldest child and only son of an international merchant who’d made himself princely-rich by means of his shrewdness in the selection of rugs, woven in the Land of the Peacock Throne. Rugs that he purchased by the bale, cheap, for resale in units, at retail-expensive, to people with far more cash’n brains back home in America.
    â€œNo, the trouble with the house wasn’t then and isn’t now with
what
it is; the trouble’s all with
where
it is. Adriatic, Mediterranean: either one of those would’ve been the ideal place for it. Wouldn’t’ve mattered in the slightest. But smack-dab in the middle of a Bristol County, Massachusetts meadow—slightly rolling, very pretty, very pleasant, very Fairfield Porter, or maybe Fairfield County—especially in springtime when the wildflowers’re in bloom—well, even though it’s in Westport and you can smell—and sense—Buzzards Bay to the south, it’s a good mile and a half from the harbor. So much for any hope of seeing open water. Which’s fatal, for a