Harvey: Living Rooms
Harvey: Living Room(s)
At 61 and counting, I still inhabit my parent’s living room. It is not attached to my parents’ house—both my father and mother are long gone—but many of the pieces of furniture that they loved and lived with in many places came with me after their deaths and found a place—in my own subsequent homes. My parents’ was a mobile living room: its key elements were amassed in New York City soon after their marriage in 1952 and shipped to Italy soon afterwards so my father could work at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. The furniture was put back in overseas crates when my father’s job took them (and me) back to New York in 1969, and went the other way across the ocean in 1976 during my college years. Finally, after my father’s death in 1978, my mother came back to her native city and reconstructed the object world of her marriage in her native city in what she called her “widow’s apartment.”
For me, there were four landmarks, four pieces of portable property that signaled my parents’ shaping presence: the “red piece,” a perhaps-very-antique Chinese whatnot, its shelves busting with familiar objects; the “Tiger Table,” a huge mosaic that my parents had bought early in their marriage and set in ebony to make a coffee table; a series of embroidered narrative pictures my father had “picked up” in Korea during the war; an ancient Chinese rug my uncle had acquired at an antique sale from a grateful patient and had given to his sister at the time of his marriage.
My relation to these pieces as part of my parents’ household changed according to where they were placed in my parents’ various apartments, which depended in turn mostly on how big the apartments were, and thus on which side of the Atlantic my parents and their possessions were housed. In the first apartment I remember, in the Parioli district of Rome, the furniture lived in the equivalent of a Victorian best parlor for adult guests only, protected from the sun by wooden shutters on the French windows, and by a double door from me and from our cat. Food and coasters would be brought in, tiny shrimp my mother would serve with in what I would now call remoulade sauce. Everyone but my mother would drink a lot. I loved the parties (although not the shrimp) but preferred the living room, as we called it, although we did not live in it. On summer afternoons, when my mother would open the shitters to air the room, the Mediterranean sun would pour golden light on a profusion of reds that exceeded the naming capacities of even my biggest Crayola box: vermillion, scarlet, crimson, Chinese, blood, rose.
I know the room sounds a little bit like the infamous “Red Room” in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, but when I lay face down on the carpet like John Ruskin and Tennyson and presumably other short-sighted Victorians, the better to see the details of its pattern, I felt anything but haunted. The hauntings would come later.
The only other house I shared full time with the red piece and the suite of belongings that came with it was a small apartment in New York without a separate living room. I became more intimate with the furniture, now slightly out of scale. As each piece became enveloped in acts of daily life (although there were no feet or food allowed on the shiny surface of the Tiger Table) the pieces lost some of their magic. They became both quotidian and vulnerable; a chip in the red piece had my father rushing to get his jigsaw and some red furniture stain; the rug became subject to doggie accidents; my friends crossed the red pool of the carpet to touch the objects on the shelves of the red piece. No longer aloof, the pieces became sacred in another way, signaling, through some difficult years, the persistence of home.
The first letter I got from my father when he moved back to Italy before my mother did—in order, he said, to “set up the house,”—was a tiny scroll, which, carefully unwound, related the adventures of my dog without a fixed home in Italy. My father and Gino would take long drives in the country to restaurants that would serve Gino pasta (meat or tomato sauce) on weekends. They spent “bachelor time” in what my father described as a featureless temporary lodging. My mother brought the spirit of reformation with her; the first letter from her came with photographs of what seemed, to a New Yorker, an endless series of rooms, with the red shrine once more intact.
My father grew sick in Italy, and came for treatment to New York City; my parents shut up their Roman apartment to live with the uncle who had given them so many of their household objects. When my father died, my mother returned to Italy to close down the apartment. Her belongings followed her across the Atlantic to be reinstated in a diminished household of one. It was in the “widow’s apartment” that I felt most acutely the power and limits of replication: by now an adult with my own series of homes and home cities, I felt both the pull of the past embodied in precious objects and a dread of going backwards into what looked but did not always feel like a childhood home. My visits to New York were mostly restless; I judged my mother for not moving on.
But when she died there was little question that my husband and I would transplant much of the living room to Houston. We sold the Tiger table—I am not entirely sure why—but remained after my mother’s death to see the red piece and pictures carefully loaded onto a moving van. A few weeks later, we were there to greet them in Texas, and to consider how their particular aesthetic would fit in with our Santa Fe style house. Of course, it did not; the reds clashed horribly with the turquoises and Saltillo tile, and with the whole feel of the place—even once we painted out beloved fireplace stucco a vague and unassertive white in a vain attempt to accommodate the reds that had abruptly stopped glowing. This was not the eclectic mixing of design magazines of the time, but a shrill conversation between two styles, neither one of them really ours: if the living room furniture belonged to my parents the style of the house belonged to the former owner and our neighbor, Joanie, who had moved across the street and turned another 50’s Houston ranch into New Mexican Country.
As we moved houses in Houston, my parents’ living room took on a life of its own. It fit nicely into a crumbling turn of the century mansion we made the mistake of buying and looked ghastly in the eventually-to-be flooded ranch house on Merrick whose charms lay very much elsewhere. Defending our home against disaster, though, meant defending our inheritance from my mother. As Harvey approached we carefully and with great difficult raised to red piece on pillars of cinderblocks as high as my chest. We rolled up the rug and pictures and lugged them to my office. Experts in approaching storms, we Gerry-rigged survival for these pieces that had already lived through so much in so many places.
It was when we moved, after that house was flooded, into a temporary rental in the Heights that the furniture came to a new kind of life. Beautifully suited to the size and style of the 20s bungalow, the individual pieces glowed anew as if in gratitude for our care. Oddly, in the more confined space of the rental’s two small parlors, the pieces looked better with our other art deco furniture. It was as if the older pieces were speaking to the newer ones for the first time. That temporary space in the heart of the Heights was a place of healing: the cats stopped fighting and wondered outside but not too far; the dogs accepted the small kitchen and pool-less backyard with great dignity; the Astros won the World Series, and the reds and pinks of all our stuff lit up the house in daylight and lamplight. The first day that the tiny front rooms were complete, I took out the camera that I had used for the last two weeks to record loss--swollen wood, broken chair legs, stained fabric--and took pictures of what had survived.
In this story of return and reformation, I have neglected to mention one household item, one piece of living room furniture that repeatedly crossed the ocean and came with us to Houston from my mother’s apartment: this was my father’s lacquered black bar. It does not fit the euphoric narrative I have told here; it sticks out for its color, its purpose, and its eventual fate. It also stands apart for its more ambivalent and indeed painful history. Of course, this bar was in many ways the locus and symbol of my father’s alcoholism that I have mentioned in passing in this blog but which was mentioned as little as possible in the living rooms in which I grew up. The bar was a beautiful object, lined in copper with a drain that led, somewhat oddly, to a lower drawer. My parents kept their liquor in it, and also their highball glasses so comfortable, I remember, in a child’s hand. Like the red piece, the bar was full of things, but they were all things related to the adult world of drinking; even my mother’s flower shaped coasters in the middle drawer, that I used as the basis for many games, seemed to have little to do with me—and too much.
Perhaps I made—am making—too much of this piece of furniture. My father did not usually mix drinks there; it was mostly a storage cabinet in my parents’ house as it came to be in mine and my husband’s. Guests loved the bar, and would love to swing the doors gently open to see the cunning places for the accoutrements of ’sixties drinking. My college friends were especially fond of it, and of my father’s performance (I mean this in the nicest sense) of hospitality before it. “Can I freshen that drink?” he would ask a boy, sometimes a boyfriend, I brought home. I can still see the young men glowing, growing taller at being treated as equals and as grown ups. It was probably then I began to hate the bar.
So why did we bring it to Houston? Perhaps I thought the bar could be wrenched from its history and come to represent the many parts of my father I loved: the reader, the writer, the sports fan, the athlete, the man who taught me to enjoy all those things and to eat shellfish besides. The man who called French fries “mouse’s tails” ; who gigged over P.J. Wodehouse with me; the man who brought home thick blue paper from his office so I could write and draw; the man whose face I saw in my own and who looked back at me when I smiled into the mirror. If reclamation was the aim, it was a failed project. I rarely looked at the bar except to clean it, and even then I was unenthusiastic. We kept our hard liquor in the bottom compartment just as my parents did, but since we almost never drank anything but wine and beer the bar was pushed to the edges of household activity. One day, I was shocked to find that its black lacquer (that the Tiger table was designed to match) was covered with a curious mildew-like film.
It is perhaps telling that I do not remember what damage the bar suffered in Harvey; I know we did not raise it up or protect it. I know we had not yet thrown it away when Harvey hit, because I have a clear mental picture, post-disaster, of old liquor bottles stacked against the wall where the bar once stood. Did its legs warp and fall off as was the case with so much of our wooden furniture? Did it get moldy? Did I finally seize the moment of disaster to rid myself of this reminder of a complicated past? Did someone make the decision for me—a friend, student, neighbor or relative—or did I resolve that it would not come with me to a new home? When I asked my husband today, he agreed it “left” after Harvey, but like me, does not remember more details.
It is strange to me that I am still fond of bars—the furniture, not the drinking establishments. When we first came to Houston and for many years afterwards, there was an antique store on Westheimer in the Montrose neighborhood that sold little else. The owner specialized in those midcentury bars that have a trick to them: when you open the doors, compartments slide out, light up, or unfold. I loved moving from one to the other, watching as the insides, snuggly fitted with glassware and tools, revealed themselves. Each bar had a different mechanism, a different hard-to-find spring that would put it in motion and expose the secrets inside.
It is easy to see my interest in (other people’s) vintage bars as either defensive or compensatory. Probably they are both. These are pieces of furniture I can open and close at will, collections of objects and memories from which I can walk away. But in late middle age I am beginning to think of these bars as functioning for me more like Victorian cabinets of curiosity. I am curious about many things about my father’s drinking and of alcohol cultures more generally. What was it like to live in Canada before the war, to be shot and hospitalized for many months during that war, to found, as my father seems to have done, a commune in Saskatchewan? What was the famously hard-drinking culture of journalism like in the late 1940’s? What was the role of drinking in expat culture in the 1960s? How were marriages of the time shaped by alcohol? Perhaps the move from my father’s bar to the bars of strangers will help me place him in a larger context. Our living rooms and everything they contain are not, after all, transparent expressions of individual (or family) characteristics, desires, and choices. No piece of furniture, no matter how distinctive or indicative of family history, was bought in an entirely free market. We are all constrained in our living rooms by our own histories, but also by the moment we live in, the class to which we were born and to which we aspire, the availability and price of goods. Other family members, other families—even strangers—live in our living rooms.