Regarding the Haunted House

By Roger Rosenblatt

Not far from where I live, standing at the side of a highway and facing a creek that runs below a bridge, is an abandoned house that was not quite lost to a fire. No one has bothered to knock it down or rebuild it. Its windows are shuttered with gray planks of wood, shingles are missing like jack-o'-lantern teeth, and its beams are scorched. It would be perfect as a haunted house for the local kids this Halloween, if any kid would care to go near it. But the house looks too forlorn for games and too forbidding. I don't even know if I should discuss it in terms of "is" or "was," since its very existence raises the question of whether a ruined house may still be called a house.

I drive past the place every day, and the first thing I think about is, How did it catch fire? Sometimes I imagine a purely prosaic event like a cracked furnace or cheap Christmas lights sparking on the rug. Sometimes I picture a modern-day Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca standing in the upstairs window, her mad hair swathed in flames, or the first Mrs. Rochester from Jane Eyre as she raves on the roof before torching the joint.

Usually (I don't know why) I see an unhappy woman who has drunk herself to sleep. The lit cigarette, which she thought she placed in the ashtray from the Stork Club, has rolled off the night table toward the chintz curtains. She dreams of the man she loved long ago and of a blazing fireplace. The dream is vivid. She can even smell the smoke.

The second thing I think about--I know this sounds odd--is Bill Clinton. But if you could see this haunted house, you would note how sad and uncomfortable it makes you feel. The place is destroyed and not destroyed; it is both the ghost and the living thing. Its overgrown lawn is as thick as thatch. Its chimney tips like a cocked hat. At dusk its side wall, blasted by the dying autumn light, shows in a fierce and pathetic white--a burn victim in a sheet.

So one reason Clinton comes to mind is that the structure is both what it is and what it no longer is. One watches the President these days as if he were a man wearing a Bill Clinton Halloween mask. The mask says: Save education, save Social Security, Kosovo, the Middle East. The man slumps in a chair in a corner of his house and wonders who is going to save him and if he is going to make it through another hour.

And like the house, he is a little scary too, a monument to danger. Houses tend to catch fire when people set them on fire, usually out of desperation or carelessness. The same people who build houses destroy them, and then they go on to build another, often a replica of the first. Like many people, I have always looked upon Clinton as a man capable of creating the grandest house on the block, and equally capable of setting it ablaze. He has arson in his blood. After the Gennifer Flowers story broke six years ago, a friend of mine offered good odds that Clinton would not make it through his term or terms without being badly burned by a sex scandal. There were no takers.

The trouble with people who set their houses on fire is that they affect not only everyone living in the house but the neighbors as well. The house that was once the pride of the village is suddenly the blight, and one wants it either flattened or restored to its former glory. If it merely continues to stand where it is, it creates a perpetual Halloween and haunts the whole town.

I don't know if any citizenry in American history has ever looked upon its leader with so uncomfortable a mixture of contempt, sympathy and hope. I have no idea how people felt about Andrew Johnson during his impeachment hearings, but I can clearly remember that with the house of Nixon one could not wait to see the boards, joists, nails, lintels--everything--hauled away in trucks so that the country could get to the task of making a clean new place to live.

In Clinton's case, most people, myself included, do not want to see him torn down, though few doubt that without lessons in home safety he will continue to set fires that others will have to put out. The confounding, unnerving, exasperating thought is that the structure as it stands is such a waste of good materials, and that it seems blind to its own haunting appearance, besides.

Today, as Halloween approached, I decided to pull off the highway and walk to the house. Up close, it looked much the way it looks from the road--that discomfiting combination of construction and destruction. If anything, it appeared more melancholy, with its screen door hanging tipsy off one hinge, and the chipped latticework at the side, originally for roses, and an electric meter with its dials stopped cold. At the far end, where the kitchen was gutted, someone had shoved together an enormous pile of sheet metal, tarpaper, wire and smashed glass.

I looked at the absent doors, and the places where the walls had been and the charred fireplace that remains intact, and I thought, What a mess. Yet anyone could see that this was once a beautiful house.