A MYSTIC OF HOUSES

By LANCE MORROW

I claim, half-seriously, to be a mystic of houses. When I walk into a house, I think I know--that is, I feel--the emotional history of the place. Everyone knows that a house has an aura, as a person does--an atmosphere, a vibration that is characteristic and unmistakable. I am abnormally sensitive to houses, as a dog is a genius about smells, or as a soldier who took a bullet a long time ago might be sensitive to changes in weather. I mention all this because a ghost has turned up.

My wife and I went house hunting in a rural county. The exercise sharpened my house-mystic's faculty. We inspected dozens of houses, led up and down dirt roads and blacktops by a real estate agent. He would recite the history of each house and, most discreetly, tell something about the owners ("The kids are grown; they're moving back to the city," or, once the agent knew us better, "They're getting a divorce--she's taken up with the contractor"). As I skimmed up gossip, my eyes would frisk the house in an abstracted way, taking in mood, angles of light and shadow, and after that, piecing together what I thought was the house's story.

Once we inspected a yellow brick farmhouse nestled in a fairy-tale little valley, its cow pastures enclosed by wooded ridges of old-growth maple, birch and hemlock. I wanted the house. Then I walked inside and knew I didn't want it anymore. I picked up ... a kind of rage, a claustrophobia, a violence. The atmosphere of the house was red and gave off a low, unwholesome electricity, a Satan's hum. The ceilings pressed down. The walls seemed to be stained by anguish. I burst out of the house as if from a room full of poisoned gas.

A house's joy may announce itself as vividly as its misery, or an inherent contentment as readily as a permeating sorrow. The personality embedded there may be stolid, smug, hospitable, plainspoken, snobbish. I cannot explain the physics, but I imagine that the passions and attitudes and conversations, the laughs and screams of past occupants come, over a period of years, to saturate the walls and wallpapers and paints and floors and beams, as the sweats and oils of a man's head get into the band and felt of his hat. Something in our core detects house moods in the way a forming infant picks up the moods of its domicile, the womb. A house transmits different influences the way a pregnant mother does, depending on whether she gets drunk at night or listens to Mozart.

It is easy to detect an alcoholic house--it smells of its sorrows, smudged rages and dead brain cells. A house may be possessed more easily by a demon than a person may; a person has consciousness and mobility and a measure of will, all of which he may use to flee. A house is immobile, a cruder and more passive organism, though possessing a soul nonetheless, and is articulate in its own language. A house may be in a state of grace or in a state of mortal sin. If it harbors hatred or incest or violence or some other misery, the house will absorb the facts and become an archive of the unhappiness. The reverse is true. Love gives a house a radiance. All of us know these things.

The resonances of a new house may be premonitions rather than memories. One day at dusk in late November, I visited the freshly minted suburban house of a young woman, recently married. Her husband was at work. The woman did not work. She sat alone at home and waited for his return--a bride marooned in desolate, treeless suburbia. I visited the woman in the early '70s. I pieced together, from that half-hour, what proved to be an accurate scenario of the course that American feminism would follow. The house predicted everything.

My wife I and finally bought a 150-year-old white farmhouse on a dirt road. Everyone who visits speaks with wonder about the house's emanations. A family lived here happily for many years. The old man's wife died in her 70s; he lived on in the house and died at an advanced age. The house radiates an astonishing sweetness.

Several times in the past two weeks, my wife has wakened at 4 in the morning and heard footsteps in the house--a man's footsteps, she thinks, not stealthy, but matter-of-fact, like those of a man going about early-morning chores. I have listened, heard the sounds and gone to look, and concluded that the furnace has been making footstep noises.

I don't quite believe it. An amputee may harbor in his nerves the ghost of the missing leg--his former completeness. Perhaps out of habit, our house believes, down in its planks and nails, that the old man still gets up at 4 and busies himself at coffee and oatmeal. A puttergeist. I am happy to share the house with the ghost (though I sleep later than 4 in the morning and wish that at that hour he would keep it down). I trust my wife and I will eventually replace the old man's ghost in the house's affections.