GOOD-BYE TO FIFTY-FIVE
DISMANTLING A HOUSE – RECONSTRUCTING TWO LIVES

By SARAH BALDWIN-BENEICH 
November 22, 1992 
Publication: Providence Journal (RI) 

IN HIS ESSAY “Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street,” E. B. White sits in his New York apartment preparing for his move to Maine, “trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave.” Overwhelmed by what years of haphazard accumulation has left him with, he’s convinced his six-room flat is “equipped with a check valve: the valve permits influx but prevents outflow.”

There is this sense of bewilderment, and a certain sadness, in the strange act of emptying a house of its contents. The whole affair is even more poignant when the house is not one’s own. But then there is also an undeniable thrill. I suppose it is not unlike detective work or forensic medicine, for in all such matters one is faced with an apparently random assortment of parts, and the trick is to put them together so as to reconstruct what came before – the lives those people lived and the times they lived in.

Not long ago, my family and I set about the formidable task of returning my grandparents’ Providence house, where they had lived since the early ’20s, to its barest, most marketable state. Nine hours a day for two solid weeks, we dug, sorted, debated, set aside, donated, and discarded three stories and a basement’s worth of possibly every single object from every single day of one couple’s life.

Unfortunately, I could not plunk down the old Remington in the middle of our mess and contemplate those tenacious possessions on the keys. I write on a computer, which is firmly plugged into a wall, and that wall is in France. Which is why I had to bring the mess back with me in my head – everything that didn’t fit in my trunk.

So here I sit at my desk in Paris, surrounded by remnants of other people’s lives, trying to evoke what it was like to sift through the clutter, and the treasures.

IF E. B. WHITE felt the tide of his “indestructible keepsakes” creeping dangerously around his ankles at 48th Street, he surely would have felt the need for a dinghy to stay afloat in the house at 55 Lorraine Avenue. For my grandfather’s two main traits were beautifully symmetrical: not only was he possessed by a compulsion for acquiring things, but he also never, ever, threw anything away.

He was not an acquisitive man per se, just . . . prudent. After all, here was a Scotsman who lived through two world wars, an investment banker who survived the Crash of ’29. His hoarding instinct, coupled with a “one day, this may serve” kind of practicality, resulted in more than the usual agglomeration of photographs, birth notices, obituaries, and letters.

What else could have explained that extraordinary subterranean stockpile that was the basement?

One entire wall was lost to a battalion of canned goods, empty jars, and rolls of aluminum foil. Ancient housecleaning products and burned-out light bulbs struggled to escape from the filing cabinets and cardboard storage closets. The entire southwest corner had capitulated to an army of intended gifts (mostly of plastic persuasion), and the Ping-Pong table threatened to collapse under several cubical refrigerators and legions of tools. There were plantless pots full of soil, crippled chaises longues, wooden toilet seats still in their packaging, artificial Christmas trees, and a couple of hulking indoor-outdoor vacuum cleaners.

At the other extreme, the attic, we uncovered some interesting relics – interesting because they were more personal, obscure, sometimes absurd, often ancient-seeming. The higher I climbed, the hotter it got, so upon reaching the third floor I sat down – and disappeared under a tidal wave of books. But before long I resurfaced with a real prize: my grandfather’s flight log from World War I, with entries in his own illegible scrawl. Here was my Rosetta Stone.

I knew he had been proud to be one of the first fliers, and apparently he never got it out of his system, for next I unearthed a note written in 1922 on the Biltmore letterhead, with an engraved scene of the hotel and some sleek cars running across it. The letter is addressed to my grandfather, Treasurer of the Aero Club, by Mr. Rudolph W. Holfinger, Maitre d’Hotel, who assures him that all will be in order for the club’s coming dinner-dance. America was barely in her ’20s then, feeling extravagant and still defining elegance by European standards: “The elevator starter,” writes Mr. Holfinger, “will receive instructions to take only invited guests. . . . piano to be tuned International Pitch. . . . orchestra will play from nine p.m. until three a.m. . . . buffet supper will be served at twelve midnight. . . . thirty gallons Orange Punch. . . . tomatoes a l’aviateur.”

Some of our finds were a little frightening. Peering under the eaves, for example, my father gasped at coming across every issue of Barron’s since 192 2stacked next to 15 oil lamps still full of oil.

WHERE WAS my grandmother while her husband was amassing all these things? At Wayland Square buying linens, from the look of the hall closet, or at home writing letters, on 10 different sorts of engraved stationery. She must have played a lot of cards, too, for there were bridge scorepads too numerous to count, and monogrammed quilted-satin card-table covers, and enough decks of cards and cribbage boards to open a casino.

DESPITE THE articles distributed among family members or dropped off in about fifty trips to the Salvation Army, there was still enough unnamable, unsavable stuff to fill more than a hundred heavy-duty trash bags, which squatted in the street in front of the house for days. Getting rid of the latter was a humbling, and later side-splitting, experience.

We loaded the leftovers into large vehicles and transported them to a consignment shop in Barrington. The appointed “appraiser,” a very respectable lady, stood by eagerly as with a flourish we popped open the car trunk and slid back the van door. A second’s glance at our bounty, and her face fell. She suddenly looked as though she might swoon. Her hands clutched at each other. Only her upbringing saved her from bursting out, “Where did you get all that junk, and what do you want me to do with it?”

MY PARENTS WERE decidedly less enchanted than I by what they considered an incomprehensible, almost obscene collection of things. Maybe visions of their own attic flashed through their minds. Of course they paused over report cards from Lincoln, yearbooks from Moses Brown, my uncle’s letters from Vietnam. They were touched by a rather abstract drawing of the Powser, my grandfather’s cherished boat, which I had done when I was 5. (How did our teachers know that the shelf life of construction paper was forever?) And they amused themselves trying to pick out my grandparents as children in those solemn-faced portraits from the last century.

But for me it was all archaeology. Here were the actual newspapers announcing the end of World War II and Kennedy’s assassination; here was a Turks Head Club luncheon menu with mint juleps for a quarter; here were tickets to a 1946 Brown-Harvard game. Ancient history come alive.

Maybe, too, I wanted it all to matter somehow – all those years, all those mornings. And there is something pleasing in the improbable time and distance covered by this 1953 brochure of Bickford’s Original Pancake House, which has now made the trip from Peabody to Providence to Paris; this Official Gray Line Guide to New Orleans, “the Paris of America”; this 1964 Providence Journal-Bulletin Gazetteer explaining all the Rhode Island place names, from Abbott Run to Hell’s Half Acre to Young Square; this strangely tinted “lusterchrome” postcard from Dallas’s Adolphus Hotel (with its “famous Century Room and smart new Coffee Shop”).

By saving all this pointless treasure – from the 213 pencil stubs to the waxed laces now tying my shoes – I have retrieved a past: a past that might otherwise have gone out with the trash.

The problem is, I don’t have an attic. Or a basement. You can imagine what it looks like around here. Grampa would feel right at home.