The House
By Joe Roubicek
Author’s Note: The following is an excerpt from his memoir-in-progress.
I was born and raised in a house that had been a convent until the Sisters of Seton Hall sold it to my family. It was located in the Village of Patchogue on the south shore of Long Island. Like Quogue, Setauket, Montauk, and Shinnecock, Patchogue is a Native American name, not easy to spell; it means “a turning place,” and for our family it was.
Our family was poor, as were many others during the 1950s, and my parents had their hands full with seven children. I would be the eighth, the “surprise baby” who would come along another five years down the road, and my father would move out shortly after that. Not a rosy picture, but life doesn’t have to be easy to be wonderful.
The old, three-story Victorian was located just two blocks north of the Great South Bay where I spent much of my childhood days treading clams, feeling for them with my feet in the sandy shallows, or fishing off what we called the “L Dock” for its shape. There were six bedrooms in the house, each with a sink in the corner, so I believed that bedrooms normally had sinks. I never used them because the water was clouded and rusty; but as a child, I could picture the nuns dressed in black washing up at those sinks, all quiet, mysterious, and a bit spooky, to be honest.
Just before the Sisters of Seton Hall sold the house to my family, they moved a grave off the property, that of Sister Clotilda, a former Mother Superior of the convent. She was reinterred from our backyard to a location elsewhere, and my mother spoke about this as if her spirit was still present, making our house and its grounds uniquely spiritual. This didn’t help my childhood view that the dead once lay where I played. The yard was my playground, after all, and I couldn’t picture Sister Clotilda playing war games with me and my little green army men playset.
All this talk of spirits and graves had me thinking our house was alive. I don’t mean that it would come alive like in horror movies or Looney Tunes, but that the house was alive as in a being, a living thing—it just acted up sometimes.
On calm summer days, I could feel the house relax and imagined it quietly taking in the bay breeze. When winter storms lashed out and pipes burst or the cellar flooded, I saw my house as being injured and distressed until repairs were made.
On windy nights, I would hear things that I could usually understand. These sounds had rational explanations, like creaking wood, doors closing by the breeze, the furnace firing up, or a hot water pipe rattling. But sometimes I would hear things that just didn’t make sense, especially on those quiet nights when everyone should have been asleep. My bedroom was on the second floor, and at times I could hear the distinct sounds of wooden chair legs sliding coarsely along the old linoleum floor in the kitchen downstairs. I assumed it was my siblings. Most of them were much older and had the freedom to come and go as they pleased, as long as they were quiet at night for our working mom. When I questioned them, though, they denied being up then and blamed it all on my imagination. But I knew this was not the case. “I’m young but not stupid,” I thought. So I just listened to the house’s normal chatter.
One night, when the sounds of the sliding chairs woke me, I slipped out of my bed to the head of the stairway and looked down to see a dim glow coming from the kitchen. I sat down on the top step and waited. The chairs stopped moving, but I heard faint whispering from the kitchen, then silence, and more whispering until I was sure that my siblings were up. Tiptoeing slowly down the dark stairway, I reached the bottom only to see that I had been mistaken. The kitchen was empty. Four chairs sat around the kitchen table as the streetlight’s reflection shone in through the window. If it had been my imagination at work, then things were exactly as they should have been, but this troubled me. I was sure of what I had heard, and the only possible explanation was ghosts.
The next day, I spoke to my mom about this. I needed clarification of what was real and what was not—fact or fiction. The kitchen was Mom’s favorite room. When she wasn’t at work, Mom would sit at the table reading paperbacks while snacking on crackers and Muenster cheese peppered with . . . well, lots of pepper. On weekends, she’d have pigs’ knuckles and sauerkraut slow cooking on the stove, and she’d purr to her noisy parakeet in its cage on top of the refrigerator. I could tell this was her happy place.
When I told her about what I’d heard the night before, Mom didn’t tell me that I was imagining things as I thought she would. She peered over her reading glasses and said, “We live in a hallowed place, and there are only good spirits here.” Then she went back to her book.
She said it so matter-of-factly, as if I should have known this, and that was completely unexpected. How could I argue with someone who agreed with me? I accepted what she said, and her words seemed to validate my belief that our house was alive as well.
I believed that spirits are real, and this must be spirituality. One that seems to have no boundaries.
That was six decades ago. To this day I don’t have a rational explanation for the moving chairs on the tiled kitchen floor, and I like it that way. It’s a reminder that sometimes spirituality can conflate fact and fiction just enough to keep my life interesting.
I have so much to learn.
Joe Roubicek is a retiree who spends quality time writing fiction and memoir with epiphanies. He moved recently from Florida to Nashville to be closer to family—a joyful and dramatic life change. He started his first writer’s support group at the Nashville Library Hermitage branch and is at work on his memoir.
Photo of “The House,” courtesy of the author.