Free Write: Return to Childhood Home

Walt has arrived back in Shelsandra, his childhood home. It is his first time back in his adult life. He is walking through the house, making his way to see his father, Kris, who he has not seen or spoken to in just as long a time.

***

He took the stairs at a deliberate pace. He told himself this was in order to collect his thoughts, but he had been trying to do that for several days now and he was no more successful now than in Chicago, on the jet, the transport plane, the private plane, the helicopter. At the time he wrote that off to the noise and bustle of the various engines, but now in the silent sturdiness of Shelsandra, the noise in his ears seemed worse than any jet turbine. These stairs—how old were they? Yet perfectly silent, not a creak as he padded on the Oriental rug. The dark wood railing, so smooth, except he was already anticipating the place near the top where his hand would encounter deep gashes in the dark chocolate wood, the result of an “experiment” performed by an 11-year-old Walt, who couldn’t resist the urge to experience the feeling of swinging the machete his father had brought him from Kenya.

More memories in store at the top of the stairs: The chaise lounge with the burgundy velvet upholstery worn down in corners to tan, where he had once found a maid sleeping sitting up and had studied her oddly bent nose too closely until she had awoken with a shriek. The small table with the exact same bowl of wax fruit, though looking pristine from regular dusting; he didn’t check to see if anyone had ever discovered the one ruined apple that his friend Roberto, having been fooled in the low light, took a hearty bite when they were nine. The lead candelabra with three thick candles that Mother always lit when entertaining, though very few guests ever came up these stairs to the Kurtzman family quarters. Noticeably absent was a portrait of Walt, done when he was almost a teenager, by a friend of his mothers who had gone on to become a successful painter in New England. He had worked from a photograph he had taken of Walt on a trip to Boston where Father had worked and Mother and he had walked the Freedom Trail when not sitting through endless lunches and dinners with relatives Walt had never met before and would never meet again. Walt had never liked the picture much because it conjured for him the anger he was filled with that day, made to sit on a porch in Brookline and listen to his mother evading questions that would get into too much detail about their faux-life in Minnesota.

His hesitation at the top of the stairs was not to reminisce but rather to remember where his father would be. When Walt last visited Shelsandra, Kris still spent his resting hours in the parental bedroom suite. But Margot had reported Kris’s increasing reclusiveness, and if it was isolation his father wanted it was more likely he’d be in the study. This was where Walt headed, down the darker of the two hallways. At the end was the closed study door. He watched the bottom of the door for any sign of light, and at first he thought it was completely dark, he was about to double back and head to the bedrooms after all, when he heard a sound of something falling, a box or large book, beyond the doorway. He approached, prepared to knock, and then decided to push open the heavy door.

“Hello?” He was surprised at the sound of fear in his voice. He cleared his throat, fighting the quaver: “Father?”

Actually there was some light, from a single desk lamp, but it was blocked from the side of the room Walt stood on by stacks and stacks of books and file boxes. The sound of papers being moved suddenly ceased as the figure on the other side of the paper wall listened. “Yes? Who is it?”

“Father, it’s Walt.”

A longer pause. Then another cleared throat. “Son! Your mother told me you were … is today the day?”

“Yes. We arrived about an hour ago.”

“Come here!” he beckoned. Kris's voice was welcoming, but weak, as if he had just woken up.

Walt studied the books and papers. “I’m not sure where …” But then he saw an opening, and he worked his way through there, stepping over more scattered tomes, some open with cloth bookmarks laid across the open pages. The flutter of fear was back again as he came around the edge and caught his first glimpse of Kris, which was in silhouette as the single desk lamp shone in his eyes.

His father laughed, and the chuckle transformed into a cough that shook his whole body. The chair bearing his weight squeaked in rhythm. Walt considered for a moment moving to his father, clapping him on the back, but his disorientation fixed his feet. Instead he asked: “You okay?” which Kris dismissed with a wave of a hand, and in short order he had regained control.

“You … look good, Nicholas,” Kris said. “Considering all the states your mother has imagined you in over the last few years, I believe she must be happy with the state you’re in.”

“Yes,” was all Walt could say, and he wanted to reply with something in kind, something superficial noting his father’s condition, something he might be able to find to say that would be complimentary, except that he still couldn’t see much other than his father’s profile. He could see that Kris was significantly balder … or no, now that he studied him for another moment, it appeared that he was wearing a beret.

“How long will you be with us?” Kris asked, studying his hands in his lap.

“I’m not sure,” Walt said, and suddenly unsure if his father had any idea why he had returned to North Center at all, he diverted the subject: “I brought somebody with me, Father. Two people, actually. Sherry, and her daughter Arden.” He suddenly felt like a college schoolboy, looking for his father’s approval via the girlfriend he had dragged home with him … an experience he had never actually had. Better late than never.