A House and its Memories

In the Home section of Thursday’s Times, the lead article concerned a remarkable African-American family and their stately home in Croton-on-Hudson, which they bought in 1966. Standing on a hill overlooking the Hudson, the thirty-plus room mansion solved the problem of housing a widowed mother, five of her eight adult children, and a young grandson. The siblings, none of whom had married except for their divorced sister (the mother of the boy), all educated and, according to the Times, all strong-minded and opinionated, pooled their resources to buy the place, with its nearly twenty acres and swimming pool. Fortunately, all were enthusiastic gardeners, and one of the brothers was mechanically gifted and able to help keep the building in good shape. All the adults adored the child, and all helped to bring him up.

The child, now 47, is James Moorhead, an architect with offices in Seattle and New York. Three years ago he moved back into the house with his wife, Pattie McCluskey, a marketing director, and their four-year-old daughter, Oona, to care for his mother and two surviving aunts. A second daughter was born to the couple two years later. The house is so large that the girls get about with the aid of scooters. The Times pictured them on scooters in the enormous formal dining room.

The last sibling died in January, confronting Mr. Moorhead and Ms. McCluskey with the problem of what to do with the house. “Even if money weren’t an issue,” Mr. Moorhead said (the tax bill is $45,000 a year), “a house like this has to be your life, and I’m not sure that’s what we want.” So should the couple improve the house, which is structurally sound, or sell it? If they sell it, what should they do with the family documents and the hundreds of composition books in which his grandmother kept a daily journal? “Can you keep the memories,” asks the Times, “if you get rid of the house?”

I thought the question strange, for in my opinion the memories persist even if you’ve lost all your family’s documents and furnishings and even if the property has long passed out of your hands. My parents bought their only house in 1939. It was my permanent address from the age of nine, when I entered fourth grade, until I went to work for Abraham & Straus in 1958, a freshly-minted MBA, when I was twenty-eight. That's only nineteen years in all, and during many of those years I was away either at college or in the army or in graduate school. My father, widowed in 1951, continued to live in the house long after his children had left it, moving away only in the last year of his life. The house was sold after he died in 1977.

Whenever I asked him why he continued to live in that house – not as grand as the mansion in Croton-on-Hudson but a large house nonetheless – he would answer that he was keeping it for his children. At the time, I didn't understand his answer. After all, he could put us up at the Ritz-Carlton when we came for a visit for less than what it cost him to maintain the house. It was only later that I understood my emotional attachment to the house and the wrench I felt when it was sold.

When he moved away to live in the guesthouse on my brother and sister-in-law’s farm, he took some of his furniture, papers, books, and memorabilia with him. The moving truck suffered a fire, however, and much of what he sent was lost. A few items from the house, though, remain. When we were visiting my brother and his wife recently, I noticed a pewter tray that I remembered from my childhood and the sight of it made me glad. A cream-colored, bear-shaped cookie container and an egg-boiling gadget that my sister salvaged from our old home make me similarly happy whenever I see them. But I don’t need those relics to remind me of that house or my life in it.

That house still inhabits my dreams and I suppose it will continue to do so as long as I dream. In those dreams set in my old home, I’m never a child, nor do my parents or siblings ever appear in it. Instead, I’m carrying on with my life as usual, but my life is there in that old house, not in any of my other homes, not even our home in Jerusalem which we occupied for 32 years, more than twice as long as I lived in my childhood home. But that childhood home is in some ways profoundly home.

Of course, if Mr. Moorhead and his wife decide to sell their house, they’ll have a much greater problem than most children have when disposing of their deceased parents’ belongings. They'll have to consider the belongings and papers of many more adults. Still, it’s hard for me to believe that if the house is sold, the memories will go with it. Mr. Moorhouse is unlikely ever to forget that house or the experience of growing up in it. Memories, it turns out, are the most durable of our possessions.