Danielle Steel - The House

“I should have brought a flashlight,” Sarah said, sounding annoyed. This was not going to be as easy as she had hoped. As she said it, Marjorie reached into her bag, and handed one to Sarah. She had brought another for herself.

“Old houses are my hobby.” They both turned their flashlights on, and peered around. There were heavy boards on the windows, a white marble floor beneath their feet that seemed to stretch for miles, and overhead an enormous chandelier that was electrified, but the connections to the switch must have decayed over the years, along with everything else.

The hallway itself had beautiful molded panels and was very large, the ceiling high. And then on either side, they saw small receiving rooms that must have been rooms where people waited when they came to visit. There was no furniture anywhere to be seen. The floors of the two receiving rooms were beautiful old parquet, and the walls were carved antique boiseries that looked as though they had come from France. The two smaller rooms were exquisite. And in each there was a spectacular chandelier. The house had been stripped before Stanley bought it, but he had mentioned to Sarah once that the previous owners had left all the original sconces and chandeliers. They both saw then, too, that there were also antique marble fireplaces in each of the rooms. Both receiving rooms were identical in size. Both would have made exquisite studies or offices, depending on what the house became in its next life. Perhaps a fabulously elegant small hotel, or a consulate, or a home for someone incredibly wealthy. The interior had the feel of a small château, and the exterior had always suggested that to Sarah as well. It was the only house even remotely like it in the city, or perhaps even in the state. It was the kind of house, or small château, one expected to see in France. And according to Marjorie, the architect had been French.

As they proceeded farther into the enormous white marble hallway, they could see a large staircase in the center of it. Its steps were white marble, and there were bronze handrails on either side. It swept grandly toward the upper floors, and it was easy to envision men in top hats and tailcoats and women in evening gowns walking up and down those stairs. Overhead was a chandelier of incredibly vast scale. They both stepped gingerly away from it, each of them with the same thought at the same time. There was no way of knowing how secure anything was, after all those years. Sarah was suddenly terrified that it might come crashing down. And as they stepped away from it, they saw an immense drawing room beyond, with curtains covering the windows. Marjorie and Sarah both walked toward them, to see if they were boarded up. The heavy curtains shredded in their hands as they pushed them aside. The windows were actually French doors into the garden. There was a whole wall of them, and here they were only boarded with semicircles of wood at the top. The rest of the windows were filthy but uncovered, they saw, as soon as the curtains were pushed aside. Sunlight entered the room for the first time since Stanley Perlman had bought the house, and as they looked around the room they were standing in, Sarah's eyes grew wide and she gasped. There was a gigantic fireplace on one side, with a marble mantel, boiseries, and mirrored panels. It almost looked like a ballroom, but not quite. The parqueted floors looked several hundred years old. They too had obviously been removed from a château in France.

“My word,” Marjorie said in a hushed whisper. “I've never seen anything like it. Houses like this just don't exist anymore, and never did out here.” It reminded her of the “cottages” in Newport that had been built by the Vanderbilts and Astors. Nothing on the West Coast had ever compared to this. It looked like a miniature of Versailles, which was precisely what Alexandre de Beaumont had promised his wife. The house had been a wedding gift to her.

“Is this the ballroom?” Sarah asked, looking impressed beyond words. She knew there was one but had never even remotely imagined anything as beautiful as this.

“I don't think so,” Marjorie said, loving every minute of their tour. This was so much better than anything she had hoped. “Ballrooms were usually built on the second floor. I think this might be the main drawing room, or one of them.” They found another like it, though slightly smaller, on the other side of the house, with a small rotunda adjoining the two. The rotunda had inlaid marble floors, and a fountain in the center that looked as though it had worked at one time. If one closed one's eyes, one could imagine grand balls here, and the kind of parties of a bygone era that one only read about in books.

There were also several smaller rooms, which Marjorie explained were fainting rooms, where in earlier days in Europe, ladies could rest and loosen their corsets. There was also a large series of pantries and service rooms, where food had obviously been sent up from the kitchen, but not prepared. In a modern world, one could turn the pantries into kitchens, since no one today would want their kitchen in the basement. People no longer had dozens of servants to run food and trays up and down the stairs. There was a row of dumbwaiters, and when Sarah opened one of them to inspect it, one of the ropes broke in her hands. There was no sign of rodents or damage in the house. Things had not been chewed, nothing was damp or mildewed. Stanley's monthly cleaning crew had kept it clean, but there were obvious signs nonetheless of the ravages of time. They also found six bathrooms on the main floor, four of them in marble, for guests, and two simpler tiled ones, obviously for servants. The back stairs area for the huge staff of domestics they must have had was vast.

By then, they were ready to move upstairs. Sarah knew there was an elevator in the house, but Stanley had never used it. It had long since been sealed off, as even he acknowledged that it would be far too dangerous for current use. Until his legs had finally failed him completely, he had valiantly marched up and down the back stairs. And once he could no longer walk, he never came downstairs.

Marjorie and Sarah made their way cautiously toward the grand staircase that ran up the center of the house, admiring every inch and detail around them as they went, floors, marquetry, boiseries, moldings, windows, and chandeliers. The ceiling over the grand staircase was three stories high. It ran up the main body of the house. Above it was the attic where Stanley had lived, and below it the basement. But the staircase itself, in all its grandeur and elegance, took up a vast amount of space in the central part of the house.

The carpeting on it was faded and threadbare but looked as though it was Persian, and the fittings holding the carpet in place were exquisite antique bronze, with small cast antique lion's heads at the end of each rod. Every detail of the house was exquisite.

On the second floor, they found two more splendid living rooms, a day parlor facing the garden, a card room, a conservatory, where the grand piano had once been, and finally the ballroom they had both heard about. It was in fact an exact replica of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, and utterly beyond belief. As Sarah pulled the curtains back yet again, as she had in almost every room, she nearly cried. She had never seen anything so beautiful in her life. She couldn't even imagine now why Stanley had never used the house. It was much too beautiful to stand empty all these years, unloved. But grandeur on that scale, and elegance of the kind they were seeing, had clearly not been his thing. Only money was, which suddenly struck her as sad. She finally understood now what he had been saying to her. Stanley Perlman had not wasted his life, but in so many important ways, it had passed him by. He hadn't wanted the same thing to happen to her, and now she could see why. This house was the symbol of everything he had owned but never really had. He had never loved it or enjoyed it, or allowed himself to expand into a bigger life. The maid's room where he had spent three-quarters of a century was the symbol of his life, and everything he'd never had, neither companionship, nor beauty, nor love. Thinking about it made Sarah sad. She understood it better now.