The Harlem House
By Celine Aenlle-Rocha
Pearl Garnett watched them walk up the steps from her window seat. There was the man she knew was called Richard Taylor, but today he had a white couple with him. They were young, maybe early thirties. The woman tripped as she danced up to the door and the young man caught her. Pearl saw a look of surprise in the woman’s face, rather than embarrassment.
She turned to her daughter, who was practicing scales on the oakwood piano. “Cathy, go get your father.”
“But I just got started,” said Cathy. She was ten years old but tall as a teenager. C sharp rang out—the wrong note. “Now you’ve made me mess up,” Cathy sighed.
“Just go call him down, please,” Pearl said. “Tell him Mr. Taylor is back and I’m not sure I can deal with him myself.”
Cathy jumped up, running to the stairs. Pearl knew she didn’t like Mr. Taylor, that he talked to her too much like a child even though most adults thought she was older. “Daddy!” she called, her voice like a vibrato against the walls. “That realtor ‘bout to knock on the door!”
Frank was upstairs reading—Cathy’s practicing gave him headaches. Pearl heard her husband sigh as he came down. “Already? It’s only been a month.”
The doorbell rang. High B flat.
“Are you gonna yell at him, Daddy?” said Cathy hopefully.
“No,” Frank said, frowning at her. “Of course not.” He opened the door.
Pearl was annoyed, now with both her daughter and with Mr. Taylor. But she was more annoyed with the latter, the man coming in with the afternoon sunshine and the young white couple. Mr. Taylor was a small, portly Black man, a buffoon of a real estate agent, marking time for them with his biannual visits, his ever-increasing offers.
Pearl ran her hands, suddenly sweaty, down her sides. She was forty with side-swept hair, the shoulder pads of her green A-line dress adding much-needed weight to her thin frame. Even Mr. Taylor, in his late fifties now, probably thought she looked a little old-fashioned—but, Pearl thought, at least she matched her house.
“I’m so glad I caught you, Frank,” Mr. Taylor said. He smiled so wide that Pearl could tell he was really trying this time. The couple beside him said nothing. The woman’s eyes went first to the ceiling, the floors, the walls, then finally to Frank, whom she eyed curiously, and to Cathy, who was leaning against the stair rail, smirking. Pearl stepped into the entryway and the woman’s eyes rested on her for a moment before moving on.
“I’d like to introduce you to Mr. and Mrs. Wilson,” said Mr. Taylor. “They’re recently married and looking to purchase their first house in the area.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Frank.
The woman called Mrs. Wilson had long brown hair parted down the left side. Pearl thought she was too young to be married. Pearl herself had waited until she was thirty, only setting the wedding date when she found that a white hair had split a curl in two. This woman wore clothes that didn’t fit her: a t-shirt with lettuce edges that looked like it was made for a child and a battered blue cotton skirt held up with a leather belt. She was one of those women, Pearl thought. Those women that hide their wealth behind youth and vintage clothes.
“It’s Carol Novak,” the woman corrected. “I didn’t take my husband’s name.”
Pearl bristled, her shoulders warm. Of course Carol Novak wouldn’t change her name, not like Pearl had done.
Mr. Taylor began apologizing, but the woman interrupted him. “You have a lovely home. It’s just Brian’s type, isn’t it, babe? Old-timey.”
The husband looked embarrassed, but he finally spoke up. “The fireplace is gorgeous,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a real fireplace in New York City.” They all turned to look at it. It was an enormous thing. Pearl had painted it a light, colonial blue on a whim recently—or maybe it had been a few years ago, she couldn’t quite remember—but she had left the Victorian panels untouched. Gilded flowers hugged the burnt brick, and the steel peacock screen Pearl’s mother had bought when she married still stood guard.
“It’s so nice of you to come by, but there’s been a misunderstanding,” said Pearl. “As I’ve told Mr. Taylor many times, we’re not selling the house. We’re just as happy as we’ve always been.” She noticed that the man’s eyes lingered on the fireplace as she spoke.
Mr. Taylor’s face turned red, though he didn’t look surprised. He turned to Frank, hoping for an ally. “Mr. Garnett, surely you can see that this is the right time to sell. The market may never be the same again.”
“It’s my house,” Pearl said sharply. “It’s been mine for years and I’m not planning to sell it.” She turned to Carol Novak, waiting for an apology, but the woman’s face was expressionless.
“Of course, of course,” Mr. Taylor said quickly. “But this is a decision you’ll make as a couple.”
“We’re not selling,” Pearl said again. Mr. Taylor’s eyes went up to the crown molding and he sighed deeply.
“Technically, we don’t need your permission,” said Carol, finally rejoining.
Pearl felt a hush. Then Frank said, gravel in his voice, “I don’t follow.”
“You’re dead, so you don’t actually own anything at all. It’s only because of a legal technicality that we don’t have it already.”
“Thank you very much for stopping by,” said Frank. His hand was shaking.
“But—”
“Get out,” he said. Pearl could tell, immediately, that he regretted saying it. Carol’s lips curled upwards, and her short, chewed nails wrapped around her cell phone.
“We were thinking September,” she went on. “We’d rather not have to all squeeze in here, so I hope you can find somewhere else to go before then.”
Pearl opened the front door.
“Very sorry to bother you,” the husband stammered, clearly afraid of ghosts.
Pearl could tell that Carol, eyes white-blue and bright with delight, wouldn’t forget what Frank had said. Her husband put his arm around her shoulders and tried to lead her down the steps but she turned back and smiled up at them as Pearl closed the door.
Pearl tried to shake the shiver down her spine. The living never seemed to understand that ghosts feared them even more.
“I knew you’d yell,” Cathy said happily on her way back to the piano.
Pearl leaned against the door to catch her breath, and as she slumped the welcome mat beneath her slipped and she crashed to the floor.
The Harlem House on 135th Street was a brownstone, three stories high, the front door six feet wide, weathered steps off the ground. It was built some twenty years or so after the Civil War and Pearl always loved that it sat so tall, though she knew from a plaque she’d read somewhere that brownstones were so high so the smell of Victorian horse-drawn carriages wouldn’t intrude on the indoors.
Pearl inherited the Harlem House from her grandmother, who had bought it cheap during the Depression after living on the top floor and saving her teacher’s salary all through the Renaissance years. Pearl’s mother had lived in the house her whole life before her heart attack at fifty-three. Cathy was born in the house, because the hospital was filled up and Pearl’s cousin was a midwife anyhow.
Pearl had met her husband when she was performing at Minton’s and he’d walked up to the stage just before closing. “Can you play that for me again?” Frank had asked, smiling, as she packed up her keyboard.
Cathy was born barely nine months after the wedding. Her birth screams were a high C sharp and Pearl named her so, sometimes calling her Catherine the Great. They went on in the Harlem house on 135th Street until June 29th, 1990, when the living changed.
None of them could remember the fire. That was the trouble with dying, it was impossible thereafter to remember the feeling of living, of breathing. The smoke was cleared twelve hours later, and then there was a permanent stillness in the air.
They got up that morning and realized something had changed. They could see their molted bodies still clawing at the window in Cathy’s room, where Pearl and Frank had rushed as soon as the smoky smell woke them. Firefighters opened the front door, asking if there were any survivors.
Cathy began to remember dying, and she started to cry. “I’m too young to die,” she said. “Mommy, it hurts.”
Yes, Pearl thought. It was the most pain she’d ever experienced. To be consumed by something insatiable, something with no thought whatsoever to someone’s dreams.
When the police arrived Pearl tried to explain that they were alright, they didn’t have to move on like you were supposed to when you died. Pearl was writing an opera. Cathy still had school to finish. Frank wanted another child.
“That’s not how this works,” said Detective Anderson. He glanced around the foyer, waved his hands. “You might want to get someone over here when we’re done to clean everything up.”
“I . . . alright,” Pearl said, defeated.
“Thank God you’re one of the good ones. I hate arguing with bodies after I’ve already peeled them off the street,” said Detective Anderson. Pearl couldn’t help but laugh, although she hated him.
Pearl insisted on staying in the house during the repairs. She paid for them with her savings. She didn’t seem to need the money anymore.
Somehow, the flames had only licked up the two bedrooms on the third story. The guest bedroom and living room on the second floor survived; the dining room and parlor (the Piano Room, Cathy called it) were immaculate. The three of them slept on twin beds and sofas for two months.
Frank suggested that Pearl see her lawyer, make sure they wouldn’t lose the house. Pearl was nervous as she waited to meet with him, but he told her it would be alright. Pearl’s grandmother had very specifically stated that the house be passed down through her descendants, “living or dead,” until one of them decided to sell it.
She breathed a sigh of relief.
But then, life—death—went on. For thirty years. Most of the time, Pearl forgot that she was dead. After all, the family still sat for dinner at the dining room table and played piano in the afternoons. If being stuck weren’t so comforting, Pearl might have noticed that Cathy never seemed to get any better at her pieces, that the house still aged while they did not.
At first the only noticeable difference was that Cathy wasn’t allowed to go to school anymore. Pearl and Frank tried to appeal the school board’s decision, but the answer they got was very clear: the dead simply didn’t need an education. Towards what, exactly, would they apply it?
Then Pearl and Frank lost their jobs, she at the Metropolitan Opera and he at the elementary school on 110th Street where he taught gym. Then there was the church, where one day Pastor Greg told Frank, “This just may not be the right place for you anymore.”
Then the support group for the Recently Deceased. After five years membership permanently expired. “All of our other members have successfully reached closure and moved on to the afterlife in that time,” said Pastor Greg. It was nothing more than a weekly meeting, attendees divided based on demographic: Single Unemployed Men, Widowed Women Under Thirty, Unappreciated Mother-in-Laws, Underestimated Teenage Virgins. But it was something: shared grief in lives cut short. Even Cathy liked going, for her only chance to continue seeing kids her age.
“You can’t just kick us out,” Pearl said. “We still need you.”
Ten years after the fire, Pearl finally admitted she was fighting a losing battle when they found that they could no longer step foot outside. Their feet would simply not budge beyond the welcome mat. This made Pearl burst into tears right on her doorstep. She’d been about to go see about buying a computer for Cathy so that she could surf the web after her homeschool lessons.
“The world doesn’t want us anymore,” Frank said as he held her. And after she’d calmed down, he brought up, hesitantly, Moving On. He was raised in the Protestant faith and believed they would have to find what came next sooner or later.
“But the house,” Pearl said. “I can’t leave the house. What would happen to it?”
The neighborhood was changing. It had started even before the fire. The first new family had appeared in early spring of 1996 and it had only gotten worse since then. By the time the millennium turned over Pearl was seeing white faces outside every day. She wondered if they were on their way to Minton’s, if the keyboardist there was still Black.
“It could’ve been Mr. Taylor who set the fire,” Frank said that night in bed.
Pearl was still fuming over Carol Novak. She looked at him, amazed it hadn’t occurred to her before. “That detective said it was the faulty heater we never fixed. And we didn’t even know him then—”
Frank shook his head. “I did fix that heater, I swear I did. I remember because it was the day before my birthday, the fire was the day before—” His eyes welled up. “And since when do detectives always get it right?”
“But Mr. Taylor didn’t come around until just a few years ago.”
“There were six fires that summer,” Frank said. “The mayor said it was just a hot summer but there were six, all houses in Harlem, and people were home every time— ”
“—all families who owned them. And we were the only ones who had that clause in the deed,” Pearl finished. She rubbed her eyes.
The next day was Saturday and that meant bread-baking for Frank and gardening for Cathy (she was learning how to care for basil today), and, if Pearl was lucky, piano-tuning for her.
Sometimes Pearl did wonder—did Cathy still need homeschooling anymore? In Dead Years, she was forty, the same age Pearl was when they died. But she had never stopped looking or acting like a ten-year-old. She awoke each morning and wanted to watch 80s sitcoms.
Cathy didn’t seem to mind, at least not until recently. She knew she would never go to college, but they always said that learning never finished and she’d rather sit through school every day with her parents than the other option—the unknown. But she sometimes begged to go outside now, as if she’d forgotten that in that realm her parents were not the be-all-end-all but simply captives alongside her.
“Sourdough—bread, or bagels?” Frank asked Pearl. They were sitting at the kitchen counter atop wooden bar stools. Cathy was in the dining room, writing her botanical terms on flashcards.
“Hmm? Oh, bread, I think,” Pearl said. Her leg was bleeding, just a little bit. A nail on the stool had come loose and bitten her.
Pearl had noticed fairly early on after they could no longer leave the house that somehow they never ran out of food, whether fresh or non-perishable. It reminded her of the magical pantry in one of Cathy’s books about teenage witches.
Or—it occurred to her that perhaps time had stopped, stood still, and they were reliving the same day again and again. Perhaps outside it was the early 90s and Cathy’s friends were still brandishing Air Jordans and Fresh Prince lines.
Never mind that the house was falling apart. No, it wasn’t quite that—it was falling on top of them. Loose nails, rotted floorboards, new drafts.
But, then, there was always Mr. Taylor to remind her that life was going on outdoors.
“Pearl? Can you get the door? My hands—” Frank was saying. He held them up: his brown palms were slick with dough.
Time was slipping away from her, passing her by as she stood up, made her way to the front door.
As if called by her own memory, there was Mr. Taylor.
“No clients today?” Pearl said dryly as she let him inside. “Frank is busy, let’s not bother him—come into the office, Richard.” She led him down the thin hallway behind the stairs into the small room they’d once used as Cathy’s nursery. It was still painted that pale salmon pink that had been popular then, but now it was crammed full with so many other outdated things: VHS tapes, Pearl’s old Walkman, Frank’s mystery paperbacks.
“It’s a nice room, as I’ve told you before,” Mr. Taylor said as he closed the door behind them. Pearl tapped her fingers against the desk. “It would make a lovely guest room,” he went on. “But I wouldn’t think you have many guests.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’d love to sell it off,” Pearl sighed. “But unfortunately—”
“The Wilsons were correct,” he interrupted her. “There’s a law that says after thirty years, any property inhabited by squatters—ghosts, I should say—is, essentially, up for grabs.”
“But I own the house,” she said. It must have been the thousandth time she’d said it.
“Not after thirty years,” he said slowly, as if speaking to a child. “There’s a clause, an expiration date. It doesn’t matter what the will says, the law trumps it.”
“You’re destroying Harlem, you know that?”
He rolled his eyes. “Integration is the norm now. You died too young, Pearl. It’s not my fault.”
“Oh, you didn’t set those fires to get rid of us?” she said. “So you could make plenty of room for rich white folks—”
“Of course I didn’t,” he said, throwing up his hands towards the ceiling. “Do you think I need to do things like that? My business isn’t made by murdering innocent people. But you have to see, I don’t understand why it’s taken thirty years for you to see, you don’t own this neighborhood anymore. The world is changing. People are mixing. You have to get with the program.”
Pearl had spent years thinking of Mr. Taylor as a grown man in a too-small coat, some kind of Shakespearean bumbling fool, but now she recognized a coldness in him. He was capable of pushing her out of her own house and not losing a wink of sleep.
“When my grandmother lived in this house, raising my mother on her own, she used to see Zora Neale Hurston at the grocery store every week,” she said. “ If I were to go to the grocery store today—that new Whole Foods on 125th you told me about? I hardly think I’d see anyone who looks like me.”
“Those fires were accidents,” he said calmly. “The city knew it was too hot that summer, the mayor was supposed to have the housing department come around to look at radiators—”
“Yeah, I bet he was.”
Mr. Taylor was silent for a moment. “You have thirty days,” he said finally. “I’ve been kind to you, I really have. I’ve given you a chance to leave with dignity. You wouldn’t get the same from everyone. Everyone else who died that summer, they moved on.”
He fingered his beard, turned towards the door. “I’m frightened, too, of what comes next,” he said, turning back around. Pearl met his eyes. “But it can’t be worse than purgatory, can it?”
On his way out Mr. Taylor paused at the kitchen door, Pearl at his back. Frank was on his second loaf. The air was warm and smelled of growing yeast. Cathy sat at the kitchen island, chin in her hands, elbows powdered white with flour. She was singing that song Pearl hated—the one about slow living.