A New Story

I came into the seventies with my brick settled and my stair rail worn to satin at the second turn. A household arrived from a ferry town across the river, and I learned them by their trunks — the way people who mean to stay set a trunk down, squarely, and go back for the next. Rooms get used constantly. Being lived in is rarer. It begins with where the winter coats go.

The Man from Burlington

In the directory for 1867 Howard Spencer is a company president with a city office and a country address: a desk on South Third Street, a house in Burlington, New Jersey. Four years later the desk has not moved and the door has — same office, new threshold on the south side of Pine, two blocks from the Square. He would live behind that door for twenty-two years before he owned an inch of it.

The house he rented belonged to a dead man's estate. The merchant who took the ground in 1854 had occupied the finished house only a few winters before letting it out, and after his death the title ran through wills into a trust company's hands. The Spencers moved in under trustees, and stayed longer than anyone before them.

I know money by its smell before I know its name. Coal in the front rooms, beeswax on the rail, and under all of it, on certain sleeves, a fine chalk-white dust that never quite brushed out.

White Clay

The dust was kaolin. Howard Spencer was a pioneer of the kaolin and spar workings at Hockessin, Delaware, and drew a large fortune out of the soft white china clay that becomes porcelain in a kiln. The teacups on the mantel and the money that paid for the mantel came out of the same ground. It is a peculiarly Philadelphia fortune: not railroads, not iron, but the powdered whiteness that makes a plate ring when you flick it.

Not everything the clay bought could be kept. In the spring of 1891 a Spencer child died in this house of scarlet fever — seven years old, the eldest son of Graham and Agnes, named for his grandfather, who was still very much alive and about to buy the house his grandson had died in. The death notice printed no given name at all, and closed the door on the rest: interment private.

Bought at the Hammer

That purchase came at the Philadelphia Exchange on Wednesday, May 10, 1893. Howard Spencer was the buyer, and the deed followed on June 29. After thirty-nine years the house stopped being an investment and became a possession.

Pine Street, No. 1822, four-story residence, lot 22 x 90 feet, $14,000.

Eleven O'Clock, November

He had it three years. Howard Spencer died at Atlantic City on June 28, 1896, aged seventy-five. Five months later, on November 21, his son Graham died in Philadelphia at forty-four, and on the morning of Tuesday, November 24, at eleven o'clock, the funeral went out through this door — from the residence of his relatives, as the notice had it, a man carried out over a step that was not his. Late November light comes through the tall front windows flat and silver. The pocket doors rolled back into the wall to make the two parlors one long room. Cold air pushed in each time the door opened, and hothouse lilies lost an argument with coal smoke.

Slow feet that morning, and many of them, every one careful on the marble because November leaves it slick. Then the house went quiet in the particular way a house does when the person deciding what happens next is a woman standing alone in the hall.

What the Widow Did

Agnes M. Spencer took title on April 3, 1899, under her father-in-law's will, and did not wait out the summer. By July she had architects; by August she had a contractor and a price. A widow who had buried a son, a father-in-law and a husband inside six years answered by building upward — a whole new floor lifted over the old roof, new rooms with nothing in them yet, standing at the top of the stairs above every room where the mourning had happened.

Sawdust that autumn, and mortar, and the strange warm draft of a house briefly open to the sky. When they closed it again I was five stories tall. I have kept the extra floor. It is the quietest part of me — and at two in the morning it is the only room in Philadelphia where you can hear the street stop.