This was named a “Best of Holidailies 2013.” Thank you Holidailies, and all my readers!

December 5, 2013
Thursday

In my piece for Tuesday, about the picture of me as an infant with writing in my mother’s hand on the back, I mentioned that I remember the wallpaper.

The house we lived in from the time I was born until I was seven was part of what had been “the Hoke mansion.” It was not so much a mansion as a fairly stately house, especially for its surroundings. It was probably built at the turn of the twentieth century, or even earlier. It was the property of a family that owned a dairy. My mother moved there in about 1941, after her father died and she brought her mother to live with her. They had the smaller portion, a living room, a large bright dining room, a kitchen built onto the side (likely originally a porch — the entrance to the basement, a dank dirt-walled area, was beside the back door), and what had been the back stairs of the house that led up to two bedrooms and a bathroom so large that it probably had once been another bedroom. The other portion, where lived the elegant Muttersbaughs (Mrs. M was a voice teacher, and their daughter went on to a career in opera), had a large living room and dining room, the original kitchen with a butler’s pantry, and a splendid staircase that went up to three or four bedrooms. There was a long low outbuilding that was a shoe factory when we lived there, a large lawn, and an expanse of grass behind the factory. I don’t know for sure, but I am guessing that the shoe factory had once been a cowshed, the grassy area the pasture.

My mother married in 1946, and I was born in 1947. There are pictures showing me in my crib, installed in a corner of my parents’ room, the wallpaper visible behind me. Another picture shows me posed on my grandmother’s bed in her room, with similar flowered wallpaper above.

When my sister was born in 1950, I was moved to a single bed in the corner of my grandmother’s room, and my sister got the crib. Although the house seemed large to me, it must have been cramped. In 1954 my parents bought a house, certainly the fulfillment of the American dream of home ownership. I experienced the move as a profound loss. I had to change schools, and my grief at having to leave “the big trees and the grass” (always rendered as “big twees and the gwass”) was bandied about for years as a family joke.

There was wallpaper in the new house, half a double on Fifth Street in Harrisburg that was probably built around 1910. More cabbage roses on the walls. We lived there until I was sixteen, when we moved to a brand new house where the walls were all white. It had been the sample house of the neighborhood that sprang up around it, and when my parents bought it, they just left the walls that way.

In my first year of teaching I spent two weeks in the home of one of my students. Her parents were going to the west coast for a business trip and a winter vacation, and they wanted an adult (although I was barely five years older than their daughter) with a car to stay in the house with her. These people were well-to-do, and their house was elegantly appointed. Every single room had wallpaper — no 19th century cabbage roses, but a stripe or a small geometric on three of the walls, and a larger, splashier design on the remaining wall. I loved the house, and the family, and I decided then that such a design scheme must be what well-to-do, elegant people did with their interiors.

In 1976 I moved to a new house in a newly established neighborhood. I had to pick light fixtures and cabinet configurations, choose the colors of the siding, the flooring, and wallpaper in the kitchen, the dining room, and three bathrooms. The wallpaper I chose for the dining room was a quite expensive Williamsburg reproduction, reducing the funds available for other decoration choices. My best effort after the dining room was the design for the kitchen. The three bathrooms were an afterthought, and my builder’s representative lost my choices anyway, so I had to pick again, being careful not to go over the “allowance,” since the project had encountered other cost overruns as well. The hallway bathroom got 19th century cabbage roses, in blue with sickly yellow leaves.

In the years since, I have hung wallpaper myself in all of the bedrooms, always the 3-and-1 concept I learned from my sojourn in a rich family’s house. And one of those bedrooms I did twice, changing the front corner room from a jungle print and bamboo shoots hung in 1977 for tiny pink rosebuds and a climbing vine in 1985. A professional paperhanger handled the installation of the wallcoverings when we redecorated and remodeled the downstairs. The bathrooms have remained an afterthought. For 37 years there have been cabbage roses in the main bathroom, the bathroom that became Lynn’s.

The wallpaper was never right for the use that had to made of the room. The exhaust fan was never strong enough, and failed utterly around 1990, causing mold to begin accumulating in the corners and the crevices. We had a new fan installed and anti-mold measures taken, and I did give some thought to redoing the walls. But it was a project that kept falling to the bottom of the list of priorities, after a car for Lynn, and hockey equipment, and college expenses, and literary gallivants. A casualty of Lynn’s leaving home and my devotion to writing instead of housekeeping has been, among other things, that bathroom. When the faucet in the sink “froze” (became totally inoperable) because of lack of use and the inexpensive materials the builder used, I shut the door and began ignoring the room.

I finally had the faucet repaired last month when Lynn and Matt were coming to stay for a night or two while they attended a wedding here. This coincided with a clearing of my head and a new sense of direction and purpose in getting the neglected parts of my life in order. I began to plan redecoration of that bathroom, and, jokingly, remarked to Lynn that she could have input into the new wallpaper choices if she wished. She sniffed that not only did she not care, but that wallpaper was decidedly passè now, and if it ever fell to her to dispose of this house, she would have all the wallpaper ripped out and the walls painted, so that potential buyers wouldn’t flee in disgust.

Well alrighty then! I must be way behind on trends in interior design.

I’m using that bathroom more these days, now that the sink is operational. After I posted the piece about my baby picture, I took a close look at the wallpaper. Is it possible that my choice reflected something of a longing for the remembered rooms of my childhood? On Fifth Street I shared a room with my sister, but I used to appropriate my grandmother’s room in the months she visited her cousins in Florida, and it became mine after she died. It’s where I read my first novels, where I first tried writing my own.

The bigger. more urgent question, however, is: How did Lynn’s handprints come to be watermarked into the area above the towel rack? And do I really want to obliterate them?

ADDENDUM: The artist responds:

If you spent enough time in that bathroom, you would discover that a simple imprint of a wet digit does not leave a significant mark… Those handprints were a premeditated project that took days and days of careful repositioning of my hands. I worked hard on that! I wondered if you would ever notice them… And it took you about a decade!
— Lynn DeAngelis April, b. 1985, American artist