12
BECAUSE THE SHELL of the mansion survived, the Nevsky place was still the grandest house in town, still the largest and most substantially built, and even if it was uninhabitable, it still was able to play its most important role for Babbingtonians, including me: its role as a narrative device. The mansion’s shell focused the stories that people told about the fire. It didn’t give those stories a point, and I didn’t recognize that lack for a long time, but it did give them a focus and, thereby, a tightness they would not otherwise have had. The shell, the presence of it, the way it loomed—in fact and in the mind’s eye—brought the storyteller back to it, and to the night when it had burned, giving a center to stories that would otherwise have drifted off in a thousand directions because the people who told the stories really wanted to tell stories about themselves, just as I do. The best of the storytellers, I came eventually to understand, learned how to shape the story of the fire to make it a story about themselves, seasoning it with details imported from regions of their lives far removed from the fire, but they all learned—and I learned from listening to them—that they couldn’t get away with telling only their egocentric stories. They had to put the mansion at the center. They couldn’t just blather on about themselves. They had to keep returning to the mansion. If they kept the mansion there at the center, if the portraits they painted of themselves showed them standing in front of the mansion that chilly night late in the year, their faces ruddy with the light of the flames, if they used the fire as a basis for some speculation about the ways in which their lives and their listeners’ had been forever linked through the experience of the fire, if they said something apparently wise about the way it had brought so many lives together at a common point, then they could hold an audience for a very long time, and they could bring themselves into the story as often as they liked.
Even now, when the mansion has been restored for years and is actually far more splendid than it ever was before the fire, the burned-out shell reaches across time and tumultuous memory to try to insert itself at the center of this story, a story that I admit, with admirable authorial frankness, is about me. So strong is the narrative appeal of the mansion that I’m having a hard time walking past it to continue on my way to the Glynns’, where I must, as I promised I would, try to convince Andy to let me escort his daughters to the movies. I paused, in memory, in front of the mansion’s burned-out shell, and meant to pause only a moment, but here I am, delayed here still, still caught in the contemplation of the place. I really must be going. It’s time to turn away from the mansion now, move on, knock at the door of the carriage house, and have the Glynn twins tug me into the slate foyer, asking, “Where have you been, Peter? It’s getting late!”
However, that remark—“It’s getting late”—reminds me of a bit of the history of the mansion, and I feel oddly compelled—as if the burned-out shell had a power over me and my narrative that is beyond my control—to tell just a little bit more of its story. I give in. I’ll do it.
[to be continued]
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🎧 813: Because the shell . . .