The Park Avenue Hovel, page one part 2

This goes, straightforwardly enough, between page 1 and page 2.

The house had been built on cattle speculation money, Horace Aloysius Yarbough's second fortune, after the railway came through in 1886. He'd won and lost his first fortune living out of cheap rooms south of the stockyard, but when he made the money back he'd built a cattle baron's house and transported his wife and children down from Chicago to live in it. Three floors not counting basements or attics, it included servant's quarters, two kitchens, and a set of stables and carriage-house behind it which Horace's son had converted into automobile garages and an indoor tennis-court (the court was torn down during the war, replaced by a victory garden that had fed the half the block).
Its highly pitched roofs in a climate that saw hail more often than snow owed more to architectural fashion than utility, but the large windows and raised floors conceded to meteorology and opened the house, allowing the humid air to circulate through the rooms and halls, and kept it from becoming stifling even in the depths of summer. Like the city Horace had built it in, autumn was its best season, over-roasted air clearing from under the eaves that had shaded the house before the evergreens had grown large enough to do the job. Silvered by a rising half-moon, those evergreens rustled in a familiar wind, the presage of fall that they had known a hundred times before, and the house darkened against the night.

Posted at Sunday, November 22, 2009 04:02 PM
In Short Fiction Category | Permalink