The Lighthouse

It was a combination of things. For one, the walls were painted a battleship gray and the plaster ceiling was so smoke-stained that it approached the same color. All that gray made it gloomy, even when the sun shone obliquely through the window over the sink. The propane stove was another problem: it was old and crochety and you couldn’t get it lighted without an effort. It was better than the one in the living room, though, the old wood-burner; that one smoked like crazy when the wind shifted and began baffling around the lighthouse tower and down into the kitchen chimney. They had had to open the first-floor doors and windows to air the place out, which of course robbed the first-floor rooms of most of their heat.

But the kitchen… it was still the worst room. The well water that came out of the taps had a brackish, mineral taste; they’d have to buy bottled water in Hilliard tomorrow. The refrigerator made funny humming, rattling noises, as if it were about to break down-or explode-at any second. As for the pantry, it wasn’t even attached to the kitchen; you had to go down three steps and through a small cloakroom to get to it, which made it inconvenient and not much good for anything except as a storeroom for bulk supplies. But at least it had an outside door, so you didn’t have to trundle the supplies through the kitchen and cloakroom.

And then there was the other well, the abandoned one under the trapdoor in the pantry floor. One of the early keepers, a man named Guthrie, had sunk the well in 1896 on open ground a short distance away from the original building; it was slightly less than twenty feet deep. When the next keeper took over in 1911 he had built the pantry as an addition and cut the trapdoor to give access to his water supply. (Jan knew all about this but had neglected to tell her beforehand.) The well had long since dried up, and once that happened it had been used as a refuse dump for a while. Jan had shone a flashlight down inside it to reveal rocks and scrap metal and God knew what else. Rats, for all she knew. She had a horror of rats.

Well, there wasn’t much she could do about the pantry-except to put up more shelves, maybe, and make sure the trapdoor stayed shut-but the kitchen itself would have to be dealt with. There was no way she was going to live here a full year surrounded by all that dingy gray. Repaint the walls, and either paint or replaster the ceiling, depending on whether or not she could get the smoke grime off. Put some color in, some of the Metropolitan Museum posters she’d brought.

…

She smiled wryly, aware of the fussy domesticity of her plans. Here they were at the beginning of their big adventure, and all she could think about was painting the kitchen.

But was it going to be an adventure? she thought wistfully. At the moment it seemed no more exciting than a child’s vacation at the seashore. Well, perhaps that was appropriate. Often when she thought about herself, she felt as if she were a mere child; felt that nothing real had ever happened to her, nothing that constituted a test of her mettle. Everything in her adult life-after a bit of initial career and romantic disappointment-had been too easy. And she herself had remained untouched by life, growing from a pleasant, smiling child into a pleasant, smiling woman with few problems.

True, Jan had remained in love with her, hadn’t tired of her or outgrown her. But sometimes she wondered just how much good she really was to him. There was a dark, brooding side to his nature that she didn’t really understand and in which she couldn’t share; there were problems he encountered with which she couldn’t help. If she had experienced more, lived more, felt more, wouldn’t she have grown in step with him? Or was she one of those people who were condemned to forever exist in the shadowland between childhood and adulthood?

Weighty questions, Ryerson, she told herself. Too weighty to be thinking about tonight. Fussy domesticity suddenly seemed a better subject, and she began to contemplate the rest of their living quarters.

They were habitable enough. No, she might as well be fair: they were more or less comfortable. Along with the kitchen, cloakroom, and pantry, the ground floor was comprised of the living room and one large bedroom. The bedroom had two good-sized windows facing seaward, and since it offered the most natural light, they had agreed she should use it as her studio. The second floor consisted of a bathroom and two bedrooms-the largest of which they would sleep in, the other use for Jan’s study. Above that, built into a bubble-like niche in the tower, was the lightroom, where the keepers had stored cleaners, polishes, and supplies for servicing the light. There was even a barrel of sand in there, for use in the event of fire.