October Stories - Grandpa's House
On one Halloween in the seventies, we visited my Grandpa at his house in downtown Downers Grove. I can’t remember why we were there on a day when we would normally be gathering candy on our own street, but we figured why not try trick-or-treating in this neighborhood while we were there. It wasn’t a fruitful venture. The neighbors all seemed to be elderly or not at home. The houses were much bigger and older than the ones on our street. We knocked on enormous doors and heard it echo inside like an ancient tomb. Eventually, someone might crack open the door, be confused about what we wanted, and finally produce something from their pantry that could pass for a treat. A few houses later we gave up and went back to Grandpa’s.
My Grandpa’s house was pretty cool…in the daytime. It had banisters, old-timey keys resting in bedroom doors, a sunroom, built-in cabinets, a front room with a view of the Tivoli - the town’s movie palace, a garden to wander through, giant cellar doors that opened from the outside, wait…those were creepy. I mean, did those doors lead into the house? Let’s move on. French doors in the foyer, white stucco exterior with bits of glass mixed in to make it sparkle, crushed limestone driveway, bathroom with decorative tile, a curved handrail leading up a staircase that turned a corner. You couldn’t see what was at the top of the stairs from the bottom. I never liked that. When we visited at night, my brother and I refused to climb those stairs to the washroom. We would rather wait until we got home where we would make a mad dash to our house’s only washroom. Grandpa’s house had a lot of features that were benign in the daylight, only to transform into something quite different when the sun went down. Outside there were enormous, sprawling trees throwing ominous shadows, the glowing eyes of raccoons peeking up from the sewer grates on the side of the street, back inside there was a boarded-up fireplace, a rear staircase off the kitchen that led down, down into the cold basement where you could find a freestanding toilet, bare rafters, and a pantry with a heavy door. If someone turned off the light and closed that door you’d never get out. You would have to wait for someone to hear your calls of distress as the spiders crawled over your toes and up your pant legs. It was also down here in the basement that the laundry chute terminated.
There was a family gathering here with my older cousins from Missouri. They played a prank by getting me to go upstairs and witness a ghost making the lid of the laundry chute pop off. It was actually one of the others in the basement throwing a beanbag up the chute to make the lid jump up and down. I shit myself figuratively and got so freaked out that they showed me how it was done. People loved to freak me out in inventive ways and I rarely disappointed.
I keep returning back to the creepier features of the house but there were too many warm and inviting things there to keep me scared for very long. There was a drawer full of M&M’s, a roll-top record player filling the smoky air with music, lunch meats and breads, Saltines with butter, bananas, Coca-Cola, card games, dominoes, and Chinese Checkers. After my Grandpa passed away, the house left our family and went to another until it was finally wiped off the face of the Earth, a casualty of the tear-down culture that has taken over the area. The only record I have of it was found on the wall of the pizza place next to the Tivoli where you can order a slice of dry, tough pizza and be wrung up by one of their many mumbling teenage cashiers. The house is just visible in the background of the photo. I took a picture of that picture and it is now imprisoned on my Blackberry somewhere. As evidenced by the preceding paragraphs, I don’t really need a picture to remember most of the details. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of my sometimes sketchy memory, but the spirit is there.
