#Saltbox Roof | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

naffeclipse · 3 months ago

Text

Charm Brought It Back

Reader x Witches!Sun, Moon, & Eclipse

Commission Info

I am so excited to present this Hocus Pocus inspired AU requested by the lovely @jackofallrabbits! The boys star as the witchy brothers who return once a fated reader lights the starry candle. They simply must show their gratitude! And what better day to post such a spooky and fun fic than on Friday the 13th?!

Content Warning: Suggestive themes, heavy kissing, and heavy touching.

———

You turn the key and cut the engine of your car. With a flick, you turn off the headlights. The beginning of a sunset swoops down onto your ill-adjusted vision. The horizon is drenched in purples and oranges as shadows begin to crawl off of trees and their yellowed leaves. It will take a minute or two for your sight to adapt, but you have tilted and revolved the structure waiting just at the edge of the forest within your mind’s eyes for days now. It’s beyond the dirt road you’ve pulled onto the shoulder of.

Blinking slowly, you find the house’s dark silhouette through the boughs of clustered trees, and you sigh at the beauty of its preserved history.

The building is an artifact dating back roughly to the 1630s. A post-medieval English-style home, it contains two stories with an overhanging jetty and stunning clapboard siding that has survived a little under four centuries of existence. Your eyes catch on the windows and your heart sings at the sight. Diamond-paned casement. And there, decorative pendants of celestial bodies, including iron-casted suns, moons, and overlapping symbols of the two. The steeply pitched roof is common for the era and is more renowned in its descendant the saltbox form, but this style boosts its spooky aura.

The Puritan colonists were the ones responsible for importing the style to America as they landed here on the eastern coast.

It’s no stretch of the imagination to think of witches and execution trials while gazing over the beautiful home. You’re particularly intrigued by the history of the Salem witch trials, and as a historian, you couldn’t deny yourself the chance to enter the building and feed the gnawing need to stand within a piece of history.

Stepping out of your car, a gust of wind carrying the bitter edge of autumn cuts through your brown sweater. You shiver and shut the door as quietly as you can manage. This is hallowed ground. This will supply your ever inquisitive mind which is always looking to the past with a curiosity most insatiable.

You face the home. A footpath lightly serpentines between the trees. Hooligans with destructive tendencies and teenagers on dares will venture here for a spooky, fun time, but are usually caught by the police because the building sits on private property. You asked for permission from the owner of the hundreds of acres of forest land that includes the so-called “Witch House” if you might enter the premises. Given your credentials, you were certain the owner would trust you with exploring the home.

Much to your relief, the owner agreed.

You look up, arms clutching your knitted sleeves to fight the chill of an October breeze, in awe and reverence.

From your pocket, you slip out a wrought-iron key with the symbol of the moon overlapping the sun to form a black eclipse and marvel again at the intricacy of ancient beauty. Your fingertips grow chilled in the late hour. The sun shifts from orange to dark, bleeding red like blood from a heart spilled across the horizon. You walk towards the home.

Perhaps you should have arrived sooner. You were caught in another historical journal depicting the specific timeframe of when this home would have been occupied by its original inhabitants.

The rumors even now speak of curses and cursed artifacts within the building. Some of it is true—you have confirmed with your own scholarly sources. The original owners were a trio of brothers. They were accused of witchcraft and hanged for the crimes. That much is historically documented and verified.

What is fantasy is the tale of the brothers casting a curse with their dying breaths, declaring they would one day return if a virgin lit a starry candle on the anniversary of their executions.

Superstition. Most likely, the fear of the townspeople transcended to their children, and their children, down and down until it became a tale to spin on Halloween night around these parts.

The door is black as you approach it. A stray branch catches on your sweater, pulling on a thread, and you yank yourself free and silently mourn the roughen fabric before returning your attention to what really matters. You must be careful. This entire place is iconic and in need of preservation.

You slip the key into the lock hole and turn it with a thick, heavy click before the black wood door groans and slides inwards as if inviting you into its sphere. You take a breath. Your boots cross the threshold and you enter the home.

As is typical of some homes built in the early seventeenth century, an open hall greets you. In the far back is the fireplace with a cauldron still sitting upon an ashy bed. An original wood-carve table and chairs are set to one side as a staircase climbs up into the darkness of the second level. What little red light leaks inside is narrowed and cut up into diamonds by the panes. To one wall, shelves contain dusty and forgotten cooking utensils, once glimmery copper pots, and dinner dishes with designs considered much too gawky in the Puritan era but it causes you to softly gasp.

Your hand covers your mouth as you gaze around you, overwhelmed with the beautiful intricacies of metallic chandeliers holding half-burned tallow candles, and to the other wall lies a bookshelf covered in cobwebs as if the spiders refuse to let anyone examine such precious reads. Your fingers already itch to gently pry out one manuscript and gaze at the original script of whoever wrote it.

But the light—it’s far too dark now. The red has given way to blue and pale indigo. You squint. You reach into your other pocket for a lighter and flick it on. The tiny flame spouts a delicate light. Never would you dare admit this out loud to a living soul, but you so desperately wish to see the home in its authentic state, lit only by the technology the brothers had at the time: fire.

There are thick, yellowed candles lying on the table and clustered together on the narrow window sills. You have no hope of reaching the metal chandeliers but you do spy a candelabra positioned near the bookshelf on a small end table. You light it first with a careful touch of your lighter flame. The wick catches, even after all of these years. You smile softly, your heart warm within your chest as you bask in the essence of this beautiful place.

A few more candles should suffice.

You slip to the table to light the thick and tall candles. The flames bloom and warm the space in rich light, casting thick shadows from support beams. You almost set your lighter away when you spy one last candle set upon a golden candle holder. The fashioned metal twists and twines with elaborate engravings of shooting stars and slices of sun rays were placed in the corner of the room almost out of sight. The curiosity within you urges you to take a step, then another, and another. You stand in front of the almost forgotten candle.

The tallow is black as midnight. Strange. How did they color this? Embedded within the darkness are speckles of white, splattering the candle like an array of stars. Your eyes stray in search of constellations before shaking your head.

It’s true. There is a starry candle. Perhaps the brothers did dabble in the occult, playing with cards and fortune telling, and being punished with death for their interest in unholy magic.

The wick is dark and untouched as if it were never lit before. You bring the lighter flame closer. Superstition might worry another, but you concern yourself with logic and reason—explanations of humanity rather than inexplicable forces beyond comprehension.

Something stirs from a nearby corner shelf. Two long ears twitch. You catch a glimpse of a rabbit with creamy white fur just before it leaps off of the shelf and directly onto your arm. You yelp. Nearly dropping the lighter, you scramble back as the rabbit hits the floor, collects itself, and sits on its haunches.

Green eyes glare up at you. The rabbit, small and bunny-like, stays firmly between you and the starry candle.

You stand with your chest heaving and your lungs scraping out air, almost burning your thumb on the lighter flame before turning around yourself. Where did the woodland creature come from? Did it crawl its way inside like a rat and become trapped within the colonial home? The shot of adrenaline still flowing through your veins leaves your hands shaking.

The rabbit is still watching you with uncanny eyes. Prey animals so rarely stare back at bigger, larger threats. Perhaps it’s a pet. A runaway pet that somehow ended up here, of all places.

You slowly offer out your hand, keeping the lighter away in your other, as you take a step towards it.

It thumps a foot once, as if in warning, then bounds away. You watch it disappear into the house, still reeling from the fright it gave you.

If Michael was here, he would have laughed and told you to leave with him, now. He never wanted you to go here, especially alone, but you shake such ominous warnings away. He said curiosity killed the cat. You disagreed. This house is a part of history, not a curse. Witches are mere stories, conjured out of historical unrest and the longing to blame bad luck and tragedies upon an individual or three.

There’s always an explanation for fear superstition or mistrust. It’s far more sad than it is spooky.

You shake your head, smooth out the creases in your sweater, and face the starry candle again. The lighter flame flickers softly as you draw near it.

It is the anniversary of the brothers’ executions. You remember now as the shadows from other candles drape over you like a veil. You are also a virgin.

You laugh to yourself, covering your mouth as you do so. Look at you! You’re getting so worked up because a rabbit jumped at you.

It’s only hocus-pocus.

You tilt the lighter until it engulfs the wick. The flame catches, and you at last snap the lighter shut and return it to your pocket. Your eyes squint slightly at the candle. The wick snaps and bursts into sparks. The flame is not yellow or orange or even blue—it’s pure white like a comet streaking across the sky.

A crack of thunder splits the night sky with a bellow so monstrous, you feel like a child again, fearing a storm. You drop low to the ground, shielding your head as if the very world was going to fall upon you. A spark cracks in the fireplace, conjured out of ash underneath the cauldron before it burns hot and bright. The cauldron immediately begins roiling and bubbling with water. Laughter, great and terrible, and filled with the most jester-like joy sweeps over the room.

The pulse in your ears drowns at any sense but the need to hide. You scramble into the corner, tucking yourself behind the stand of the starry candle and hunker down. Holding your breath, you grab a fistful of your sweater while clutching your chest, and watch the door to the almost 400-year-old house fly open.

Three figures stride inside, looking about the place with wide eyes and disk-like heads framed in jutting adornments not unlike sun rays or shrouded in a heavy, dark blue hood.

“Brothers! We’re home!” The first one, tall and dark with deep red hues to his form, accent in sharp orange sun rays and an eclipse upon his face, turns to face his brother with bright, cat-like yellow eyes. “Isn’t it glorious?”

Another figure steps forward, yellow and off-white. Pale eyes beam. His head is crowned in bright sun rays as well. His spindly fingers twindle together in exuberant energy while he glances about the room eagerly. “Oh, yes, yes! More than anything! It’s as if we weren’t gone for more than a day—though the dust and cobwebs beg to differ.”

He draws a claw—you suck in a sharp breath—along the table’s edge and rubs his taloned fingertips together in disappointment.

“We must get to cleaning at once.”

“No,” the last figure fixes his hood with silvery digits. Golden jewels hang down the back of his unusual skull, the last and most prominent adornment a thick, golden star pendant. His eyes cast around the room, scarlet, and searching. “We must thank the little mouse who lit the candle.”

He flashes sharp teeth within his wide mouth, shaping it into a hungry grin. You gulp.

“Where are our manners?” The red and dark one twists back to the room with a flourish of his arms. His yellow gaze sweeps over the shelves and floors with a blade-like glint. “Of course, we must thank one so lovely.”

A dark cape drapes about his person. Underneath, a white flowing shirt hangs loosely to his lithe and slender figure, causing you to balk upon staring at such an exposed chest. The other two are no different, wearing similar shirts and dark trousers, but the hooded one bears a thick, longer cape while the sunny figure shares a cape similar to the first.

The yellow one lifts his wrists and frowns at the red ribbons tied around them. Golden bells jingle softly in an ominous chord.

“How terrible a reminder of our current impermanence,” he growls low in his throat, all cheerfulness lost and causing you to squeeze your ribs in fear.

“Patience, Sun,” the red one speaks, though he too casts a narrowed glance to the black ribbons and golden bells adorning his wrists. “We will affix ourselves back to this world in due time.”

“Eclipse, what a delicious creature I smell.” The hooded figure steps deeper into the home. Blue claws scratch at equally blue ribbons knotted to his hand bones but his attention is terrifyingly fixed on the candle stand just above your hiding spot.

You shrink further into the corner.

“Yes, Moon? And how lovely?” Eclipse, you assume, asks. His yellow eyes flash.

“As lovely as the stars,” Moon answers.

You watch claws curl around the wooden side of the candle stand, scratching deeply into the wood before a half-moon face emerges from behind, teeth set like a predator’s upon the sight of a wounded animal. Your heart flutters like a bird with a broken wing.

“Hello, little mouse. Won’t you come and play with us?”

You scream as he leaps behind the candle stand, takes you by the arms, and pulls you to your feet. You struggle to free yourself, crying out as he grabs hold of your wrists and fixes you firmly in place.

“My, how sweet,” he purrs in a dangerously low voice that rolls in the back of his throat. “You are the darling virgin who lit the candle, no?”

“Let me go!” You thrash but Moon grins in delight, as if you’re simply too precious.

“You deserve proper thanks,” He lowers one hand, forcing you to submit with slightly bent knees. “Here is my gratitude, little mouse.”

You freeze as he brings your hand towards his mouth, and a hundred, horrifying visions of him biting your fingers off or sinking his teeth in your palm send your blood into a frozen sludge of fear.

The witch, however, presses a kiss to the center of your palm. The softness catches the gears in your mind and jerks them to a halt.

“Thank you for allowing us to return once more,” he rasps. His scarlet eyes find yours between the space of your thumb and forefinger, and a strange stirring takes hold of your middle.

“This isn’t real,” you breathe. Dizziness begins to take hold.

This must be a dream, a thought gone wild, or inhaled bacteria triggering hallucinations.

Moon’s grin widens. He lowers your hand, loosening his hold for one precious moment. You rip your hands free of his grasp. A low growl escapes him but you’ve already slipped away, your eyes upon the door and spilling with the need to rush out into the night, away from the impossibilities standing before you—

Arms snatch your waist and lift your feet from the ground. You gasp.

Held in the air, you squirm before a hot breath dusts the shoulder of your sweater. You fall still, your throat bobbing as a mouth presses into the corner of your neck and lays a kiss on the sensitive spot. Gooseflesh prickles up and down your body.

“I assure you, I’m very real, little mouse,” Moon purrs. His hands squeeze your hips once. “And as nice as this… attire is, I would dress you in blues and silvers. You would look proper and powerful, like my brothers and I.”

A squeak escapes you. You shrink against him, caught in his embrace.

“Brothers?” The word rattles out of your throat.

“This is our home,” Moon whispers. “And you are our most honored guest.”

You manage to pry off his hands from your waist. With a sinister chuckle, the blue and silver hands release you. Without looking back, you run, ignoring the twinge in your stomach that whispers it was too easy to get away.

You hardly get a few steps before the sunny one—Sun—steps into your path. He catches you in his arms and spins you in a waltz at breakneck speed, your feet never touching the ground, before stopping without warning as he dips you low. He looms above you, his smile filled with sharp teeth.

“Let me get an eyeful. Oh, yes, you look good enough to eat,” he simpers. His hand splays along the small of your back and you gawk up at him, still trying to regain your balance after the sickness-inducing whirl. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited for you.”

“I just want to leave,” you whimper. “Please, don’t hurt me.”

“Hurt you? Sunshine,” he laughs, and it echoes with all of his heart—do once-hanged witches have a heart? There is no historical journey to give context to this very moment, you fear.

He lowers his sultry gaze to you. “I wish to only thank you. And I intend to.”

He pulls you back to your feet. You’re still clasped in his embrace like lovers on a ballroom floor. His hand hooks tight to your hip, and his other catches the side of your face. Heat spreads through the marrow of your bones.

On the tabletop beside you, something white moves across the plane of its surface, hunkering behind the thick stack of candles still burning.

His head lowers to your neck. You stiffen as he tilts your head away, opening you to his parting teeth. A tongue, dark and sinuous, flicks out of his maw. A gasp slips from your lips at the wet lick up the column of your throat. Eyelids fluttering, you start to sag as weakness fills your knees. He drags his tongue higher to taste your jawline and finishes at your cheek with a swipe for good measure.

Your hands find him and clutch tightly to his slender arms. He presses his lips to your ear and with a misty warmth, whispers.

“Thank you for—Gah!”

The white rabbit leaps up from the table, squirming directly between you and his chest, breaking you apart. Instinctively, you jump away just as Sun snarls. The heart-wrenching sound shakes your entire frame as he snatches the rabbit by the scruff before it can scramble back from his wretched claws.

“I’ll boil you alive!” he thunders. He steps towards the cauldron, back where Moon leans against the wall, watching the spectacle with an amusing twitch of his grinning maw. Behind you, Eclipse stands at the door like a sentinel, his eyes still hungry and even furious as he follows his brother’s movement to the cauldron.

Sun dangles the rabbit, now struggling and kicking but unable to find purchase against the witch’s hold, above the boiling water of the caldron.

“No!” you cry.

Sun’s eyes widen. He turns back to you just as you close the distance and scoop the rabbit in your arms. His claws, pale-boned and wickedly curved, clench around emptiness. Without thought, you turn and run again though there is little hope as you come to the door. Your boots stamp against the wooden floorboards.

The rabbit in your embrace turns its face up to you and mutters in a woman’s voice, “You have no idea what you’ve just done.”

You gawk, stunned before hands catch you by the shoulders. You’re brought to a dead halt. The rabbit leaps from your arms, drops to the floor, and races away into a shadowy corner of the room with only one glimpse of its fluffy tail before you’re left alone.

You twist and face the eldest witch’s attention. Eclipse. His yellow eyes go up and down your body, and you watch in muted shock as two additional arms emerge from the shadows of his cap. He forces you backward, one step after the other until your back is pinned against a dusty wall.

You stare into his eyes, chest rising and falling rapidly. Your pulse pounds in your eardrums.

“I don’t believe this is happening,” you utter.

The witch tilts his head with a wicked grin.

“We’ll make you a believer yet.” He promises, and his deep cords vibrate through your form. “My dear, we simply must thank you for all that you’ve done for us.”

His claws slip over your collarbones. Your breath quickens, a stirring you cannot name unfolding deep within your middle. His extra set of hands fall to your hips and begin caressing the bones. Daintily, carefully, his warm fingertips slip just underneath the hem of your sweater, touching your bare flesh. A shiver runs down your entire body, leaving you to squirm.

“Be a good little comet,” he says softly, “Let me pour my gratitude all over you.”

“I didn’t—I didn’t know it was true,” you stare into his face, marked with a red crescent over a dark shadow, and his eyes pierce into the very nature of your being. “You’re back.”

“Because of you,” he rumbles softly in his chest. His grin pulls higher at the corners.

His claws slip over the nap of your neck and card gently into the small, sensitive hairs at the bottom of your skull. You breathe in. His eyes brighten in pleasure before he slips his sharp but controlled talons over the shells of your ears and follows the arch of your cheekbone. His gaze drops to your lips. Your heart thumps and thumps against your sternum so powerfully, you fear he may hear it.

His lips pull over his razor-sharp teeth and you stop breathing.

His other set of hands begins working up the sides of your torso. He rubs slowly and gently, but you squirm despite this. He touches you far too intimately when you have never experienced such affections before. A mewl escapes your lips. You wriggle as he refuses to relent.

In answer, his upper hands lower and capture your hands together in one, and pin them above your head to hold you in place. He coos, chastising. A great roil starts in your stomach and expands upwards until your face becomes pink and flushed.

“Hold still, little comet,” he chuckles, and you whimper. “I’m not finished with showering you in all my adoration.”

“Eclipse,” your breath is harsh and hot.

“It is good to hear my name upon such lovely lips,” his voice lowers, husky and scorching. “I knew a virgin would light the candle. I swore it to my brothers as they set us on the gallows and draped nooses around our necks. You are our light, our savior. How could I ever thank you?”

In his words, his burning stare that singes with sincerity, it clicks into place. All at once, you believe what you are seeing with your own two eyes.

It’s true. He’s back. He and his brothers have returned with magic.

“I have questions,” you say hesitantly in your demureness, “I want answers.”

“Of course,” Eclipse agrees easily. “But first…”

A dark claw brushes your hair back from your face. The flutter in your heart can’t seem to hold still. Eclipse’s grin widens and his eyes soften.

“You have freckles like constellations,” he murmurs in the manner of one gazing at the night sky or one studying an ornate painting.

Before you can shape words to reply, to say anything that might free you from his grasp, his mouth is upon yours. A sound softly catches in the back of your throat. You fall still under his caressing hands still moving below your sweater. He traces the row of your ribs. You have just enough mind to wonder if he feels your skin prickle in your sensitivity. His other hand clasps your wrists tighter. You gasp against his teeth.

He pulls gently, hungrily, taking you as if a bite of honeycomb. You become melted honey, easily malleable between his teeth and then molded by his mouth. His tongue invades you. You moan softly at the claim he lays upon you until you become weak in the knees and almost fall. His kiss seals your fate.

He releases you from his maw. You sink slightly, and his arms fall out from under your sweater to properly catch you. He lowers your wrists, returns your hands, and brushes your hair once more from your face.

A chuckle emits from his lips, and you burn.

“You’ll stay with us, won’t you?” he asks, but he waits for no answer as he scoops you into his arms. Feet dangling, you have no choice but to cling to his shoulders and endure his brothers’ attention as he twists around and faces them.

The rabbit’s right. You are in trouble. Michael warned you. He said curiosity killed the cat.

But charm brought it back.

#naff's writing commissions #witches and rabbits and candles oh my #if michael was there he would be so mad at you for lighting the candle smh #hocus pocus au my beloved #witch!eclipse #witch!sun #witch!moon #charm brought it back #naff writing

399 notes · View notes

bettyfrommars · 8 months ago

Text

Welcome Back to The Nightmare Factory

Steve's Version

m a s t e r l i s t

Blurb 1

Nightmare!Steve x fem!Reader

word count: 2.2k

18+ONLY, lurking monsters, night terrors, star-crossed lovers

Author's Note: Hi, I've missed you. Until now, we've only explored this world with Nightmare!Eddie, but it's time to throw Steve into the mix. Different reader, of course, and I plan to jump around to random scenes as this progresses; it shall not be a linear experience. Nightmare Steve is a biker Steve hybrid that will often cross over into the world of Hawkeye that I created for my biker!Steve au.

Also, you do not need to have any knowledge of the original Nightmare Factory or biker Steve to enjoy this xoxox

You didn’t know how long you’d been waiting on the bench under the bus stop awning, but the sun was sinking on the horizon and the air vibrated with the promise of rain. A drizzle dotted a few fine pinpricks on the sidewalk, yet you could feel a damp chill seeping in through your bones as if you were already soaked.

Across the street between monochrome, saltbox roof houses, stood an old brick building. A flickering neon sign out front had the outline of a purple hand on it, palm out announcing Psychic Readings in a mustard yellow that rivaled the melting sun beyond.

You looked down at your wristwatch, only to realize you weren’t wearing one, and then checked up and down the empty street. Just when the thought occurred to you that there were no other humans around, the flutter of a curtain in one of the houses across the way caught your eye.

Maybe the buses stopped running at dusk and you’d missed the last one. But then, how would you get…to wherever you were going?

“It’s never on time,” a voice next to you spoke up, making you jump.

You were certain that there had not been anyone sitting on the bench with you a second ago.

“The bus, it’s never on time,” she repeated. The woman had short, dark blonde hair tucked behind her ears, a spray of freckles across her nose, and a restless smile tugging up the side of her mouth. “There is always a lot of traffic at the factory on Fridays.”

“The factory?” You cocked your head, trying to understand.

The last offering of fuchsia in the sky flickered and was gone in a blink, erupting a sudden fear in your gut at the loss of light. The fresh blanket of cold made your toes cramp, as if they’d met with one of those icy pockets in sunless, concrete corners.

The woman kept the side of her face to you at all times, never turning to look at you straight on. You had this crazy notion that perhaps the other side of her didn’t exist.

The sight of a motorcycle approaching warmed your heart and your guts for some reason, and you hoped that the bus was not far behind. The rider inched to a halt at the curb in front of you, stomping one booted foot down to steady himself, engine grumbling. In the amber glow of the single streetlamp, you were able to get a look at him.

Wearing sunglasses at night, he raked a big hand through his head of thick, unruly hair, and reached up to light the smoke that was held between his lips. The lighter’s flame let you see the square line of his jaw and that the tattooed lettering on the knuckles of one hand spelled LOVE. He wore leather and denim, with a red shirt, and he tipped his chin to you before turning to the other woman on the bench.

Behind him, the neon psychic sign blinked furiously as the bus in question crawled into view.

”Thank you for keeping an eye on her,” Steve said to the other one on the bench, exhaling smoke out the side of his mouth.

“Of course,” she stood to button her coat. “Beers are on you this Friday.”

“Remind Eddie if you see him, I might be running late again.” He hadn’t gestured to you, but somehow you knew that you would be the one to make him run late.

The bus rattled closer; it was filled with blue light and odd, dark shapes.

“Are you ready?” The man on the motorcycle tossed the smoke to the pavement and extended his hand to you. “Jump on.”

You got to your feet and hesitated, trying to figure out where you knew him from.

“But I’m waiting for—-”

At that, the air brakes on the lumbering passenger vehicle hissed, coming to a stop, and a cloud of fog billowed up around it.

“You were waiting for me,” Steve tipped his chin at you. "I made a promise."

At another glance, you saw through the windows that it was crowded in figures wearing black shrouds, shuffling forward at the sight of you. They were moaning with unspecified longing that somehow translated into the creepiest sound you’d ever heard. Gasping, you took his hand, and he pulled you close, urging you on the seat behind him.

“I got you,” he whispered.

On the bench, Robin filed her fingernails with an emery board, blowing a pink bubble with her gum like she hadn’t a care in the world.

You held onto Steve’s leather jacket to swing your leg over the bike, zipping your torso flush to his warm back.

Behind Robin stood an endless sea of the same shrouded creatures, clustered dead still in the night as if being actively born from it. Some had antlers, some had hunched backs, and others were impossibly tall and thin. Lining up front to back and shoulder to shoulder, appearing out of seemingly nowhere, collectively withering one long, low growl.

You hugged him frightfully close, squeezing your eyes shut to bury your face in the back of his neck. He smelled like warm summer rain, damp earth, campfire smoke, and a zest of vanilla spices. Safe, I'm safe.

He revved the throttle and told you to hang on tight, but you wavered, checking to find that the army of faceless ghouls were right there—they’d been yards away, but now they were within arm's reach, hovering.

But then you were in the wind, head forced back by the velocity, choking on a scream, whimpering unintelligible pleas into the leather of his jacket.

He shifted gears and it felt like you’d entered some type of warp speed, engine humming between your legs. Eyes shut tight, you swore you felt sharp swipes of skeleton hands at your back and heard the shrieking wails of defeat as the masses lumbered to catch up.

The flap of enormous wings sounded as a few took to the sky, but Steve shifted again, lowering his head. “Don’t look,” he begged. “Soon they won't be able to touch us.”

Back at the bus stop, the door to the bus squealed open, and Robin did not look up from picking a piece of skin from her cuticle.

“Good luck with the next one, Dickie,” she said to the driver who hulked in his seat like Mothman, one clawed hand clutching the wheel.

Dickie looked from Robin to the road ahead and back a few times, trying to understand what was happening, before sinking his wings with a sigh.

“Do you need a ride, sugar?” His voice was usually deep and bellowing on the job, but just then it came out in a comically high-pitched southern accent.

—---

The first time you met Steve, he’d been waiting in the corner of your bedroom.

Waiting for you to go to sleep.

But you were up late watching Ewoks: The Battle for Endor on the small, VCR combo TV that was perched on your dresser. The violet crescents under your eyes hinted to the lack of sleep you’d been getting the past few months. You’d been having a bad rash of nightmares, and if you didn't know any better, you’d think you'd been specifically targeted somehow.

This was not the first time you’d unknowingly had a movie night with shadow Steve, but it was the first time you’d felt his presence. He was nothing but a dust mote of a glimmer, but still, you stared right at him, and asked if anyone was there.

Had he made a sound? Had he accidentally snickered a bit too loud at the giddy Ewoks? Or were you starting to sense him though the cosmic barrier that kept you in different worlds?

It made his heart stall for a second, mouth agape, and a hand outstretched, ready to come clean. To let you know that he wasn’t just some creep off the street, that he was just doing his job—but of course you couldn’t see him. If he ever got the chance to explain it all to you, he’d let you know that the two of you were on different channels of reality. Like switching stations on a radio, he could tune into you, but you didn’t know how to tune into him.

So, there was no way that you could…

“Back again I see,” you hummed, turning to face the screen from where you sat propped up against the headboard in your pajamas. “Where will you be hovering tonight? On the ceiling or at the foot of the bed?”

Were you talking to him? As far as he could tell, you were the only two in the room.

“I’m not afraid of you,” you whispered, defiantly.

Did you really mean it, or were you trying to convince yourself?

“I don’t want you to be afraid of me,” but even as he stepped forward, he knew the effort was fruitless.

The sound of a barely audible whisper made you turn the volume on the tv down.

Okay, before you’d been bluffing, but that time you really heard something.

Flinging the covers off to jump out of bed, you spun around, wielding the remote out in front of you like a weapon.

“Who’s there?”

Nothing. No one. Just you and all of the nightmares you’d been having about paralysis demons pinning you down and sucking out your soul.

A horrifying thought occurred to you then that maybe they’d followed you out of your dreams and into the waking world.

You tossed the remote back onto your bed, spinning around to address the room. “If you have something to say to me, do it now. Don’t be a fucking coward and wait till I'm asleep.”

Your declaration was met with nothing but the garbled conversations on the TV.

It took a while for you to finally get to sleep, but once you did, that’s when the rattling on your closet door started. It was just a few scratches at first, coming from the inside, but then the doorknob wiggled.

Steve stepped out of the corner and walked—nay, floated.---around to the other side of your bed to act as a barrier between you and whatever was coming out of the closet. The beeping on his watch told him you were entering a deep sleep; he’d also draped an invisibility layer down just in case you did happen to wake up during the confrontation.

The closet door creaked, opening an inch, just enough for three long and meaty, hairy fingers to curl into sight.

“Wrong room, genius,” Steve said curtly.

The door propped ajar just enough so that one big, milk white eyeball could peer out. “Steve?” A garbled voice whispered. “I thought you were at the abandoned hospital with Hopper tonight?”

“I was,” Steve answered. “But now I’m here, asking you not to bother with this one.”

The big eye twitched, blinking a few long blinks. “Whatever you say, dude. I’ve got better places to be.”

Whispers tickled at your ears, as if someone was having a conversation nearby, but not close enough to fully comprehend the words.

You heard the name Steve.

So then you muttered it outloud: “Steve?”

Shocked, he spun around, staring at your parted lips. But then a snore escaped from the back of your throat, and he eased back.

“I won’t let them bother you,” was what he said, and you believed him. Whatever that meant.

—-----

The motorcycle began to slow, and you took the opportunity to check behind you, slumping with relief to find that the highway was empty. Lined with evergreens on either side, the road shot straight out behind the two of you into ominous, smoky oblivion, as if there had never been a town or a Psychic sign or a bus stop.

Steve knew he was cutting it close, his time with you would be over soon, but he wanted to take you out and show you something cool, maybe even impress you. He’d told you about the crimson-colored lake before, about how you could see Mermaids and all manner of sea creatures. It didn’t make sense that they were all in a lake, but still, there it was.

“Have you ever seen a mermaid in real life before?” He asked over his shoulder, shouting above the wind.

You hadn’t, not that you were aware of, anyway. Everything felt so real, it hadn’t even occurred to you that perhaps you weren’t even in the real world.

“Well, don’t talk to them, and don’t look at them for very long,” he warned. “They’ll bite your face off as easily as wink at you.”

You nodded, taking in that information.

“I want to show you where—-”

But then the road dropped off at an abrupt cliff edge that appeared to jut straight down into a sea of stars. It was like a reflection of the sky above.

“Shit, I’m so sorry—” Steve yelled as the bike caught air.

You were going down, falling into the ether of nothingness, and you couldn't tell if the blood-curdling scream you heard belonged to you or someone else.

You clung to Steve while you plummeted down through the infinite space of some unknown universe, about to crash and burn.

Was this it? Is this how you die?

In bed, your eyes flew open with a jolt, clutching a pillow to your chest like you might’ve once held onto a boy for dear life. The pillow smelled like warm summer rain, campfire smoke, and vanilla spices.

After a few blinks, you realized that was the first time you’d slept all through the night without being forced awake by terrors in a very long while.

-----

Thank you for reading, and much love to those of you who have enjoyed this world from the start. Now that I'm writing again, I'm working on a very special chapter for Nightmare Eddie as well that I can't wait to share with you.

#Nightmare Factory #nightmare!Steve #Steve Harrington #Steve Harrington fanfic #Steve Harrington fluff #Nightmare Steve #biker!Steve #nightmare!Eddie

106 notes · View notes

dankusner · 6 months ago

Text

youtube

The Libra husband is not an easy man to please. The monotony of domesticity is not to his liking.

But he is a passionate man. And a respecter of tradition."

All I have to do is find this Libra man. "The Libra husband is reasonable. He is a born judge. And no other zodiacal type can order his life with so much wisdom." God. That's all I need: order. That's all I need: an ordered life. You know, a manager. But he's got to be a Libran.

Inside Grey Gardens With Gail Sheehy -- New York Magazine - APR. 13, 2009

The Secret of Grey Gardens By Gail Sheehy

From the January 10, 1972 issue of New York Magazine.

This is a tale of wealth and rebellion in one American Gothic family.

It begins and ends at the juncture of Lily Pond Lane—the new Gold Coast—and West End Road, which is a dead end.

There, in total seclusion, live two women, twelve cats, and occasional raccoons who drop through the roof of a house like no other in East Hampton.

Ropes of bittersweet hang from its frail shoulders.

A pair of twisted catalpa trees guard its occupants, but nothing is safe for long from invasion by the bureaucrats and Babbitts.

Least of all a mother and daughter of unconventional tastes who long ago turned their backs on public opinion.

The seeds of their tale go back to 1915 when the family first discovered, beyond “dressy” Southampton, a “simple” summer resort composed of saltbox houses and village greens.

The sea was still tucked then behind great cushions of sand dunes.

Behind them potato fields stretched in white-tufted rows clear to the horizon like a natural Nettle Creek bedspread.

Right from the start, East Hampton provided a refuge for the family’s scandals and divorces and all manner of idiosyncrasies common to those of high breeding.

The family brought the wealth of Wall Street to this simple resort.

It casually purchased a cabana at the Maid-stone Club for $8,000 in 1926.

The men set down roots in four houses and sired beautiful women.

In due time the little girls’ names entered the Social Register.

Later they would appear in the creamy pages of The Social Spectator…

“Seen at the recent East Hampton Village Fair, ‘Little Edie’ Beale,” under the picture of a full-lipped blonde shamelessly vamping through the brim of her beach hat, or, “Picking up another blue rib-bon at the East Hampton horse show, Miss Jacqueline Bouvier with her father, John Vernou Bouvier III captions which reflected the infinite self-confidence of the indomitably rich.

The Social Spectator described an era which will never be again.

The family’s homes are gone now, all but one.

And the family itself, after 300 years, has slipped back into the abominable middle class.

All except a few.

One became the most celebrated woman in the world, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.

Two others never gave a damn about all that.

They rebelled against the Maidstone, shunned garden parties to pursue the artistic life.

Now, passed over by history, they are left to the wreck of their house.

Contemporary East Hampton is caught up in a war of land values.

It is no longer a refuge for artists and eccentrics.

The dropouts at the foot of the lane do not conform to the new values exhibited by “beach houses” with elevators.

Their lives are remote from the Friday afternoon helicopters which ferry high-powered businessmen out from the city and drop them into pastel sports cars on D. Blinken’s lawn.

Around the corner from them, on West End, a parade of tycoons’ castles, one owned by Revlon’s Charles Revson (who copied the house next door), ends in a nest of five mansionettes owned by Pan Am’s Juan Trippe and family.

But the grounds belonging to the dropouts bear no resemblance to putting-green lawns, nor to the wedding-cake trees created by topiary gardening on estates which retreat from them behind trimmed privet hedges.

These two have lived beyond their time at the juncture of Lily Pond Lane and West End, where the privet runs wild over a house called Grey Gardens.

Last summer our lives crossed by chance.

My daughter and I often walked past Grey Gardens on the way back from Georgica Beach.

We could see little of the house because on that side it was obscured by a tall hedge with an overpowering fragrance of honeysuckle.

But my daughter had seen fat cats in the high grass.

She also reported a light in the second-floor window at night.

On this scanty evidence she had dubbed it the Witch House.

One Sunday morning’s discovery changed all that.

My daughter came running, tearful, holding three baby rab-bits in a Tide box.

She had found them motherless by the side of the road.

“Can’t we take them home?” she asked.

I explained they would never survive the train ride.

She had another idea: if the Witch House had all those cats, whoever lived there must like animals.

Before I could protest, we had ducked under the hedge, skittered past a 1937 Cadillac brooding in the tangled grasses, and we were deep into the preserve of twelve devil-eyed cats.

There was no turning back.

“Mother?”

We whirled at the sound of an alien voice.

She was coming through the catalpa trees as a taxi pulled away, and she was covered everywhere except for her face, which was beautiful.

“Are you looking for Mother, too?” she asked, more unnerved than we.

My little girl held out the Tide box to show her the trembling bunnies.

“Did you think we care for animals here?”

The woman smiled and bent down close to the face of the child, who silently considered her.

This was not at all a proper witch.

She looked sweet sixteen going on 30-odd and had carefully applied lipstick, eyeliner and powder to her faintly freckled face.

The child nodded solemnly: “This is an animal house.”

“You see! Children sense it.”

The woman clapped her hands in delight.

“The old people don’t like us. They think I’m crazy. The Bouviers don’t like me at all, Mother says. But the children understand.”

My little girl said it must be fun to live in a house where you never have to clean up.

“Oh, Mother thinks it’s artistic this way, like a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Don’t you love the overgrown Louisiana Bayou look?”

My daughter nodded vigorously.

At this point the woman looked shyly up to include me in the conversation.

“Where do you come from?”

“Across the way.”

“My goodness, it’s about time we got together! How many years have you been here?”

She rushed on before I could answer, as though reviving a numb habit of social conversation and desperate not to lose the knack.

“You phone me. Beale. That’s the name, Edith Beale.”

As she swept past us in a long trench coat and sandals, her head wrapped in a silk scarf knotted at the back of the neck, I could have sworn she was—who?

I’d seen her picture hundreds of times.

Edie Beale, safe on her porch, pointed out the formally lettered sign she had made for the front door: Do Not Trespass, Police on the Place.

“Are there really?” my daughter breathed.

“Not really, but Mother is frightened of anyone who comes by.”

She then described a neighbor who tries to club the cats to death at night, and the boys from across the street whose surfer friends try to break in.

I suggested the boys might just be prankish.

“Oh no, they’re dangerous. I can tell what’s inside a person right away. Mother and I can see behind the masks; we’re artists, it’s the artist’s eye. I wish I didn’t have it. Jackie has it too. She’s a fine artist.”

“Jackie?”

“I’m Jacqueline Bouvier’s first cousin. Mother is her aunt. Did you know that?”

“No, we didn’t.”

“Oh yes, we’re all descended from fourteenth-century French kings. Now a relative has written a book saying it’s all a lie, that we don’t really have royal blood. He’s a professor, John H. Davis, and he’s breaking with history. Everyone is. That’s how I know the millennium is coming. The Bouviers: Portrait of an American Family. Not a bad book really.”

(Subsequently, I read the Davis book and was struck by the parallel courses of their two lives—Little Edie, better known as Body Beautiful Beale, but so breakable; her young cousin Jackie, whose heart developed a steel safety catch—until an accident of fate drove one to the top and condemned the other to obscurity. It came out in the inauguration scene:

“The Reception for Members of President and Mrs. Kennedy’s Families” was the first Kennedy party held in the White House.

Peter Lawford and Ted Kennedy showed up.

Little Edie Beale approached J. P. Kennedy, who was looking his usual unassuming self, and reminded him jokingly that she had once almost been engaged to his first-born son, Joe, Jr.

And if he had lived, she probably would have married him and he would have become President instead of Jack and she would have become First Lady instead of Jackie! J. P. Kennedy smiled and took another drink.)

“I’ve just come from church, which put the millennium in my mind,” the lady of Grey Gardens was saying.

The woman before me, a version of Jackie coming from church on a Greek island, was Little Edie in the summer of her 54th year!

“You…resemble your cousin,” I faltered.

“Mmmm, Jackie had a very hard time. Did you like the Kennedys?”

She didn’t skip a beat.

“They brought such art to the country! Besides the clothes and makeup, politics is the most exciting thing about America. Didn’t you think the Kennedys would be around forever—at least three terms?”

Her eyes danced.

My daughter wanted to know if she knew President Kennedy well.

“Jack never liked society girls, he only dated showgirls,” she began, synchronizing only with her memories.

“I tried to show him I’d broken with society, I was a dancer. But Jack never gave me a tumble. Then I met Joe Jr. at a Princeton dance, and oh my!” She swooned. “Joe was the most wonderful person in the world. There will never be another man like him.”

“But you were a ballerina?”

My daughter wanted to stick to the facts.

“What, sweetheart?” Edie Beale was off in her private world again; this brought her back.

“Oh yes, I started in ballet. Ran away from home three times. First to Palm Beach; everyone thought I’d eloped with Bruce Cabot, the movie actor—I didn’t even know him! I never did anything but flirt—you know, the Southern belle. My father brought me back. He’d always thought my mother was crazy because she was an artist. Then I went into interpretive dancing and ran away to New York. Mother caught me moving out of the Barbizon, she thought it was the correct spot. But I moved into New York’s oldest theatrical hotel. On the sly a friend sent me to Max Gordon. The minute he saw me he said: ‘You’re a musical comedienne.’ I said, ‘That’s funny, I did Shakespearean tragedy at Spence.’ Max Gordon said the two were very close. I was all set to audition for the Theatre Guild that summer. Shaking with fear, you can imagine with my father still alive—he’d left Mother for the very same thing! I modeled for Bachrach while I was waiting for the summer to audition. Someone squealed to my father. Do you know, he marched up Madison Avenue and saw my picture and put his fist right through Mr. Bachrach’s window?”

At that, Little Edie threw back her head and giggled so contagiously we caught it ourselves.

“But”—we were gasping for the end of the story—“did you ever go for the audition?”

“Oh no. Mother got the cats. That’s when she brought me down from New York to take care of them.”

It was a stunning non sequitur, but the empty finality of her voice made the meaning clear.

We had come to the dead end of a human life.

Cats crouched all around in the grass, rattling in their throats, mean and stricken.

“Are they wild?” I asked.

She called for Tedsy Kennedy, a Persian.

“Mother bred them all. We’ve had 300 cats altogether. Now we have twelve, but they’re not wild. They’re fur people.” Tedsy Kennedy leaped out of her arms.

She tried for Hipperino, Little Jimmy, Zeppo, Champion—“He’s a mother’s boy”—and finally she succeeded in scooping up Bigelow.

“It’s true about old maids, they don’t need men if they have cats.”

She put her lips to the ear of the fur person named Bigelow: “We’re going away together, all right, Bigs? Just you and me?”

Bigs writhed out of the embrace too, giving her nothing but a blood bubble on one finger.

Then an operatic voice sang its lament through the upstairs window.

EeeDIE? I’m about to die.

“Oh dear, Mother’s furious because she’s not getting attention. I’ll be right up, Mother.”

“The bunnies.”

My daughter offered the Tide box.

“They are sweet, but you see, Mother runs everything around here. I work for her and she might throw me out….” Little Edie accepted the bunnies anyway.

She walked us up to the catalpa trees.

Suddenly she gasped, shrank back:

“Oh dear, it’s fall.”

We followed her eyes to the ground where a dead mouse lay in our path.

“That’s the sign of an early fall. There’s evil ahead,” she said.

It was not an early fall.

But Edith Beale was right about evil in the wings.

Late August Saturdays still found the new rich along the Gold Coast entertaining the “fun people” in lime pants from Southampton.

At high noon they sat beside gelid pools exercising little but their mouths; talking business, nibbling quiche, complaining about neighbors who drive down the land values.

These are the city people who send out their architects to order the shoulders of the sea broken, crushed, swept back into the potato fields.

On the leveled stage they set down their implausible houses and bathwater pools.

New dune grass eventually appears in patches, row on row, like hair transplants.

But dunes never grow back.

The new people use the sea only as a backdrop

(“You don’t swim in it, do you?”), insulting it, hating it really.

The wind wrecks their hairdos.

Sand nicks their glass window walls.

They use the sand only as a mine field to hide the wires leading to their Baroque burglar alarm systems.

So long as real-estate moguls and barons of Wall Street and their shrill, competitive wives keep coming out from the city to erect display cases on the dunes, the Village Fathers will appease them.

The new people create jobs and pay obscene beachfront taxes.

Nothing is likely to be said aloud about what they violate of East Hampton.

But when a few of them complain about those two living in an “eyesore” near their precious land values, the Village Fathers can be very quickly turned into a posse.

Even as Labor Day approached, such a posse was being assembled against the Beales.

The sea comes into its wild season with September riptides.

Gathering far out, it hurls its weight against the land, smearing the beach with tidal pools, while opposing waves tear at virgin sand and drag it back.

Most people in East End stay away from the beach then.

Who was that lone figure in black?

Both Sundays after Labor Day she ran off the dunes like an escapee and plunged into the surf.

Alarmed at first, I watched her draw the water hungrily around her.

But she was a strong swimmer, a child-woman of such unspent exuberance.

Her body was still beautiful, I thought, as Edith Beale came up the beach in a black net bathing suit.

“I haven’t seen you in so long!” she called. “Mother never allows me to show myself on the beach after summer, but this fall I had to come out.”

I said she still looked like a model.

“Shall I tell you what I’ve done for twenty years? Fed cats. Mother wouldn’t let me go around with American men, they were too rich and fast. She was afraid I’d get married. Nothing has happened in twenty years, so I haven’t changed in any way.”

She remembered every detail from our last encounter.

How was my trip to Russia? she asked.

How are dancers treated there?

“The simple life is not understood in America,” she broke in with a deep whisper.

“They’re all so rich and spoiled. I would have loved this life, except—I never got to say goodbye to any of my friends.”

She blushed to the edges of her flowered cap, admitting she had always preferred older men.

“They’re all dead now and I’m alone….”

We walked toward the sea, which seemed to revive her spirits.

“So I had to make friends with the younger generation,” the voice lilting now, “the boys who come by and like the overgrown look. We sketch together.”

She turned quickly and scanned the beach.

“Maybe they thought I was getting too friendly with the young boys.”

They?

Her eyes focused on a dark blur, maybe a mile away.

She recounted a strange phone call from one of her brother’s sons last February:

You’re in the soup, he kept saying, the County’s going to take your house.

“I’m psychic and I feel it coming.”

That was her brother coming now, in the jeep down the beach; she grew stiff and asked me to stay and meet him.

I wondered which brother it would be, having read of the contrast between them.

While Little Edie confounded her Bouvier relatives by imitating her mother’s rebellion against bourgeois conformity, her younger brother, Bouvier Beale, was following in the footsteps of his lawyer father and grandfather.

He married a society girl and established his own law firm in New York—Walker, Beale, Wainwright and Wolf.

Today he lives in Glen Cove, belongs to Piping Rock, as did his grandfather, and only last summer built his own summer home in Bridgehampton.

The other brother, Phelan Jr., escaped to Oklahoma and never came back.

But why hadn’t they come to the rescue of their 76-year-old recluse mother and pathetic sister buried alive in Grey Gardens?

Edith Beale must have read my thoughts.

“Now my brothers, they’re great successes. But the way they’ve been acting has put Mother more on my neck than ever. They refuse to give one penny to the house. The trust from my grandfather is about gone. Mother suffered reverses in the stock market last year, so my brothers sold her blue chip stock.”

I asked a sensitive question about her present financial situation.

“Oh we’re not destitute, Mother has collateral. It’s been my life’s work to protect her collections, we don’t trust anybody.”

The rest was hurriedly whispered: “My brother, Bouvier Beale, has been after Mother for a year now to sign over power of attorney. I think he wants to take over the house and put poor Mother into an institution. He treats her just as her father did, you know, because she’s an artist. It all goes back to Mother deciding she wanted to sing…she was so advanced. Grandfather threatened to disown her but she made plenty of appearances in clubs around New York. She is still totally modern and correct in everything, with one exception. My career.”

But how could Mother deny her the very freedom of expression for which she had defied an entire family? I pressed.

“Two women can’t live together for twenty years without some jealousy,” Little Edie Beale said reluctantly. “Not that my voice is better than Mother’s, but she can’t dance.”

The jeep was upon us.

Its driver, a stiffly formal man, was introduced as Bouvier Beale.

Seemingly embarrassed, he walked off with his sister for a private conference.

As I climbed the dunes, their bodies were turning rigid in dispute, necks stiff.

A shout came back in a man’s voice: “You must go to a room in the Village!”

Little Edie broke away and ran for the sea.

October begins the bad months.

When summer finishes with East Hampton and black ice begins to form, the stupid puddle ducks freeze in the Village pond and the caretakers stay drunk, and besides family fights and in-breeding there is very little to do. The Village Fathers had cut out their work in advance.

The new Village building inspector, A. Victor Amann, had sent a letter to the Beales back last February, demanding the overgrowth be cut back: the Village would do it for $5,000.

He sent a copy to the trust fund, which replied there was no money left.

Another letter from P. C. Schenck’s fuel company of East Hampton warned the Beales their furnace was unsafe.

A copy of that was mailed to Bouvier Beale, along with his mother’s unpaid bill of $800.

Ignored, the Village Fathers moved in on October 20. Little Edie was on the porch of Grey Gardens when five people materialized.

She thought they were wearing costumes, she told me.

One said: “You have no heat.”

Another said: “You have no food.”

A public nurse said: “You’re sick.”

“Mother, did you hear that? This horrible public health nurse says we’re sick!”

Little Edie stamped her feet furiously, informing her invaders:

“We’re Christian Scientists. The only medicine is work.”

Mother’s voice boomed from the window: SEND that nurse AWAY—SHE’S been in contact with ALL the GERMS of SUFFOLK COUNTY!

The invaders retreated, but only to assemble a proper posse (which took all of two days).

East Hampton’s Mayor Rioux was away on vacation and his deputy, Dr. William Abel, was determined to have done with the misfits.

“People are basically no damned good,” the Acting Mayor later expressed himself to me.

I thought this odd coming from a chief surgeon at Southhampton Hospital, but Dr. Abel added, “I prefer animals.”

The very mention of the Beale house caused him to grip his knees and go white:

“The house is unfit for human habitation—animals don’t live like this. The two sweet old things won’t move unless they are forcibly moved because, unfortunately, they’re not mentally competent.”

He declined to go into the reasons for his diagnosis because “I get so wrapped up in it.”

But as a public official he felt it his duty to leave me with a warning.

“Are you aware that many of the most horrible murders in our country are committed by schizophrenics who appeared perfectly stable, maybe even saner than I?”

In an unusual move, the Village sought help from the County.

On the 22nd of October a raiding party of twelve made its move.

County sanitarians, detectives, and ASPCA representatives from New York forced their way past the ladies of Grey Gardens armed with a search warrant issued by a Town Justice on the ground that the Beales were harboring diseased cats.

Cameras recorded the sorry scene: cat manure covering the floors; a five-foot-high mound of empty cans in the dining room; the Sterno stove on Mother’s bed; cobwebs, cats and all sorts of juicy building-code violations.

Mother thought it was a stickup.

The sanitarians had the dry heaves.

It remained for the ASPCA man, alone, to report he’d seen human fecal matter in the upstairs bedroom.

“They never said why it was they’d come,” Little Edie told The East Hampton Star.

Sidney Beckwith, of the County Health Department, got on the phone with Bouvier Beale and quoted the hot report of his inspection.

“Mr. Beckwith, you’ve described it very well, but it’s nothing new—Mother is the original hippie,” said Bouvier Beale.

Astonished that such a prominent family would sit back and let their relations be condemned, Mr. Beckwith warned that the next inspection would create a national scandal.

“If that’s what it takes to get Mother out of the house, sobeit,” said Beale.

It was never clear after the whole mess hit the newspapers, a month later, who had put whom up to what.

But three forces conspired to finish off the ladies of Grey Gardens: Village Fathers, a few nameless neighbors, and their closest kin.

My first clue to their plight was a New York Post headline of November 20:

JACKIE’S AUNT TOLD: CLEAN UP MANSION

I called immediately but the Beales’ phone was “out of order.”

There was nothing to do but drive out to Grey Gardens.

Stripped of summer foliage, it stood naked to prying eyes.

Shades of Chappaquiddick.

Five girls from Huntington sat in a car across the street, trading binoculars:

“We’ve been here all day.”

An old local jumped out of his station wagon, armed with an Instamatic, and posed his niece before the pariahs’ house.

“Sure, I knew old Black Jack Bouvier, used to caddy for him up the Maidstone,” the old man said. “Knew the Beales too, delivered a lot of packages up here.”

But wasn’t he horrified at this invasion of their privacy?

“We swim in different schools. I don’t have much in common with the Beales,” he said. “I’m a local working person.”

At dawn the following day I reached young Edie Beale by phone.

She was terrified, but adamant:

“Mother would never be put out of this house. She’s going to roof it, plaster it, paint it, and sell it. We’re artists against the bureaucrats. Mother’s French operetta. I dance, I write poetry, I sketch. But that doesn’t mean we’re crazy or taking heroin or anything! Please—” her voice pleaded for all she was worth—“please tell them what we are.”

In the early twenties “Big Edie”—sister of Black Jack Bouvier (Jackie’s father), wife of lawyer Phelan Beale, and mother of Little Edie—became the first lady of Grey Gardens.

It was a proper 28-room mansion when they bought it.

The box hedges surrounding it were trimmed.

But even then a mantle of ivy draped its gables and the lush walled-in garden to one side suited Big Edie’s unconventional personality.

By 1925 her husband was prospering.

Her children, Little Edie, Phelan Jr. and Bouvier, were small.

But Edie had a retinue of servants that freed her to cultivate interests and opinions which the Bouviers considered downright subversive.

She played the grand piano in her living room by the hour and sang, in her rich mezzo so-prano, “Indian Love Call” and “Begin the Beguine” to a husband who was generally upstairs hollering for his tuxedo to be pressed.

He’d go off to stuffy cocktail parties and Maidstone dances which bored her to tears.

Since she was likely to wear a sweater over her evening gown and discuss Christian Science, the family became less and less insistent that Big Edie come along.

Big Edie’s two brothers were then in fierce competition to become rich men.

Before they reached 35, Black Jack Bouvier had reaped a fortune of $750,000 on Wall Street, while Bud Bouvier made his money in the Texas oil fields Jack was always one up on his brother, which drove Bud to destroy his marriage and caused the first Bouvier divorce in 100 years.

In 1929, the same year that the beautiful Jacqueline was born to Black Jack, his brother drank himself to death.

Material success had become the real Bouvier god, as it was for so many others of that wildly prosperous era.

Only Big Edie, among the Bouviers, dropped away from bourgeois conventions.

Her brother’s demise foreshadowed the family’s deterioration.

Within two weeks of Bud’s death, and with the entire clan at the peak of its fortunes, the stock market crashed.

Black Friday found the old family broker, M. C. Bouvier, at his office at 20 Broad, congratulating himself on his cash reserves and the quality of his bonds.

Black Jack was much less serene.

He was forced to ask for help from his father-in-law.

James T. Lee agreed on the condition Black Jack curb his flamboyant lifestyle—Jackie’s father was fatally susceptible to beautiful women and big money, which he spent faster than he earned.

It was a great humiliation to move his wife and Jacqueline to a rent-free apartment, provided by his father-in-law, at 740 Park Avenue.

By 1935 his net worth had plummeted to $106,444.

The family’s lot began to improve only when M. C. Bouvier died in 1935, leaving his brokerage firm to Black Jack, and his fortune to Major Bouvier, who became the family patriarch.

But as for Big Edie, her husband had left her in Grey Gardens and disappeared into the Northwest woods, where he built his own hunting lodge, Grey Goose Gun Club.

He sent only child support.

Big Edie became dependent on her father, Major Bouvier, for a subsistence of $3,500 a year, and began to withdraw into seclusion.

The Bouviers lived their golden East Hampton summers through the thirties and forties, seemingly exempt from the country’s economic despair.

Ignoring Depression and war, they divided their time between the Maidstone Club and Lasata, Major Bouvier’s great house on Further Lane.

But the Major’s flamboyant reign was accomplished at a gruesome price, to be paid much later by his heirs.

By living off principal, he assured the family comfort and style only for as long as he lived.

But for the moment, his grandchildren were dazzling the cabana owners of the Maidstone.

The Bouvier who attracted all the stares as she sauntered down the midway was Little Edie.

The Body Beautiful at 24.

Her cousin Jackie was a solemn twelve and generally in jodhpurs.

About the contrast Black Jack was fiercely defensive.

During luncheons at Lasata he would announce to the family: “Jackie’s got every boy at the club after her, and the kid’s only twelve!”

Everyone knew Little Edie was It, but her mother never rose to the bait.

Big Edie was always busy directing the attention to herself.

The excuse might be Albert Herter’s portrait of her in a blue dress, done twenty years before.

“Did you know the blue dress in that painting is the same one I’m wearing now?”

She would pause for effect.

“That’s how poor I am.”

Black Jack would remind her that a clever woman would have gotten some alimony out of her husband.

Big Edie would remind her family that she was not a golddigger.

Whereupon she would head for the piano with ten adoring children traipsing at her heels.

The last of the fashionable family affairs was the 1942 wedding of Big Edie’s son, Bouvier Beale.

A ceremony at St. James’s was scheduled for four, and almost the entire Bouvier family was in place.

Big Edith was the missing guest.

The wedding was half over when she arrived, dressed like an opera star.

The bride and groom took the incident in stride, but Major Bouvier had had his fill of Edith’s outlandish behavior.

Two days later he cut her out of his will.

From then until his death in 1948, the moralizing Major used his changing will as a club, but Edie had already become the recluse of Grey Gardens when the news came that her share of the dead Major’s dwindled fortune was a $65,000 trust fund, her sons in control.

On that sum, Big and Little Edie have lived for the past 23 years.

Little Edie always talked about getting away…

“I’ve got to get out of East Hampton, fast,” she told her neighbor, Barbara Mahoney.

That was sixteen years ago, when she crossed the street to take her a friendship card with a red sachet: Thank you, Barbara, for being my friend, it read.

“You know,” she whimpered, “I’m 38 and I’m an old maid. I don’t have any friends. Ought to get away. I don’t know where to go!”

About that time the ladies of Grey Gardens met Tex Logan in Montauk.

He was playing steel guitar and looking for jobs.

“He was mad about my mother,” Little Edie recalls, “so you know, he came in as a carpenter-maintenance man-cook. Tex did just about everything for nine years, on and off.”

But Tex was a wanderer.

When he grew bored, he’d hitchhike out of town and when he came back he was inevitably drunk.

Then there was the night Tex was arrested for possession of a pistol at Mrs. Morgan Belmont’s bridge party.

The East Hampton Star gave the Beale house as his address.

How the ladies of Grey Gardens did fuss!

Tex didn’t come back again until the winter he contracted pneumonia.

He was found a week later, dead, in the kitchen of Grey Gardens.

This time The East Hampton Star noted, discreetly, the man was the Beales’ “caretaker.”

“We never let anybody in here after that,” Little Edie recalled, “because the house is loaded with valuables. Except once, in the early spring of ’68, when the Wainwrights invited Mother and me to a big dance. Mother said we should make one last appearance before the Old Guard of East Hampton. I was so excited—but Mother said, ‘You are absolutely not going to that dance unless you get somebody to help clean up this mess.’”

youtube

Little Edie hired two boys, sons of old natives, who were home from the Navy.

She noticed they were acting funny on the second floor, but in her excitement she ignored it.

The party was being given by young Edie’s childhood friend, Carolyn Wainwright, for her daughter’s debut.

The reclusive Beales made a breathtaking entrance.

Mother wore a wrapper open to the waist and clasped with a dazzling brooch.

In her hair, which looked as though it hadn’t seen a comb in years, she had wound faded silk violets.

Little Edie arrived desperate to dance, trailing a black net stole over her black bathing suit and fishnet tights.

Edie danced by herself with one red rose.

Somebody’s sympathetic husband got up to dance with her, but she was inexhaustible.

The rock music grew wild and Little Edie even wilder—“I flew into a jungle rock and nobody could control me, not even Mother!”

Late in the evening, Big Edie dragged her wayward daughter home, scolding all the way: her disgraceful behavior would release evil spirits, just wait.

They entered Grey Gardens to find $15,000 worth of heirlooms stolen.

Last August the Beales paid $1,790 in taxes to the Village of East Hampton for one more year in the life of Grey Gardens.

“Why are my brothers so anxious to get Mother out?”

Little Edie kept asking.

“She was going to sell the house anyway, before the taxes are due next August. She’s just a little superstitious. Mother thinks if she makes a will, she’ll die.”

Meanwhile a Village official was calculating out loud:

“It would take about $10,000 to demolish the house. With the land cleared you could easily get $80,000, a sum that would be of considerable interest to members of the family…”

Other estimates run as high as $300,000.

“The final degradation for Grey Gardens,” moaned Edith Beale.

When the raids began, the Beales decided the Village was out to break them.

“I don’t think we can live in America any more,” sighed Little Edie.

“The only freedom we have left is the press. Thank God I could tell my side of the story to The East Hampton Star. Isn’t it a terrific paper; it’s our Daily News!”

Meanwhile the international press was having a field day with the sordid tale—“they keep saying we’re old and ill and have to be institutionalized,” Little Edie wept to her lawyer, Mr. LaGattuta from The Springs. “I don’t look old, do I?”

But Mother felt she was smarter than any lawyer and refused to pay LaGattuta a fee.

After a third inspection on December 7, Mr. Beckwith informed the Beales by letter:

“Should you continue living in this dwelling under the existing conditions, this department will have no recourse but to take action to remove you.”

That action would be an eviction hearing immediately after Christmas.

Mr. Beckwith took the liberty of sending a copy to Mrs. Onassis with a personal note, mentioning that her aunt and cousin had spoken fondly of Jackie and if she could do anything to help, the Beales certainly needed it.

Although Mrs. Onassis was in New York partying all month, she made no effort to contact her brutalized relatives.

Her social secretary, Nancy Tuckerman, insisted that Mrs. Onassis was always very fond of them, too.

In her opinion, however, it was not a matter of money but of how they chose to live.

The last time I saw Little Edie was the week before Christmas, when she invited us out to take pictures.

Prepared as though for her stage debut, garbed in black net and flashy reds and heavily perfumed, she swept out the door in grand theatrical tradition.

EeeDIE! WEAR YOUR MINK! a voice called to her.

“Mother always tells me how to dress,” she exclaimed, returning with a bottle of frosted fuchsia nail polish and a mangy fur jacket. When we had finished, she invited us in.

“What can they possibly have against this house? They haven’t seen the inside.”

She led us into the narrow damp hall and up the lightless staircase, pointing out the carved banister and paneled doors…“These are very much in demand these days.”

Animals hid still as stone in the gloomy deeps until we passed; suddenly dust would scatter and…something leapt past our heads—a bat, no, a cat—flying to some ceiling perch.

The windows at the top of the stairs were blinded with cobwebs and pawing vines, the bittersweet vines of Grey Gardens grown thick as boa constrictors.

Mother had set out some crackers and Taylor’s port for our refreshment.

Little Edie poured.

“Only students of architecture can fully appreciate this place,” she said.

Her performance was exquisite.

We scarcely noticed a cat eating his own droppings in one corner.

We were completely entranced by this bizarre version of a White House tour led by Jackie Kennedy.

Mother kept wheezing inside and banging on the floor.

“She’s furious because I’m getting all the attention,” confided Little Edie.

Would Mother like her picture taken? we ventured.

“You don’t want your picture, do you, Mother?” she called out.

And then to us, in a theatrical aside, “Mother looks like she’s about to die.”

I AM. I’M GOING TO DIE TODAY!

“You see?”

EeeDIE? My MAKEUP is under the BED.

“Never mind, Mother.”

We reminded Edie of a beautiful girl whose picture ran 30 years ago in The Social Spectator, Little Edie Beale at the East Hampton Fair.

“I hate it when people say I was beautiful in the old days,” she grimaced.

“I want to detach myself from the past! Do you understand? I like to think I’m good now. I’m terrific now!”

But what does she do here for twelve hours of every day? We asked the second lady of Grey Gardens.

“I wake up and write poetry, like other people have coffee. I love the late movies on TV.”

And in between?

Something snapped in Little Edie at that moment. Her mask dropped and she whispered with urgency of a child:

“I’ve been a subterranean prisoner here for twenty years. If you only knew how I’ve loathed East Hampton, but I love Mother….they must have found out how I hated this house. They must have heard my scream.”

What scream?

“Last summer, out that broken window, when I screamed at Mother for the first time—‘It’s boring, boring, boring here! I’ll go anywhere to be free!’.”

This was the Secret of Grey Gardens—the unfinished woman who stood before us, consumed by cats, fed upon for decades by her broken mother, was far from buried in Grey Gardens.

She was only now ready to live!

Her family has disintegrated, the survivors have turned away, preferring scandal to parting with a sou from their fortunes to ameliorate this shame.

There is nothing left now, nothing, but the hope in Little Edie’s wound-shattering scream.

As we backed toward the car her lower lip trembled.

She came running to the edge of the catalpa trees and cried out: “Call me anything, but don’t call me old!”

EDIE AT JFK'S INAUGURATION

‘The Bouviers arrived first, followed by the Lees, the Auchinclosses, then the others, the Kennedys arriving last because they had endured the cold the longest.

We all reached for the hot coffee or tea, the spiced punch, the champagne, the cocktails, anything to thaw out.

Then we returned to our respective clans.

I walked over to Hugh Auchincloss.

He had never met me before and didn’t know me from Adam.

“I know all about you,” I told him.

I almost spat in his face.

I told him off for Jack Bouvier’s sake, for Jackie’s father.

The Kennedys all looked very unhappy.

I couldn’t understand how, having finally attained their dream, they could be so morose.

They seemed hyper and morose at the same time.

I’ve never seen so much unhappiness in one room before.

I went up to Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch, and told him that I’d almost been engaged to his eldest son, Joe Jr. I knew Joe Jr. from a Princeton house party.

He was visiting Princeton, and so was I.

So I told his father that if the almost-engaged had become a reality, and if Joe Jr. had lived and gone on to become President of the United States, then I, little Edie Beale, would now be a First Lady, and not cousin Jackie.

He walked away from me shaking his head.’

Edie Beale, cousin to Jacqueline Kennedy and the star of 1975’s Grey Gardens interviewed by C. David Heymann

A Woman Named Jackie, C. David Heymann, Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1989.

#Youtube

2 notes · View notes

honorhearted · 5 months ago

Text

The stiffness in Francesca's posture lessened, and Benjamin arched a brow as she said, “I suppose I shall forgive you then."

He laughed, nudging her with his shoulder. "You suppose?"

"Although I do believe that Hyacinth was hopeful for your affections," she continued on. "I recall her once describing you as ‘dashing’, although she shall certainly have my head to know I am telling you as such.”

Perhaps it wasn't kind to laugh -- no, he knew it wasn't -- and yet Benjamin could barely smother his snort as an amused gleam danced across his eyes. "Don't worry, I'd never tell her," he promised. "It'd be a cruelty to remind her of her own lapse in sanity. Though I have to ask..." Here, his expression grew a touch impish. "Did you also think I was 'dashing,' or did you mock her for her questionable taste in men?"

Before he could anticipate the attack, Francesca kicked at the placid water and sent a tall, silvery arc of droplets across his chest and face. Benjamin caught her offending leg and tugged. She laughed while falling against the earth, the sound bright and effervescent akin to the dawn breaking through wispy clouds, and struggling to gain the upper-hand, he joined in on her laughter, attempting to pin her down while she squirmed within his grip.

"I don't think it's very ladylike to drench your husband," he teased. "If you didn't look so beautiful right now, I would've tossed you headlong into the creek."

“Is it too late to call off the marriage?” Francesca teased, giggling while he tickled against her ribs.

Avoiding an errant elbow, Benjamin grinned and pinned her hands together, giving off the illusion of prayer. "That could always be arranged," he played along. "If you'd like to request an annulment, we have Crazy Man Jack, an old pig farmer who thinks he's a magistrate. He's only a little less qualified than our actual magistrate."

Francesca's giggles slowly quelled, and as a look of realization dawned upon her blush-kissed features, she nodded, eyes bright as she agreed, “Yes. Lets go home.”

Unable to help it, Benjamin smoothed the hair back from her face and tucked a long, coiled lock behind her ear, fondly skimming his thumb along the curve of her cheek. "Then let's go," he softly agreed. For once, no quips escaped him. This entire moment was perfect -- she was perfect -- and offering her his hands, he helped her up to her feet and genuflected to fetch her shoes.

By the time they reached the old Tallmadge saltbox with its slanted roof and bright, whitewashed planks, the sun was sloping beyond the trees, and Benjamin still found himself incapable of his usual jests.

Squeezing Francesca's hand, he opened the door, then looked back at her with a sheepish smile. "Well...I suppose it's not very romantic to announce my intentions, but I believe this is the part where I'm supposed to carry you over the threshold," he said. "If you'll recall, my practice on the Brewsters' family dog didn't go so well." He laughed then, the sound soft and husky with nerves. "Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever picked you up even once..."

"Oh.” His clarification did indeed set her mind at rest, expression softening as she recalled how much her family did love the man before her – Gregory, in fact, had been rather peeved that Francesca had garnered quite so much of his attention, much to her endless amusement. “I suppose I shall forgive you then. Although I do believe that Hyacinth was hopeful for your affections. I recall her once describing you as ‘dashing’, although she shall certainly have my head to know I am telling you as such.”

In her mind’s eye, she could imagine the future that he spoke of as clear as day: A gaggle of children around the fire as they awaited a bedtime story, or sitting with her at the pianoforte, or asking their father a million questions a minute. Francesca had lived that life in her own childhood, had adored every moment of it in fact, and she would love nothing more than to pass along such a life to somebody else.

“I am relaxed,” she insisted with a soft grin, eyes fluttering closed as he pressed a kiss to her brow. “Perhaps the most relaxed I have been in weeks. I no longer have a wedding to plan, after all.”

“I can’t believe you thought I was after your sisters. Clearly, Frannie, I was after your mother.”

Shocked laughter erupted from her then, a hand raised to swat at him playfully. When he anticipated the attack, Francesca swerved to kick out her legs from the still waters, sending a spray in his direction.

“Is it too late to call off the marriage?” she teased, giggles coming in waves as Ben captured her hands with his own. His question sent a shiver through her, the last embers of laughter dancing across her lips as she nodded, blue eyes bright as they met his own. “Yes. Lets go home.”

#socialseasons #for everything a season #ben x francesca

506 notes · View notes

vscmaja · 1 year ago

Video

youtube

Roofing-8 Different Types of Roofs

When you are planning to build your home or renovate your home, it is important to pay attention on roofing. There are many different roofs available in the market. Every roof is different from each other. You must choose your home roofing which suits your country climate and home structure. Many of us only know about flat roofs and pitched roofs but there are many different styles are available. There are different kinds of roofing styles available in the market. Here is a description about some roofing materials and styles. The first roofing type is the mansard roof. The mansard roof is made up of four slopes. Two slopes are on the each side of the home. The lower slope of mansard roof is a steeper and it is vertical slope than the upper slope. The upper slope of mansard roof is not visible from the ground. This is the French style of the roof.

The advantage of this roof is it gives extra space for living or storage at the top of your home. The second roofing type is the gambrel. This type of roof is same mansard roof. The main differences are that it has vertical gable ends and the gambrel roofs hang over the frontage of the home but mandrel roof does not. This roofing style is Dutch inspired pattern. The third roofing type is saltbox. This type of roofing style looks very interesting. Saltbox is an uneven long pitched roof. It has one short side and one very long side. The fourth roofing type is pyramid roof. The shape of this roof is like a pyramid. This type of roofing is used in small home structures or small home portions. This type of roofing is usually used in pool house or garage. The fifth type of roofing is hip roof. This type of roof is sane as pyramid roof. The only difference is that its four sides meet at a flat spot. This type of roof is architecturally more practical than other roof types.

The sixth type of roofing is bonnet roof. This type of roofing is same as pyramid roof or hip roof. The only difference is that two of the slides slope out an angle. This type of roof is mostly used to cover outdoor porch area or veranda. The seventh type of roofing is flat roof. The main benefit of this roof is that it construct very easily because it design is simple. This roof is also safer it you are going to stand on it. This roof is usually more accessible. The one big disadvantage is that flat roofs need more maintenance than other type of roofs. The eighth type of roofing is skillion roof. The skillion roof has single sloping roof surface. The half surface of this roof is like triangular roof and the other half is like as flat roof. Much modern architecture suggests using this type of roofing to create different and unique shape. The appropriate roofing type can give a great value to your home.

#youtube

1 note · View note

throofingsolution23 · 2 years ago

Text

Roof Styles for Home

Just like homes, Roofing Solutions are available in a variety of styles and shapes. Roof style makes a statement in architecture. A roof can make such a powerful style statement that it is often the case that the rest the house just follows suit. A mansard is a common roof style in French 19th-century architecture. It is also seen on French country style houses.

You will see two types of neighborhoods when you drive through them: either a dominant style of roof or a mixture. In a neighborhood where a dominant roof style is prevalent, homes are often built by the same builder or in the same period. Homes in a neighborhood that has a mix of styles of roofs were built at different times by different builders. This is true for both old Victorian neighborhoods and modern subdivisions.

These are the most popular styles of roofs on homes:

Gable- The gable is a roof that has two slopes that meet at the central ridge. Both sides have the same angle and length. The name pitched roof or peaked roof is also used to describe this type of roof. This simple style is used by many homes all over the world.

Cross Gable -A Cross Gable Roof is two or more gables that meet at a right angle. This stylish update of the traditional gable is found on many homes.

SaltboxThe roof of the saltbox is a variation on the gable. The house is two-story in the front, and one story at the back. For this arrangement, the front gable has a steeper slope than the longer, shallower run at the back. This roof, also known as a "catslide", is a New England tradition.

HipThe roof of the hip has four sides with the same slope. The longer sides end at a point on the ridgeline, while the shorter sides are at a point near the end of the ridgeline. This type of roof was popular in 1960s and 1970s subdivisions.

Pyramid () - A pyramid roof has a hip style roof where the sides are arranged at a point rather than meeting at the ridgeline. Some roofs are equal in length and have the same slope, while others have a different slope and length. Since ancient Egypt, this style is common.

Mansard The mansard is a roof with four sides, each of which has two angles. The lower angle, which is often quite steep, accommodates openings and windows. The steeper angle at the top is centered at a peak, or along a ridgeline. This is the traditional French style.

Gambrel A gambrel is similar to a mansard, except that the roof has angles on only two sides. The two other sides are flat, similar to the ends of a gable. This style is commonly found in French- or Dutch-influenced neighbourhoods.

Flat –A roof with a flat surface is a plane that has little or no slope. There is some disagreement, but most roofs that have a slope of 10 degrees or less are considered flat. This style is common for commercial buildings.

Shed The roof of a shed is a flat roof with one side higher than the other. Many modern houses have a slope of at least 10°.

Barrel Roof The barrel roof has a half-cylinder form that runs along the length of the roof. It is a good choice for a rectangular structure.

Dome RoofA circular structure needs a dome roof that resembles half of a globe.

0 notes

civiconcepts · 2 years ago

Text

30 Types Of Shed | Different Types Of Shed In Backyard | Types Of Backyard Shed | Best Shed Styles Designs

Introduction To Shed

There is a number of factors to take into consideration while you are thinking about creating the shed in your backyard. Considerations include were to create the shed, its size, any inside furnishings you might wish to add, the color, and even the materials you would like it to be created. The majority of us really benefit from having extra room, whether it's for work, storage, or leisure activities. However, expanding the square footage of an existing house can be both expensive and time-consuming. For this reason, most homeowners are turning to backyard sheds. It can be difficult to choose the perfect Type of Shed for your requirements because there are a lot of options available.

What Is Shed?

Shed The shed is an excellent structure to keep in your backyard which can benefit everyone. The shed is an outstanding choice that will increase the look of your house and used for many years. By giving a location to keep garden and lawn items, festival decorations, sports equipment, and other items, the backyard shed can significantly benefit the organization of your house. The backyard storage shed offers a lot of advantages. In a backyard, a shed is usually a straightforward, single-story roofed structure used mostly for activities and as a workshop. It is available in a variety of sizes and shapes, as well as the best sheds provide different storage options like shelves or spacious areas that are suitable for storing both large and small things. In short, backyard storage shed stores as well as secures objects that might usually be in the way unsecured or unsafe in the backyard. The Different Types of Sheds are highly known for withstanding the effects of nature, including rainfall, winds, snowfall, heat, and humidity. Read More: What Skills Do I Need To Build A 10×12 Backyard Shed?

Types Of Sheds In Backyard

There are several distinctive and eye-catching Types of sheds available on the market, and installing one of them in your backyard will improve your outside surroundings. As you purchase your home, some types of sheds will already be there, or you can choose to have one created in your yard. - A-Frame - Gable - Lean-to - Saltbox - Gambrel (Barn-style) - Vinyl Shed - Green Roofs - EPDM Rubber - Clay Tiles - Personal Belongings Storage - Metal Shed - Firewood Storage - Roofing Shingles - Wood Shed - Tool Shed - Sheet Metal - Large - Extra Large - Medium - Small - Cement Blocks - Concrete Pad - Gravel Pad - Concrete Piers - Garden Office - Studio - Greenhouse - Modern - Storage - She Shed - Shed Flooring Materials - Shed Floor Insulation - Post and Beam - Ventilation A-Frame Shed

A-Frame Shed The A-frame sheds are a particular form of a shed that has an A-shaped design with a sloped roof that comes to a point in the center. The A-frame sheds are usually smaller as well as composed of either metal or wood. A-frame sheds are among the most often used types because of their affordability and accessibility. It can be used as a workplace, a playroom for children, or even as storage. Gable Shed

Gable Shed A gable shed is an excellent option if you want to construct a shed in your backyard which provides lots of storage area and suits the majority of house styles. These Types of shed would be a great option for any outdoor space because it has plenty of capacity for tools and gardening equipment. Gable Roofs are appropriate for areas that have a high amount of snow because they are created to sustain heavier weights. Lean-to Shed

Lean to Sheds Lean-to sheds are unique in shape. Among all shed types, the lean-to-shed is probably the simplest to construct. There is just a single panel on the roof. The fact that one of its walls in this structure is shorter compared to the rest makes it special. Obviously, the shorter side contains less space, although it is still used in many sectors. It can be used for storing tools, barn sheds, housing livestock, and other things. Read More:12 Different Types of Gardens | Most Popular Types of Gardening | Top Garden Types With Pictures Saltbox Shed

Saltbox Shed Saltbox sheds are described as having a longer sloping roof at the rear and just a smaller one out front. A saltbox shed is a good option if you want to suit the color of your shed to that of your home. These types of sheds also include fashionable windows with outside shutters, which enhance their visual appearance. It can be used as a workshop, playroom, garage, or even as an area to store goods that you don't know other places to put. Gambrel (Barn-style) Shed

Gambrels Shed This particular types of shed is well-known because the inside has plenty of height due to the roof's extremely high slope. Gambrels types of sheds are the best choice if you are looking for a shed to enhance storage, put a car in it, or make a workspace. It is the best choice for your requirements because they are both spacious and adaptable. VinylShed

Vinyl Backyard Shed The less expensive alternative for your shed can be a vinyl-type shed. Vinyl is a popular material for sheds because they need less maintenance as well as can be less expensive initially. This type of shed is suitable for storing items. Vinyl roofing is an excellent choice if you want to add an extra layer of protection to your shed. Green Roofs Green Roof The green roof is really a good choice if you want to have a roof that blends in with the surrounding environment. These types of sheds are created with a water-repellent membrane to prevent water from penetrating the shed and resulting in moisture problems. EPDM Rubber Shed

EPDM Rubber Shed EPDM rubber roofing is composed of recycled rubber as well as comes in huge rolls. It is commonly used on industrial structures with flat or low roofs. It is simple to install on new roofs as well as also performs well as a replacement if the roof has been broken and has to be repaired or replaced. Read More:10 Best Outdoor Plants For Home | Top Outdoor House Plants Clay Tiles Shed

Clay Tile Shed If you want to give your shed some serious curb appearance, think about using clay tiles for the roof. You must plan for clay tiles from the beginning of your foundation because they are weighty and difficult to utilize for a roof. Otherwise, your shed won't be able to hold them. Furthermore, the walls as well as the roof of the shed must be of good quality in order to withstand its weight. Personal Belongings Storage The one important reason that several renters as well as homeowners create this types of shed on their property is to have a place to keep their personal stuff. As humans age, they start to gather more and more things, and it might be difficult to let things leave as well as get rid of them. Metal Shed Metal Shed The metal shed won't corrode for a very long time because they are usually made of galvanized steel or stainless steel. Metal is a durable substance that can resist a variety of weather conditions. The advantage of steel is that it resists fire, which is especially beneficial due to its low cost. Therefore, metal types of sheds can be the finest choice when you intend to store flammable objects. Firewood Storage

Firewood Storage If you are using firewood to heat your house, you are aware of how crucial it is for the wood to remain dry, especially in regions with lower planting temperatures. The firewood rack is a fantastic place to begin when it comes to securing your firewood. As the firewood has reached the appropriate season, you should carefully store it inside the shed to preserve it safe, dry, and ready for use. Roofing Shingles The roofing shingles ensure that your shed completely suits your house and gives the appearance of being a part of it. Furthermore, using excellent shingles also means that you won't have to think about leakage or the roof failing soon. It is a good idea to replace your house shingles as well as the shingles on your shed roof at a similar time, as this will ensure that they age at a similar time and continue to look wonderful together. Read More: What Is A Privacy Fence | How To Install Privacy Fence | Best Privacy Fence Materials Wood Shed

Wooden Backyard Shed Wood is usually a long-lasting shed substance. It looks wonderful and is a wonderful option when you want to use the shed as a home office or a place for your children to play. The wooden types of shed can resist the weather as well as prevent decay if built and maintained carefully. Moreover, you have the choice to add extra paint and design components to a wooden shed to better customize it. Tool Shed

Tool Shed Every householder has instruments that they use to maintain the home but it might be difficult to identify where to place your tools if you don't have space in a basement or a garage to store it. Backyard sheds work well for this purpose and they will store your yard equipment and tools safely. In addition to having floor space, tool sheds usually contain a few shelves for storing tools, fasteners, and many other small items. Sheet Metal Shed

Steel Metal Shed Sheet metal is generally used for commercial structures, and it is a fantastic choice for the house shed because it is not only affordable but also highly durable. If you stay in a place which suffers extreme weather, this is a great option because it greatly reduces the chances that your roof will ever be damaged. Large Shed

Large Shed By selecting a slightly bigger types of shed, you get a lot more storage capacity as well as the freedom to move around. This is a crucial aspect to think about if you want to use your shed for working on equipment or potting plants. Some larger sheds can be used as a home office or as a personal area. Extra Large Shed

Extra Large Shed All types of garden machinery, vehicles, toys, or excess stuff that don't accommodate your house or garage are excellent options for storage in the extra-large types of shed. They are also suitable as a home office or creative area. Medium Shed

Medium Shed The medium shed size is perfect for storing small garden equipment like riding lawn mowers which you need to store after usage but don't wish to bury or make difficult to find. Choosing a medium-sized shed will allow you to store a few extra things. Small Shed

Small Shed The smaller shed choice will be suitable if you only need a shed to keep a few random pieces of outdoor equipment or gardening tools. These shelters are less expensive, take up a smaller space on your land, and are less noticeable to visitors. Read More: Essential Things to Consider When Building Your Dream Home Cement Blocks Shed It is a really simple types of shed with a base built by stacking cement bricks till you achieve the desired level. After that, it will be simple to place the shed on top of the cement blocks. Concrete Pad The concrete pad foundation performs well enough to support heavy types of sheds as well as it is suitable when you want to store your big machinery, car, and gardening machinery inside of heavy sheds. This types of shed will have a permanent as well as a stable foundation; you will not be willing to relocate it in the long term. Gravel Pad Shed This shed foundation will only function properly if the area where your shed will be placed is completely level. It is crucial to create a barrier across the foundation to prevent the gravel from moving. Concrete Piers Shed Concrete piers are an excellent foundation for almost every size shed, even if they are more time-consuming to construct and durable. To make piers, holes are drilled or excavated into the soil up to the frost line and the holes are then filled with concrete. Garden Shed It is crucial to be able to relax in peaceful surroundings in order to concentrate on your business strategy; many homeowners who require additional areas are creating high sheds on their lands in order to use them as workplaces. Studio Shed The studio sheds are a fashionable unique method for homeowners to build extra bedrooms, man caves, home workshops, as well as other recreational or useful areas. Read the full article

#differentshedstyles #differentstylesofsheds #differenttypesofshed #differenttypesofsheds #gardenshedstyles #picturesofshedsinbackyards #shedstylesdesigns #shedtypes #shedwithwoodstorage #storageshedstyles #stylesofsheds #typeofshed #typeofsheds #typesofshed #typesofsheds #typesofstoragesheds

0 notes

moonverc3x · 4 years ago

Note

Does J have a house or a place to stay at??? Because I have funny idea and it has something to do with this.

Indeed she does!! I made a 3D model of it to help me with drawing rooms and stuff!

here is the floorplan, and if you're comfortable, dm me your email and I can send the 3D model to you! (anyone can ask if you want it--)

#hnnnn Im sure this layout is crap #I took a interior design and modeling class once #but I rember nothing about it except for a certian style of roof called 'saltbox'#side note:#DDD had this house built in a rush #so its basically cappy sized #way too big for J

2 notes · View notes

longlive2023 · 4 years ago

Text

saltbox house?????

#strange #i mean it's interesting to think of as a metaphor #they're all kinda about opportunity and potentially losing that #though it goes in backward order regarding loss #like it starts with tlgad where rebekah harkness loses her fortune due to her spending #and it ends with james on the porch not knowing whether he's lost betty or if he could make it up #kinda like how in a saltbox house it's big and has two stories on one side #but then the roof slants and the second story disappears #idk i might be reaching #leelannoying

6 notes · View notes

grey-gardens · 2 years ago

Text

The Secret of Grey Gardens

APR. 13, 2009 By Gail Sheehy

From the January 10, 1972 issue of New York Magazine.

This is a tale of wealth and rebellion in one American Gothic family. It begins and ends at the juncture of Lily Pond Lane—the new Gold Coast—and West End Road, which is a dead end. There, in total seclusion, live two women, twelve cats, and occasional raccoons who drop through the roof of a house like no other in East Hampton. Ropes of bittersweet hang from its frail shoulders. A pair of twisted catalpa trees guard its occupants, but nothing is safe for long from invasion by the bureaucrats and Babbitts. Least of all a mother and daughter of unconventional tastes who long ago turned their backs on public opinion.

The seeds of their tale go back to 1915 when the family first discovered, beyond “dressy” Southampton, a “simple” summer resort composed of saltbox houses and village greens. The sea was still tucked then behind great cushions of sand dunes. Behind them potato fields stretched in white-tufted rows clear to the horizon like a natural Nettle Creek bedspread. Right from the start, East Hampton provided a refuge for the family’s scandals and divorces and all manner of idiosyncrasies common to those of high breeding.

The family brought the wealth of Wall Street to this simple resort. It casually purchased a cabana at the Maid-stone Club for $8,000 in 1926. The men set down roots in four houses and sired beautiful women. In due time the little girls’ names entered the Social Register. Later they would appear in the creamy pages of The So-cial Spectator… “Seen at the recent East Hampton Village Fair, ‘Little Edie’ Beale,” under the picture of a full-lipped blonde shamelessly vamping through the brim of her beach hat, or, “Picking up another blue rib-bon at the East Hampton horse show, Miss Jacqueline Bouvier with her father, John Vernou Bouvier III cap-tions which reflected the infinite self-confidence of the indomitably rich.

The Social Spectator described an era which will never be again. The family’s homes are gone now, all but one. And the family itself, after 300 years, has slipped back into the abominable middle class. All except a few. One became the most celebrated woman in the world, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Two others never gave a damn about all that. They rebelled against the Maidstone, shunned garden parties to pursue the artistic life. Now, passed over by history, they are left to the wreck of their house.

Contemporary East Hampton is caught up in a war of land values. It is no longer a refuge for artists and eccen-trics. The dropouts at the foot of the lane do not conform to the new values exhibited by “beach houses” with elevators. Their lives are remote from the Friday afternoon helicopters which ferry high-powered businessmen out from the city and drop them into pastel sports cars on D. Blinken’s lawn. Around the corner from them, on West End, a parade of tycoons’ castles, one owned by Revlon’s Charles Revson (who copied the house next door), ends in a nest of five mansionettes owned by Pan Am’s Juan Trippe and family. But the grounds belong-ing to the dropouts bear no resemblance to putting-green lawns, nor to the wedding-cake trees created by topiary gardening on estates which retreat from them behind trimmed privet hedges. These two have lived beyond their time at the juncture of Lily Pond Lane and West End, where the privet runs wild over a house called Grey Gardens.

Last summer our lives crossed by chance. My daughter and I often walked past Grey Gardens on the way back from Georgica Beach. We could see little of the house because on that side it was obscured by a tall hedge with an overpowering fragrance of honeysuckle. But my daughter had seen fat cats in the high grass. She also reported a light in the second-floor window at night. On this scanty evidence she had dubbed it the Witch House.

One Sunday morning’s discovery changed all that. My daughter came running, tearful, holding three baby rab-bits in a Tide box. She had found them motherless by the side of the road. “Can’t we take them home?” she asked. I explained they would never survive the train ride. She had another idea: if the Witch House had all those cats, whoever lived there must like animals. Before I could protest, we had ducked under the hedge, skittered past a 1937 Cadillac brooding in the tangled grasses, and we were deep into the preserve of twelve devil-eyed cats. There was no turning back.

“Mother?”

We whirled at the sound of an alien voice. She was coming through the catalpa trees as a taxi pulled away, and she was covered everywhere except for her face, which was beautiful. “Are you looking for Mother, too?” she asked, more unnerved than we.

My little girl held out the Tide box to show her the trembling bunnies.

“Did you think we care for animals here?” The woman smiled and bent down close to the face of the child, who silently considered her. This was not at all a proper witch. She looked sweet sixteen going on 30-odd and had carefully applied lipstick, eyeliner and powder to her faintly freckled face. The child nodded solemnly: “This is an animal house.”

“You see! Children sense it.” The woman clapped her hands in delight. “The old people don’t like us. They think I’m crazy. The Bouviers don’t like me at all, Mother says. But the children understand.”

My little girl said it must be fun to live in a house where you never have to clean up.

“Oh, Mother thinks it’s artistic this way, like a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Don’t you love the overgrown Louisiana Bayou look?”

My daughter nodded vigorously. At this point the woman looked shyly up to include me in the conversation. “Where do you come from?”

“Across the way.”

“My goodness, it’s about time we got together! How many years have you been here?” She rushed on before I could answer, as though reviving a numb habit of social conversation and desperate not to lose the knack. “You phone me. Beale. That’s the name, Edith Beale.”

As she swept past us in a long trench coat and sandals, her head wrapped in a silk scarf knotted at the back of the neck, I could have sworn she was—who? I’d seen her picture hundreds of times.

Edie Beale, safe on her porch, pointed out the formally lettered sign she had made for the front door: Do Not Trespass, Police on the Place.

“Are there really?” my daughter breathed.

“Not really, but Mother is frightened of anyone who comes by.” She then described a neighbor who tries to club the cats to death at night, and the boys from across the street whose surfer friends try to break in. I suggested the boys might just be prankish.

“Jackie?”

“I’m Jacqueline Bouvier’s first cousin. Mother is her aunt. Did you know that?”

“No, we didn’t.”

“Oh yes, we’re all descended from fourteenth-century French kings. Now a relative has written a book saying it’s all a lie, that we don’t really have royal blood. He’s a professor, John H. Davis, and he’s break-ing with history. Everyone is. That’s how I know the millennium is coming. The Bouviers: Portrait of an American Family. Not a bad book really.”

“The Reception for Members of President and Mrs. Kennedy’s Families” was the first Kennedy party held in the White House. Peter Lawford and Ted Kennedy showed up. Little Edie Beale approached J. P. Kennedy, who was looking his usual unassuming self, and reminded him jokingly that she had once almost been engaged to his first-born son, Joe, Jr. And if he had lived, she probably would have married him and he would have be-come President instead of Jack and she would have become First Lady instead of Jackie! J. P. Kennedy smiled and took another drink.)

“I’ve just come from church, which put the millennium in my mind,” the lady of Grey Gardens was saying. The woman before me, a version of Jackie coming from church on a Greek island, was Little Edie in the summer of her 54th year!

“You…resemble your cousin,” I faltered.

“Mmmm, Jackie had a very hard time. Did you like the Kennedys?” She didn’t skip a beat. “They brought such art to the country! Besides the clothes and makeup, politics is the most exciting thing about America. Didn’t you think the Kennedys would be around forever—at least three terms?” Her eyes danced.

My daughter wanted to know if she knew President Kennedy well.

“Jack never liked society girls, he only dated showgirls,” she began, synchronizing only with her memories. “I tried to show him I’d broken with society, I was a dancer. But Jack never gave me a tumble. Then I met Joe Jr. at a Princeton dance, and oh my!” She swooned. “Joe was the most wonderful person in the world. There will never be another man like him.”

“But you were a ballerina?” My daughter wanted to stick to the facts.

“What, sweetheart?” Edie Beale was off in her private world again; this brought her back. “Oh yes, I started in ballet. Ran away from home three times. First to Palm Beach; everyone thought I’d eloped with Bruce Cabot, the movie actor—I didn’t even know him! I never did anything but flirt—you know, the Southern belle. My father brought me back. He’d always thought my mother was crazy because she was an artist. Then I went into interpretive dancing and ran away to New York. Mother caught me moving out of the Barbizon, she thought it was the correct spot. But I moved into New York’s oldest theatrical hotel. On the sly a friend sent me to Max Gordon. The minute he saw me he said: ‘You’re a musical comedienne.’ I said, ‘That’s funny, I did Shakespearean tragedy at Spence.’ Max Gordon said the two were very close. I was all set to audition for the Theatre Guild that summer. Shaking with fear, you can imagine with my father still alive—he’d left Mother for the very same thing! I modeled for Bachrach while I was waiting for the summer to audition. Someone squealed to my father. Do you know, he marched up Madison Avenue and saw my picture and put his fist right through Mr. Bachrach’s window?”

At that, Little Edie threw back her head and giggled so contagiously we caught it ourselves. “But”—we were gasping for the end of the story—“did you ever go for the audition?”

“Oh no. Mother got the cats. That’s when she brought me down from New York to take care of them.”

It was a stunning non sequitur, but the empty finality of her voice made the meaning clear. We had come to the dead end of a human life.

Cats crouched all around in the grass, rattling in their throats, mean and stricken.

“Are they wild?” I asked.

She called for Tedsy Kennedy, a Persian. “Mother bred them all. We’ve had 300 cats altogether. Now we have twelve, but they’re not wild. They’re fur people.” Tedsy Kennedy leaped out of her arms. She tried for Hipperino, Little Jimmy, Zeppo, Champion—“He’s a mother’s boy”—and finally she succeeded in scooping up Bigelow. “It’s true about old maids, they don’t need men if they have cats.” She put her lips to the ear of the fur person named Bigelow: “We’re going away together, all right, Bigs? Just you and me?”

Bigs writhed out of the embrace too, giving her nothing but a blood bubble on one finger.

Then an operatic voice sang its lament through the upstairs window.

EeeDIE? I’m about to die.

“Oh dear, Mother’s furious because she’s not getting attention. I’ll be right up, Mother.”

“The bunnies.” My daughter offered the Tide box.

“They are sweet, but you see, Mother runs everything around here. I work for her and she might throw me out….” Little Edie accepted the bunnies anyway. She walked us up to the catalpa trees. Suddenly she gasped, shrank back:

“Oh dear, it’s fall.”

We followed her eyes to the ground where a dead mouse lay in our path. “That’s the sign of an early fall. There’s evil ahead,” she said.

It was not an early fall. But Edith Beale was right about evil in the wings. Late August Saturdays still found the new rich along the Gold Coast entertaining the “fun people” in lime pants from Southampton. At high noon they sat beside gelid pools exercising little but their mouths; talking business, nibbling quiche, complaining about neighbors who drive down the land values.

These are the city people who send out their architects to order the shoulders of the sea broken, crushed, swept back into the potato fields. On the leveled stage they set down their implausible houses and bathwater pools. New dune grass eventually appears in patches, row on row, like hair transplants. But dunes never grow back. The new people use the sea only as a backdrop (“You don’t swim in it, do you?”), insulting it, hating it really. The wind wrecks their hairdos. Sand nicks their glass window walls. They use the sand only as a mine field to hide the wires leading to their Baroque burglar alarm systems.

So long as real-estate moguls and barons of Wall Street and their shrill, competitive wives keep coming out from the city to erect display cases on the dunes, the Village Fathers will appease them. The new people create jobs and pay obscene beachfront taxes. Nothing is likely to be said aloud about what they violate of East Hampton. But when a few of them complain about those two living in an “eyesore” near their precious land values, the Village Fathers can be very quickly turned into a posse. Even as Labor Day approached, such a posse was being assembled against the Beales.

The sea comes into its wild season with September riptides. Gathering far out, it hurls its weight against the land, smearing the beach with tidal pools, while opposing waves tear at virgin sand and drag it back. Most people in East End stay away from the beach then.

Who was that lone figure in black?

Both Sundays after Labor Day she ran off the dunes like an escapee and plunged into the surf. Alarmed at first, I watched her draw the water hungrily around her. But she was a strong swimmer, a child-woman of such unspent exuberance. Her body was still beautiful, I thought, as Edith Beale came up the beach in a black net bathing suit.

“I haven’t seen you in so long!” she called. “Mother never allows me to show myself on the beach after summer, but this fall I had to come out.”

I said she still looked like a model.

She remembered every detail from our last encounter. How was my trip to Russia? she asked. How are dancers treated there?

“The simple life is not understood in America,” she broke in with a deep whisper. “They’re all so rich and spoiled. I would have loved this life, except—I never got to say goodbye to any of my friends.” She blushed to the edges of her flowered cap, admitting she had always preferred older men. “They’re all dead now and I’m alone….”

We walked toward the sea, which seemed to revive her spirits. “So I had to make friends with the younger generation,” the voice lilting now, “the boys who come by and like the overgrown look. We sketch together.” She turned quickly and scanned the beach. “Maybe they thought I was getting too friendly with the young boys.”

They?

Her eyes focused on a dark blur, maybe a mile away. She recounted a strange phone call from one of her brother’s sons last February: You’re in the soup, he kept saying, the County’s going to take your house. “I’m psychic and I feel it coming.”

That was her brother coming now, in the jeep down the beach; she grew stiff and asked me to stay and meet him. I wondered which brother it would be, having read of the contrast between them. While Little Edie confounded her Bouvier relatives by imitating her mother’s rebellion against bourgeois conformity, her younger brother, Bouvier Beale, was following in the footsteps of his lawyer father and grandfather. He married a society girl and established his own law firm in New York—Walker, Beale, Wainwright and Wolf. Today he lives in Glen Cove, belongs to Piping Rock, as did his grandfather, and only last summer built his own summer home in Bridgehampton. The other brother, Phelan Jr., escaped to Oklahoma and never came back.

But why hadn’t they come to the rescue of their 76-year-old recluse mother and pathetic sister buried alive in Grey Gardens? Edith Beale must have read my thoughts.

I asked a sensitive question about her present financial situation.

“Oh we’re not destitute, Mother has collateral. It’s been my life’s work to protect her collections, we don’t trust anybody.” The rest was hurriedly whispered: “My brother, Bouvier Beale, has been after Mother for a year now to sign over power of attorney. I think he wants to take over the house and put poor Mother into an institution. He treats her just as her father did, you know, because she’s an artist. It all goes back to Mother deciding she wanted to sing…she was so advanced. Grandfather threatened to disown her but she made plenty of appearances in clubs around New York. She is still totally modern and correct in everything, with one exception. My career.”

But how could Mother deny her the very freedom of expression for which she had defied an entire family? I pressed.

“Two women can’t live together for twenty years without some jealousy,” Little Edie Beale said reluctantly. “Not that my voice is better than Mother’s, but she can’t dance.”

The jeep was upon us. Its driver, a stiffly formal man, was introduced as Bouvier Beale. Seemingly embarrassed, he walked off with his sister for a private conference. As I climbed the dunes, their bodies were turning rigid in dispute, necks stiff. A shout came back in a man’s voice: “You must go to a room in the Village!”

Little Edie broke away and ran for the sea.

October begins the bad months. When summer finishes with East Hampton and black ice begins to form, the stupid puddle ducks freeze in the Village pond and the caretakers stay drunk, and besides family fights and in-breeding there is very little to do. The Village Fathers had cut out their work in advance. The new Village building inspector, A. Victor Amann, had sent a letter to the Beales back last February, demanding the overgrowth be cut back: the Village would do it for $5,000. He sent a copy to the trust fund, which replied there was no money left. Another letter from P. C. Schenck’s fuel company of East Hampton warned the Beales their furnace was unsafe. A copy of that was mailed to Bouvier Beale, along with his mother’s unpaid bill of $800.

Ignored, the Village Fathers moved in on October 20. Little Edie was on the porch of Grey Gardens when five people materialized. She thought they were wearing costumes, she told me. One said: “You have no heat.” Another said: “You have no food.” A public nurse said: “You’re sick.”

“Mother, did you hear that? This horrible public health nurse says we’re sick!” Little Edie stamped her feet furiously, informing her invaders: “We’re Christian Scientists. The only medicine is work.” Mother’s voice boomed from the window: SEND that nurse AWAY—SHE’S been in contact with ALL the GERMS of SUFFOLK COUNTY!

The invaders retreated, but only to assemble a proper posse (which took all of two days). East Hampton’s Mayor Rioux was away on vacation and his deputy, Dr. William Abel, was determined to have done with the misfits.

“People are basically no damned good,” the Acting Mayor later expressed himself to me. I thought this odd coming from a chief surgeon at Southhampton Hospital, but Dr. Abel added, “I prefer animals.” The very mention of the Beale house caused him to grip his knees and go white: “The house is unfit for human habitation—animals don’t live like this. The two sweet old things won’t move unless they are forcibly moved because, un-fortunately, they’re not mentally competent.” He declined to go into the reasons for his diagnosis because “I get so wrapped up in it.” But as a public official he felt it his duty to leave me with a warning. “Are you aware that many of the most horrible murders in our country are committed by schizophrenics who appeared perfectly stable, maybe even saner than I?”

In an unusual move, the Village sought help from the County. On the 22nd of October a raiding party of twelve made its move. County sanitarians, detectives, and ASPCA representatives from New York forced their way past the ladies of Grey Gardens armed with a search warrant issued by a Town Justice on the ground that the Beales were harboring diseased cats. Cameras recorded the sorry scene: cat manure covering the floors; a five-foot-high mound of empty cans in the dining room; the Sterno stove on Mother’s bed; cobwebs, cats and all sorts of juicy building-code violations. Mother thought it was a stickup. The sanitarians had the dry heaves. It remained for the ASPCA man, alone, to report he’d seen human fecal matter in the upstairs bedroom.

“They never said why it was they’d come,” Little Edie told The East Hampton Star.

Sidney Beckwith, of the County Health Department, got on the phone with Bouvier Beale and quoted the hot report of his inspection.

“Mr. Beckwith, you’ve described it very well, but it’s nothing new—Mother is the original hippie,” said Bouvier Beale. Astonished that such a prominent family would sit back and let their relations be condemned, Mr. Beckwith warned that the next inspection would create a national scandal.

“If that’s what it takes to get Mother out of the house, sobeit,” said Beale.

It was never clear after the whole mess hit the newspapers, a month later, who had put whom up to what. But three forces conspired to finish off the ladies of Grey Gardens: Village Fathers, a few nameless neighbors, and their closest kin. My first clue to their plight was a New York Post headline of November 20:

JACKIE’S AUNT TOLD: CLEAN UP MANSION

I called immediately but the Beales’ phone was “out of order.” There was nothing to do but drive out to Grey Gardens. Stripped of summer foliage, it stood naked to prying eyes.

Shades of Chappaquiddick. Five girls from Huntington sat in a car across the street, trading binoculars: “We’ve been here all day.” An old local jumped out of his station wagon, armed with an Instamatic, and posed his niece before the pariahs’ house. “Sure, I knew old Black Jack Bouvier, used to caddy for him up the Maidstone,” the old man said. “Knew the Beales too, delivered a lot of packages up here.”

But wasn’t he horrified at this invasion of their privacy? “We swim in different schools. I don’t have much in common with the Beales,” he said. “I’m a local working person.”

At dawn the following day I reached young Edie Beale by phone. She was terrified, but adamant: “Mother would never be put out of this house. She’s going to roof it, plaster it, paint it, and sell it. We’re artists against the bureaucrats. Mother’s French operetta. I dance, I write poetry, I sketch. But that doesn’t mean we’re crazy or taking heroin or anything! Please—” her voice pleaded for all she was worth—“please tell them what we are.”

In the early twenties “Big Edie”—sister of Black Jack Bouvier (Jackie’s father), wife of lawyer Phelan Beale, and mother of Little Edie—became the first lady of Grey Gardens. It was a proper 28-room mansion when they bought it. The box hedges surrounding it were trimmed. But even then a mantle of ivy draped its gables and the lush walled-in garden to one side suited Big Edie’s unconventional personality.

By 1925 her husband was prospering. Her children, Little Edie, Phelan Jr. and Bouvier, were small. But Edie had a retinue of servants that freed her to cultivate interests and opinions which the Bouviers considered downright subversive. She played the grand piano in her living room by the hour and sang, in her rich mezzo so-prano, “Indian Love Call” and “Begin the Beguine” to a husband who was generally upstairs hollering for his tuxedo to be pressed. He’d go off to stuffy cocktail parties and Maidstone dances which bored her to tears. Since she was likely to wear a sweater over her evening gown and discuss Christian Science, the family became less and less insistent that Big Edie come along.

Big Edie’s two brothers were then in fierce competition to become rich men. Before they reached 35, Black Jack Bouvier had reaped a fortune of $750,000 on Wall Street, while Bud Bouvier made his money in the Texas oil fields Jack was always one up on his brother, which drove Bud to destroy his marriage and caused the first Bouvier divorce in 100 years. In 1929, the same year that the beautiful Jacqueline was born to Black Jack, his brother drank himself to death.

Material success had become the real Bouvier god, as it was for so many others of that wildly prosperous era. Only Big Edie, among the Bouviers, dropped away from bourgeois conventions. Her brother’s demise foreshadowed the family’s deterioration. Within two weeks of Bud’s death, and with the entire clan at the peak of its fortunes, the stock market crashed.

Black Friday found the old family broker, M. C. Bouvier, at his office at 20 Broad, congratulating himself on his cash reserves and the quality of his bonds.

Black Jack was much less serene. He was forced to ask for help from his father-in-law. James T. Lee agreed on the condition Black Jack curb his flamboyant lifestyle—Jackie’s father was fatally susceptible to beautiful women and big money, which he spent faster than he earned. It was a great humiliation to move his wife and Jacqueline to a rent-free apartment, provided by his father-in-law, at 740 Park Avenue. By 1935 his net worth had plummeted to $106,444.

The family’s lot began to improve only when M. C. Bouvier died in 1935, leaving his brokerage firm to Black Jack, and his fortune to Major Bouvier, who became the family patriarch. But as for Big Edie, her husband had left her in Grey Gardens and disappeared into the Northwest woods, where he built his own hunting lodge, Grey Goose Gun Club. He sent only child support. Big Edie became dependent on her father, Major Bouvier, for a subsistence of $3,500 a year, and began to withdraw into seclusion.

The Bouviers lived their golden East Hampton summers through the thirties and forties, seemingly exempt from the country’s economic despair. Ignoring Depression and war, they divided their time between the Maidstone Club and Lasata, Major Bouvier’s great house on Further Lane. But the Major’s flamboyant reign was accomplished at a gruesome price, to be paid much later by his heirs. By living off principal, he assured the family comfort and style only for as long as he lived.

But for the moment, his grandchildren were dazzling the cabana owners of the Maidstone. The Bouvier who attracted all the stares as she sauntered down the midway was Little Edie. The Body Beautiful at 24. Her cousin Jackie was a solemn twelve and generally in jodhpurs. About the contrast Black Jack was fiercely defensive. During luncheons at Lasata he would announce to the family: “Jackie’s got every boy at the club after her, and the kid’s only twelve!” Everyone knew Little Edie was It, but her mother never rose to the bait. Big Edie was always busy directing the attention to herself. The excuse might be Albert Herter’s portrait of her in a blue dress, done twenty years before. ��Did you know the blue dress in that painting is the same one I’m wearing now?” She would pause for effect. “That’s how poor I am.”

Black Jack would remind her that a clever woman would have gotten some alimony out of her husband. Big Edie would remind her family that she was not a golddigger. Whereupon she would head for the piano with ten adoring children traipsing at her heels.

The last of the fashionable family affairs was the 1942 wedding of Big Edie’s son, Bouvier Beale. A ceremony at St. James’s was scheduled for four, and almost the entire Bouvier family was in place. Big Edith was the missing guest. The wedding was half over when she arrived, dressed like an opera star. The bride and groom took the incident in stride, but Major Bouvier had had his fill of Edith’s outlandish behavior. Two days later he cut her out of his will. From then until his death in 1948, the moralizing Major used his changing will as a club, but Edie had already become the recluse of Grey Gardens when the news came that her share of the dead Major’s dwindled fortune was a $65,000 trust fund, her sons in control.

On that sum, Big and Little Edie have lived for the past 23 years. Little Edie always talked about getting away… “I’ve got to get out of East Hampton, fast,” she told her neighbor, Barbara Mahoney. That was sixteen years ago, when she crossed the street to take her a friendship card with a red sachet: Thank you, Barbara, for being my friend, it read. “You know,” she whimpered, “I’m 38 and I’m an old maid. I don’t have any friends. Ought to get away. I don’t know where to go!”

About that time the ladies of Grey Gardens met Tex Logan in Montauk. He was playing steel guitar and looking for jobs. “He was mad about my mother,” Little Edie recalls, “so you know, he came in as a carpenter-maintenance man-cook. Tex did just about everything for nine years, on and off.” But Tex was a wanderer. When he grew bored, he’d hitchhike out of town and when he came back he was inevitably drunk. Then there was the night Tex was arrested for possession of a pistol at Mrs. Morgan Belmont’s bridge party. The East Hampton Star gave the Beale house as his address. How the ladies of Grey Gardens did fuss! Tex didn’t come back again until the winter he contracted pneumonia. He was found a week later, dead, in the kitchen of Grey Gardens. This time The East Hampton Star noted, discreetly, the man was the Beales’ “caretaker.”

Little Edie hired two boys, sons of old natives, who were home from the Navy. She noticed they were acting funny on the second floor, but in her excitement she ignored it. The party was being given by young Edie’s childhood friend, Carolyn Wainwright, for her daughter’s debut. The reclusive Beales made a breathtaking entrance.

Mother wore a wrapper open to the waist and clasped with a dazzling brooch. In her hair, which looked as though it hadn’t seen a comb in years, she had wound faded silk violets. Little Edie arrived desperate to dance, trailing a black net stole over her black bathing suit and fishnet tights.

Edie danced by herself with one red rose. Somebody’s sympathetic husband got up to dance with her, but she was inexhaustible. The rock music grew wild and Little Edie even wilder—“I flew into a jungle rock and nobody could control me, not even Mother!” Late in the evening, Big Edie dragged her wayward daughter home, scolding all the way: her disgraceful behavior would release evil spirits, just wait. They entered Grey Gardens to find $15,000 worth of heirlooms stolen.

Last August the Beales paid $1,790 in taxes to the Village of East Hampton for one more year in the life of Grey Gardens. “Why are my brothers so anxious to get Mother out?” Little Edie kept asking. “She was going to sell the house anyway, before the taxes are due next August. She’s just a little superstitious. Mother thinks if she makes a will, she’ll die.”

Meanwhile a Village official was calculating out loud: “It would take about $10,000 to demolish the house. With the land cleared you could easily get $80,000, a sum that would be of considerable interest to members of the family…” Other estimates run as high as $300,000.

“The final degradation for Grey Gardens,” moaned Edith Beale.

When the raids began, the Beales decided the Village was out to break them. “I don’t think we can live in America any more,” sighed Little Edie. “The only freedom we have left is the press. Thank God I could tell my side of the story to The East Hampton Star. Isn’t it a terrific paper; it’s our Daily News!”

After a third inspection on December 7, Mr. Beckwith informed the Beales by letter: “Should you continue liv-ing in this dwelling under the existing conditions, this department will have no recourse but to take action to remove you.” That action would be an eviction hearing immediately after Christmas. Mr. Beckwith took the liberty of sending a copy to Mrs. Onassis with a personal note, mentioning that her aunt and cousin had spoken fondly of Jackie and if she could do anything to help, the Beales certainly needed it. Although Mrs. Onassis was in New York partying all month, she made no effort to contact her brutalized relatives. Her social secretary, Nancy Tuckerman, insisted that Mrs. Onassis was always very fond of them, too. In her opinion, however, it was not a matter of money but of how they chose to live.

The last time I saw Little Edie was the week before Christmas, when she invited us out to take pictures. Pre-pared as though for her stage debut, garbed in black net and flashy reds and heavily perfumed, she swept out the door in grand theatrical tradition.

EeeDIE! WEAR YOUR MINK! a voice called to her.

“Mother always tells me how to dress,” she exclaimed, returning with a bottle of frosted fuchsia nail polish and a mangy fur jacket. When we had finished, she invited us in. “What can they possibly have against this house? They haven’t seen the inside.”

She led us into the narrow damp hall and up the lightless staircase, pointing out the carved banister and paneled doors…“These are very much in demand these days.” Animals hid still as stone in the gloomy deeps until we passed; suddenly dust would scatter and…something leapt past our heads—a bat, no, a cat—flying to some ceiling perch. The windows at the top of the stairs were blinded with cobwebs and pawing vines, the bittersweet vines of Grey Gardens grown thick as boa constrictors. Mother had set out some crackers and Taylor’s port for our refreshment. Little Edie poured. “Only students of architecture can fully appreciate this place,” she said. Her performance was exquisite. We scarcely noticed a cat eating his own droppings in one corner. We were completely entranced by this bizarre version of a White House tour led by Jackie Kennedy.

Mother kept wheezing inside and banging on the floor. “She’s furious because I’m getting all the attention,” confided Little Edie. Would Mother like her picture taken? we ventured. “You don’t want your picture, do you, Mother?” she called out. And then to us, in a theatrical aside, “Mother looks like she’s about to die.”

I AM. I’M GOING TO DIE TODAY!

“You see?”

EeeDIE? My MAKEUP is under the BED.

“Never mind, Mother.”

We reminded Edie of a beautiful girl whose picture ran 30 years ago in The Social Spectator, Little Edie Beale at the East Hampton Fair.

“I hate it when people say I was beautiful in the old days,” she grimaced. “I want to detach myself from the past! Do you understand? I like to think I’m good now. I’m terrific now!”

But what does she do here for twelve hours of every day? We asked the second lady of Grey Gardens.

“I wake up and write poetry, like other people have coffee. I love the late movies on TV.”

And in between?

Something snapped in Little Edie at that moment. Her mask dropped and she whispered with urgency of a child:

What scream?

“Last summer, out that broken window, when I screamed at Mother for the first time—‘It’s boring, boring, boring here! I’ll go anywhere to be free!’.”

This was the Secret of Grey Gardens—the unfinished woman who stood before us, consumed by cats, fed upon for decades by her broken mother, was far from buried in Grey Gardens. She was only now ready to live! Her family has disintegrated, the survivors have turned away, preferring scandal to parting with a sou from their fortunes to ameliorate this shame. There is nothing left now, nothing, but the hope in Little Edie’s wound-shattering scream.

As we backed toward the car her lower lip trembled. She came running to the edge of the catalpa trees and cried out: “Call me anything, but don’t call me old!”

Source: nymag.com/news/features/56102/

#grey gardens #quotes #interview #big Edie #big edie beale #little edie #little edie beale #the beales of grey gardens #east hampton #the secret of grey gardens #New York magazine #inside grey gardens #albert maysles #david maysles

10 notes · View notes