Summer Recollections #3

The Summer House

"No one really warns you about a place you can't return to"

He was eighty-four years old and the memory of his early life was probably more vivid now than it ever was. As he aged, he had unanswered questions. What really happened during those years? It was such a grand house frequented by prominent people. It was a large two-story white house with a large windowed attic. Each room had a fireplace so the roof line was almost like that of a castle with attic dormers and chimneys for each fireplace in the house. Balconies on the second floor overlooked the manicured grounds. He could remember playing on the terrace around the estate. Ornate statues sat in the flower beds that were maintained by a team of gardeners. Sometimes he sat on the cement benches and watched them work. They were always clipping and trimming and pruning. A water fountain trickled near the hedge and he loved to watch the gold fish in the basin of the fountain. He had all day to play outside while his mother worked inside the house. She was the housekeeper of the grand house.

The house was part of the farm estate although the owner was a "gentleman farmer." He didn't actually dirty his hands but he did have his hands in the business. The farm work was performed by employees. He had several of them to manage. His wife managed the domestic workers and the social calendar. Even though World Was II was raging and many of the local young men had left, parties were still hosted at the estate and wealthy families were entertained.

He was born there in 1941. Although he couldn't remember that far back, he had been told that he wasn't actually born in the big house. His mother had a small clapboard cabin tucked in the trees behind the house. Other women who were employed in the big house shared a different cabin. His mother probably had her own because she had a crying baby. The farm hands had another cabin near them. It was bigger because there were more of them. Beside the three cabins, a small barn sat hidden in the trees. The main barn was on land below the house and was surrounded by fields. All he could remember of the little barn near the cabins was some chickens, some gardening tools and some cobwebs. It was fun to peek through the windows but it was too scary for a young boy to venture into.

His father had gone to war so his mother was happy to have a job and a place to live. She often thought her living arrangement wasn't much better than a slave on a plantation but she was treated well by the owners and was paid for her work. She enjoyed working in the big house and becoming invisible when she needed to be invisible like when there were big events with the social elite. She spent a lot of time in the kitchen and it was her job to prepare hot meals for the farm hands for lunch and dinner. The employees ate their meals in a large room on the side of the house. The working kitchen and the tables for farm hands were away from the family's dining room, parlour, living room and ballroom. The workers knew their place and respected the boundaries.

Sometimes on a Saturday night when his mother wasn't needed to assist with a party or social gathering, she would leave the baby with the women in the next cabin. She liked to get a ride into town to go dancing at the pavilion at the lake.

Just before he turned five years old, his father returned from the war and came to the estate to get his mother. The war was over and they would return to the city to live with his grandparents and resume life as they knew it before 1939. While his father embraced his mother, he stood behind her apron, shy of this new person he had never before met.

When he finally poked out his head, his father asked, "And who have we here? I don't know this little fellow."

"Why this is Paul, your little son," his mother replied.

His Dad looked a little surprised and picked Paul up into his arms. "And how old are you, Paul?"

"I'm soon going to be five!"

His Dad had a puzzled look and said, "You sure are a handsome big boy!"

At the end of the week, when Paul and his parents were packed up and tearful goodbyes had been said, the family headed back to the city eager to reacquaint and get to know each other as a family.

When Paul was six years old, he overheard his mother and father talking about a letter that had arrived in the mail. He couldn't understand what it meant but he understood the government cheques were going to stop. Each month, his mother watched for the cheque from the Canadian Patriotic Fund (financial assistance to families of soldiers with additional allowances for children) but this letter said the assistance was terminated, effective immediately. He heard them speak quietly: Paul doesn't qualify. The date of birth of your son, Paul, does not match the records of military service. Paul couldn't understand the letter and he wasn't supposed to be listening, but he knew something was not quite right.

The years went by but the Summer House was rarely mentioned. The grandeur remained in his memory...the fine house, the manicured grounds, the expensive furniture and decor. When he asked questions about the Summer House, his mother often changed the subject or was too busy to answer.

His father passed when Paul was in his early sixties, followed by his mother soon after. It was his task to sort through their belongings and put the house up for sale. In the back of his mother's wardrobe, Paul  found a shoe box of photos of his early years. Although the photos were all black and white, his memory was in vivid colour: the grand white house, the lush green gardens, the colourful flowers and guests dressed in fine clothes. There was a picture of himself sitting on the steps of the grand entrance to the house. Another was a picture of his mother in her apron in the side kitchen serving the farm hands. Among the photos, a man dressed up for a night out leaning against a 1943 ford coupe looking at his mother who was dressed up and smiling at the man. Who was that man? Paul couldn't remember. He knew his father was away to war in 1943. Didn't his father go to war in 1939? And then it dawned on him. He was born in June 1941. His father went away in 1939 for over six years. He thought back to the puzzled look on his father's face when they met and the letter from the government. It was fuzzy  and he had only been five years old but it was all coming together. The man who had raised him was not his father. He couldn't be!

He needed answers and the person with the answer, his mother, was gone. Who was his real father? It became an obsession to find the answer before his own life was done. For fifteen years, Paul followed various trails of DNA but had nothing conclusive. Twenty-nine thousand obscure matches yielded no answer.

In June 2025, he returned to the summer house with his wife and friends. The long driveway bordered by trees no longer had an ornate gate and posts. The manicured lawns were burned off and untrimmed; the flower beds were beds of weeds. Even the concrete statues had toppled and the benches rested lopsided beneath a tree that may have been beautiful at one time. At the edge of the unmanicured lawn, tangled dog strangling vine and poison ivy partially hid the clapboard remains of the cabins. The three cabins were mostly collapsed with animals living in them. The barn still had cobwebs that could be seen through the windows.

Tentatively, Paul made his way to the front entrance of the house. The house itself was in need of repair. The door to the side kitchen was hanging from a single hinge. Everything needed paint and repair. He tapped on the door and was welcomed by the current owner, Pato, who was trying to dispose of the house. Pato's mother had been the previous owner but had died. He didn't want it. It needed too much work.

"Would you like to walk through?" Pato asked after Paul told his story about the 1940s at the summer house. Paul was excited at the invitation and disappeared behind the sagging entrance.

A half hour later, Paul returned with a smile across his face that reached his eyes! "I had the whole tour...the kitchen where my mother worked is still there. The dining room for the farm help is now an art gallery. The foyer is still beautiful and bright although the grand piano is gone. I even went up to the bedrooms that overlook the gardens! It was a wonderful tour!"

Whether he saw it as it was in 2025 or  saw it through his rose-coloured glasses of happy memories of the 1940s, one can't be sure. The answer he is looking for is somewhere in the summer house but the people who could tell him are gone.