In the Victorian Wild
by
Rita Leganski
The stately Eastlake Victorian house was meant for people with servants—and exterminators and electricians and their own personal Roto-Rooter Man. A professional home inspector would undoubtedly have been downright suspicious of the place and advised prospective purchasers that it had the makings of an insatiable money-sucking, sanity-thieving monster. But, my husband, Nick, acting as his own inspector, pooh-poohed several glaring danger signs and went ahead and bought the house anyway.
I was visiting my parents in Wisconsin at the time and had never even laid eyes on the place. He told me it needed wallpaper. He was telling the truth, just not the whole truth. He failed to mention the gas leak, the lack of even anemic water pressure, and the fact that the entire upstairs and the dining room (for some inexplicable reason) were running off one 15 amp fuse. But most of all, he said not one word about the bats.
Apparently copious amounts of bat droppings in the attic hadn’t struck him as being the least bit unsavory. Perhaps he looked forward to the excitement of sharing our home with flying rats. My guess is that he thought I would deal with it while he was at work.
We had moved in over the course of a week in late August when the air was humidity pudding. The last of our belongings came through the door and bumped into Nick on his way out. The Lord of the Manor was off on a business trip. How nice for him.
My visiting mother-in-law, two young children, two very freaked-out cats and I were the very picture of innocence on our first night alone in the huge, old echoing house. Our first full day had been an exhausting one. My toddler had gotten away and was nearly to the river before I caught up with him, and my five-year-old had managed to get covered in bites from something in the neighbors’ sandbox (a favorite hangout for the flea-infested black squirrels). And, oh yes, we thought we could smell gas.
After putting the boys to bed that first night, Mom and I were sewing curtains in the old summer kitchen way at the back of the house. All of a sudden, one of the cats bolted and we could hear him somewhere in the dining room yowling and bumping and thrashing around. I went after him, and when I tried to cross the empty room nearly knocked myself out on the chandelier that was hanging at eye level. I had to feel around for the light switch that had been covered to match the peacocks-and-cabbage-rose wallpaper. Finally, my fingers came in contact with the switch and the place lit up like Versailles.
Then I saw it. I remember exactly what I said at that moment. I said, “Well, Mom, we’ve got a bird in here.” How touchingly naïve I was.
Bat wings have a sound all there own, a spooky thoop-thoop that brings out goose bumps the size of your head. A bat glides along with its mouth wide open catching dinner on the fly. That one flew straight at me before veering off at the last second, but not before I’d gotten a chilling glance at its fangs. I was sick with fright. My mother-in-law reacted the way she did to all upsetting things—her colitis flared up and she was struck with immediate galloping diarrhea.
I didn’t know what to do. My children lay innocently sleeping upstairs. What if the blood-thirsty rodent made its way to their little necks? Mom was terrified, but couldn’t leave the bathroom. She insisted, however, that the door remain open, just in case there was a bat in there waiting to spread its webby membranous fingers and tangle itself up in her hair.
I did the only thing I could think to do, I called the police. They told me not to worry; everyone in St. Clair had bats at one time or another. It’s more afraid of you than you are of it, they said, just turn on the lights, open the doors and it’ll fly out. A simple solution. Relief washed over me. I lit up every room, threw all the doors wide and in so doing invited every flying, crawling, slithering thing within a mile to please come in. I’m certain the bat thought, Leave? Why should I leave? I’m not leaving. This place is a resort.
The next half-hour was a tilt-a-whirl, roller-coaster, House of Horrors experience. I alternated checking on the boys and searching out the bat. Satisfied that it wasn’t in the kids’ room, I closed the door and concentrated my efforts downstairs. After a full thirty minutes I was getting nowhere. I called the cops back and in gasping hysterics shared every bit of my full-blown panic with them. They must have heard the cacophony of buzzing, chirping, screeching and flushing that was going on by this point. They said they would be right over.
Two police officers came in, politely looked away from Mom on the public toilet, cased the joint, and having located the perpetrator hanging in the front parlor’s bay window, asked for a shoe box and a flashlight. Then they went in and closed the pocket doors incarcerating themselves with Dracula. A few grunts and thumps later they emerged with the lid firmly clamped on the shoebox. They said they’d captured it. I was overjoyed.
After they left, taking the shoebox with them, I went to check on the children again. What the heck? The door wouldn’t open! I began cursing as if my life depended on it. I called the police again and identified myself as the woman from the house with the bat-and-the-lady-in-the-bathroom. The same officers came back and, now that the doors were shut again, noticed the gas leak. Had I thought about a hotel? they asked, and advised me to call Fassbender, a real good guy, first thing in the morning.
My husband came home three days later and confronted by his wife-turned-tarn-hag, at first pled ignorance but then rather coyly admitted that he may have noticed evidence of bats when he first saw the place. However, he blamed the intruder on the fact that we’d moved things in after dark when bats are active. No big deal.
That night, our bedroom door crashed open. His mother, who would rather have died than enter the room in which we were in bed together was silhouetted in the light of the hall, a kid on each hip, looking for all the world like Bad Bart crashing through the saloon doors.
“Wake up!” she commanded, “There’s one of those THINGS in my room! Here. Take the boys, I’m going downstairs. I’d rather be gassed than bitten by a bat.” Having saved the children, she squared her shoulders, raised her chin and descended the stairs with what was left of her New England dignity. And the bat went with her.
Mom’s extended visit had taken a toll. Devoted as she was, she felt it was time to call it a day when she discovered that she’d lost 13 pounds and couldn’t seem to shake the colitis-aggravated fatigue that was preventing her from really putting her shoulder to the wheel. She promised to come back when her strength returned. Bless her heart.
The adventure had just begun; at this point we had no idea how unmercifully wretched our lives would become. We still thought of disaster in the singular, when in fact there is no such thing in an old house.
The gas leak was the catastrophe of the moment. I followed the cops’ advice and called the appropriate Fassbender (there were eight of them in the yellow pages, each covering a particular area of home improvement).
I was a cigarette smoker in those days, it was my slim link to normalcy and I had the notion that it helped my shredded nerves. What with the gas leak and all, I only smoked outside hoping to avoid blowing myself up along with the kids, the house and everything we owned. So Gas Leak Repair Fassbender shows up on the appointed day and says he’s going to ‘sniff’ around (yuk yuk). He seemed friendly enough, a working man in coveralls who looked a lot like Harpo Marx. I was amused by how far down his nose he wore his eyeglasses. I asked him if I should stop smoking; I meant it in a situation-specific way, only in relation to the gas leak. His answer was not what I expected. Tilting his head back and looking at me through his distant spectacles he said: “Well, I’m no doctor, but they say it’s bad for you.” Mother of God, this from a man who held our fate in his hands.
He tinkered around, up and down the basement stairs, in and out of the kitchen and laundry room until he managed to isolate the source of the leak. It was nothing major, he told me, the clothes dryer hook-up just needed more gumping up. I wished with all my heart that he would have used some sort of professional wording, some Underwriter’s Laboratory rhetoric like ‘secured and sealed the gas line/appliance connection to ensure absolute safety’ but gumping up was his professional term of choice and that was that. He fixed the thing and it was on to the bats.
I mustered my resolve and demanded that we hire an exterminator—not just any exterminator—I would accept no less than the best damned bat exterminator in these United States. A pox on the cost! In the interest of expediency we hired the guy who kept the local schools free of vermin. I took him on a tour of the house and he showed me the hundred or so places where the bats were gaining entrée. He also explained a bit about bat social custom. It seems bats are nomadic, and in late summer/early autumn are just looking for a nice place to settle in. They prefer to peacefully coexist in an atmosphere of No Harm, No Fowl. However, they are discouraged by certain behaviors such as putting down poison. The exterminator said it was more of a deterrent than an instrument of painful death. Considering that we had small children, I could only allow the stuff in the attics and basement. In that case, the bat man said, he couldn’t guarantee results unless we blocked up all the teensy-tiny crevices through which the critters were getting in.
The people next door, Karl and Donna, informed us that they had opted for a particular type of trap, a shallow aluminum pan coated in a sticky substance that bats found simply irresistible. It was cheaper than paying someone to put down poison. When a bat detected the stuff it would throw its entire body in the pan and then be unable to get out; eventually it would die of starvation. They said it was the best thing they’d found, the only downside being that the bats screamed pretty loud when they realized that they’d made a deadly mistake, and someone had to harvest the cadavers every now and then. Karl and Donna had developed a veritable product line of bat-eradicating homeopathic remedies. Mothballs clustered in nylon stockings hung all over their house and there were tennis racquets in every room. In these places you just never knew when a pick-up game of racquet-bat might toss some excitement your way.
The harsh realities of life in an old house were slapping me down. First and foremost I had to choose a method of bat eradication. The sticky pans were out of the question, the whole thing smacked of torture to me. I couldn’t do it. And so we paid to have the poison put down in places that were inaccessible to our children and pets and began to batten down the hatches.
That was the point at which things started to get risky. The exterminator had marked all the hotspots and wrote up instructions on how to fix them, a task designated to Nick. It was the least he could do. While he was patching and plugging his way around the house, I was wallpapering the upstairs bathroom. The wallpaper was the pre-pasted kind that is first soaked in water and then pressed into place. I should explain that this house had been built before indoor electricity and therefore the outlets were usually found somewhere near the middle of the wall. All that lath and horsehair plaster had presented too much obstruction to finagling the wires all the way to the baseboards.
Our upstairs bathroom was no exception. I had worked my way around the room until I came to one of those eye-level outlets just over the sink. As I pressed the wet paper to the wall, I had the sensation that my hands were falling asleep. Damn, I thought, just when I’d gotten the roll perfectly in place. I decided to hold it up with my head in order to shake some feeling back into my hands. It was the moment I invented electro-shock therapy for the do-it-yourselfer. Trust me when I say even mild electrocution is a creepy experience.
That was it. Enough was enough. I calmly left the bathroom, closed the door, and went in search of my husband. He was at the top of a very tall ladder fixing a bat hole in the front porch roof.
In a conversational tone I said, “Nick, we have trouble in the bathroom.”
And then, just as he cupped his hand behind his ear and shouted, “What?” a mother raccoon who was living in the porch roof with her babies lunged at his head with an insane ferocity. The ladder looked like the big hand on a clock as it began a graceful arc from the 12 to the 3 carrying Nick to the ground before collapsing on top of him. The porch roof fell in a few seconds later.
The efforts of the raccoon, the falling ladder and the collapsing porch roof all failed to kill Nick, so I went ahead and explained the wall-papering incident to him. He made a decision—you didn’t need to zap his brain with electricity to get his attention, zapping mine would do just fine. He knew a problem when he saw one and was downright certain that this unforeseen electrical snag was a greater danger than the bats, and so all efforts shifted. We were going to take a proactive stance, get right in the fire hazard’s face and spit at it. We reconnoitered to the attic and approached the gargantuan matrix of brittle knob-and-tube wires that nurtured all the electricity in the house. Nick cut the one he felt was the offender and Armageddon commenced. On its best day, the electrical capacity in that house was nothing to write home about. For instance, if you were making toast and the refrigerator decided to kick on, a fuse blew. But this was a turn for the worse. We were about to get up close and personal with the Dark Ages. Unfortunately, it was time for another business trip. We would have to make do. We put one foot in front of the other like weary pioneers for some six weeks while we fixed our electrical problems during stolen moments.
Catastrophe struck anew in the midst of the power outage. Our pets, ergo we, suffered an infestation of fleas. Who knows from where? Could’ve been the bats, could’ve been those flea-bag squirrels, whatever. I wasn’t about to lose control of things, so I reached for the yellow pages and tracked down yet another exterminator, this time a flea expert. I chose a man from Port Huron, someone without a drop of Fassbender blood in his veins. In this man I had found the Anti-Christ of the flea world. He wore an eye-patch and a jagged scar dominated the right side of his face. His threatening appearance fed my hunger for flea obliteration.
I wanted Nagasaki.
I wanted Hiroshima.
I would get them from this man.
He was a commando and we became his followers. I had visions of wearing camouflage and teaching my children how to slither on their bellies and pull the pin out of a grenade with their teeth. We were given instructions: every single thing in the house was put out in the open and laid bare in order to soak up the death vapors that would emanate from the numerous flea bombs my sinister hero was going to detonate.
I had crossed over into an alternate reality. Gone were the days of high heels and perfume; I was in the business of conquering nature. Most of the time I was consumed with revulsion at the very thought of bugs in my house, but at other times I rationalized: could be worse, could be head lice. Old houses play mind games like that with you.
We soldiered on. The re-wiring was finished and not a moment too soon because the weather was getting a little chilly. In preparation for winter, Nick decided to show me what to do in case the pilot light on the furnace went out when he was away. We traversed the maze of rooms in the basement until we came to a metal door. I thought it led to another room, but no, it was the door to the furnace itself. He opened it and we beheld the pilot light. Calling it a pilot light doesn’t really do justice. Raging flame doesn’t even do justice. Inferno merely hints at the magnitude of the thing. It was without a doubt the belly of the beast. Nick talked, I listened and silently determined that I would take the kids and pets and go to a hotel before I went near the thing. Did he think I was the nit-wit of the universe?
As huge as it was, oddly enough that furnace wasn’t the only heat in the house. A very small furnace occupied part of a wall in the family room. Initially, we had joked about the cheesy-looking little thing, never once believing that we would actually use it. But as the weeks wore on and the weather got colder, in what would prove to be a prophetic choice of words, I proposed that we ‘fire it up.’ I have no idea why we continued to be so foolhardy. You would think by that point we wouldn’t have trusted anything.
It worked fine—at first. We were grateful for the warmth it gave and regularly chanted to it in praise and thanksgiving. And then one night a tongue of blue flame flashed forth from its vents and just as quickly flashed back. It was a sight that sent our sympathetic nervous systems into overdrive. At our current stage of denial, many of the house’s quirks and fits failed to penetrate the emotional defense system we had developed. We’d started to shrug things off in the interest of maintaining a slim hold on sanity. Not that time. The thought of explosion galvanized us into action. We extinguished the pilot, put on sweaters and called a professional who found squirrels nesting in the chimney causing some sort of rogue backdraft. Did the news upset us? Pshaw. We were unfazed. After all, we battled bats on a weekly basis. What were a few squirrels to us? Did the cost upset us? Absolutely not. Life is full of choices—some people choose to spend on food and clothing and things of that ilk, while others choose to spend on squirrels. We chose squirrels.
Winter passed, spring arrived and with it the yen to tackle all those projects whose budgets had been spent on heat. First, there was plastering and painting to be done. A quick trip to the basement would yield the spackle and I would be off and running. As I descended the basement stairs to fetch a trowel, I thought the brick floor looked shiny. Closer inspection showed it to be wet. Hmmm. I was pretty savvy to these situations now. I grabbed a flashlight and followed the trail. Were those suds? How could that be? I continued to follow the little stream until I came to water bubbling up through a small hole in the floor. I called the city water department. They sent, not one, but two Fassbenders to investigate. Oh ya, they smelled sewage and oh ya, they smelled chlorine too. A few minutes later one of them had a Fassbender EUREKA moment. The two of them conferred and, well, hey, there was an easy solution to the mystery after all.
“Ma’am,” one of them said, “all of St. Clair sits over an artesian well which the Diamond Crystal Salt Company pressurizes and depressurizes depending on the situation at hand. Why, sometimes water comes right up through the sidewalks in St. Clair.”
My ears started to ring and my breathing became shallow. “Are you telling me that my house may fill up with water?”
They responded in a Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee manner, sort of taking turns speaking. “Oh, nuthin’ that serious—but your basement, well now that’s a horse of a different color—Oh, ya. We can just about guarantee a flood there—I know of one time them people in that pink house up the street had fish in their dining room. Remember that, Harv? ”
A twitch had begun under my right eye. I didn’t trust those two. I called a plumber, another out-of-towner non-Fassbender, who recommended a sewer pipe specialist. That fellow’s verdict was that we had tree roots in the sewer pipes largely due to the fact that ours were the old-fashioned clay type; a tree’s finger root had no trouble getting into the flange where one piece fit over another. And what with daily fertilization, well, you know how these things go.
In addition to flushing a tablespoon of copper sulfate once a week, we had a standing appointment with the sewer man. I became his little helper. To this day my mother insists that I was born for better things.
If it wasn’t an indoor problem, it was an outdoor one. The yard work exhausted us, which was a blessing in a way. We were too tired to get alarmed much anymore. Case in point: lying in bed one night I heard water running. I nudged Nick who said it was just one of the kids ‘taking a whiz.’ I disagreed. Little boys pee like little boys; this sounded like a racehorse. We went in search of the sound. There was a hatch in the upstairs hall ceiling that concealed a pull-down ladder. Nick opened it and was immediately knocked to the floor by the ensuing waterfall. The whole business was caused by a leaking widow’s walk.
Oh, there’s more to that story. So much more. But I must stop now. It’s not good for me to revisit some things. Memories of rebuilding the very peak of the house are still jarring, as are memories of setting the yard on fire and getting religion on a runaway riding mower.
If I learned nothing else from my Victorian home I learned that an old house is a lot like a nuclear explosion—it’s just one big death cloud that mushrooms and obliterates all intelligent life.
And, oh yes, where there’s one bat there are at least fifty more. Go figure.