The Mothball Autopsy

That first day was as she imagined drowning. She had arrived first, four thirty AM with her father’s panel van to stake out a space for her air mattress and saturate the building with an attitude of possession she was patently without in every other situation. That, at least, was what she imagined as she sped cross country from New York. Her vision was one of passive control over the frenzy; a kind of serene dominance by merit of her unparalleled caring. She would assert herself as one invested to the point of deserving the role of mediator.

She had a few hours start on the move-out before the first collective of her sundry cousins and aunts would be there, and she had planned to use them well. She marched alone through unlit hallways and took mental stock of rooms and their contents, surveying for their preservation.

There were four stories, including the basement, and between them lay enough objects to fill a dozen comparable houses. The back staircase was so obscured by a hoard of canned goods that it was rendered unusable. The library, while packed to the ceiling and most of the floor, could not accommodate the many cubic yards of books stored in piles in hallways and bedrooms. The attic housed half a dozen life-sized plush wild animals, including a dromedary camel and three species of tiger. Trash and treasure were compiled indiscriminately: a shoe box full of googly eyes and a toilet brush would sit balanced atop a cello that outdated the United States of America. A wedding ring might hide at the bottom of a tea tin used to collect extra rubber bands. She loved this place; growing up with the rare treat of a visit, the discovery of rooms she never knew existed, the rich and antient density of the walls and the hollowness of the space between them. She loved the critical mass of objects. A world of boxes in which a lid could be lifted and a secret suddenly known, and forgotten just as fast. She loved its strange smell, composed of things she would try to list and inevitably give up on: bricks, old books, dial soap, soot, wallpaper paste, whisky, wool, coal smoke, old upholstery, cake. And something else musky and indescribable, which her father attributed to carcinogenic moth balls from many decades ago that no one could find. She had never seen any, but she had seen plenty of moths.

Imaginably, she lost her control as soon as she was anything but alone. A pack of cousins arrived with their giant cars and their agendas for organizing chaos: burn it, sell it, claim it, or throw it away.  She spent the morning trying first to direct the dismemberment, then, backing down, to protest it, piece by piece as it was done before her eyes and carried out to the driveway.

The campgain desk from 1790 that always stood in the dining room between the abacus and the Christmas decorations – “Just set it in the main hall – John and Margarite claimed it.” She called, vowing to impose it upon John and Margaret later for safe keeping. She could trust them.

The enormous tin of cookie cutters that hadn’t been touched since the gingerbread rush when she was seven – How dare they leave them open for the pitiless aunts to comb through for the few worthy peices?

The three hundred stuffed sheep that were being borne down from a children’s guest room – those had to stay together – all of them! They couldn’t be dispersed like a persecuted religion across the abusing world of second-hand stuffed sheep. They were her sheep!

But soon there were too many of them. She was all but ignored after an initial greeting, and then forced to run frantic down hallways after them.

This would fetch half a grand at auction.

That matches my friend’s drapes at home.

Those are garbage – throw them out in that dumpster you rented.

By midday another taxi full of well-meaning relatives rolled in and, in her desperation, she let the second story fall to the rest of the rest of the clan, then the third, and the vast and mysterious basements and attics. A little at a time at a time she was outsourced by her own necessity until there was no ground she could hold. Every word spoken to her served the same purpose as the breadcrumbs in a very stingy meatloaf. Things – the things no one else would be able to put in the right place – were flying out through every door and window, floating up through the chimneys and running down the drains. She shut herself in the drawing room downstairs and held out, her hair coming unfastened and falling around her face. If I can salvage this one room… Her face was steaming. Sweat hung in her clothing and the strings of the apron she had put on to save it from being thrown away with everything else that no one had the time or patience to treat deservingly. She spun on her heel in the middle of the oriental carpet, trying by process of painful elimination to isolate what she could deal with. It was like trying to take a living thing apart without hurting it.

The stack of magazines on the sofa: she had all the New Yorkers at home already. Good. Those went into the wastepaper basket. Nothing else easy on the surface. Aunt Mabel burst in wielding a silver candlestick in her hand, as if to fend others off from the coffee service she was smuggling to her Grand Caravan outside.

“Out!” she yipped, dropping the last stack of magazines. Mabel turned and bustled out before a slamming door.

Drawers. She didn’t know what was in those. She eased the nearest one open and began spreading its contents out on the couch next to her. A parcel of letters so old she couldn’t begin to decipher the handwriting. A handful of miniature nutcrackers. A finger puppet. A turquoise ring. A roll of register paper. A collection of pencils. A cigar box full of empty tins. A package of spearmint lozenges. She could throw those away, but she remembered them. They must have been there for twenty years, and that was just her memory. Maybe it was longer. But how could she even begin to do this if it seemed wrong to throw out a Hall’s product? She leaned back into the velvet security of the sofa and took the room in whole. The grand piano stood with the bass-viol propped against its hip. The leaded windows filtered the light in patterns wrought in antique glass. On the porch beyond the windows a trumpet vine rose in a shaggy column toward the ceiling, painted an original copper blue.

How could she hope to reassemble this place somewhere else? In her own tiny life, between certainties, between loves, between homes, without all the people who had pieced it together? Without time? How rare it was to have amassed so many lives like layers of fallen leaves in the same place! Nothing she could do with the pieces could put right the way the light fell white-gold on rugs from Persia and mahogany from extinct trees. The same ghosts wouldn’t take hold in a surrogate body. That was reanimating the dead.

The moving men came on someone else’s orders, and as they dragged the hutch away from the dining room wall a little white door was exposed in the paler space left in the furnishing’s outline: a portal onto the dumb-waiter shaft. The dumb-waiter had been torn out like a crustacean from its shell some fifty years ago, to accommodate for new electrical wiring. She took the knob between her thumb and forefinger and drew it open. A fire-extinguisher had been stowed away inside on the makeshift partition that made up its floor. And next to it, under the same dusky blanket of dust, lay a small colony of moth balls.

Alone for a moment, she inhaled slowly, a deep, searching breath and reached in to gather them in her hands. Six chalky white spheres that left their shrouds of dust on her skin. The naphthalene smell bloomed around her. There they were. A few of however many thousands were hidden inside the fabric of the place.

She shoved them into the side drawer of The Campaign Desk from 1971, next to the unintelligible letters, and picked it up on her way out. They had filled her van for her, with things they wanted her to take to auction later that day; to squawk and heckle like them to people who could not be made to know. She slammed the back doors, set the desk on the passenger seat and leapt in next to it. She never bothered to take off the apron. As the engine started she looked back at the shoddy Italianate temple, its lights flashing on and off as the people marauded room to room. And then she drove away.

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