Perhaps, I've been Summoned
The Judge would not let me sleep
Last night, the Judge was in my dreams. I should say he was in my waking thoughts, the ones I had from 1:30am to about 3am when I was not sleeping, but lying in bed wondering how I would tell this story. It’s the one about living in a house in Maine that is inhabited by his presence—not in the walls or the wide pine floorboards, but in my mind when I look down hallways, or out the window and think that, around the corner, time may bend and I’ll hear laughter from the dinner party he held on New Year’s Eve in 1924, or the music for the backyard wedding of his daughter Pauline, or the emptiness of the house when his children did not visit.
The house speaks to me but I admit I asked it to. When we moved in five years ago during the most isolating years of the pandemic, I longingly searched for records of life as it existed before our modern crisis, asking the local historical society for any record they had about the house and its previous owners and digging through old newspaper files online and the paper index of the most comprehensive book written on the town, a two-volume tomb by historian Joyce Butler.
The Judge left a trail.
Maybe men such as he—whose family built the house in 1802, who go to Dartmouth and then Columbia Law School, who speak at civic functions and who sponsor debating competitions for local school children, are the very sort whose trails are not only written but saved.
But then, again, the story of the heartbreaks is also there. His family lost the house once—before he was born—and it was only through a relative’s marriage into the family that bought it—that the house threaded back again to his lineage. Some relatives—also before his birth—were lost at sea, as many were in this ship driven town. And the Judge’s own daughter, the very one married in the backyard here in Kennebunkport, died young, just weeks after co-staring in a Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta with her husband. And his first marriage would not only dissolve but become front-page news when his ex-wife took him to court for more alimony as she raised the granddaughter left motherless after that daughter’s death.
A few days ago, I had a roofer come by. He arrived in a red and black wool guide shirt with a wool collard shirt beneath. He was a Mainer and he knew old houses.
“You have one of the special ones,” he said, taking a look. It was built with old-growth timber. It had been cared for over the years. As for the roof, it probably had several layers still on it, beneath the asphalt shingles.
Layers and layers, beneath this modern finish—still there and still holding up, like the bricks in my fireplaces or the hammered-marked nails in the basement.
What is the Judge telling me? What am I telling him.
I guess it’s time to find out.
Photo of The Judge, sitting in the living room of our house, set against a mural of the house painted in 1925, to depict the home in the 1800’s, when it was a stop along the stage coach line to Portland. The Judge had the mural painted by Louis Norton—who you’ll meet later.