Grandma’s house was big and old. It was built in a style called Tudor—mostly brick but accented in triangular gables with half-timbering in stucco. Windows were tall and narrow with multiple panes sometimes diamond-shaped. English ivy had been allowed to spread over the front exterior. Steeply pitched roofs supported a surprisingly large number of chimneys that served different fireplaces in the house.
The layout wasn’t rectangular or at all regular, having parlors, pantries, and attached garages that extended at unexpected angles. The front door was strangely heavy, quite difficult to push open. When you walked through the house, you’d pass from a somber mahogany-paneled room with massive drapes into a happier, sunnier room with potted plants and a piano. The bright solarium—the safest room—was sometimes at one end of the house, sometimes at the other.
The main staircase was wide and carpeted in plush scarlet. It turned 180 degrees at a broad landing that was home to a stately grandfather clock or else a freestanding suit of medieval armor—and the armored knight might be holding in his mailed fist a lance or a mace. The bedrooms were too many to count and again included shadowy ones with monstrous closets and brighter ones with love seats and toy chests.
One pantry had a false cabinet that opened a trapdoor to a steep and narrow descent, practically a ladder, ending in a tiny wine cellar. Here you needed a candle or flashlight to see the dusty bottles in their cubbyholes. The regular basement had one safe room with sinks and laundry machines and a smell of linen; but its halls trailed off into rank black chambers where you shouldn’t go. Likewise the attic was one long airy room stocked with antique board games and boxes of painted wooden soldiers, but it was connected by crawlspaces to smaller rooms that were unlit, suffocating, and whispering with wasps.
The sprawling grounds were partly forest, partly lawn and garden. You walked along extensive, meandering footpaths through rosebushes, under an arched trellis, and into a courtyard whose hub was a circular wading pool around a fountain. Jets of water sprayed variously, creating rainbows. The statue in the middle of the pool was now a sea captain, now an old bearded Neptune, but most often a kneeling mermaid with golden hair, bare breasts, and shining scales from the waist down. Dragonflies whizzed everywhere. Amazing birds with complicated patterns sat in the arbor recesses. Grandma might be seen walking through the courtyard, practicing with her wand.