Gathers his Inheritance: Buechner on Houses and OZ
I’d had bad beats before: lousy hands at college — and sometimes casino — poker tables, promotions I ought to have had whose politics went sideways at the last minute, a few awkward fumblings in the direction of stock investing. But nothing hit quite as hard as losing the house.
I had taught for most of the decade at Seattle Pacific University, which happens to sit at the base of the highest value real estate neighborhood in Seattle’s already hyper-inflated market. You can’t touch a garden shed in Queen Anne for less than a million dollars. So, we rented, and I assumed always would, until one day, when my wife’s best friend asked, “do you guys want this house?” What did she mean by “want”? She was a millionaire — I guess I knew that already — and at 80 years old and in declining health, probably wouldn’t around for much longer. She didn’t have any heirs either, or relatives she was in touch with. Is this woman seriously offering us a house? Turns out, she was asking whether we’d like to buy it, but for whatever we could afford rather than for what it was worth. “What do I need with extra money?” she reasoned. We were over the moon. We ran the numbers and found a fair middle. We walked with her through the rooms while she suggested, “maybe you could put the crib here and this room would be perfect for your son.” It felt otherworldly, like a dream, a blessing on a blessing. She could leave her home to friends who loved it, to people who loved her rather than selling it to strangers, and we would have the first stability we’d ever known.
It all fell apart when some well-intentioned, if distant, friends of hers presumed that my wife and I were fraudsters trying to swindle an old woman out of her land value. “She must be out of her head, too old to make financial decisions,” they said. Never mind that we were giving her twice what she’d paid for the house, the friends simply couldn’t imagine that someone of sound understanding wouldn’t want to get every cent possible, that she could cost herself, knowingly, in order to bless a poor couple of artists. They scuttled the plan, moved her to an elder-care facility, sold the house by quick-deed, and pocketed the difference. It was the ugliest thing I’ve ever been a part of.
It is also, very nearly, the plot of Frederick Buechner’s fifth novel, The Entrance to Porlock (1970), in which an aging paterfamilias attempts to leave a valuable piece of real estate not to his immediate family, but to a local disabled community instead, who might be more blessed thereby.
