spite of the fact that its housing stock has withstood modernity’s rush, leaving it with an earnest old-style-suburban appeal. There is, however, no intact town center left, only a couple of at-home antique shops, a lawn-mower repair and a gas station-deli hard by the state road. The town office (I’ve checked into this) has actually been moved to the next town down Route 1 and into a mini-mall. At the Haddam Realty Board I’ve heard the sentiment bruited that the state should unincorporate Penns Neck and drop it onto the county tax rolls, which would sweeten the rates. In the past three years I’ve sold two houses here, though both families have since departed for better jobs in upstate New York.
But in truth I’m showing the Markhams a Penns Neck house not because I think it’ll be the house they’ve waited for me to show them all along, but because what’s here is what they can afford and because I think they may be dejected enough to buy it.
Once we turn left off 571 onto narrow Friendship Lane, pass a series of intersecting residential streets to the north, ending up at Charity Street, the beating-whomping hum of Route 1 traffic fades out of earshot and the silken, seamless ambience of quiet houses all in neat, close rows amid tall trees, nice-ish shrubberies and edged lawns with morning sprinklers hissing, plus no overnight parking—all this begins to fill the space that worry likes to occupy.
The Houlihan house, at 212 Charity, is forthright and not even so little, a remodeled gable-roofed American farmhouse set back on a shaded and shrubbed double lot among some old hardwoods and younger pines, farther from the street than any of its neighbors, and also elevated enough in its siting to suggest it once meant more than it means now. It has, in fact, the nicer, larger, slightly out-of-place look of having been the “original farmhouse” when all this was nothing but cow pastures and farmland, and pheasants and unrabid foxes coursed the turnip rows and real estate meant zip. It also has a new bright-green shingled roof, a solid-looking brick front stoop, and white wooden siding a generation older but of more or less the same material as the other houses on the street, which are smaller one-storey, design-book ranches with attached pole garages and little concrete walks straight to the curb, where mailboxes are posted house after house after house.
But here—and to my complete surprise, since I see I’ve, in fact, never seen it before—here might be the house the Markhams have been hoping for; the fabled long-shot house, the one I’d never shown them, the little Cape set too far back, with too many trees, the old caretaker’s cottage from the once-grand manor now gone, a place requiring “imagination,” a place no other clients could quite “visualize,” a house with “a story” or “a ghost,” but which might have a je-ne-sais-quoi attraction for a couple as amusingly offbeat as the Markhams. (Again, such houses do exist. They’ve usually just been retrofitted into single-practice laser-gynecological clinics run by doctors with Costa Rican M.D.’s and are most often found along older, major thoroughfares and not in actual neighborhoods in towns like Penns Neck.)
Our “Lauren-Schwindell Exclusive” sign is staked out front on the sloping lawn with Julie Loukinen , the listing agent’s name, dangling from the bottom. The grass has been newly trimmed, shrubbery pruned, the driveway swept clear to the back. There are lights inside, glowing humidly in the post-storm gloom. A car, an older Merc, sits in the driveway, and the door behind the front screen is standing open (aka no central air). This could be Julie’s car, though we haven’t planned to show the house as a team, so that it probably belongs to owner Houlihan, who (I’ve arranged this with Julie) is right now supposed to be eating a late breakfast at Denny’s courtesy of me.
The Markhams sit silent, noses first in their listing
But in truth I’m showing the Markhams a Penns Neck house not because I think it’ll be the house they’ve waited for me to show them all along, but because what’s here is what they can afford and because I think they may be dejected enough to buy it.
Once we turn left off 571 onto narrow Friendship Lane, pass a series of intersecting residential streets to the north, ending up at Charity Street, the beating-whomping hum of Route 1 traffic fades out of earshot and the silken, seamless ambience of quiet houses all in neat, close rows amid tall trees, nice-ish shrubberies and edged lawns with morning sprinklers hissing, plus no overnight parking—all this begins to fill the space that worry likes to occupy.
The Houlihan house, at 212 Charity, is forthright and not even so little, a remodeled gable-roofed American farmhouse set back on a shaded and shrubbed double lot among some old hardwoods and younger pines, farther from the street than any of its neighbors, and also elevated enough in its siting to suggest it once meant more than it means now. It has, in fact, the nicer, larger, slightly out-of-place look of having been the “original farmhouse” when all this was nothing but cow pastures and farmland, and pheasants and unrabid foxes coursed the turnip rows and real estate meant zip. It also has a new bright-green shingled roof, a solid-looking brick front stoop, and white wooden siding a generation older but of more or less the same material as the other houses on the street, which are smaller one-storey, design-book ranches with attached pole garages and little concrete walks straight to the curb, where mailboxes are posted house after house after house.
But here—and to my complete surprise, since I see I’ve, in fact, never seen it before—here might be the house the Markhams have been hoping for; the fabled long-shot house, the one I’d never shown them, the little Cape set too far back, with too many trees, the old caretaker’s cottage from the once-grand manor now gone, a place requiring “imagination,” a place no other clients could quite “visualize,” a house with “a story” or “a ghost,” but which might have a je-ne-sais-quoi attraction for a couple as amusingly offbeat as the Markhams. (Again, such houses do exist. They’ve usually just been retrofitted into single-practice laser-gynecological clinics run by doctors with Costa Rican M.D.’s and are most often found along older, major thoroughfares and not in actual neighborhoods in towns like Penns Neck.)
Our “Lauren-Schwindell Exclusive” sign is staked out front on the sloping lawn with Julie Loukinen , the listing agent’s name, dangling from the bottom. The grass has been newly trimmed, shrubbery pruned, the driveway swept clear to the back. There are lights inside, glowing humidly in the post-storm gloom. A car, an older Merc, sits in the driveway, and the door behind the front screen is standing open (aka no central air). This could be Julie’s car, though we haven’t planned to show the house as a team, so that it probably belongs to owner Houlihan, who (I’ve arranged this with Julie) is right now supposed to be eating a late breakfast at Denny’s courtesy of me.
The Markhams sit silent, noses first in their listing
Similar Books
