The World Is on Fire. Joni Tevis
and teak for the floors, German silver inlay for doors, pipestone for a fireplace.
In the end, she knew none of it mattered. She signed her thirteen-page will thirteen times, leaving provision for the house to be sold at auction and the furnishings to be left to Francis, her favorite niece, who took what she wanted and sold the rest. A practical way to dispose of things: leave the gaslight chandelier with thirteen jets; leave it all, with minimal instructions, so that mountain of stuff won’t hold you back. Set aside a sum to hire a man to deal it all out once you’re gone.
How I love a good auction, the auctioneer’s chant braiding buyers, goods, price. His chant is a ballad that lasts all day, and each lot is a verse. What will you give me, he cries, what’ll you give? More, always more: rugs scrolled like scripture, bareheaded lamps shorn of shades, books on orchardcraft, cobbler’s tools. Sales used to be regulated by candles; bidding lasted, like a séance, until the flame guttered dry.
But for the kitchen, the Grand Ballroom, and the séance room, it’s hard to tell what most of the rooms were used for, and that’s not the only thing that gives the Winchester House a rickety, kaleidoscopic feeling. There are shallow cabinets an inch deep, and others large as generous rooms. One door opens onto a one-story drop, another onto slats instead of flooring. A staircase ends blind in a ceiling, and another forks into a Y, eleven steps up and seven steps down. Despite the fortune Sarah spent, the house feels temporary as a badly pitched tent.
Here we stand in the Hall of Fires. It’s lined with hearth after hearth, strange for central California, but the guide tells us that Sarah craved the heat to ease her arthritis. I think of her sitting on this bench, listening to her house: a medium taps out a message from the dead, coins snick like knitting needles, and a gun-shaped latch snaps home. Two swings tap a trim nail true. A burning log hisses, freeing drops of old rainwater. A signal card drops into a slot: Mrs. Winchester needs assistance in the Hall of Fires, and a nurse heads toward her to help. Radiators knock, carrying waves of warmth. The rim of a plate kisses its kin, and the maid clicks the cupboard door closed.
By April 1906, Sarah had lived in her house twenty-two years. During that time, her workers had built, among many other rooms, the Grand Ballroom. Whereas the rest of the house follows no rules—chimneys stop shy of ceilings; an extravagant rock-crystal window receives only slantwise light—the parquet floor in the Ballroom is precise down to the hair.
“The floor builder used no nails,” our guide tells us, “only glue.” He would have worked a section at a time, fitting one piece of smooth wood against another in a neat herringbone. This must have been the hushed corner in a house constantly worried by sound, and even now I’d like to stand here awhile, quiet, in this sunny corner.
I wonder if he heard the remembered racket of other workers when he slept at night, as I have in my own dreams, the carnival jingles of the theater-lobby arcade, the burr and shriek of machine parts turning and dropping off the lathe.
Above the glowing floor hang two stained-glass windows with quotations from Shakespeare. From Troilus and Cressida: “Wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts”; from Richard II: “These same thoughts people this little world.” According to legend, only three people ever entered the house through the richly carved front door: Sarah, the man who delivered it, and the door-hanger. When Theodore Roosevelt dropped by one afternoon to express his admiration for Winchester rifles, servants sent him around back.
But on April 18, 1906, just after sunrise, the earth shook. In San Francisco, the ground liquefied and houses crumbled, their fronts peeling off and their walls buckling and kneeling. There must have been screams and silence—people shaken from sleep and too surprised to speak. When the gas lines ruptured, walls of flame pushed up the city’s hillsides; pictures taken just after the disaster show buildings planed open, whole city blocks of blackened rubble where houses had stood, rifts carved in the countryside, oaks riven, fences fallen, barns sucked flat.
Later, some witnesses told of hearing “an approaching roar” at dawn, or feeling a cold touch upon the cheek. Others said dogs pawed at doors and birds flew strangely; earthworms wriggled to the surface and tied themselves in knots. In the Daisy Bedroom, a fireplace shook loose and collapsed, and Sarah was trapped alone.
“Sarah believed she caused the quake,” our guide says. “She thought the spirits were rebuking her for spending too much time on the front part of the house.” So, the guide goes on, she ordered those rooms to be boarded shut and never went there again. No one danced across the Grand Ballroom’s smooth parquetry, no chamber orchestra warmed the walls with music, and no friend paused in front of the Shakespeare windows and asked Sarah what she meant in choosing them.
But the guide hustles us away too quickly from the earthquake-wrecked rooms, with their crumbling plaster and naked studding, lengths of ship-lathe and dusty little cobwebs. Light bends from a curved window. Torn wallpaper and scrawls of glue stain the walls, and I think of that old line from Pliny the Elder: “Hence also walls are covered with prayers to ward off fires.” The floor creaks companionably, and there’s no armchair to distract, just the bones of the tired old house. I’d stay here all day if I could.
A telling detail hides in the house’s thirteenth bathroom: a spiderweb window Sarah designed. The artisan rendered the web’s arcs in balanced curving sections of glass, but this is shorthand; in any real web, something more pleasing than symmetry develops. After all, symmetry leaves gaps, and if prey escapes, the spider starves.
Jean-Henri Fabre, a French naturalist writing during Sarah’s lifetime, noted that the orb-weaver spider works in a method that might seem, to the untrained observer, “like mad disorder.” After the initial triangle, spokes, and spiral, she rips out the preliminary threads, whose remnants appear as specks on the finished web. (In one added room of the Winchester House, you can make out the slope of a previous roof, a vestige of what the house used to be.) The spider fills out the web, testing its tension as she goes, finally building up the “sheeted hub,” a pad near the web’s middle where she rests and waits. Fabre calls this area “the post of interminable waiting.” When night fades, the spider destroys the web, eating the silk as she goes. Says Fabre: “The work finishes with the swallowing.”
The spider carries within her belly a store of this strong, pearly stuff, which nobody has yet been able to replicate. She dashes along an invisible line to bind a fly with bights of silk; she bluffs her foes by “whirling” or “shuttling” her web at them. Naturalists used to carry scraps of velvet to the field, so they could have a better backdrop for examining the webs they found. An entrepreneur once made wee cork-padded cuffs and fitted them to a spider’s legs, then wound skein after skein of silk from her spinnerets until the creature ran dry. He repeated the process with thousands of spiders until he had enough material to weave a gray gown of spider silk, which he then presented to Queen Victoria. During World War II, British gun manufacturers used black widow silk to make crosshairs for rifle sights.
As for me, when spring comes, I keep a lookout for the “sea of gossamer,” as it’s been called, when spiderlings take flight. In summer I have spied many a tight purse or reticule in which a swaddled grasshopper still struggles, staining the silk with dark bubbles of tobacco juice. And in fall I watch big garden spiders move from holly bush to camellia, spooling out guy lines and waiting under the streetlight for miller moths. With articulate legs, they pluck strands of silk and load them with gum. When dawn comes they finish hunting and tear down their webs, swallowing the golems a line at a time.
The Winchester House was once a living thing, Sarah’s shadow self, breathing in and swelling out, tough as twice-used nails. There are many threads to this story; many entrances, but only one safe exit. Not the door that opens onto a one-story drop, or the one that opens onto slats above the yellow