A Happier Life by Kristy Woodson Harvey
Every house has a story. And, if you had asked my friends and family members the day my husband and I went to look at a historic house on the coast of North Carolina’s third oldest town, they would have said ours had a cautionary tale. They weren’t totally wrong.
The first time we walked inside, my husband actually, literally fell through the floor. The house had been empty for more than a decade due to an unusual will provision, and it hadn’t been updated or remodeled since at least the 1950s. In the living rooms, the original hardwood floors were covered with green shag carpet, the kitchen had appliances that looked like they belonged in an episode of Leave it to Beaver — not to mention fake wood paneling and three layers of vinyl flooring. The bathrooms were various shades of pink, green, and harvest gold, the peeling ceiling plaster had been covered by stick-on tiles, and water spots surrounded the chimneys. The porches were sagging, the widow’s walk was rotting, and the exterior paint was peeling. And yet … This place had something. When I said that to my father-in-law, a retired architect and builder who had come to look at the house with us, he said, “Oh, yeah, it has something: ghosts.”
Maybe he was right. And maybe that was precisely why I fell in love with it. Maybe that was exactly what caused my husband and me to ignore the disbelief of our friends, the well-meaning warnings of our family members and the Historic Preservation Committee horror stories from our soon-to-be neighbors. This house had ghosts. And I wanted to meet them all.
A House “Teeming With History”
The minute we began unearthing the floors and stripping the walls and demoing the ceilings, the stories began. Some were true. (Well, true-ish, anyway.) Like how the President of the Bank of Beaufort once lived here and, when he embezzled from his patrons, got caught and fled town, he hid the money somewhere in the house. We’ve never actually found it but hope springs eternal.
Some were fabricated: the reason the ceiling in the downstairs bathroom was only five feet tall was because that’s where the children were locked when they were bad. Some were unsubstantiated but historically plausible: the woman that inhabited this house in the 1920s went up to the widow’s walk on the roof every night to search for her husband, who had been lost at sea.
Some things we know for sure: the original house, which was built in the mid-seventeen hundreds, as were the other houses on our street, burned down in a fire. This house, built in 1903, was its replacement. Some we only feel: this was a house full of love, full of energy, and, as we restored it to its former glory, it seemed to stand tall and proud again.
We gave this house a second chance. (Or a third? Or a fourth? Who knows!) And it gave us a place for our family to grow, to escape from the pressures of the real world, and to make memories we will cherish forever. This house, much like the town it resides in, is quirky and weird and imperfect. But it’s also heartbreakingly beautiful and teeming with history, with columns originally from early 1900s ship’s mast that still leak sap in the spring and hardwoods that are bruised and gashed and worn from age, handmade tiles we painstakingly repaired and hand-carved mantels. We discovered an ancient cistern underneath the guest bedroom floors — which slope precariously to the right — and shed tears when a stunning pecan tree that was nearly as old as the house itself finally became too dangerously sick to continue to try to save.
Building Up a Narrative
This house doesn’t just have a story. It is a story. And so it seems fitting that, all these years later, it would be the backdrop for my eleventh novel, A Happier Life, the one I finally set in Beaufort, NC, the town that stole my heart from the first moment I stepped foot on its sandy shore. In so many ways, A Happier Life is a book about the secrets our houses hold, the laughs they store within their walls, the memories they keep safe forever. The house in the story, based on the house we like to think we breathed life back into, has kept the secrets of Rebecca Saint James — Beaufort’s finest hostess — and her husband Townsend, and what happened to them the fateful night of their disappearance in 1976.
Almost fifty years later, their granddaughter, Keaton Smith, returns to the house that time and family forgot to wade through the detritus of her grandparent’s lives, to put their beloved home — which had been in their family since the beginning of Beaufort itself — on the market.
In dismantling the home she’d only heard stories about, she begins to understand not only who her grandparents were but also that what she has been told about their demise might not be totally accurate.
In so many ways, it is the house itself that leads her to the truth. Which seems right. Because I read once that every conversation, every laugh, every sneeze, every sound ever made in a house is stored somewhere inside its walls. Sometimes I think of that, wonder if it’s true, if one day my great-grandchildren will be able to sit in this home and distill conversations from 1907. Or 2024. Like DNA testing or cell phones, it’s only impossible until it isn’t. Or maybe one day they’ll read A Happier Life, recognize this home, and smile. Because through good and bad, for better and for worse, this house has become a part of our story. And every now and then, I love remembering: Like the many, many families before us, we’ve become a part of its story, too.
