I’d heard him joke about certain young lady ghosts that lived around/inside the stone privy yet standing at an old girls’ academy, The Burwell School, right in Hillsborough. “The Haunted Outhouse,” Tad called it. I asked him what it felt like, his freely moving around this particular ghost-nest; his knowing that they knew that he was there, observing, enjoying. “Oh, M.E., I’d say like ‘walking through a rain of talcum powder too fine to notice but it still gets your hair feeling whitish and you can sort of smell it, dusty humany basementish almost rose-smellin’ sorta”; but he grinned as if only teasing. Even so, it stopped me, how certainly (I mean how lightly) he’d said all that.

  In the car, I sat shoulder to shoulder with my friends riding west. I recalled his “They never have lied to me.”

  Well, you need not be Sherlock to deduce as how this means a critical mass of earlier sightings, or promptings, promises. In the car bound home, I think we kept so hushed and a little glum, because we knew—if we hadn’t before—who he was. We knew that Tad wouldn’t make up such things—he’d never, ever lied to me, or to anybody, except out of white-lie kindness, or during something like losing at backgammon for Preservation’s sake. I chastised myself for that three-second delay in taking what he’d handed me first. But, even so, we all suddenly unwillingly knew he was going to die. Soon. Somehow his seeing the occupants of this last great house he’d saved showed us just how soon (four weeks). He’d made us start to see the bricks through him. Come to think of it, we’d always seen the bricks through Tad!

  Tad’s mission (and I can use that word in good conscience here) was about so much more than just saving certain pretentious properties for a few more generations of socially ambitious Carolinians who could afford to replace octagonal slate roofing tiles that can cost, as we all know, up to $69 per. The houses whom he’d saved were suddenly extravagantly giving groundbreaking housewarming gifts back to him. Presents from Presences! Farewells. They meant, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

  That’s just one story about him. But it’s the one that came to me. I know there are people in historic preservation who are only interested in the architecture, in the pediments, the lemon-oiled perfectible period detail. I fear I’ve met a few. I fear I myself have been wedged into more than a few mullioned window seats with Laura Ashley floral prints and peppermint-stripe piping on the cushions under my increasingly historical whatever (and there till after 2 a.m.). These experts consider the people who actually live (or lived) in these fine places as something like the furniture—you maybe need them there to make the house seem finished, but they’re incidental to the structure’s superior claims. With Tad, the living, the livingness of the place and what went on there and what might go on there next, that was the definition of his passion, boxwood by old rose, slate by slate, mantel to passing mantel.

  Then Tad died. At noon, March 31, Patrick left a message on my machine; he said that during the night, Tad had typed in caps in his computer notebook, HERE GOES. Pat suggested maybe I should get to the hospital? “It’s started,” Tad told me in his quiet way. By the time I found the message and rushed in there, it was almost over, and I held one hand and Patrick was on the other, as at some birth. He was spared nothing, Tad, but he presided over it, “inhabited” his dying. Our boy half-hosted it as he’d done everything else. With one of his final breaths—by then far past language, which had been a great ally of his—he blew sort of a kiss.

  Patrick Trevor—after contacting Tad’s parents (who were, for various reasons, unable to be with him at the end), Pat, after signing the coroner’s papers, after speaking to doctors and nurses and the many close friends who’d gathered—bent toward Tad’s computer. (It was still glowing in one corner of the unlit room.) At 1:04 a.m., Patrick withdrew the disk containing Tad’s final “Available for Restoration.” I had agreed to take over this newsletter, so Pat handed the disk to me.

  Back home, and right after the funeral, soon as I saw the pages printed out, I understood that, despite Tad’s determination to finish Issue # 14, despite Tad’s victory in staying one room ahead of the dementia, certain lapses had occurred. Confusions about sequence and details beset him at the end. Because of a final throat infection, Tad was sometimes unable to speak (“the worst indignity, damnit”); so he’d commenced typing notes to Pat and others, using the screen of his Toshiba Notebook. These were interspersed with hard-sell raves about some condemned home’s architectural niceties. The computer’s amber screen was often his hospital room’s only night light.

  Tad’s notes and personal asides found their way into what, without such personal interjections, might have been a more official, if less original, text.

  With Patrick’s permission and after my having misgivings about it, I want to offer a sample of this final document. I do this, being sure that Tad Worth, always able to see beauty latent under surface rust and seeming ruin, would approve.

  In the final hospital stay, during his clear early weeks, Tad wrote the portrait of Elkton Green with which this issue started. (Despite his, I thought, irresistible come-on, we lost that great house to the insatiable yellow bulldozers.)

  After describing Elkton Green so well, after thinking his portrait had sold the house, if now unable to talk effectively, Tad still tried to interest some new buyer in Shadowlawn, too. He would work on this document during his stray good 10-minute patches. By then the plantation house had been largely restored by Tad and the crew. And I’m glad to say that we have now sold Shadowlawn to Pam and Joseph Wainwright, who know exactly what they have and are willing to do whatever’s required to pull it back from the edge. So, Tad, it is saved.

  This, the end of his Shadowlawn entry, was the last thing he typed. Of all his final ramblings, it’s what I choose to print:

  The carriage house retains its frilled facing and a small family chapel, close by the water, still have traces of an ebonized Maltese cross atop its modified cupula…. The records show that slave and master worshiped here as one and

  Needs further expertise regarding modern plumbing. Still suitable fr. occupancy. Somebody is out there, sure of that … needs.

  New systems required throughout, oh true … By now there are hookups for natural gas heat and air, the evenings expecially, and the sense of others who’ve been near and can be … Mint, mention mint….

  About how close to water, mention. Noble approach, mention noble approach, and English boxes. Many, big as Pluto, planet Pluto, not dog. Joke. How the fires could have been set in middle of floors don’t know, we found the fireplaces to still draw perfectly perhaps a hundered years since fullest use, birds nests and old squirrels nests went up like tinders but the thrill to run outdoors at night and see smoke coming curling, like a thing relearning to breathe really, most beautiful though feared for stray sparks, must get screens, Pat….

  Pat, hi, will leave the machine on … rougher today

  … if miss you, sorry. Must sleep more, The shakes bigtime. Drench-ola. Tell Taylor hi, and to practice. Any word from parents? Pain is bracketed now. One does not love a place less for having suffered in it, right? Rite? How can I sleep when nurses keep comin in waking me & waking me? Their good cheer wears one dow … Extensive remodel needed. Priotico nearly complete. Big family could be so happy there, house has many treasure to yeield. Fish from dock. Smoke house sutible guesshouse, aroma mild but pleasant,. can be shown daily, key at store … house dedc to comfort, Mint nearby mention drinks … The parlor facing south, original glass throws shapes thoughtful human on wall and mofvews … tireder, language going, structre goiim ssNcup[e Confusion to the emeynes-Needs work but for immediate occupancy… … Keep thinking we didn’t pay phonebill again. Is it on? A life spent in non-profit okay! Confusion, the enemy. Hi hon, wkae me anyway? What the name the scrolling at corners, supports? Begins w.C. Look up later. My books. Around here somewhere. The right book. Find what type spiders web would best take gold dust? Dr Fscher glmmy. Last rose summer, pure gloss? Miss you, will

  Sq ft: 6,8888844 ik rooms, zned for living…. Where is my father and where is my m … Aint no sech thang as bluechipgreenies—its all just greenies …, Patrick Patrick why you so kind me? !Boy, talk about AVAIL For resoration! loans availbe, save this one pls…. Any word yet? Circa exema ok? Somthng nr chimney esp. signs & wondrs W aake me anyway ok? have M.E. correct this, fake it, will make press time, fine, sure…. I hear water. There’s a bad break, leak, flor below, chk on rushing water damage close;;; I see certai of lts columns, all Ionic! I knew that. So Dry mouth./ Most of this must go but which of these is the bearing wall? Pme jakbaa

  777kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk66#33 can restore to suit any new owner. Fix. I know you out there.

  I buried something. They dug it up for me.

  Am mostly beyond all tired. mst. ctch winx … Treated 2×6s∘^I“Smokehouse roof leaki. Fix first. Alwys fix roof first, I keep … I forget. All keys, hall drwer.

  hi

  HERE GOES

  IV.

  I end by remembering a meal we had together. (One thing I must blame him for is how readily he knocked me off my diet. He’d show up with two bags of stray ingredients from Wellspring Market in Chapel Hill, asking, “But whatever shall we DO with all these perishables? As Marse Wilde said, ‘Simple pleasures are the last refuge for the complex.’”)

  We were seated at my back table, finishing some raw oysters. This was when you could still eat those raw without worrying so. We’d only just acquired Shadowlawn, work had just started. But already, when he got up to fetch something, Tad was forced to reach out for the counter to support himself. Of course, he made it look quite natural, you know. Regal. Like, oh, he was solemnly recalling something.

  Tad had been worrying over some legal issue involving right of way, easement to the entrance of the Shadowlawn big house, and he was frustrated and weak, a combination new to him. He said, “I really don’t know nothin’ ’bout rebirthin’ no houses, Mizz Scarlett.” He stopped, head dropping and knuckles going white along my counter’s ledge. I’d never seen him conventionally depressed before. Then I understood just how enraged he was at all the details, all the work left undone, and with only us amateurs trying to fake it in our way. However earnest, we all lacked his genius for vamping, guessing, making it LOOK right and therefore FEEL right, in that order of zoning.

  “I know it must be frustrating,” I said, clumsy but well meaning. “And yet, do think of everything you’ve saved, 56 or ’7 masterpieces that were headed only for the wrecking ball. Tad, do remember what-all you have achieved, m’dear.” “Well, it’s true we’ve set aside a single-family dwelling or two. But that’s such a fraction. Of what’s lost, M.E. Plus, I is so tired of keeping house, keeping on keeping on sweeping them flo’s. Turns out, I do do windows after all.”

  “You are a window, honey.” I was about to get started. “You are a window in a door.” But he stopped me from saying something even more sappy and far too comforting. Too easy, I mean.

  Then he pointed out the kitchen window toward his truck. Circa, yappy, was guarding it. I saw all these clothes piled up in the back. “Everything I’ve never been able to fit into, till today. And I feel some runway turns coming on. Point me toward your nearest changing room, per favore, Coco?”

  Tad had brought everything he’d ever purchased just in case he ever lost the weight. Today and today precisely, he’d got down to the very size he’d always imagined being (is this too much? He always told me there was no such thing as too much entertaining truth). He carried many armsful into my front parlor. I set up a chair in the foyer, between those big flanking Victorian pier glasses, 15 feet of beveled mirrors admiring mostly each other. I built a fire in either adjoining parlor, I put on a stack of Bix and Billie and turned them way up. I even let poor Circa in, despite the half-idolatrous way I love my rugs. Needless to say, we treated ourselves to a few stiff drinks. Then he came out in one ensemble after another. First it was very funny, then it got unbearable, finally so sad it turned hilarious. He was no stranger to overdoing, as he’d told me that first day.

  Tad wore every outfit, in high dudgeon with that comic-brave business he did so much during the last four years (a little Dark Victory in there, as he admitted). Tad staged the privatest of fashion shows for me. All the clean good clothes he’d never once squeezed into. “I’ve kept these in a separate closet forever called ‘Someday My Prints Will Come, in Handy….’” He lugged even more from his green Ford pickup. Heaped were all horizontal stripes, the pleated pants and tartan plaids. Circa was almost comically underfoot, yapping, entering into the spirit, running up to the mirror, considering herself, playing tag with her own reflection. She seemed weirdly smart today and almost charming.

  Tad had visibly become exactly the splendid-looking person we’d all always seen, the one that Tad himself had never quite believed was under there. Perfect finally, and startled by it, Tad kept changing outfits; he was soon looping up and down my staircase, cutting through my good steep rooms in this house he’d saved, doing dips and turns, and by the end, and after several more than our usual drier-than-the-Sahara martinis, we were both laughing and crying at once. Soon I was putting on every tweed overcoat left over from my George, and all the houseguests’ forgotten raingear and whatever clothes my missing children yet stashed upstairs. Hysterical, we were. Ah, but it was wonderful.

  It felt like a perfect weekend house-party, but it lasted only six hours. Just the two of us, taking all the parts. We were playing the way hard-disciplined schoolkids will when given, by accident, the run of the big house. It was a time as fine as ones I recalled from the mid to late ’30s. For me, the very pinnacle of fun. House parties at Nags Head just before the second war with all my girlfriends from Saint Catherine’s and many of the freckled, courteous, lovesick boys whose planes would soon have to get shot down.

  As he finally walked past me, exhausted and practically croupy from the serious laughs we’d had and how it tested his failing lungs, I noticed something. Tad was by then wearing only a wool vest and Bermuda shorts; he was barefoot. I saw how thin his legs had got. How brown, how beautiful they were at that scale. If his frontal padding always made him seem a Victorian edifice with furbelows and curly notches and overgenerous ornamentation, that joyful bulk had now changed. He was reverting, in period at least. He’d slid back down from a too-prosperous 1870, to severer, civic 1840, back to strict, pure, personal 1810. Today, Tad was exactly 1810!

  I saw, being a beneficiary of his own architectural-discussion group, that Tad had shrunk down to exactly his own favorite moment in American domestic design. His former happy corpulence had, in ending, finally achieved what he’d once called “the chaste, Greek proportions of the Federal.” Tad had always explained to us: The Federal period was the last moment when, believing Mankind (at least of the American sort) to be perfectible, Architecture proved that possible. Proved that perfection, too, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  I just wanted to say something nice to him, is all. But, stupidly, I chose to talk about his weight, which also meant of course how much he’d lost. I said, “Your legs …” and stopped, just hating myself, you know.

  “Why? Are they finally fairly ‘good’? Think so, M.E.? Well, then, back kick, shuffle ball-change. All they needed was one serious pencil-sharpener apiece. Quit while you’re ahead, hmmm? I seem to have gotten everything I wanted, for the wrong reasons. Too Much Too Soon. But, can you imagine me one day actually walking up onto the portico at Shadow-lawn, when most of it is done, and me feeling great for one whole week, with a northwest breeze and no mosquitoes and just to be up on that porch, and me wearing khaki Bermudas with hardly any paint on them, and upright at last on legs this thin? Ooh, all I need is a couple more bronzer sticks and another NEH grant, gir’friend. Can I grate some extra horseradish for your ersters, honey? I’m right here at it. I am up.”

  “Your legs are Federal now.”

  At last, I managed to say it.

  He glanced down, studied them, and looked right back at me. “My God, they are. Quelle achievement!” Then oh how he smiled at me. It was almost worth it, just for that one smile.

  I cannot explain the look of happiness Tad gave me then. I cannot explain how I go on seeing all the bricks through him. Can’t start to tell you the joy he yet gives me, day by day, room to room.

  If—(here, I am going to go ahead and do this)—if, as we are promised, “In my Father’s house are many mansions …” then there is a little justice, after all.

  He’s occupied.

  He’s One, Too

  For Edmund White,

  and for Patrick Merla

  In Falls, North Carolina, in 1957, we had just one way of “coming out.”

  It was called getting caught.

  Every few years, cops nabbed another unlikely guy, someone admired and married—a civic fellow, not bad-looking. He often coached a Pee Wee League swim team. Again we learned that the Local Man Least Likely to Like Boys did! In our town of twenty-two hundred, this resulted in confusion unto nausea.

  Our Herald Traveler was usually sedate (“Recent Church Goings-On of Fun and Note”). It now encrusted the front page with months of gory innuendo. Circulation beefed right up.

  And into jail they chucked the hearty, beautiful Dan R——, my boyhood idol.

  It took me weeks to learn why they’d removed him as completely as a carpet stain. I was nine and prone to hero worship. I suffered a slight stammer. I lunged at outdoor activities; accidents happened—often to bystanders. Archery from my tree house discouraged neighbors’ backyard cookouts. I felt that 1957 required its boys to enjoy a major sport.