Don J. Snyder - The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found

I made my confession to a rich woman this week. It followed a long run of terrible luck that she happened to come upon me just as I was breaking into the Winslow Homer cottage, where Id been hired to do some painting. I had misplaced the owners keys and was prying open a porch door when she came crashing through the bushes like a fullback. Im looking for a man to fix my windows! she bellowed. She was breathing hard and stood with her feet planted wide apart.

I asked what was wrong with her windows and she said some of them wouldnt go up and some of them went up but didnt stay up. She didnt think it was going to be a big job. Ive heard this before. Most of these ancient wood and shingle cottages on the Maine coast are crumbling beneath the surface, brutalized by decades of North Atlantic winters. You start out to put a quick coat of paint on one short board below the eaves, you get up there and find the board is soggy, you pull it off and the ends of the roof rafters crumble like old paper, and then youre left rebuilding the house and trying to explain to someone with a year-round tan why a fifty-dollar paint job is going to cost thousands.

We talked about the money right up front because I have learned that many rich people still believe that only their doctors, lawyers, and accountants deserve a living wage. I charge fifteen dollars an hour, I told her.

Thats fine, she said.

Well, Ill come have a look, I said.

At the end of the day I followed her through the grape arbor. She walked at a good clip, dressed in layers of white and topped off with a white lace shawl that caught her tangled silver hair and gave her the appearance of one of Tennessee Williamss aimless women.

It was early spring and the couches in her house still lay under white sheets like cadavers. The rooms were enormous, with handsome wood walls of oak and walnut, stone fireplaces, and stamped tin ceilings. Everything shimmered in a riot of sunlight from the lovely floor-to-ceiling windows. I had been in a number of these cottages in the year since I began earning my living as a painter. The rich women hired me because I did a good job, taking the time to sand off all the old paint, and because I cleaned up after myself and didnt show up with a boom box to keep me company.

Usually I am cautious about saying much to the summer people because it is easy to hear yourself turning into a character in a cocktail party narrative back home in St. Louis or Chicago: Oh, Ive got this carpenter in Maine, hes an absolute classic! But it was different this time. She told me that she had happened to be watching the time my four kids came by and I let them each take a turn painting the Homer cottage. I could tell right away that those are four happy children, she said. This made me feel comfortable enough to explain how, lately, I had been trying to teach myself to look up and behold them. Just the other night, I said, we had all been hurrying to get to a fifth-grade concert. I was in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner to the rhythm of the radio news, doing my compulsive little nightly dance with the sponge and dish towelif the news is particularly bad I polish the copper bottoms of the potswhen I glanced into the next room and saw my world of beauty and surprise. There was our three-year-old in her Lion King undies, white ruffled socks, and black patent leather shoes, all her ribs exposed as she stretched her arms up high so her ten-year-old sister could drop the white and blue sailor dress over her head (HOLD STILL, CARA!) while her nine-year-old sister tied pink ribbons in her pigtails (STOP JUMPING UP AND DOWN, CARA!) and her seven-year-old brother put Band-Aids on her knees as a result of her having spent the day trying to ride a two-wheeler (DONT MOVE, CARA!).

It made me think of them decorating the Christmas tree, I told her. There it is in front of you, what you work for, and the reason you live. I happened to look up at the right moment or I would have missed it. My little story didnt seem to register with her at first, she just kept on walking out ahead of me. But at the bottom of the stairs she stopped and turned to face me, and told me that I was a lucky man, that her own father had been very handy but hed never had the patience to teach her how to do anything. So now Im helpless, she said without a trace of self-pity. Cant even make my own windows stay up.

The first two days I worked alone in her house while she disappeared into the rest of her life. I can never stop myself from snooping around these amazing cottages, taking inventory and trying to piece together a picture of how rich people live. You almost always find trophies from golf and tennis tournaments, and a little glass panel of bells and wires that once summoned the hired help to different rooms. And very often one of the old vibrating machines people once used to reduce fat. Walking through the empty rooms of her house, it didnt take long to figure out that this had been her fathers house and that he had run the show with an iron hand. There were paintings of him in different rooms that showed him distant and glowering. His daughter had preserved his study and his working desk with such meticulous care that I thought of the room across the street from Fords Theatre where Lincoln had died. In fact I began to see her less as a resident of the house than as a curator of a museum. Most telling were the family photographs that depicted her as a lovely little girl with a winsome smile that slowly vanished from successive photographs as her father appeared with different women at his side.