Sputterpub's Blog

From age twenty-two to thirty-three Peg had a few affairs, several friendships and always her family, but most of her time she was alone. She saw her sister daily, but she spent her mornings wandering the fields in search of plants and birds, and her afternoons reading or assisting at the hospital. She visited her brother and sister-in-law when she had to; she welcomed her nieces and nephew whenever they came downhill to her place. Peg didn’t like Sam’s house; she fashioned excuses to get out of visiting there then which she later used to avoid any human connection at all.

She was happy in her house. Really. She just wanted to be left alone.

The fire didn’t start at Sam’s that September Monday, but his big house was in its path. Peg wasn’t spotted near the action, and she never confessed or admitted anything. No one who witnessed that awful conflagration could think it caused by one heartsore being.

For herself, she might have tolerated the situation forever. She was used to Sam. As a child she adored him. She was only six when he first visited her room, rough hand on her mouth, hard weight on her chest. It didn’t happen often. It was better to endure him than to bust him. And he wasn’t sure about their relationship; maybe they weren’t blood. But he couldn’t say that about his daughter. His daughters. No.

Sam’s house was destroyed and his remains were found later. Just his. Mary and the kids were in Wildcat Canyon with Alice and Peg when the fire started; they were nowhere near where it went. They hunted for late blackberries and didn’t notice when Peg walked one way and they another. For her part, Peg’s only target was her brother’s beloved lodge. She wasn’t aware of the hot dry wind even when it hampered her attempts to strike the match.

Alice’s and Peg’s houses were not damaged in the big fire. Their neighborhood was spared, while all of the buildings two blocks east and up were consumed. Their gardens received a coating of soot and looked grayed out for a few weeks, but the ash acted as excellent fertilizer for the highly-acidic soil. The sisters’ houses were fine but Peg stopped going out. She seemed stunned by the devastation.

She wouldn’t even attend Sam’s funeral. Mary and the kids stayed at her little place until the burial, and Mary always maintained afterward that she felt embraced by Peg’s little house, embraced and beginning to heal, but Peg was then immobilized; she refused to see her brother’s corpse into the earth.

She remained housebound until 1930. Gradually she became an old-crone legend among the children in the neighborhood. Her neglected garden was described as haunted.

But her house cared for her. Within that small space she wrote poetry and contemplated creatures and felt safe to feel. It took eight years before she grew strong enough to leave the little place and resume living, elsewhere. Then she used some more time, selecting the new owner for her house. Finally she hugged Alice goodbye. She squatted by the edge of the creek, right knee down, and stuck her hand into the cold water. Felt, heard, smelled the creek. Brought her wet hand to her mouth and tongued her own palm. Looked once more. Left.

By 1912 Sam had established himself as a business magnate and civic leader. He had married a Peralta heiress and bought his creekside mansion near the Kent estate. His sisters lived with him until tension between them and his wife grew uncomfortable. He gave them homes as much for his peace as for their own.

At first he considered a shared house for Alice and Peg. He had a small lodge in Wildcat Canyon and he thought about establishing them there. But he soon figured that wouldn’t work. They’d be too remote. Once alone they’d begin picking at one another. His sisters were particular women, very fussy. And Sam wanted to keep the canyon lodge for himself; it was where he went when he needed a break from the stress of business.

It surprised him that Alice and Peg didn’t marry. He thought Alice was a bit ugly, true, but women were scarce and she had some money; he thought she’d be a wife. And Peg was good-looking. But his sisters were single at twenty-four and twenty-two and they didn’t appear to be looking for husbands. He bought little houses for them.

So the neighborhood formed. Sam and Mary Benedict lived up the gentle slope with a view of the bay and the creek meandering by, in a gorgeous mansion which was in such a constant state of alteration and improvement that it never settled into any style before its demise in the fire of 1923. Downstream from the manor, what would be four and a half city blocks when there was a real city, the little houses of Sam’s sisters framed a big curve of the creek.

Alice’s looked like an English cottage. White stucco with a slate-like roof that curved over the small-paned windows, it stood among its rose bushes as sturdy as a bunker. But it was built of alien materials and, really, it should have faced northwest on the land even though that would have put it at an angle to the street. As it was, the house needed constant and substantial repairs. Maybe the problem was the ventilation; Alice often complained of headaches.

In contrast, Peg’s place was charmed. It was framed and walled with the redwood that had grown on its land, and most of its windows were made of its own melted dirt. It got its roof thatch from the hay field on the other side of Perkins Street. It looked like the witch’s house from Hansel & Gretel. As the years passed and Peg aged from twenty-two to forty she came to be considered a witch herself.

But that took some time. It went in two phases. Of the eighteen years Peg lived in her little house, for the first eleven she appeared quite normal. Except she was rather good-looking and somewhat rich, but she never got married.

It wasn’t that she was a lover of women. In fact, her sister Alice was that type, and Peg helped Alice keep it a secret from Sam. Alice only acted on her inclination once in her life, one summer with a charming woman who visited the area from Brussels, and Peg thought it was Alice’s self-repression, more than bad air in her house, that caused her chronic headaches.

Peg just wasn’t interested in being mated. She was a curious girl and tried sex several times, and she enjoyed it, mostly, but not enough to get married. She had an affair when she was twelve with the son of her brother’s business partner. Jeremy was fifteen at the time and completely inexperienced. In fact she seduced him. The Perkins family socialized often with the Benedicts, and Peg and Jeremy managed a regular and vigorous sex life. She was lucky to avoid pregnancy.

She had a more exciting fling when she was seventeen. The judge’s nephew visited for a month. A college man, from Yale. He was experienced; she was pleasured. But she never loved him enough to go back east with him. Peg preferred her home and her privacy. She opted for poetry and naturalism, and didn’t really have an interest in companionship.

She was quite discreet, and her brother never suspected her activities. Alice knew about some of them but of course she understood the value of a sister’s secrets.

They knew not what they did, when they built the little house. And they did it right.

The lot was rather small, downstream from the Kent estate, where the creek leveled out and zigged right in its year-round run to the bay. The property was dense with native redwoods and with live oaks and walnuts planted by the Kent family, and it just happened that the redwoods were removed to make room for the house. So it was that they built the place out of the trees that had always guarded the property. Even the window glass, bought a mile west on the edge of the bay but made, in part, from creek silica, was at home in the little house.

With that redwood, with that glass, it didn’t matter that the slope was beyond the angle of repose. That the foundation was a cattywampus sampler of different forms, nothing tied together. That the creek would swell every few years to encompass the basement for an hour, so that the little house had to more or less float on the land it covered. The designer was an unhappy unoriginal man, whose best claim to fame was to share a draftsman with Maybeck…yet the little house was built (quick and cheap) out of its own redwood and its own sand, and it stood charmed and charming.

If it were more valuable it would have been altered. It would have been bought and sold, remodeled or restored, had amenities added. If it were higher class it would have been situated to the east, with a view and a peril. But it was a modest little place, hunkering below street level, set back hidden in its oak trees. Its living room was low and shaded by the front porch, cozy and cave-like; its residents all knew they’d waste effort trying to make it light and airy, so no one painted the redwood walls or the brass window latches. It was mostly owned by single women, so no one added on to it, or drilled holes in its walls for speaker wires. In its first century it changed its roof material, added forced-air heat (cage-like around itself, with floor ducts below and ceiling ducts upstairs), and enclosed the back porch: that’s all.

It was built in October of 1912. It was listed for $3,200 but it wasn’t sold at first; it was given to a spinster sister of Samuel Benedict. They recorded a sale as if money changed hands, but Sam just gave the place to Margaret. He and Charles Perkins were the men responsible for the reservoir system that permitted development in the area, so he was well-connected with the builders. He managed to purchase his own mansion plus small houses for his two sisters, for a total of $8,493.

The three abodes were situated between the new Benedict and Perkins Streets, on the banks of the creek at the then edge of town. Sam’s place was over five thousand square feet and upstream from his sisters’ small houses. Alice’s cottage seemed English and Peg’s was like a little chalet.

Sam and Alice and Peg didn’t look like siblings. Maybe they weren’t. Their parents Abe and Helen moved to California in 1888, with eight-year old Samuel and infant Alice, and two years later, after the usual spate of summer visitors, baby Margaret just seemed to appear. No one noticed that Helen was pregnant, but she was a large woman and she wore her garments loose. Like Sam and Alice Margaret was tall, but she was dark-haired and green-eyed to their blonde-and-blue, and she seemed ingenious while they were canny.

Abe and Helen died in the influenza epidemic of 1903. Sam was then twenty-three and took charge of sixteen year-old Alice and thirteen year-old Peg. They lived together in the small family home while Sam built his fortune in reservoirs.