The rich boy’s house

 

December 15, 1998

 

I spent a great deal of time upstairs in Louis Fraulo's house, especially later when I became close friends with his younger brother, but never felt comfortable there.

It always felt like a show place to me, with the black maid constantly behind us to clean up, a maid who took the place of the mother, who was there and was not there as a matter of her madness.

I had no problem hanging around the yard or the garage, but once I entered that small vestibule where the floor was made of cut stone and climbed the carpeted stairs to the door at its top, I felt out of my depth, too used to the dust and grease of my own house to ever thrive in a place without either. I was always used to the up and down structure of the older houses in the neighborhood, where the personal spaces bedrooms and such were kept apart from the public spaces such as the kitchens and living rooms and dinning rooms by means of floors, each section rising, so that by entering a house I encountered the public space without threat of stumbling accidentally into a private space.

Not so here.

Once through the upstairs door, a visitor found himself confronted by nothing but personal space, a overflowing of rooms that didn't quite fit in with the traditional pattern of house and home. At the time, I was unaware of the bi-level ranch style home upon which the Fraulo house was patterned. Later, I would run into a similar arrangement when my aunt Alice and her family moved to Fairfield, yet even there, Alice managed to keep personal space divided by having a finished basement, in the place where Dr. Fraulo had his office, where guests went instead.

But with Dr. Fraulo's home, a guest entered right across from the kitchen, with the living room, dining room and den to the left and the various bedrooms and bathroom down a narrow hallway to the right

For most part, I spent my time there in the den, when Louis' father did not have use of it, a small, stone-floored space at the left rear corner of the house where the black and white television was located. We were not allowed to use the consol style color television on display in the living room, although often enough we played games on the carpeted floor before it. Like many places I would later come across, this house did not separate the living room from the dinning room, except for some artificial line, the dinning room marked by a large rectangular shaped glass-topped table, and the living room by smaller matching tables and huge, sprawling sofas, so comfortable I could have used any as a bed.

To the right of the door was a long hall off which the bedrooms, bathroom and maid's room (with assorted closets) opened. The kitchen had a door to this hall as well as a door to the dinning room, and was the room in which I saw Louis' mother most when she was around. The next room down the hall with its door on the same side as the door from the stairs was Louis's room, with the bathroom door the next on that side. I never ventured into any of those rooms, but imagined them to be similar in design and color as those I knew, painted in pastel green or blue or tan with a thick wood around windows, floor, ceiling and doors.

The den was the darkness room with its thick panels of real wood and stone floor, and a writing desk so fine we were told specifically not to touch it, not that I would have touched anything in that house without permission. Downstairs, I had no qualms, but upstairs, everything seemed too fragile for a boy like me.