I keep having this argument.
It’s these two houses in Evansville, Indiana.
One, designed and built by a 19- or 20-year-old William Wesley Peters in the early 1930s, is only 550 square feet. That’s as big as a driveway. Since relocated from its original site to a pad at the University of Evansville, the Peters-Margedant House is considered the first Usonian, a prototype predating the real ones Frank Lloyd Wright would seek to foist on working-class families five years later.
This is the house I think is right. The house I think is wrong is on the other side of downtown, in the historic Riverside neighborhood, an enchanting stretch of turrets and dormers and finials that are proof of the city’s turn-of-the-century mercantile jamboree, each wrought-iron fence tipped with fleur de lis, each bed of flowers a rebuke to my reluctance to get my own shit together. Completed in 1872, two generations before the Peters-Margedant House, the Reitz Home was designed by Henry Murcina, a Chicago-based architect, in the French Second Empire style. I didn’t study architecture, so I don’t know what that is, but Virginia Savage McAlester says it was an imitation of whatever France was doing at the time. It’s the house you would have seen from a horse-powered carriage and decided you wanted your own. Though the lavishly detailed style “was considered very modern,” she writes, it didn’t take long for it to get old, snuffed out by the Great Depression.
Still, this one is absolutely palatial. The scale would feel familiar to anyone who’s been in a suburban tract house after 2008 (thanks, Obama), but the details are exquisite, so obviously painstakingly done they make your own hands ache. The vestibule, ornamented with millwork carved in place by tradespeople who were imported from Europe, is festooned in gold leaf. If you lived here you would be home by now.
A Prussian emigrant, Joseph Augustus Reitz, after a previous failure to become a pottery baron, moved one more time from Louisville to Evansville and became a lumber baron. The Ohio River, wider than the freeway that split your city apart in the 1950s (thanks, Eisenhower), flowing from here to the Mississippi on down, is two blocks away. With access to it and thick Indiana forests, Reitz owned the most productive mill in the U.S., allowing him to pay to build a house during the Civil War that took up to 15 people to run. One of the Reitz daughters, all of whom used calling cards to keep them occupied during the day, confessed when she was older she’d never seen the kitchen.
Peters, on the other hand, was born right here in Evansville about 20 years after Reitz died. The son of a newspaper publisher, Peters left town after high school to study architecture at MIT. But he was turned off by a curriculum consumed with the Beaux Arts — the style he would have been all too familiar with from the Reitz Home and blocks of others like it in Riverside. No, Peters was a modernist. He left MIT to become one of Wright’s let’s call them apprentices at Taliesin in Wisconsin. There, he practiced the ideas — “small and affordable,” “constructed from natural materials,” “built low to the ground” with “significant spatial and visual interplay between indoor and outdoor spaces” (McAlester, again) — that he’d build into his first house one summer all by himself.
It’s just about perfect. Peters was 6’4”, and it’s as though he shaped the house to the specs of his own body, the low roof no higher than he could reach, the Indiana pine board-and-batten walls no farther apart, the way a child transforms the cardboard box she won’t let you throw away from the inside out. During a tour with a guide with Indiana Landmarks, I was caught in how-in-the-world wonder at just how big the small house seemed, how it all fit together just so. This is it, I was thinking. This is what I’ve been waiting for.
But the Reitz Home? Once, I stayed nearby in another old-fashioned house from the early 1900s. It had a turret. It had stained glass. It had a TRUMP welcome mat. My host, a white man in his late 50s, whose profile pic shows him in a top hat and tuxedo, was the only one I’ve ever stayed with to insist on giving me a full tour. I wanted to get away from people. I’d biked all over Evansville all day, so I was tired, hungry, grouchy. Dutifully, though, I followed him from the one room I wanted to be in to all the others, the detached garage, the pottery studio he wasn’t done with, nodding at the narration as though he were my father-in-law-to-be. Maybe he was lonely. It didn’t help I was still frustrated at the men who’d yelled at me earlier — twice in one fucking city! — out the windows of their trucks. What explains this need to take up so much space? Years ago someone even chucked a dildo at me. Could it be that … literal?
I’m too much of a coward to ask anyone these questions directly, but it’s what I wanted the Reitz Home to tell me. It’s been preserved and restored and operates now as a museum, so I emailed Matthew Rowe, the executive director, for a tour. What, I was hoping he would explain, does the house have to say? Is it only this literal?
We met one Friday afternoon in a conference room in what used to be the carriage house — appropriate, really, as that’s one of the few places where people of my stock would have been lucky to work. My father was no baron. After my mother decided we had to leave him, and we moved into her parents’ farmhouse in Indiana, he moved away, back across the country to Phoenix, where I was born. I was 4, my younger brother 1.
A year later, the police report details that he had been at the bar with a friend when he got home and started yelling at his girlfriend, then stomped down the hall, barricaded the bedroom door with his body and shot himself in the head. He died at the hospital. He was 36, I think.
So what am I missing? What does the Reitz Home have to say to people like us? Four of the 10 children never married. The most successful was the eldest son, and he simply inherited his father’s mill. His younger sister Josephine never even moved away. She died right here on Black Tuesday at 80 in the house where she was born with a collection of jewelry worth $250,000. She’d requested that her 507 diamonds, 15 rubies, seven sapphires, three pearls and emeralds be grafted onto a chalice, which was valued then at the equivalent of $1.5 million now.
As Rowe was telling me all this, I started pitying her. She must have been miserable, hoarding rubies, hoping someone was coming for her, too rich to have to do anything, too restricted to have anything really to do. But then Peters only moved back home because Wright had banished him from Taliesin when he learned his young protege was falling in love with his even younger daughter. Is the Peters-Margedant House the one you make when your heart is broken? It was built at the beginning of the Great Depression. It’s a house that says there’s no room for that right now. No you can’t do that here you’ll have to do that somewhere else. It was never so simple. Why do I presume the big thing must be vapid and the small thing virtuous? If I resent the Reitz Home for its lack of subtlety, its performance of power, I resist being pulled too closely toward the Peters-Margedant House because I worry its … its … its punyness is the same excuse I make to convince myself that getting out of the way is gracious maybe actually what I’m best at contributing to the world is silence.
I’ve never moved out of my father’s house, either.
When I was a child, and someone would call the house but not say anything on the other line, I gave myself permission to wonder. Maybe it was him. Maybe he was trying to tell me he was just waiting for the right moment to come back. It’s taken me forever to write this for many reasons, but one is that I’m still waiting. There could have been a whole other life. Everything could have been better. I think I believed the right house — the right anything — could tell me at last how to get back to the beginning, when I still had a chance, before it was too late.
I apologized and thanked Rowe for his time and walked for an hour, veering, eventually, toward the music I could hear crashing at a park. Children perched on a fountain, a pyramid of precarious slabs, and a young woman performed a song that was popular when I was in high school. “They’re still fighting,” she sang. “They’re still dying.”
It started pouring, and the crowd hurried to their cars. I was stuck here. But the band kept playing, and the woman kept singing. I could smell the last of everyone’s cigarettes as I crouched beneath an awning above the side door of a vacant theater. The Alhambra. No one’s torn it down. No one’s opened it back up. Every night, the marquee lights come on, but there’s never a show. It was just about perfect. I pulled my knees to my chest and waited for my chance.
