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THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY / Joyce Carol Oates Three nickels dropped rattling into the till and the North Clinton Street bus heaves upward, a taste of brewer's yeast and ashes, suddenly that tall narrow corner house— the grainy dark of newspaper photographs— two storeys, an attic and a basement where the girl was kept— and neighbors up and down the street heard nothing. A day and a night, January 1953, another day and a night, who knows how long, music sometimes blared from the upper windows, car doors were slammed at the curb, a bottle smashed late at night on the sidewalk, men's voices, laughter, who knows how many there were, how many helped in her death, neighbors shut their windows tight and heard nothing. This is still a city of steep hills where men and women wait in the freezing air for buses—Main St., Edgewater Park, East Ave., N. Clinton & Clinton Ext.—streets of rowhouses built to the sidewalk, no verandas and no lawns, basement windows opaque with the grime of years. In my memory a fierce wet light strikes the house's windows, an El Greco sky above the house's steep roof, but you can see it is an ordinary rowhouse, woodframe, shingled, needing paint, there at the corner of Clinton and Fourth, past which the buses heave. The girl was fifteen, a runaway, what did she expect, people whispered, our parents told us nothing and there was nothing we knew to guess 16 · The Missouri Review exactly,—that blurred photograph in the paper, confirmation, pageboy hair in the style of that year, sweet-sullen mouth, pretty— all blurred—so we stared at the house of mystery until the bus's windows steamed, saying There, that's it. There. That's it. That's the house. Joyce Carol Oates THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 17 ...

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