Wilde Lake(7)

Apparently, this did not appeal to most of the young men Adele met. Only Andrew Jackson Brant was willing to persevere.

And for all her parents’ care and oversight, she managed to get pregnant. AJ was born seven months after my parents’ wedding day, and everyone pretended he was terribly premature. I think this charade was meant not only to dodge the question of his legitimacy, but also to make sense of the fact that the new family chose to live with Adele’s parents. “Just for a year or so,” her father said. “Until everyone is on their feet.” One year turned into seven. There was always a reason to stay a little longer. AJ loves his nursery school, it would be a shame to move him. AJ is going to Gilman, practically in our backyard. I now believe my father steered the family station wagon toward Columbia that day not only out of genuine inquisitiveness, but also desperation. He had to get out of his in-laws’ house. The destination was an accident. Or was it?

Columbia itself was the opposite of an accident. One could argue it was inevitable, that this undeveloped land equidistant from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., was destined to be a suburb, but the developer Jim Rouse had something much grander in mind. Visionary is an overused word, but Rouse probably deserved it. Howard County had slightly more than thirty-five thousand people in 1960, but it was expected to boom before the end of the twentieth century. Rouse’s company began acquiring farmland privately, to avoid having prices shoot up. People knew the land was being purchased, but for what? There were paranoid, Cold War–fed rumors—Russian spies hoping to get close to NSA, a West German VW plant. Then, in June 1967, Columbia was born, a “town” comprising four villages, with each village defined by a set number of neighborhoods. The early neighborhood and street names—Dorsey, Phelps, Owen Brown, Warfield—drew on the county’s history. But the names quickly became more fanciful and literary. Faulkner’s Run, Hobbit’s Glen, Longfellow. Many of the early buildings in the town’s center were designed by Frank Gehry, but the houses themselves were generic split-levels, built to conform to the preferences of buyers at the time. Founder Rouse wanted to challenge a lot of ingrained biases in our culture; taste was not among them. He gave people the ticky-tacky houses they wanted. The only real choices were brick or wood siding, a Baltimore or a D.C. prefix for your phone.



Columbia at the age of two was still raw-looking, with immature trees and unplanted landscapes. According to family legend, my mother hated it on sight.

“It’s too cold. Too modern. I hate modern.”

“It’s the future,” my father said. “Breaking down barriers. Here, people of different classes and races will live side by side.”

“Soulless,” my mother said. “Just because you call something a town doesn’t make it one.”

“I like it,” my father said. “They’re trying new things here. Open space education, for example, where kids go at their own pace.”

“I hate it,” my mother said. “I could never live in one of these cracker boxes.”

It was their variation on Green Acres, if you know that TV show. Fresh air! No there there. But my father was too fair-minded to use “You are my wife” to clinch an argument.

Instead, he proposed a deal: “If I can find a house that you love, will you live here? I know what you like—something older, preferably made of stone, a house with character.” She said yes, probably assuming it couldn’t be done. He let the subject drop, and she thought she had triumphed. It was August now. The pregnancy was known, but only to them. They were keeping the news from her parents, whose house, large as it was, could not accommodate another grandchild.

Two weeks before Labor Day, my father took my mother to see a Revolutionary War–era tavern, eight miles north of Columbia on the road once known as the Columbia Pike. My mother had to admit she liked it, especially its tiny windows. She didn’t like light, my mother. That’s one of the things I know about her. She didn’t like light. She had grown up in a dark house, one where sunshine struggled through the amber and violet panes of stained glass. She considered shadows normal.

“The kitchen and bathrooms are hopeless,” she pointed out. “Too small, too out-of-date.”

“They can be redone,” my father promised. “I’ve found a contractor who has agreed to a rush job. Best of everything, in whatever colors you want. You can keep the wooden floors, which will be nice, I think. You never see wooden floors in a kitchen anymore. Why is that? If they’re sealed properly, they’re fine.”

“But it’s not in Columbia. It’s practically in Ellicott City.” Ellicott City was everything Columbia was not. The county seat, set in a valley alongside a cold, bright stream, filled with stone buildings dating back to the eighteenth century. “If you’re open to Ellicott City, why not Oella or Lawyers Hill?” my mother asked, then repeated, hopefully: “This isn’t in Columbia.”

“It will be,” my father said.

“Not on one of those rinky-dink lots. I couldn’t bear it.” She was grasping now. My mother had the intellect for law school, but no temperament for debate. She took things too personally.

“I found an irregular lot on the lakeside,” my father said. “It’s essentially a double. Once the plantings are mature, you’ll barely be able to see your neighbors.”