In the 1968 movie adaptation of John Cheever’s short story, The Swimmer, Ned Merrill (portrayed by Burt Lancaster) stands on a neighbor’s poolside terrace in Speedos, gazes out at the Westport, Connecticut suburban landscape, and contemplates swimming across all the backyard pools in the upscale valley to his own grand residence and waiting family, somewhere on the distant horizon of his rapidly waning psyche. As he proceeds on this symbolic journey throughout the running time of the film, Merrill’s unfortunate personal tale unfolds and the viewer bears witness to an allegorical undoing of a once flush ad agency man (total 1960’s protagonist profession) who has obviously come upon more pressing, dire circumstances in recent months. In the final scene we find a shivering Merrill/Lancaster grasping the rusty gates of a boarded up estate, his own foreclosed home, in total mental cataclysm, alone, and with no apparent hopes of redemption. Judging from the total nothingness he is left with in these last crumbling moments of the story, he obviously cheated on his wife.
I made reference to this very film just last Friday as my Buyers and I pulled up to a padlocked, once grand executive residence in an affluent neighborhood of Northbrook, Illinois. Before us stood 4,000 square feet of rambling, rat bitten, mold ridden, and overgrown memories plotted on a once bucolic, but irregular, single story setting. The original white exterior clapboard is now green and soaked with moisture, the cedar shingle roof sagging like a sway-backed horse. Shards of broken glass and rusted carriage bolts from half-hanging shutters lay strewn across slick mossy patio pavers while the kidney shaped swimming pool, abandoned except for 5 feet of rubbish and tree limbs and swamp water, sinks quietly into the back corner of the overgrown trapezoid. Ghosts of a late 1960’s cocktail party society hang from the gray, weathered latticework and peer out from the tilting gables above the gutterline; their faint voices and forgotton laughter lacing the early summer breeze. A single wind chime dances somewhere in the backgound. What a dump.
“Somebody definitely cheated on someone,” I say as I wedge the entry key into the oxidized padlock. The house is not only a foreclosure, it is a foreclosure of a foreclosure. Literally. A whole lot of things have to go wrong for something like that to happen.
My Buyer and his wife just stare at me and the house in silence. It definitely showed better on the MLS, I conclude.
“The Swimmer, with Read more
