(urth) Short Story 119: In the House of Gingerbread

[Marc Aramini]

#IN THE HOUSE OF GINGERBREAD

“In the House of Gingerbread” first appeared in *The Architecture of Fear*
in 1987 and is collected in *Endangered Species*.

##Summary:

The third person narrative begins from the point of view of a house:

>The woodcutter came up the walk, and the ornate old house watched him
through venetian-blinded eyes. … The house felt his feet on its porch, his
quick knock at its door.  It wondered how he had driven along the path
through the trees.  The witch would split his bones to get the marrow; it
would tell the witch.  It rang its bell.

Tina Heim opens the door to “the woodcutter”, Lieutenant Richard Price,
expecting some chicken soup as consolation for the recent death of her two
year old son, Alan.  Instead, Lieutenant Price presents his badge and
interrupts her question, “Have the children –“ by stating that he would
like to talk to her, preferably sitting inside. Smelling something from the
kitchen, he comments on the cooking she enjoys doing for the children every
day (in the microwave) and she asks if he can simply enter her house.  He
claims that once he is inside, he is authorized by the state to search
wherever he wants, but simply in the kitchen next to a plate with a
gingerbread man on it.

She decides to be pleasant and pours him some coffee as they sit down,
where she thinks, “This is my house … If this is an interview, then I’m
interviewing him.  She knew it was not true.”

Price asks about her husband Jerry’s death last November at the age of 41
from lung cancer, indicating that for a non-smoker who didn’t work as a
chemist certainly he was very young to die from such a malady. The
policeman asks if he might smoke, and she retrieves an ashtray for him.
She stalls for time by sweetening her coffee, trying to suppress and hide
her tears.

Price says, “People must have wondered.  My wife died about three years
ago, and I know I got a lot of questions.”  Tina notes that the gingerbread
man she cooked earlier is gone from his plate.  The cop then asks about her
son and his death last month, as well as details about her two remaining
children, whom Tina reveals are step-children, in Jerry’s custody rather
than their mother Rona’s.

Finally, Price brings up the reason for his visit: two large insurance
claims in close proximity being paid, both benefiting Tina. However, when
he mentions the insurance, he is distracted by the sound of what he
believes to be a small child upstairs.  She asks if he wants to go upstairs
and check, since he doesn’t really need an excuse.

The policeman instead keeps talking, asking if Alan was poisoned.  “She
nodded slowly, pretending there was a lovely clay mask on her face, a mask
that would be dissolved by tears, broken by any expression. ‘He ate paint
chips, Lieutenant.  In his closet there was a place where the old paint was
flaking off.’” As she begins to cry, he tries to console her and she
stands, facing a corner.  “She hoped that when she turned around, he would
be gone.”

She comments on the unfairness of life, that Lt. Price could be there
smoking while Jerry died of lung cancer but never smoked. Here he once
again brings up Jerry's Attica Life insurance policy with a double
indemnity for death by cancer; Jerry only lasted three weeks after going to
the hospital. Each of the children still has a $25,000 insurance policy,
once again with a double provision for accidental death, as was the case
for her son Alan.

>”You think I killed him.” If only my eyes could blast, she though, he’d be
frying like bacon.  He’d be burning in hell.  “You think I killed my
husband and my son to get that money, don’t you, Lieutenant?” She tried to
picture it, his brown suit blazing, his face seared, his hair on fire.

He responds that he really doesn’t think so and asks her to sign a paper
that will allow an exhumation of Jerry’s remains to test for cancer or
other poisons. She wonders if they can actually tell, and thinks of the
biblical woman’s plea, “*Lord, it has been four days now; surely there will
be a stench*”   (from John 11:39, in which Lazarus’s sister Martha cautions
Jesus against rolling a stone aside and opening his tomb – [incidentally,
Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus in the gospel of John, as the culmination of
his healing miracles and signs, sets Jesus directly onto the path of
crucifixion]).

While arsenic and lead can be detected a century after death, Price
explains that there are many other variables involved in whether the search
will provide any concrete details.  She signs the document.

In response to his question about the usage of lead paint, she reveals that
the repainting of the house hadn’t been completed, and that perhaps the
paint Allan consumed was from the 1920’s. She asks if he wants to see the
closet, and takes him upstairs to the nursery.  Price reflects that he
wasn’t even sure the house was that old – that perhaps it was “built new in
the old style, like they do at Disneyworld”, but Tina says it was built in
1882.

A paint can and stained newspapers are strewn messily about the room, and
they hear “a scraping and shuffling that might have been a small dog
scrambling to its feet, or merely some small, hard object sliding from a
collection of similar objects, a baby’s rattle leaving the top of a
careless pile of toys.”

Tina proclaims, “There’s a child in there!” but Price finds the closet door
locked. Noticing how cold it is in the nursery, Tina denies locking the
room, and then realizes that he is only looking around “as a favor” to her.
He posits it is a possum or squirrel in the closet, and tries to unlock the
room. When asked about the presence of rats, Tina responds:

>”We’ve tried to get rid of them. Jerry set traps in the basement-“ There
was a faint scrabbling from the closet; she spoke more rapidly to cover the
sound: “He even bought a ferret and put it down there, but it died.  He
thought Henry’d killed it.”

Price has picked the lock and realizes that the entire frame has been
painted over, making the door stick. During this process they proceed to a
first name basis. When he finally pries the door open, “for an instant it
seemed to her that there were eyes near the floor,” though Price sees
nothing but scratch marks in the paint which he thinks could have been a
coon or a similar medium sized animal. He says he must be going, asking
about a book she retrieved from under the strewn newspapers. “Just an old
children’s book.  Jerry found it when he was exploring the attic and
brought it down for Alan.  It was under the newspapers.”

As he is leaving, they discuss her plans to sell the house, and in response
to his comments about it being a nice place, she mutters “’It is *not* a
nice place’ … but her words were so soft only the house heard them.” On the
way out, they flirt and he promises to call her. She watches him walk away
and pat the pocket of his jacket, were she is certain he stashed the
gingerbread man cookie to be tested for poison. In her mind, she hears the
verses from the children’s book she found under the newspapers upstairs:

>”You may run, you may run, just as fast as you can, But you’ll never catch
ME,” said the gingerbread man.

The narrative jumps once again to the house’s perspective: “That evening
the house played Little Girl.  The essence, the ectoplasm, the soul of the
child seeped from the cracked old plaster that had absorbed it when new.”
Plump Henry doesn’t notice, cursing everyone in his loneliness.  His sister
Gail studies upstairs, reading a summary of D’Annunzio’s *La Gioconda* and
imagining herself as the titular model wreaking havoc upon her step-mother,
burning her as Gail's fantasies intermingle with the plot of the tragedy.

Tina is in the bathroom and sees the spirit of the house, “the silhouette
of a child with braids, a little girl whose head and shoulders were almost
the outline of a steeply pitched roof.” She imagines that Jerry is alive as
she tries to ignore the specter in the steam which has come to haunt the
old house:

>It was not so much that she had forgotten, as that she had forgotten she
herself was still living and that the living cannot communicate with the
dead, with the dead who neither return their calls nor answer their
letters. … He had given her perfumed body powder and a huge puff with which
to apply it.  She did so now because Jerry had liked it, thinking how long,
how very long, it had been since she had used it last.

Noticing that the bathroom is very cold, just as the nursery was before,
Tina contemplates that she might be too fat, “Yet Dick Price had smiled at
her; she had seen the way he had looked at her … had felt the extra moment
for which he held her hand.”

The narrative skips to Lieutenant Price reassuring the children Henry and
Gail that it was indeed cancer all along. Gail continues to claim that Tina
killed her father: “I’m sure she did. You don’t know her – she’s a real
witch sometimes.” By this point Price has ascertained that Gail was the
person who wrote the letters tipping off the insurance company that foul
play had been committed. Henry admits he helped her with several of the
letters, asking if Price will tell their step-mother.  Price leaves, saying
that Jerry’s lungs had been filled with asbestos fibers, something which
usually only happens to insulators.

Tied up in the kitchen, Tina thinks of the grim wallpaper in the nursery
they had attempted to cover and that, “It’s the gingerbread house … It
doesn’t eat you, you eat it.  But it gets you just the same.”

Harry and Gail enter and taunt her, planning to remove the adhesive tape so
it will not be melted on her body and give them away after they use the
microwave to execute her. Henry has tampered with the microwave in such a
way that it will activate even with the door open. Tina refuses to plead
for her life. Henry explodes an egg in the microwave to create a mess Tina
might hypothetically be cleaning when she has her own accident, its burst
“like an ax biting wood or the fall of a guillotine blade.”  Tina says the
children can go back to their mother Rona if they so desire, but they
really want revenge and money in the form of the insurance money she has
collected.

Henry cuts Tina loose so that there will not be rope burns on her body, and
he forces her head into the microwave and starts it. A screaming starts,
but it is not Tina’s. Henry releases her and flames and smoke escapes the
microwave. ”She wanted to laugh.  So Hansel, so little Gretel, cooking a
witch is not quite so easy as you thought, *nicht wahr*?”

The flames spread to the curtain of the kitchen, and the dry wood of the
room easily burns. Henry flees as the back door bursts inward, for
Lieutenant Price has returned to help rescue them and aid in escaping the
house. “Sirens and wolves howled in the distance, while one by one the dark
rooms lit with a cheerful glow.” Tina screams for her house, claiming she
will remember her, no matter what.
Dick points at a figure above: “for an instant (and only an instant) a
white face like a child’s stared from a gable window; then it was gone, and
the flames peered out instead. An instant more and they broke through the
roof; the house sighed, a phoenix embracing death and rebirth.”

Later the fire captain asked how the fire started, but is met with silence
and the terrified stare of Henry, while Gail edges toward the trees. Tina
blames the disaster on a cooking fire started when Henry prepared eggs.
Henry says, “She’s the best mother in the whole world!”, and Gail readily
agrees.

>”Henry, you’re a dear.” Tina bent to kiss his forehead. “I hope those
burns don’t hurt too much.” Gently, she pinched one of his plump cheeks.
He’s getting fat, she reflected. But I’ll have to neuter him soon, or his
testicles will spoil the meat. He’ll be easier to manage then.

>(She smiled, recalling her big, black-handled dressmaker’s shears. That
would be amusing – but quite impossible, to be sure.  What was it that
clever man in Texas had done, put some sort of radioactive capsule between
his sleeping son’s legs?)

The story ends with Tina saying, “You know, Dick, you’ve never talked much
about your own children. How old are they?”

##Commentary:

Every once in a while I take an existential look at this project and think,
this story says everything there is to say right there – let it speak for
itself.  “In the House of Gingerbread” works on that level, with the
dramatic tenseness, shifts in sympathetic points of view, and syncretism of
immediately recognizable source material everyone should be able to
recognize - all of these things contribute to a satisfying story that
perhaps works best on a first read … but I keep writing anyway, with the
injunction to my readers, go read Wolfe’s stories again– they are far
superior to the comments anyone can make on them, even in their mysteries.

This story and its tension works very well on the surface level.
“In the House of Gingerbread” plays with the reader's perspective quite a
bit, but comes to a fair and unambiguous ending. It has a narrative
strength which initially thrives on subverting expectations, even though
the first paragraph explicitly narrates that the house is sentient and that
a witch lives there, identifying Lieutenant Price as the “woodcutter” (of
“Hansel and Gretel” fame).  As the story progresses, Tina’s sadness over
her husband’s death and her young child’s demise is treated with sympathy
and tends to erase the sinister effect of the house ringing its own
doorbell at the start – as the first paragraph’s implications are
forgotten, eventually the domestic situation and Tina’s feelings dominate
the middle of the narrative, in a conflict that is immediately recognizable
in its mimesis of a struggling, possibly dysfunctional step-family facing
recent tragedy and (possibly unjust suspicion.

It is easy to sympathize with Tina’s anger and sadness. The dramatic
tension escalates between Tina and Lt. Price as the insurance exhumation
seems to become the dominant narrative conflict, but towards the second
half of the story, the children are revealed to be figures of tricky and
duplicitous evil in their attempts to kill their “wicked” stepmother – with
the rather interesting but logically unsound scheme of triggering a
microwave malfunction and burning her to death. It is only at the very end
of the story that the accuracy of the first paragraph is revealed – Tina
truly was a witch, greatly interested in eating these children (thus her
passion for preparing treats for their lunch every day). She is also
interested in the children of “the woodcutter”, all the while. Even with
the loss of her strange familiar, the house, Tina seems to have triumphed
and avoided the fate of the earlier witch - and in Wolfe's modernization of
Hansel and Gretel, he even has Tina think of the step-children by the fairy
tale names in the final scenes, blending together all of the similar
elements: combining gingerbread house and gingerbread man, witch and
stepmother, and transforming the oven into a modernized microwave
(obviously less effective for cooking witches than was employed in the good
old days).

The primary mystery of the story becomes the nature of the house and its
relationship to Tina Heim. The text strongly suggests the house is
"possessed" - it has absorbed the spirit of a little girl when it was new,
possibly as early as 1882 when it was built (though perhaps as late as the
1920’s, when the paint in the closet was originally applied), and is
capable of “playing Little Girl” at times. It seems that the scratching
within the sealed nursery room might be related to the manner in which the
original little girl died, perhaps even locked inside the the room Tina and
Lieutenant Price attempt to force open. The paint which Alan consumed had
already been peeled away there, and the concomitant coldness is the same
feeling Tina gets when the spirit of the house plays Little Girl and
watches her shower. Tina also continually thinks of the grim walls of the
nursery that she and Jerry had tried to cover up, but their image keeps
returning to her. Wolfe baldly states that even though “you” may eat the
gingerbread house, it gets you just the same. The first paragraph makes it
clear that Tina and the house are separate (i.e.- her witch persona is not
another artifact or example of possession when the soul of the child flees
the house - the house thinks of her as "the witch" from the very beginning.)

It is worth discussing that the original fairy story “Hansel and Gretel”,
while largely unchanged, features the triumph of the children.  In this
case, the portly Henry and conniving Gail (as Hansel and Gretel [though
Gail consonantly imagines herself as Gioconda as well]) try to microwave
the witch but fail, and it seems the wood cutter (Richard Price) has two
children of his own who are also on Tina’s menu.  Wolfe clearly
accomplishes something beneath the trappings of fantasy, and this involves
creating a metaphor for the voracious need for sustainable resources… it
seems that Henry and Gail are looking for the proverbial free lunch – the
same kind of murderous attitude for personal profit which the insurance
companies suspect in the case of two suspicious deaths. [In the original
story, the mother and father of the children are both their biological
parents, and share the responsibility for abandoning them, though this
changes in later versions, even going so far as to redeem the father].

Much of the discussion of early tales such as those of “Hansel and Gretel”
(and even “The Gingerbread Man”) categorizes them as something like
metaphors for the most basic human need: hunger stories of avoiding
starvation and confronting suppressed horrors in harsh times, horrors which
might include cannibalism. Some resources speculate that the oral tale
actually originated during the Great Famine of the 14th century, when weak
family members were viewed as conceivably disposable, and some critics
actually conceive of the step-mother and the witch as two sides of the same
coin, characters dealing with an almost identical starvation ideology: one
throwing out the children and abandoning them to death and starvation
because of scant resources, the other actually eating the children to
assuage the hunger inside her. (Though underneath it all is the implication
that in harsh times, a step-mother or even a desperate mother herself might
very well turn to eating easily killed children). In this way, the witch of
the fairy tale is actually the step-mother, with both abandonment and
cannibalism motivated by hunger and want, a dark hunger which creates the
sinister and supernatural veneer of the ogre or witch in fairy tales. In
the fairy tales, the death of one evil feminine figure is usually
concurrent with the death of the other, permitting a happy ending when the
children return to their father.  Wolfe has recognized this symbolic
association between the witch and step-mother characters and crafted a
story where they are reunited in Tina, who at times displays sympathetic
and human emotions. Even though her house is destroyed, certainly she
triumphs, for the children’s fear of her also seems to extend to a basic
fear that society itself will prove unable to temper her response if they
betray her openly (rather than covertly).

##Names:

-*Tina Heim*: Heim is the German word for “home”. Tina can either be short
for Christina (“follower of Christ”) or derived from some other name, which
can imply tiny.

-*Richard Price*: identified by the third person narrative voice as “The
woodcutter”, he goes by the nickname “Dick”. Richard can mean “powerful
leader”.  Price, besides its English meaning, can imply “enthusiasm”
through its Welsh descent from the name Rhys.

-*Jerry*: Jerry’s name implies “exalted of the Lord.”

-*Henry*: The name Henry means “home ruler” … rather ironic here.

-*Gail*: Gail’s name connotes “liveliness”.

##Literary allusions:

Obviously there are two fairy tales directly referenced by the work – that
of the German tale “Hansel and Gretel”, a brother and sister who are lured
into a gingerbread house by the promise of candy after their father leaves
them in the woods at the insistence of their stepmother, only to be
captured and fattened by a witch for consumption.  Of course, in most
versions of the fairy tale they triumph by casting the witch in her own
oven, first by feigning thinness with a stick, then ignorance of how an
oven works.  The Brothers Grimm published a version of the story in 1812.
(Tina’s last name, Heim, is also of German origin). The symbol of the house
as candy in times of starvation is quite interesting, and the temptation
leads to very real dangers. In Wolfe's story, the house acts as a
malevolent agent outside simple temptation (though Tina certainly seems to
act as a temptress to "the woodcutter") and behind the promise of a normal
suburban facade.

The other important source story, that of “The Gingerbread Man”, actually
appears in the book the deceased Jerry found in the house.  It is quite
clear that it is not from the text of the original 1975 *St. Nicholas
Magazine* tale, “The Gingerbread Boy”, for while that story contains a
gingerbread man fleeing from the couple who create it and eventually being
devoured by a fox, its taunt was not yet in the formula Wolfe employs.
Indeed, it seems that Wolfe has probably paraphrased and restructured the
modern boast of the fairy tale, which usually has the text “Run, run, as
fast as you can! You can’t catch me I’m the gingerbread man!” The idea of
consumption in fairy tales is here one of runaway food, though in some
variations the baked product or head cheese actually consumes others who
get in its path.  The gingerbread house of “Hansel and Gretel” is of course
the lure that attracts them to the witch's grasp, but the interesting
relationship between cooking, eating, and being poisoned in Wolfe’s story
still seem born of that primal hunger of darker and more superstitious
times - even if the oven is now a microwave.

Besides these fairy tales, Gail is studying a summary of *La Giocanda*,
Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 1899 tragedy. While the summary she reads gives an
accurate depiction of the play, Gail imagines herself as the model Giocanda
and mentally substitutes the words witch, Tina, and burned for wife,
Sylvia, and maimed, also attaching her brother to the fiery fantasy:

>*Gioconda is the model of the brilliant young sculptor, Lucio Settala.
Although he struggles to resist the fascination that she exercises over
him, out of loyalty to his witch, Sylvia, he feels Gioconda is the true
inspiration of his art.  During Lucio’s illness, Tina arouses Gioconda’s
fury and is horribly burned by the model and her brother.*

In the original, the wife Sylvia saves her husband Lucio from committing
suicide and even attempts to salvage the statue which is his masterpiece
when Gioconda attempts to destroy it (after Sylvia jealously says that
Lucio is no longer interested in using Gioconda as a model). The wife
Sylvia is terribly maimed in the process. It is not clear that Lucio has a
cognate in the Wolfe story, though perhaps Gail has sublimated some of her
anger at the passing of her father into this daydream and gains
satisfaction in wresting an eidolon of her deceased father away from Tina,
“his witch” (in addition, her fantasies reveal that her mother Rona was a
model as well). D’Annunzio was an important figure in the decadent literary
movement, combining some of the mystical features of symbolists and
aesthetes in an artistic direction which influenced Italian fascism and
bears some strains of resemblance to Nietzschean thought. In *La Gioconda*,
one of the themes is that a genius may sacrifice whatever is necessary,
even “lesser” mortals, in seeking out a higher purpose or ideal. Gail’s
envisions herself as the sculptor’s ideal model.

 ##Cultural allusions:

While at least one haunted house in the Chicago area was also built in 1882
(the Scutt Mansion at 206 N Broadway in Joliet), it seems unlikely that
Wolfe based this house on that particular one, which had a public
reputation for the ill fortune of its owners.  It also seems an empty
search to look for the daughters of famous writers or historical figures
who might have died in the 1880s and “become” the spirit of the house.

When thinking of American writers who might interest Wolfe and have
undergone familial tragedies, the death of Longfellow’s wife when her dress
caught fire kept coming to mind, but Longfellow himself died in 1882, and
his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who also always springs to mind when
strange houses with gables are invoked, had already been dead for years. It
is likely the spirit of the house, which might be that of a girl trapped in
the closet or even tortured in the nursery, maybe starving to death or
accidentally poisoning herself by consuming inedible material from the
house, is ultimately from an indeterminate source.

The case which the witch thinks of in which the man from Texas,
Houston-based petroleum engineer Kerry Crocker, irradiates his son is
summarized below:

>A man used radioactive sources to intentionally irradiate his 11-year-old
son on multiple occasions. The man had limited visitation rights following
divorce from the child's mother in 1971. He obtained capsules from one or
two cesium-137 oil and gas well logging sources, each 1-2 Curie, which he
was licensed to use with a company. From April to October 1972 he used the
capsules in 5 to 8 instances against his son. Around 8 April 1972 during a
weekend visit the father instructed the boy to use headphones containing
capsules. On 18 April the boy was taken to a doctor for treatment of skin
blisters. Twice in July the father drugged the boy and put him to sleep on
a cushion or pillow containing capsules; the boy awoke nauseous both times
and began to develop a rash on his thighs. On an August visit he was
instructed to sleep on a couch containing two capsules; by this time he was
under care of a doctor for skin lesions. In September the boy saw a
physician for hair loss from one side of the head. On an October visit the
father placed two capsules on the boy's legs while he was sleeping. In
February 1973 a plastic surgeon diagnosed the boy's worsening skin lesions
as radiation induced. The boy required 16 operations from January 1974 to
November 1978 including numerous skin grafts; the irradiation also resulted
in castration, with the resultant requirement for testosterone replacement.
The case was reported to law enforcement authorities on 31 January 1974,
with charges brought against the father on 2 May and his conviction on 17
April 1975 on one charge. The father appealed but jumped bond when the
appeal was denied, and was finally apprehended around 1981 following an FBI
investigation. (Johnston)

Certainly the calculating betrayal of a son by his father, probably for
revenge, fits with the story, but of special note to Wolfe fans is also the
profession of the perpetrator

##Unanswered questions:

>From the introductory segment, where the house contemplates that its witch
will split the woodcutter’s bones to get the marrow, are we to believe that
Tina’s relationship with Jerry and her feelings for Alan were genuine?  It
seems Lieutenant Price and his children have been selected as her future
victims, regardless of whether her feelings for Jerry were sincere.

What is Tina's original relationship with the spirit and the house? Did she
just happen to come upon it or is the relationship deeper? In the fairy
tale, the house is the lure of the witch, and Tina's last name is German
for home. (How long would a modernized witch live?)

##Connection with other works:

Wolfe loves appropriating fairy stories to ambiguous and sophisticated
narrative ends, as we can see in *Peace*, “The Death of Koschei the
Deathless”, and “The Little Stranger” (which also played with some “Hansel
and Gretel” imagery concerning a witch). The sympathetic portrayal of a
rather hideous character is something that Wolfe has probably done a time
or two in his fiction. The blending of the disparate ideas behind these
fairy tales, thrust into a modernized setting that somehow seems to reveal
the original source's motivation, is definitely one of Wolfe's most
polished literary techniques, and, because of the easily recognizable
material Wolfe is using here, creates a rich texture for this particular
story - even if there are no enduring mysteries or truly complex enigmas
lurking underneath the tale.

##Resources

-Johnston, Wm. Robert. “Texas Radiological Assault, 1972”. *Database of
Radiological Incidents and Related Events--Johnston's Archive*. 18
September 2007. Web. 23 April 2015.
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1972USA1.html
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