All[1] You[2] Need[3] to[4] Know about 13[5] Pepperidge[6] Lane
Listing
Imagine[7] living in this 1,913-square-foot custom-built[8] mid-century modern with a touch of Frank Lloyd Wright[9]. Immersed in a fairy woodland, the split-level boasts[10] one of the most sought-after neighborhoods[11] in Central Connecticut—schools, shopping, parks: it’s all here. The home has 3 spacious bedrooms and 2.5 baths, a fully finished basement, and a room with a sauna and jacuzzi[12]. The property sits on 1.3 acres[13] featuring a fenced-in garden and a brook with two small waterfalls[14].
[1] Four levels, ten rooms, and a two-car garage built in a riparian paradise—a tabula rasa regarding the tragedy that led to its creation. In 1932, around 4,800 miles away, the Klymiuks and Olenskys grew wheat in south-central Ukraine. The two families were friends and neighbors. When Russian dictator Joseph Stalin orchestrated the mass starvation of more than seven million Ukrainians by confiscating the nation’s wheat, the families joined forces. The Klymiuks and the Olenskys, minus an older son and his wife, escaped to America. The son and family fled as far as Poland. Living in poor tenements in parts of Southern New England no one talks about, the Klymiuks had a son named Nicholas, and the Olenskys a daughter named Lillian. Ukraine’s Holodomor lasted two years, during which the dead were dumped in mass graves, not unlike those in Bucha and other Ukrainian communities almost a hundred years later. In 1951, Nicholas and Lillian married. In 1959, they built the house on Pepperidge Lane and lived there until they died of disease and old age in 2021. Both schoolteachers and the only owners of the house, Nick and Lil passed a few months before Putin invaded Ukraine in early 2022. The term holod means hunger and mor means extermination. Having survived the Depression, husband and wife learned from their families how to work hard, save money, and eat well. They had one son, Kyrylo, born in 1964. In their free time, the family cooked elaborate dinners, attended arts events, and danced—at home and in public. In Ukrainian culture, dance was and is as important as fighting for freedom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWEhrx0Pabk
[2] Open House: The first to arrive, a middle-aged man sits in his car and admires the front of the house, its nine picture windows stacked in three rows of three, like a musical staff waiting for notes to populate its lines. He imagines the house looking at him, sizing him up, deciding if he’s worthy of its ownership. Will he be sharp enough to fit in or end up flat and broke like he found himself after graduating from the conservatory twenty-some years ago? The realtor drives up and walks to the door without looking at the man. He follows. Focused on a set of keys, the realtor says, “Just a minute,” then unlocks the door, steps inside, and turns his attention to a keypad on the wall. As the realtor punches a code, the man hears staccato beeps in C flat, E, B sharp, D, G, F, and F sharp. Entering the foyer, he marvels at the flagstone floor—shining squares and rectangles of vermillion, chartreuse, and aubergine. His body tingles at the sight of streaking bands of green infiltrating purple, whorls of purple wafting through green. Admiring the floor is like listening to a Dvorak symphony. https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=aaplw&ei=UTF-8&p=scherzo+capriccioso+op+66#id=2&vid=5e07faa9ff0ca703904a399b3c3179bc&action=click The squares seem to move beneath his feet, their subtle undulations massaging his soles. When he takes a step, the tiles tantalize his imagination, causing him to wonder, if he were a single measure of music, what would he sound like? “Fuuh-niss undahneath,” says the realtor, his Boston twang an exercise in dissonance. “Makes a vibration.” The realtor reminds the man of a chunk of nut stuck in a tooth. “Big-ass boilah. Makes a ruckus but does a damn good job heatin’ up the place.” With a job as a church receptionist and part-time conductor of the choir, the middle-aged man has no business being here. The house is at least an octave out of his range, a price that locks him out. He sees himself composing—living his dream—right here in the foyer, peering out the windows at a symphony of trees. What is it about this house that raises his spirits? Thirteen Pepperidge Lane is no ordinary place.
[3] Soon after they had immigrated to Connecticut, Nicholas and Lillian’s parents ran out of money. When they went looking for work, all they could find were jobs as apprentice weavers in textile mills, located on rushing rivers with lots of rocks. “Poor land for growing” (translated from Ukrainian), said Dymtrus Klymiuk, Nicholas’s father, who missed the expansive steppe of his homeland. Still standing in the twenty-first century, the old Connecticut mills house lofts, restaurants, and upscale boutiques. Neither Nicholas’s nor Lillian’s parents had more than a high-school education, and that was the men. Lillian’s mother was illiterate, and Nicholas’s read enough to pay bills and follow recipes. Native speakers of Ukrainian, Lil and Nick didn’t learn to speak English, read, and write until they went to school. They lived their childhoods in the shadows of bullies: the sights and sounds of children and parents calling them “foreign,” “commies,” and “low class.” Despite her ESL status, Lillian skipped a grade. Nicholas took pleasure and satisfaction in solving problems. He excelled in math and English, as well as Ukrainian folk dancing, which he studied on scholarship as a youth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6a3TgbD_Ks Neither parent taught Kyrylo—he goes by Ky—to speak Ukrainian. He never needed to.
What does it mean for a divorced middle-aged man without a house to say his apartment fails to meet his needs? He claims it’s too small, too cold, and too loud, thanks to the neighbors, whose music is all bass. His needs are minimal: a place to compose himself and his music. The latter he’s pretty much given up. Something—the ex is gone, and the kids are grown up, so he can’t blame them—always gets in the way.
Others arrive at the Open House. A pregnant woman needs to use the bathroom. The realtor is busy talking mid-century modern, so the man shows her the way. The sounds of corporate voices—wealthy New Englanders on a mission to bargain—make his stomach churn like an old Connecticut mill. He goes out to look at the brook. Is it the water or the rocks that play Elgar’s Elegy for Strings, Opus 58? https://soundcloud.com/ivan-yanakiev/edward-elgar-elegy-for-strings Number 13 is courting him.
[4] Herding a group through the grounds, the realtor uses the word babbling and destroys the man’s image of the waterway. The man goes back inside and follows the banister up to the next level. He travels in a circle from living room to dining room to kitchen, where the worn stainless-steel sink catches his eye. He’ll never know it, but that’s where Mary Olensky, Lillian’s mother, who lived with the family from 1963 until her death in ’72, used to wash dishes while talking to herself in Ukrainian. “Scrub a bit, bitch a lot,” Nick used to say of his mother-in-law, who once accused him of cheating on her daughter when he was five minutes late coming home from work. There had been a car accident—well documented on TV and in the papers the next day. At this sink on a regular basis, Mary rehashed the story of how her husband, Lillian’s father, had paid more attention to her three sisters, helping them settle in America, than he did to his own wife. On the morning of Mary’s 84th birthday, Lillian found her dead on the floor of her bedroom, now the “spa room,” located on the first level behind the garage. When Lillian was no more than Kyrylo’s age, her parents had dragged her to her aunt’s funeral, where they insisted she follow tradition and kiss the lips of the dead body lying in its casket. Remembering the incident with horror, she refused to allow her son to attend services for his grandmother, whom he loved very much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrXISoPuCGg “I’m not going to expose him to anything remotely similar to what I went through,” she had said. The funeral for Lillian’s mother was held at St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Church in New Britain, a nearby immigrant city few admit as their hometown. At this church, Kyrylo, on the day of his first Holy Communion, passed out in a pew. The cause? Hunger. Breakfast comes after the Eucharist, not before, in the Orthodox tradition. The fainting spell, which was quite graceful, occurred just as the bishop walked past. Furious that a child would fail to remain standing during such a holy momentous occasion, an old man from the pew behind beat Kyrylo with his cane until he woke up. Seated away from their son according to church protocol, Nicholas and Lillian agreed later that day to raise him without religion. Kyrylo grew up to be a world-class professional ballet dancer with an eating disorder.
The middle-aged wannabe homebuyer knows none of this. How could he? Nevertheless, parts of the family’s stories seep into his body like water in the cellar during a spring storm. It’s lunchtime. He feels like something hearty—potatoes with cheese wrapped in dough and slathered with salty, buttery onions: one of those Slavic dishes. What’s it called?
[5] Instead of going to eat, the man feels compelled to learn moreabout the house and its former inhabitants. He downloads an app and looks up the property, along with the husband and wife—now deceased—who had lived there for 62 years. The couple’s only son, unmarried and without children, owns it. He resides in another state. The house went on the market last week, during the first hot spell of the season. The man wishes it were cooler. He looks at the date on the original deed: October 13, 1959, and thinks of a thirteenth chord—a rarity, even when it comes to twentieth-century music. Driving past 13 Pepperidge Lane on his way home, he catches a glimpse of a deer munching on ivy. Watching the animal eat, he imagines the dominant 13th in Claude Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_bjsKsTQbs&t=134s .
[6] Every Easter, during the time she lived at 13 Pepperidge, Lillian Klymiuk crafted homemade Swedish meatballs using the finest meats, light cream, and Pepperidge Farm white bread. According to historians, Swedes have inhabited the land that comprises parts of Ukraine since the ninth century. Kyrylo, who is blond, and his father, who was not, were diagnosed with Dupuytren’s Contracture, also known as Viking Disease. Dupuytren’s is a deformation of the palm of the hand, believed to have originated in Scandinavia. Often prone to sparring, Kyrylo and Nicholas fought frequently, but only with words, never their hands. During the fights, Lillian played music on the stereo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oepo4KCJXuk
Eating a sandwich at work, the man looks up the word pepperidge. His friend Fern, a choir member, walks into the church office, her narrow waist catching his attention. “What are you looking at with such intensity?” she asks. The man shows her the website for Pepperidge Farm Bread, its headquarters in Norwalk, Connecticut. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4M-6X9iUjw “I used to love watching Pepperidge Farm commercials on TV,” says Fern. “I begged my mom to buy their Mint Milano cookies, but she always said we couldn’t afford it.” The man asks what Fern’s father had done for a living when she was growing up, and she says he left when she was ten years old. “Moved to New Hampshire and worked at a swizzle-stick factory. Spent all his money on drinking.” “Sorry to hear that,” says the man. When Fern speaks about family, the man notices, there’s a lilt in her voice, not unlike the sound of a theremin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSzTPGlNa5U The man reads to Fern about Margaret Rudkin, who founded a bakery in 1937 and named it after her Fairfield homestead, where a venerable pepperidge held its ground. The man’s voice sounds like a prelude—a preamble for something big. The idea for the bakery came as a result of Rudkin’s son’s severe allergies, which kept him from consuming processed bread. The only time the man buys Pepperidge Farm bread is at Thanksgiving, when he makes stuffing for the shelter, a tradition since his father passed.
[7] It took tremendous imagination for Nick and Lil to make this house a reality. As teachers, they earned $4,200 a year combined income. When they applied for a loan, banks refused. The surveyor said the land was full of ledge: “Only way to dig a foundation is to blast through rock.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk9hgi4j4SY “Gotta have lotsa moolah to do that.” That’s when the brook had a branch, and there was only one place a house could go. Husband and wife rented a backhoe, widened the brook, and diverted the branch. A place for the foundation was set, no blasting necessary. Nicholas, who taught industrial arts at a nearby high school, took an extra job to help pay for the house. A trained draftsman, he was hired to teach blueprint reading at the technical college. Lillian, who taught third grade, came up with the idea of a work-study project for his drafting students—a lab of sorts: “Gain hands-on experience. Learn to build a house. Supervision provided.” Her idea worked. The house was built by students over the former branch. Not long after Kyrylo inherited the place, he hired an inspector, who raved about the quality of construction.
[8]After choir practice, during a sudden moment of assertiveness, the middle-aged man asks Fern on a dinner date. With a stunned look in her pupils, which remind him of whole notes filled with caramel, she agrees. On their way to the restaurant, they drive by 13 Pepperidge Lane. “Big picture windows, teakwood paneling with built-in bookshelves, and a trendy hip roof,” he exclaims. “All that and a room with a spa.” Fern shakes her head. “Swimming in money, people in this neighborhood.” She admits she likes the house. Not until the two have had a few drinks does the house come up again. Fern says, “I wonder what it’s like to sit by the brook and lip-lock.” When she speaks, the man thinks of the first time she had flirted with him—during rehearsal of the handbell choir’s performance of the Flight of the Bumblebee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHNdoIWxXDk That’s when he was still married to Ellen. Nothing happened. It never does because he lives his life by the rules. At least Fern encourages him to compose. Ellen never did. “Is that a question or a request?” he asks. Fern’s answer is a lift of the eyebrows—tapered like the stems of a couple of eighth notes. He and Fern drink too much and end up leaving their cars at the restaurant. The night is muggy, and he sweats while they walk. Few cars pass as the two stagger arm-in-arm through leafy neighborhoods featuring colonial, ranch, and mid-century modern houses separated by sizable swaths of hilly landscape. The man looks down at his jiggling stomach. It reminds him of an accordion playing the Beer Barrel Polka. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIo-l_TnT7A&list=PLNz2EYNZUFbuoNwUQg-_z3uE25w1FlSVc When they reach Pepperidge Lane, the trees are so thickly settled that the one streetlight below Number 13 has little impact on the path leading to the house. He and Fern sit facing each other on the ground by the brook in back. He thinks about making a move, but it doesn’t happen. The attraction is there, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. Every so often, he hears the high-pitched buzz of a mosquito and waves his arms. The clouds part to reveal a nearly full moon. Fern says she can’t stand the bugs. “And I need a drink of water,” says the man. “I feel dizzy and dehydrated.” Fern helps him stand and leads him toward the house. “What do you want to do?” she asks. “I can call Uber. We can deal with the cars tomorrow.” His eyes settling on her shadow, he realizes she’s about half his size. He thinks about how well she handles her liquor, not like him. That’s because he doesn’t drink. He’s too busy following the rules. And in the process, he’s done nothing worth noting. He doesn’t even play an instrument anymore. Ellen thought he was boring, which is why she ran off with a pilot. The only enjoyment he experiences is hearing other people’s music—life-altering composition borne out of hard work, alongside an ability to break rules and take risks. He thinks of a record album left on a shelf in the house before him. The couple who used to live here had great taste in music. Considering the title tune, they must have been very much in love. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1QJwHWvgP8
[9] Nick, who loved fishing in rivers and streams, never had a chance to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water in southwest Pennsylvania. But he had studied pictures of the house, marveled over cantilevered balconies hovering above a rushing stream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBH7vlPqX6M When he first visited the property at 13 Pepperidge, he imagined drawing up blueprints that bowed to the genius of Wright. But a bit of research led to a revelation of astronomical expense. When Lillian reminded him of the Great Flood of ’55, which had dropped around ten inches of rain on parts of the state, he abandoned the idea. Instead, they purchased some classical records, listened to them, and made love. Then they devised the plan to divert the brook and design a house.
[10] Wishing he had brought a bottle of water, the middle-aged man spots the snake-like shadow of a hose. Before he can get to it, the automatic sprinklers activate, drenching the two intruders from shoulder to foot. His ankles start to itch, and he bends down to scratch. “Poison ivy,” he blurts. “Think I saw some by the brook.” Fern starts scratching her hands. “Now you got me doing it.” The man tells her to stop. “If we wash off with soap and water in the next few minutes, we might be okay. Fern takes his arm. “So what do you want to do?” He walks toward the house. “There’s a bathroom on the other side of this door.” “So?” He reaches into his pocket and takes out a tool. “What the hell is that?” asks Fern. He tells her it’s a lock pick, and she laughs. “You, Mister Good and Proper, pick a lock? I don’t believe it.” “My father was a locksmith. Wanted me to go into the business. I wouldn’t. He never thought much of me, and I didn’t think much of him. But one thing I can tell you: he was a good teacher.” As the middle-aged man calibrates the pick wires, Fern pulls a leaf from his hair. The feeling of her hand on his head turns him on, makes him want to get inside and out of his clothes. The lock is moderately easy to pick, and the alarm barely beeps before he punches the code: 10, 13, 59, hashtag, his ability to turn sounds into notes and notes into numbers unimpeded by inebriation. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UKUNc8mxlWo “You’re one hell of a guy,” says Fern.
[11] Born in 1914, Piotr Olensky, Lillian’s eldest brother, didn’t fare so well after he left his family in the Carpathian foothills and settled in the village of Mokre, which means moist in Polish. And it is: misty moist and cold and dark for much of the year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW6-vVvTYn0 But that’s not what made his life miserable. He criticized the Communists and landed in a work camp. Seven days a week, he carried cross-ties on his back—heavy chunks of wet larch wood for the railroad. It took him two years to walk home when the Russians finally let him out, that is, after they had beaten him, damaging two of his vertebrae. Lillian and Nicholas sponsored Piotr and his wife Kateryna as immigrants—hired attorneys, went through lots of red tape. The couple came to Connecticut, rented an apartment in Hartford—all one room with the toilet exposed to the kitchen and everything else. Kyrylo remembers it. He also remembers Piotr the factory worker, who smoked and spoke almost no English, who lived with a wife with missing teeth and a mouth that smelled of sour cabbage. It was one of Kyrylo’s first memories. Growing up, he never liked Ukrainian food. He didn’t like the language, either; to him it sounded backward and harsh. Once accepted into the Russian-run School of American Ballet in New York, he changed his surname to Klemens: “like Hartford’s most famous author but with a K instead of a C,” he had said. “Before he became Mark Twain.” The Russians didn’t think much of Kyrylo: too short and not the right body. He ended up dancing for ballet companies in the Midwest, cities surrounded by fields of grain, places known for extreme weather and dedication to the arts. When he started out in 1984, he earned $13,000 for the full arts season. His career lasted seven years. Then came the injury. Kyrylo had no business dancing with a woman whose skeleton was heavier than his, but he was used to following directions, listening to his directors, hoping for better roles. Lifting his big-boned partner through hundreds of rehearsals and a few performances damaged three of his vertebrae. Teaching ballet for the past thirty years hasn’t earned him much money either. He’d have gone broke, if it weren’t for his parents, always willing to help out.
[12] The middle-aged man and Fern take off their shoes and socks and scrub each other’s feet and ankles with a loofah in the downstairs half bath. The man suggests stripping the rest of the way and washing and drying their clothes while they try out the jacuzzi. Fern agrees. The two kiss in the tub while the washer runs its course. Fern leaves to go to the bathroom and comes back with a bottle of vodka she says she found in the back of a closet. They drink. Fern talks about her childhood—moving with her single mother to a bad neighborhood because they couldn’t afford anything else. She drinks more than the man. She tells him they should “fuck up the house” before they leave. “Bunch of rich bitches. Don’t know the meaning of hard work. Everything laid out for them on a platter.” Fern is taking a swig of vodka when Kyrylo enters the room, so full of fog and mist that the barrel of his shotgun reminds the man of a bassoon. “Who the fuck are you, and what are you doing in my house?” says Kyrylo, his body still muscular, despite the injuries and time away from the stage. As Kyrylo speaks, the middle-aged man hums the notes of the Bolero bassoon solo by Ravel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrvMrjWxWxk&t=27s Fern turns off the jacuzzi and says, “We sort of got drunk and did something stupid.” Kyrylo shakes his head. “This is the kind of thing I’d expect from teenagers, not the likes of you.” When the middle-aged man looks at Fern’s face, he no longer hears music. When Kyrylo looks at the man and woman, he thinks of all the teen parties he was never invited to when he lived in this house, back when he was an oddball, the only boy in ballet. When he orders the intruders out of the hot tub, he thinks of his white-haired grandmother, dead on the floor, a foot or so from where he’s standing.
[13] Piotr hated Connecticut—working in a floundering lock factory, hearing only English outside the apartment, visiting his sister, who, with her husband, had bought a piece of land overrun with trees and weeds. But he cared about Lillian and her family, so he and Kateryna volunteered to help when it came time to clear the property for a house. The owners at work, brother and sister-in-law ripped out the brush, piled it up, and set it on fire. The fumes from the fire gave Piotr and Kateryna poison ivy in their throats and caused them an overnight at the hospital. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgwQ1DHepOw Claiming responsibility, Lillian paid their medical bills using money she had saved to buy furniture. After that, the immigrants left. Lillian and Nicholas slept in sleeping bags on the floor for the first year after the house was built. The old furniture was long gone; they had sold it to help pay for the house. Piotr used his saved wages from the lock factory, worth a lot more in Poland than in the US, to purchase four pieces of land and build four houses—one for himself and three for his sons, who had been living in cramped Communist-bloc apartments—digs that made the Hartford rental look luxurious. To earn a living, he grew potatoes and willows. The latter he chopped down and sold to makers of violins. When Kyrylo retired early from dancing, he decided to take a trip to think things out. He ended up in Mokre. Piotr’s grandson hosted him, and they traveled around visiting one relative after the next. To Kyrylo’s surprise, he liked the food. He especially enjoyed staying in one of the houses—simple with antiquated plumbing—built with Connecticut factory money. The people living there seemed happy. When he returned home, he changed his name back to Klymiuk.
[14] During the house intruder’s first night in jail—Fern is released on bail, thanks to her mother—he starts composing for piano and theremin, something with a water theme. It storms all night. Awakened by the sound of rain beating a drum solo on the roof, he composes some more. In the midst of creation, he pictures the way a theremin is played—without touching it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6KbEnGnymk Fern, he decides, is not for him. When he finally falls asleep, he dreams that the brook where he and Fern had caught poison ivy floods its banks. The next day, Fern visits her mother—the first time in a year—just two blocks from the Olenskys’ old apartment building, the man still in jail.
Kyrylo quits his job and takes 13 Pepperidge Lane off the market. Then he moves in, for how long, he’s not sure.