When we bought the house, my husband and I both assumed, upon the candid statement of the real estate agent, that the only thing defective on the property was the left-hand gatepost leaning off at a rakish angle. The roof, the furnace, the wiring, the plumbing, the foundations—all of these, we believed innocently, were new, newly repaired, or so solid that not even an earthquake could shake them. “But,” the real estate agent told first me, and then my husband, and then both of us together, “I’d be a pretty poor businessman if I tried to tell you that gatepost is straight.” We were forced to agree: that gatepost was emphatically crooked, and the real estate salesman was not a pretty poor businessman at all. The gateposts were massive stone affairs, although there was no wall to go with them; they stood at the end of a driveway which, while nicely dry during the summer months when we looked at the house, was not the splendid sweeping affair the gateposts seemed to imply. Nevertheless, my husband and I told one another with shy pride that the gateposts gave our meager three acres something of the air of an estate, except that of course the left-hand gatepost was a little crooked.
