The painter arrives in Rockland on a listing steamship his wife Jo disappointed with dreary Ellsworth They rent a room in a faded Victorian from the improbably named Asenath Achorn He’s visited Maine before, but this fine old place enchants him—the captain’s home on Talbot Avenue mourning doves flying over empty clotheslines the limestone quarries that remind him of New Mexico
He places his easel in the South End and finds a long-abandoned boarding house the way Mrs. Achorn’s home might look in a decade The painter tries to capture how this haunted house slopes and slumps but spots a child in the grass
Adorable, yes, but ruining his painting of abandonment so he asks Jo to shoo him away with fifty cents the boy takes both quarters but races to the painter a cheap sketchbook in hand and explains that his name is Andy and that he just finished drawing the house, too “But I added skeletons!”
It’s true – pale bony figures are crawling out of the windows of this house. The painter writes a note on a blank page “Ghoulish but promising—Ed Hopper”