207 Gillette Street is the address where Dominick Birdsey is found unconscious after a fall, amid the aftermath of Henry Rood’s suicide. The house becomes both the setting of a dangerous misidentification and a place Dominick later associates with horror and loss.

The house and the fall

When emergency medical technicians arrive in response to Ruth Rood’s hysterical 911 call, they find Dominick in the front yard, lying on broken shutters. They mistake him for Henry Rood and assume that his fall is the suicide attempt Ruth has been reporting. Her frantic account eventually clarifies that her husband is in the attic and has shot himself. Dominick’s leg is badly injured: his fibula has separated from its joint, splintered, and protruded through the skin. The medics sedate him and prepare him for transport.

Dominick remembers the fall but not hitting the ground. What returns afterward comes in brief flashes: a dog barking among onlookers and someone screaming when rescuers try to remove his work boot. Later, he pictures the house scraped and burned down to bare wood, surrounded by scaffolding and awaiting primer and paint. The repair work would require him to return, so he considers hiring someone else to finish it, even if paying out of pocket means taking a loss. Avoiding the house matters more to him than the money; he thinks of it as a curse and wonders how Ruth is coping with her husband’s death.

The house as an afterimage

Even away from 207 Gillette Street, Dominick sees Henry Rood again at the window, staring out at him. The remembered image turns the house from a work site into a place bound to an unanswered question: Dominick wonders why Henry had gone up to the attic and why he had been there to witness the aftermath. His concern also shifts toward Ruth, whom he remembers as decent to him despite the trouble over the house, and he wonders whether she has family or a friend to sit with her. The address thus remains present not only through the damage that needs repairing, but through Dominick’s uneasy recollection of the people left in its wake.

Costs and associations

The injuries at 207 Gillette Street also threaten Dominick’s livelihood. He reckons that the truck, a five-hour operation, and a prolonged hospital stay will add to the cost of the accident, while the work he expected to take in November and December has been lost. He had estimated that he would clear only twenty-two or twenty-three thousand dollars for the year, and now fears he may no longer be able to climb ladders. The prospect of sorting out insurance exhausts him; the damaged house has turned from a job site into a financial burden he may have to pay someone else to finish. Thinking about whether Ruth has anyone to support her, Dominick recalls that she had treated him decently despite the difficulties over the house. His concern for her leads to an association with Dessa’s divorce: the phrase that Dessa’s father used when she announced she was leaving Dominick was that she would be better off without him. Leo had relayed the remark after the Constantine family’s annual Fourth of July picnic. In Dominick’s hospital recollection, the house on Gillette Street therefore draws together immediate practical losses and older domestic ruptures, without resolving the questions Henry Rood’s death has left behind.

The collapse of defensive composure

Dominick’s thoughts about Ruth and the house surface while he is hospitalized, worn down enough to abandon the defense he has been trying to play. He repeats the cheer De-fense! De-fense! to himself, then admits he is too tired to keep at it and no longer cares whether the man in the next bed hears him cry. The image of Henry at the attic window returns in that exhaustion, making the address part of a memory Dominick cannot simply set aside: he is left asking why Henry had gone up there, and why Dominick had been the one to see what followed.