DeTamble home in Lincoln Square

The DeTamble home in Lincoln Square is the red-brick bungalow that Henry and Clare select through an unusual reversal: Henry knows its future appearance before they find it in their present. Chosen by matching a remembered view from the back window, the house becomes both a home they make together and a fixed point in a life whose chronology is repeatedly unsettled.

Finding the House

In May 1994, while the couple are house-hunting, their different methods expose what Henry knows. Clare inspects the properties carefully, considering their woodwork, appliances, furnaces, and basements; Henry goes straight to the back of each house and studies the view. He explains that he has already visited their future home on an autumn afternoon. In that glimpse, he stood beside a marble-topped table inherited from Clare’s grandmother and saw a brick building that would become Clare’s studio, where she was working with blue paper. He also remembers her yellow bandanna, green sweater, rubber apron, and a grape arbor in the yard.

After roughly a month and twenty more houses, Clare finds the bungalow on Ainslie, in Lincoln Square. Built in 1926, the red-brick house fits Henry’s memory: from the back window are the yard, the grape arbor, and the view of Clare’s future studio. Clare recognizes the match and decides they will buy it, even though the realtor asks whether she wants to inspect the rest of the house and consult her husband. Henry has already seen it. His glimpse has turned house-hunting into a search for a known future, while Clare’s discovery makes that future theirs to enter.

Moving In and Making a Home

The couple move in on July 9, 1994. The move is larger than expected: Clare’s Victorian furniture and Henry’s seventy-eight boxes of books overwhelm the movers’ estimate of a straightforward two-bedroom move. Once the workers have left, the couple explore the house together, touching its walls and cherry windowsills and testing the claw-footed bathtub and the heavy Universal stove. The naked windows and empty rooms mark the house as not yet furnished, but also as newly available to them.

Clare moves through the rooms, opening cupboards and closets and touching the house; Henry follows. Their first night in the bungalow turns it from a property recognized in advance into a shared home. Afterward, lying on the bare floor among the boxes, Henry understands that they have found a home. The house’s significance is therefore not limited to its role as the destination of his foreknowledge: it is made intimate through their arrival and first evening there.

Domestic Life and Time Displacement

The bungalow also anchors a marriage lived on mismatched timelines. In 1996, about two years after their wedding, Henry and Clare decide to try to have a baby. Clare is intensely absorbed in the possibility of motherhood, imagining a child and noticing babies around her, while avoiding the fear that Henry’s condition might be inherited or affect their chances. The house is the setting within which their hoped-for family life takes shape, though the decision carries uncertainties neither can settle by ordinary planning.

A later discontinuity makes those differing timelines concrete. Clare tells Henry she is pregnant, and he initially begins to ask how it could have happened before realizing that the encounter belongs to his own past but only weeks earlier for her. He recalls the night in 1996 when they were trying to conceive; for Clare, the same night is recent. The home holds both versions of the event without making them simultaneous in the couple’s experience. Their domestic life is shared, but the order in which they live it is not.

A Fixed Place in an Unfixed Story

The Ainslie house also gives Henry a place to which he can try to return when he is distressed. At one point he leaves after an argument and drives alone toward the lake, although he knows he is tired and upset. The drive offers a temporary separation from the home and from Clare; his departure is a choice made in the present, unlike his involuntary displacements through time. That the house remains the point from which he leaves gives the episode a domestic counterweight: refuge and strain coexist there.

Across the novel’s dated, alternating accounts, the house is a stable setting against which time’s instability becomes legible. Henry’s future memory helps Clare identify it; later, the couple’s marriage, hopes for a child, and moments of conflict are associated with their life there. The bungalow does not resolve the uncertainties of their chronology or family future. Instead, it makes visible what they can build within them: a shared place recognized in advance, then gradually inhabited as home.