DeTamble home on Ainslie Avenue

The DeTamble home on Ainslie Avenue is the Lincoln Square house Henry recognizes from a future visit and Clare ultimately chooses after a day of searching. A red-brick bungalow built in 1926, it is identified not first by its rooms or condition but by a view of the backyard: the grape arbor and the future studio that Henry has already seen. The house brings foreknowledge into the couple’s ordinary decisions, then becomes the setting where a predicted future turns into their lived home.

Selection and Recognition

On May 18, 1994, Clare describes the couple’s house-hunting as an unusually open inspection of other people’s private spaces. She moves through each property carefully, checking woodwork and appliances, asking about the furnace, and looking for water damage. Henry’s method is different: he goes straight to the rear of each house and studies the view from its back window. Their realtor, Carol, finds his behavior odd; Clare explains it as gardening enthusiasm before asking him what he is looking for.

Henry tells Clare that he has been in their future home on a beautiful autumn afternoon. From a back window beside a small marble-topped table Clare received from her grandmother, he looked across the backyard toward what seemed to be her studio. He remembers her pulling blue sheets of paper, with her hair held back by a yellow bandanna and a green sweater beneath her familiar apron. A grape arbor stood in the yard. Because the glimpse did not tell him when it occurred, or how old Clare was, he cannot be certain it is their first house. He is nevertheless trying to find the view again, treating the remembered scene as a way to identify the place.

Clare worries that this certainty could lead them to reject a better house simply because it lacks the expected view. Henry answers that the amount of their belongings he saw makes him confident it is their home, while conceding that it might not be their first. The exchange marks a difference in how they approach the decision: Clare wants to weigh the present options, while Henry has already encountered one possible future. His knowledge guides the search, but it does not remove Clare’s concern about what they might give up along the way.

About a month and twenty houses later, Clare finds the bungalow on Ainslie, in Lincoln Square. When Carol opens it, Clare feels that something fits and walks directly to the back window. The view confirms the scene Henry described: the future studio and the grape arbor. Clare tells Carol they will buy it, then reassures her that Henry has already seen the house. Recognition comes through the rear window; the decision, however, is Clare’s.

Moving In and Making a Home

The couple move in on July 9, 1994. The day’s heat and the scale of the job overturn the movers’ expectation that a two-bedroom apartment will be a quick undertaking: Clare’s heavy Victorian furniture and Henry’s seventy-eight boxes of books fill the rooms. The sheer number and character of their possessions make the house a record of two distinct lives being brought together, not an empty setting awaiting them.

After dark, Clare and Henry explore the house by touch. They run their hands over the cherry windowsills, test the water in the claw-footed bathtub and switch on the heavy Universal stove. With the windows bare and the lights off, they move through the rooms and inspect the closets, cabinets, and windows. Clare touches the etched-glass fixture in the dining room. These acts of testing and handling turn the house from a matched image into a physical place they are beginning to inhabit together.

Their first night in the house ends with the two of them together on the bare floor among the boxes. Henry understands the place as home. That feeling is not established by the house’s age or architecture alone: it emerges after the move, through their attention to its rooms and fixtures and the work of making a shared life inside it. The bungalow that first mattered as a view from a future window becomes, in the present, a home they can touch and occupy.

House, Time, and Belonging

The house condenses the novel’s contrast between ordinary planning and Henry’s involuntary knowledge of what lies ahead. Clare’s search involves inspection, discussion, and uncertainty; Henry’s back-window test is shaped by an earlier encounter with the house in his own nonlinear experience of time. Their different approaches do not cancel each other out. His glimpse narrows the search toward a specific place, while Clare evaluates the decision and recognizes the matching view for herself.

The backyard is the hinge between these temporal positions. In Henry’s account it contains the grape arbor, the studio, and an image of Clare at work; when Clare later finds the house, those details make a future scene legible in the present. The couple do not merely receive a prediction about where they will live. They reach the place through repeated visits and a choice, then fill it with books, furniture, gestures, and shared routines. The house therefore joins two kinds of time: the future Henry has already glimpsed and the present Clare and Henry make their own.