The Summerhouse is a neglected outbuilding on the Blackwood grounds whose troubled history and physical decay make it an unlikely refuge. After a painful confrontation with Charles Blackwood, Mary Katherine Blackwood goes there for the first time in six years. Inside its wet darkness, she reconstructs the family dinner table in her mind, turning a place the family had avoided into a temporary refuge for memory and belonging.

Design and Reputation

Mary Katherine remembers that her father planned the Summerhouse and intended to divert the creek past it and build a small waterfall. But something about the wood, stone, and paint had made the finished place feel bad. The original plan suggests an intended retreat beside the water; the completed building instead became a space the family shunned.

Her mother had once seen a rat looking in through the doorway, and after that nothing could persuade her to return. The family’s avoidance followed: Mary Katherine recalls that no one had liked the Summerhouse much, and that where her mother did not go, no one else went. Its reputation thus rests not on a stated supernatural event but on a chain of unease and refusal, beginning with the rat at the threshold.

Decay and Isolation

By the time Mary Katherine returns, the setting around the Summerhouse has grown unruly. Trees crowd its sides and press over the roof; flowers once planted there have either died or grown into large, tasteless wild plants. Mary Katherine considers the building the ugliest place she has ever seen and remembers that her mother had seriously asked for it to be burned down.

The interior is wet and dark, with only a stone floor to sit on. Chairs and perhaps a low table once stood there, but they have disappeared, either carried away or rotted. The emptied room gives the building its particular desolation: it is not simply remote from the household, but stripped of the furniture that might have made it usable. Its neglect also contrasts with the carefully maintained domestic life associated with Constance Blackwood’s kitchen and the family’s inherited belongings.

Mary Katherine’s Return

Mary Katherine reaches the Summerhouse after fleeing into a field of tall grass, where Jonas finds her and sits with her out of sight. After a long time, she knows where she wants to go. She has not approached the building for six years, but Charles has made the world seem so dark to her that this forsaken place is the one that will do. Jonas dislikes the Summerhouse; when Mary Katherine turns onto its overgrown path, he goes another way, apparently expecting to meet her later.

Once inside, Mary Katherine sits on the stone floor and mentally arranges the family around the dining-room table. Her father takes the head, her mother the foot; Julian Blackwood and Thomas Blackwood sit on either side of their mother, while Dorothy and Constance Blackwood sit beside their father. Mary Katherine places herself between Constance and Julian, in what she regards as her proper place. In the empty building, the absent chairs and table are supplied by memory, and she listens inwardly to the family speaking, including an exchange about buying her a new book and giving her what she wants.

Narrative Significance

The Summerhouse’s significance lies in the reversal between its physical and imagined uses. The family’s history has marked it as undesirable: the planned creek and waterfall never redeem it, the mother’s encounter with the rat closes it off, and weather and neglect complete its abandonment. Yet at the moment Mary Katherine needs distance from Charles, the very place no one chose becomes available to her.

Her imagined seating arrangement makes the visit more than an escape into an empty outbuilding. It restores a family gathering in thought and fixes Mary Katherine within it, beside Constance and Julian, as someone who belongs. The Summerhouse offers no repaired furniture or renewed household life; its shelter is temporary and inward, fashioned from the remembered order of the table rather than from anything the building can provide.