Chapter 10
EVERY GROUND-FLOOR ROOM but the kitchen had double pocket doors, and above each door was a fretwork transom for the air to circulate in the summer.
The windows were fitted so tightly that not even the fiercest winter storm could cause them to rattle.
The second-floor hall had a chamfered railing that pivoted neatly at the stairs before descending to the entrance hall.
All the floors were aged chestnut. All the hardware was solid brass—doorknobs, cabinet knobs, even the two-pronged hooks meant to anchor the cords of the navy-blue linen window shades that were brought down from the attic every spring.
A ceiling fan with wooden blades hung in each room upstairs and down, and out on the porch there were three.
The fan above the entrance hall had a six-and-a-half-foot wingspan.
Mrs. Brill had wanted a chandelier in the entrance hall—a glittery one, all crystal, shaped like an upside-down wedding cake.
Silly woman. Junior had dissuaded her by pointing out the impracticality: any time the tiniest cobweb was spotted trailing from a prism, he would need to send a workman over with a sixteen-foot stepladder.
(He failed to disclose that for another client, he had once designed an ingenious cable-and-winch lift system to raise and lower a chandelier at will.) His main objection, of course, was that a chandelier would not have been in keeping with the house.
This was a plain house, in the way that a handcrafted blanket chest is plain—simple, but impeccably built, as Junior, who had built it, should know.
He had overseen every detail, setting his hand to every part of it except those parts that somebody else could do better, like the honeycombing of tiny black-and-white ceramic tiles in the bathroom, laid by two brothers from Little Italy who didn’t speak any English.
The stairway, though, with the newel posts running clean through the hand-cut openings in the treads, and those pocket doors that glided almost silently into their respective walls: those were Junior’s.
He was a brash and hasty man in all other areas of life, a man who coasted through stop signs without so much as a toe on the brake, a man who bolted his food and guzzled his drinks and ordered a stammering child to “come on, spit it out,” but when it came to constructing a house he had all the patience in the world.
Mrs. Brill had also wanted velvet-flocked wallpaper in the living room, fitted carpets in the bedrooms, and red-and-blue stained glass in the fanlight above the front door.
None of which she got. Ha! Junior won just about every argument.
Mostly, as with the chandelier, he cited impracticalities, but when he needed to he was not averse to bringing up the issue of taste.
“Now, I don’t know why, Mrs. Brill,” he would say, “but that is just not done. The Remingtons didn’t do that, nor the Warings, either”—naming two families in Guilford whom Mrs. Brill especially admired.
Then Mrs. Brill would retreat—“Well, you know best, I suppose”—and Junior would proceed as he had originally intended.
This was the house of his life, after all (the way a different type of man would have a love of his life), and against any sort of logic he clung to the conviction that he would someday be living here.
Even after the Brills moved in and their cluttery decorations choked the airy rooms, he remained serenely optimistic.
And when Mrs. Brill started talking about how isolated she felt, how far from downtown, when she went to pieces after she found those burglar tools in the sunroom, he heard the click of his world settling into its rightful place. At last, the house would be his.
As it had been all along, really.
Sometimes, in the weeks when he was sprucing the place up before he installed his family, he drove over in the early morning just to take a walk-through, to relish the thrillingly empty rooms and the non-squeaking floorboards and the sturdy faucet handles above the bathroom sink.
(Mrs. Brill had wanted handles she’d seen in a Paris hotel, faceted crystal knobs the size of Ping-Pong balls.
In Junior’s opinion, though, the only sensible design was a chubby white porcelain cross—easiest to turn with soapy fingers—and for once Mr. Brill had spoken up and agreed with him.)
He liked to gaze up the stairs and imagine his daughter sweeping down them, an elegant young woman in a white satin wedding gown.
He envisioned the dining-room table lined with a double row of grandchildren, mostly boys, his son’s boys to carry on the Whitshank name.
They would all have their faces turned in Junior’s direction, like sunflowers turned to the sun, listening to him hold forth on some educational topic.
Maybe he could assign a topic each night at the start of the meal—music, or art, or current events.
A ham or perhaps a roast goose would sit in front of him waiting to be carved, and the water would be served in stemmed goblets, and the salad forks would have been refrigerated ahead of time as he had observed the maid doing in the Remingtons’ house in Guilford.
Everything till now had been makeshift—his ragtag upbringing, his hidey-hole courtship, his limping-along marriage, and his shabby little rented house in a rundown neighborhood. But now that was about to change. His real life could begin.
Then Linnie Mae had to go and interfere with the porch swing.
In the Brills’ time, the porch swing had been an ugly white wrought-iron affair featuring sharp-edged curlicues that gouged a person’s spine.
Its rust-pocked figure-eight hooks made a screechy, complaining sound, and the heavy chains could seriously pinch your fingers if you gripped them wrong.
But Mrs. Brill had swung in that swing as a little girl, she’d told Junior, and it was clear from the lingering way she spoke how fondly she looked back on that little girl, how she cherished the notion of her cute little childhood self. So Junior had had to allow it.
When the Brills moved out, they left behind all their porch furniture because they were going to an apartment.
Mrs. Brill told Junior, in a sad little voice, to be sure and look after her swing, and Junior said, “Yes, ma’am, I’ll certainly do that.
” The moment they were gone, though, he climbed up on a ladder and unhooked the swing himself.
He knew what he wanted in its stead: a plain wooden bench swing varnished in a honey tone, with a row of lathed spindles forming the back and supporting each armrest. It should hang by special ropes that were whiter and softer than ordinary ropes, easier on the hands, and when it moved there should be no sound at all, or at most just a genteel creak such as he imagined you would hear from the sails on a sailboat.
He had seen such a swing back home, at Mr. Muldoon’s.
Mr. Muldoon managed the mica mines, and his house had a long front porch with varnished floorboards, and the steps were varnished as well, and so was the swing.
Junior couldn’t find this swing ready-made and he had to commission one.
It cost a fortune. He didn’t tell Linnie how much.
She asked, because money was an issue; the down payment on the house had just about ruined them.
But he said, “What difference does it make? There’s not a chance on this earth I would live in a place with a white lace swing out front. ”
It arrived raw, as he’d specified, so that it could be finished to the shade he envisioned.
He had Eugene, his best painter, see to that.
Another of his men spliced the ropes to the heavy brass hardware, a fellow from the Eastern Shore who knew how such things were done.
(And who whistled when he saw the brass, but Junior had his own private hoard and it was not his fault there was a war on.) When the swing was hung, finally—the grain of the wood shining through the varnish, the white ropes silky and silent—he felt supremely satisfied.
For once, something he’d dreamed of had turned out exactly as he had planned.
Up to this point, Linnie Mae had barely visited the house.
She just didn’t seem as excited about it as Junior was.
He couldn’t understand that. Most women would be jumping up and down!
But she had all these quibbles: too expensive, too hoity-toity, too far from her girlfriends.
Well, she would come around. He wasn’t going to waste his breath.
But once the swing was hung he was eager for her to see it, and the next Sunday morning he suggested taking her and the kids to the house in the truck after they got back from church.
He didn’t mention the swing because he wanted it to kind of dawn on her.
He just pointed out that since it was only a couple of weeks till moving day, maybe she’d like to carry over a few of those boxes she’d been packing.
Linnie said, “Oh, all right.” But after church she started dragging her heels.
She said why didn’t they eat dinner first, and when he told her they could eat after they got back she said, “Well, I’ll need to change out of my good clothes, at least.”
“What do you want to do that for?” he asked.
“Go like you are.” He hadn’t brought it up yet, but he was thinking that after they’d moved in, Linnie should give more thought to how she dressed.
She dressed like the women back home dressed.
And she sewed most of her clothes herself, as well as the children’s.
There was something thick-waisted and bunchy, he had noticed, about everything that his children wore.