A Spool of Blue Thread (6 page)

He said, “Pretty good.”

It was really very hard to visualize Denny’s personal life.

Nor were they always entirely clear about his occupation. They did know that at one point, he had a job installing sound systems, because he volunteered his expertise when Jeannie’s Hugh was wiring their den. Another time, he showed up wearing a hoodie with
KOMPUTER KLINIK
stitched on the pocket, and at Abby’s request he offhandedly fixed her Mac, which had been acting a bit sluggish. But he always seemed free to come and go, and to stay as long as he liked. How do you reconcile that with a full-time job? When Stem got married, for instance, Denny came for a solid week to fulfill his best-man duties, and although Abby was thrilled about that (she fretted about her boys’ not being close), she kept asking if he was sure this wouldn’t cause him trouble at work. “Work?” he said. “No.”

On one occasion, he visited for nearly a month with no explanation whatsoever. Everybody suspected that it involved some private crisis, since he arrived looking very seedy and not in the best of health. For the first time, they noticed faint lines at the corners of his
eyes. His hair straggled unevenly over the back of his collar. But he didn’t refer to any problems, and not even Jeannie dared ask. It was as if he had his family trained. They had become almost as oblique as Denny himself.

This stirred some resentment in them, from time to time. Why should they tiptoe around him? Why should they have to deflect the neighbors’ questions about him? “Oh,” Abby would say, “Denny is fine, thank you. Really fine! Right now he’s working at … Well, I’m not sure exactly
where
he’s working, but anyhow: he’s just fine!”

Yet he did provide something that they counted on, somehow. He did leave a hole when he was absent. That first time that he skipped the beach trip, for instance, the summer he claimed to be gay: nobody knew that he wasn’t coming. They kept waiting for him to phone and announce his arrival date, and when it grew clear that he wasn’t going to, everyone experienced the most crushing sense of flatness. Even after they’d arrived at the cottage they always rented, and unpacked their groceries and made up the beds and settled into their usual beach routine, they couldn’t shake the thought that he still might show up. They turned hopefully from their jigsaw puzzle when the screen door slammed in an evening breeze. They stopped speaking in mid-sentence when somebody out beyond the breakers started swimming toward them with that distinctive, rolling stroke that Denny always used. And halfway through the week … oh, here was the strangest part. Halfway through the week, Abby and the girls were sitting on the screen porch one afternoon shucking corn, and they heard Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 1 playing out back. They looked at each other; they rose from their chairs; they rushed through the house and out the door … and they saw that the music came from a car parked across the road. Someone was sitting in the driver’s seat with all the windows rolled down (but still, he must be baking!) and his radio playing full-blast. A man in a tank top; not an item of clothing Denny would have been caught dead in. A heavyset man, if you judged by the girth of the elbow resting on the window
ledge. Heavier than Denny could be even if he had done nothing but eat since the last time they had seen him. But still, you know how it is when you’re missing a loved one. You try to turn every stranger into the person you were hoping for. You hear a certain piece of music and right away you tell yourself that he could have changed his clothing style, could have gained a ton of weight, could have acquired a car and then parked that car in front of another family’s house. “It’s him!” you say. “He came! We knew he would; we always …” But then you hear how pathetic you sound, and your words trail off into silence, and your heart breaks.

I
N THE WHITSHANK FAMILY,
two stories had traveled down through the generations.
These stories were viewed as quintessential—as
defining
, in some way—and every family member, including Stem’s three-year-old, had heard them told and retold and embroidered and conjectured upon any number of times.

The first story concerned their earliest known ancestor, Junior Whitshank, a carpenter much sought after in Baltimore for his craftsmanship and his sense of design.

If it seems odd to call a patriarch “Junior,” there was a logical explanation. Junior’s true name was Jurvis Roy, shortened at some point to J. R. and then re-expanded, accordion-like, to Junior. (This was a fact so little known that his own daughter-in-law had to ask his name when she was briefly contemplating making her firstborn a III if he turned out to be a boy.) But what was even odder was that Junior was not some distant great-great, but merely Red Whitshank’s father. And there was no evidence of his existence prior to 1926, which seemed an unusually recent year for the start of a family tree.

Where he came from was never documented, but the general
feeling was that he might have hailed from the Appalachian Mountains. Maybe he had once said something to that effect. Or it could have been mere guesswork, based on the way he talked. According to Abby, who had known him since her girlhood, he had a thin, metallic voice and a twangy Southern accent, although he must have decided at some point that it would elevate his social standing if he pronounced his
i’
s in the Northern way. In the middle of his country-sounding drawl, Abby said, a distinct, sharp
i
would poke forth here and there like a brier. She didn’t sound entirely charmed by this trait.

Junior’s few photos revealed a face that was just a little too fine-boned—a look that people back then felt no compunction about referring to as “poor white trash.” In coloring he was pure Whitshank, black-haired even in his sixties with very white skin and squinty blue eyes, and he had the rangy, gaunt Whitshank body. He wore a stiff dark suit every day of the year, Abby said, but here Red would interrupt to say that the suits were a later development, when all Junior had to do was tour his work sites checking on things. Most of Red’s childhood memories featured his father in overalls.

At any rate, Junior’s first recorded appearance in Baltimore was as the employee of a building contractor named Clyde L. Ward. This came to light in a typewritten letter that was found among Junior’s papers after his death, telling Whom It May Concern that J. R. Whitshank had worked for Mr. Ward from June of 1926 through January 1930 and had proved an able carpenter. But he must have been more than merely able, because by 1934, a tiny rectangle in the
Baltimore Post
was advertising the services of Whitshank Construction Co., “Quality and Integrity.”

It was not the best era for starting a business, heaven knows, but apparently Junior flourished, first remodeling and then building from scratch various stately houses in the neighborhoods of Guilford, Roland Park, and Homeland. He acquired a Model B Ford pickup with an interlaced “WCC” painted on both doors above a
telephone number—no mention of the company’s full name or its function, as if everyone who counted surely must know, by now. In 1934 he had eight employees; in 1935, twenty.

In 1936, he fell in love with a house.

No, first he must have fallen in love with his wife, because he was married by then. He had married Linnie Mae Inman at some point. But he never had much to say about Linnie, whereas he had a great deal to say,
reams
to say, about the house on Bouton Road.

It was nothing but an architect’s drawing the first time he laid eyes on it. Mr. Ernest Brill, a Baltimore textile manufacturer, had unfurled a roll of blueprints while standing in front of the lot where he and Junior had arranged to meet. And Junior glanced first at the lot (full of birds and tulip poplars and sprinkles of white dogwood) and then down at the drawing of the front elevation, which showed a clapboard house with a gigantic front porch, and the words that popped into his head were “Why, that’s
my
house!”

Not that he said this aloud, of course. “Hmm,” he said aloud. And “I see.” And he took the blueprints from Mr. Brill and studied the elevation. He turned to the sheets beneath to look at the floor plans. He said, “Mm-hmm.”

“What do you think?” Mr. Brill asked.

Junior said, “Well …”

It was not a grand house, of the sort that you might expect a man like Junior to covet. It was more, let’s say, a
family
house. A house you might see pictured on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, plain-faced and comfortable, with the Stars and Stripes, perhaps, flying out front and a lemonade stand at the curb. Tall sash windows, a fieldstone chimney, a fanlight over the door. But best of all, that porch: that wonderful full-length porch. “It hit me,” was how Junior would put it later. “I don’t know; it just hit me.”

So he told Mr. Brill, “I reckon I could do it.”

Why hadn’t he simply built an identical house for himself? Red’s children used to ask. Copied the blueprints and built his own? Red
told them he couldn’t say. Then he said that maybe it had had something to do with the site. Bouton Road was prime real estate, after all, and by 1936 most of the lots there had been bought up. In those days of no air conditioning, houses in Baltimore wore thick, dark awnings that shrouded the windows nearly to the sills from May to October of every year, but awnings wouldn’t be needed with all those tulip poplars. Besides, the way the house would occupy that particular property, perched at the top of a long, gentle slope: where else could it show so well?

So Junior built the house for Mr. Brill.

He built better than he’d ever built anything in his life. He niggled over every pantry shelf and cabinet knob. He argued against any request that struck him as cutting corners or lacking in good taste. Because taste, really, was the secret of Junior’s reputation. How he came by it nobody knew, but he had the most unerring nose for anything pretentious. No two-story columns for Junior! No la-di-da portes cochères, with their intimations of chauffeured limousines gliding up to let their passengers off! When Mr. Brill dared to broach the possibility of a U-shaped “carriageway” out front, Junior all but exploded. “Carriageway!” he said. “What in tarnation is that? You drive a Chrysler Airflow, not a coach-and-six!” (Or that was his report of the conversation, at least. He may very well have exaggerated his own outspokenness in the telling.) Then he went on to fantasize, at length and in loving detail, how visitors would approach the house. The driveway should run to the side, he said, for the sole use of the Brill family. Guests should park down on the street. Picture how they’d climb out of their cars, raise their eyes to the porch, start up the flagstone walk while Mr. and Mrs. Brill stood waiting on the porch steps to welcome them. Oh, and by the way, those steps should be wooden. It was wrong to have anything else. People thought of wooden steps as buckling or peeling, but when they were properly cared for there was nothing handsomer than a wide set of varnished treads (a bit of fine sand mixed into the varnish for traction) rising to
a wooden porch floor as solid as a ship’s deck. Such steps took work, took money, took vigilance. Such steps
signified
.

Mr. Brill said he completely agreed.

Junior spent almost a year on the house, using all his men plus some he brought in from outside. Then the Brills took possession, and he went into mourning. Ordinarily a talker—his customers tried to avoid running into him when they had any place urgent to get to—he fell into a deep silence, and moped, and took little interest in the job that followed the Brills’ job. It was Junior himself who revealed all this, years later. (His wife was not very forthcoming.) “I just couldn’t believe,” he said, “that those folks got to live in my house.”

Luckily, it turned out that the Brills lacked handyman skills. When the first frost came, they telephoned Junior to say that the heat wasn’t working, and Junior had to drive over and bleed their radiators. He could have shown them how to do it themselves, but he didn’t. He went around to every room with a radiator key, and when he was finished he slipped the key back into his pocket and told the Brills to call him again if they had any more trouble. Pretty soon he was stopping by on a more or less weekly basis. The windows—outsized—required special screens and storm windows with finicky hardware, and he was the one who arrived spring and fall to supervise their installation. Like a love-struck groomsman who hangs around the bride long after the wedding, he kept inventing excuses to pop in. He dropped off a can of touch-up paint and then half a box of leftover floor tiles. He double-checked a lock that he had oiled just the week before. He came and went at all hours, using his own keys if nobody was home. Any telltale sign of wear he discovered sent him into a tizzy—a chip in the plaster or a hairline crack in a bathroom sink. He behaved as if he’d merely lent the house out and the borrowers were mistreating it.

One of Red’s earliest memories, dating from age three or so, was of clambering down from his father’s truck while Mrs. Brill stood
waiting on the back stoop, a cardigan clutched around her shoulders. “Don’t you go running off again if you don’t hear it first thing,” she told his father in a shrill voice. “I just know it’s going to get quiet the minute you step inside.” That had been a squirrel in the attic, Red recalled. “She was a real nervous Nellie,” he said. “She thought every animal she met was out to get her, and she was always smelling smoke, and she was scared to death of break-ins. Break-ins! On Bouton Road!” Most damning of all, she never really warmed to the house. She complained that it was too far from downtown, and she missed their old apartment with her ladies’ club a stone’s throw away. Granted, there was a ladies’ club on Roland Avenue, but that wasn’t quite the same thing.

What made it worse was that Mr. Brill traveled frequently on “bidness,” as Junior called it, leaving Mrs. Brill with no protection but their two spoiled boys. (Junior attached the word “spoiled” to the Brill boys every time he mentioned them, although he never offered any concrete examples of spoiled behavior.) The boys were in their teens and weighed at least as much as Junior did, but it was Junior Mrs. Brill telephoned whenever she heard a noise in the basement.