A Spool of Blue Thread (7 page)

And Red could just about bet that Junior wasn’t paid for his trouble. The Brills took him for granted. They addressed him by his first name while they remained “Mr.” and “Mrs.” Mrs. Brill descended on him each Christmas just as she descended on her yard boy and her cleaning girl, arriving at his door in her puffy fur coat with a basket of store-bought preserves. Her car purred out front; she never stayed to visit, although she was always invited.

Junior lived in Hampden, mere blocks away from the Brills but a world apart in atmosphere. He and Linnie rented a two-bedroom house that sat several feet below the level of the street, which gave it a huddled look. They had two children: Merrick (a girl) and Redcliffe. Oho! this might lead some to say. Was it possible that the Whitshanks’ mysterious family origins might have included some Merricks? Or Redcliffes? But no, those were just Junior’s notion of
names that sounded genteel. They implied illustrious forebears, perhaps on the mother’s side. Oh, Junior was forever thinking up ways to look like quality. And yet he kept them in that sad little house in Hampden, which he didn’t even bother fixing up although he could have done it better than anyone.

“I was biding my time,” was how he explained it years later. “I was just biding my time, was all.” And he went on changing the fuses in his beloved Bouton Road house, and tightening its hinges, and chasing off various birds and bats without the least sign of impatience.

One cold evening in February of 1942, Mrs. Brill arrived on the Whitshanks’ front stoop with both of her boys in tow. None of them wore coats. Mrs. Brill had been crying. It was Linnie who opened the door to them, and she said, “What on earth …?” Mrs. Brill grabbed Linnie’s wrist. “Is Junior here?” she asked.

“I’m here,” Junior said, appearing next to Linnie.

“The most awful thing,” Mrs. Brill said. “Awful, awful, awful.”

Junior said, “Why don’t you come on in.”

“I walked into the sunroom,” she said, staying where she was. “I was planning to write some letters. You know my little writing desk where I conduct my correspondence. And there on the floor by my chair I saw this canvas bag, like a tool bag. That kind with the jaws that open? And it was open all the way, and I could make out these burglar tools inside.”

“Huh,” Junior said.

“Screwdrivers and a crowbar and—oh!” She slumped sideways toward one of her boys, who stood his ground and allowed it. “On top,” she said, “a coil of rope.”

Linnie said, “Rope!”

“Like what you would tie someone up with.”

“Oh, my heavens!”

“Well, now,” Junior said, “we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

“Oh, would you, Junior? Please? I know I should have called the
police, but all I could think was, ‘I just have to get out of here. I have to get my boys out.’ And I grabbed up the car keys and ran. I didn’t know who else to turn to, Junior.”

“Now, you did exactly right,” Junior said. “I’m going to take care of everything. You stay here with Linnie, Mrs. Brill, and I’ll have the cops make sure it’s safe before you go back in.”

Mrs. Brill said, “Oh,
I’m
not going back. That house is dead to me, Junior.”

At this point, one of her sons said, “Aw, Ma?” (History’s only recorded comment from either of the Brill boys.)

But she repeated, “Dead to me.”

“We’ll just see, why don’t we,” Junior said. And he reached for his jacket.

What did the two women talk about, once they were alone? Years later Jeannie asked that, but no one could give her an answer. Linnie herself had never said, apparently, and Merrick and Red had been so young—Merrick five and Red four—that they didn’t remember. It almost seemed that when Junior left a scene, it had ceased to exist. Then he returned and everything started up again, brought to life by his whiny, thin voice and “He says to me …” and “Says I, I says …”

The police said to him, “Looks like a plain old workman’s bag,” and Junior said to them, “It sure does.” He nudged it with the toe of his boot. “How to explain the rope, though,” he added after a moment.

“Lots of times a workman needs rope.”

“Well, you’re right. Can’t argue with that.”

They all stood around a while, looking down at the bag.

“Thing is,
I’m
their workman, most often,” Junior said.

“Is that a fact.”

“But who can figure?”

And he turned up both palms, as if testing for rain, and raised his eyebrows at the police and shrugged, and they all agreed to drop it.

Then the conversation when Mr. Brill returned from his trip: “
You
buy the house?” Mr. Brill said. “Buy it and do what with it?”

“Why, live in it,” Junior said.

“Live in it! Oh. I see. But … are you sure you’d be happy there, Junior?”

“Who wouldn’t be happy there?” Junior asked his children years later, but what he said to Mr. Brill was, “One thing, I know it’s well built.”

Mr. Brill had the grace not to explain that this wasn’t quite what he’d meant.

Red remembered growing up in that house as heaven. There were enough children on Bouton Road to form two baseball teams, when they felt like it, and they spent all their free time playing out of doors—boys and girls together, little ones and big ones. Suppers were brief, pesky interruptions foisted on them by their mothers. They disappeared again till they were called in for bed, and then they came protesting, all sweaty-faced and hot with grass blades sticking to them, begging for just another half hour. “I bet I can still name every kid on the block,” Red would tell his own children. But that was not so impressive, because most of those kids had stayed on in the neighborhood as grown-ups, or at least come back to it later after trying out other, lesser places.

Red and Merrick were folded into that pack of children without hesitation, but their parents never seemed to blend in with the other parents. Maybe it was Linnie’s fault; she was so shy and quiet. Noticeably younger than Junior, a thin, pale woman with lank, colorless hair and almost colorless eyes, she tended to shrink and wring her hands when somebody addressed her. It certainly wasn’t Junior’s fault, because he would go up and start talking to anyone. Talk, talk, talk people’s ears off. Or was that the source of the problem, in fact? People were polite, but they didn’t talk back much.

Well, never mind. Junior finally had his house. He tinkered endlessly with it. He put a toilet in the hall closet underneath the stairs, because almost as soon as they moved in he realized that one bathroom was not going to be sufficient. And he lined the guest room with cabinets for Linnie’s sewing supplies, since they never had guests. For years they owned next to no furniture, having sunk every last penny into the down payment, but he refused to go out and buy just any old cheap stuff, no sir. “In this house, we insist on quality,” he said. It was downright comical, the number of his sentences that started off with “In this house.” In this house they never went barefoot, in this house they wore their good clothes to ride the streetcar downtown, in this house they attended St. David’s Episcopal Church every Sunday rain or shine, even though the Whitshanks could not possibly have started out Episcopalian. So “this house” really meant “this family,” it seemed. The two were one and the same.

One thing was a puzzle, though: despite Junior’s reported loquaciousness, his grandchildren never formed a very clear picture of him. Who
was
he, exactly? Where had he come from? For that matter, where had Linnie come from? Surely Red had some inkling—or his sister, more likely, since women were supposed to be more curious about such things. But no, they claimed they didn’t. (If they were to be believed.) And both Junior and Linnie were dead before their first grandchild turned two.

Also: was Junior insufferable, or was he likable? Bad, or good? The answer seemed to vary. On the one hand, his ambition was an embarrassment to all of them. They winced when they heard how slavishly he aped his social superiors. But when they considered his pinched circumstances, his nose-pressed-to-the-window wistfulness, and his dedication—his genius, in fact—they had to say, “Well …”

He was like anybody else, Red said. Insufferable
and
likable. Bad
and
good.

Nobody found this a satisfactory answer.

All right, so the first family story was Junior’s: how the Whitshanks came to live on Bouton Road.

The second was Merrick’s.

Merrick was her father’s daughter, no doubt about it. At the age of nine, she had engineered her own transfer from public school to private, and while Red was stumbling through the University of Maryland with his mind fixed on his true calling—construction—Merrick was off at Bryn Mawr College, studying how to rise above her origins. On winter weekends, she went skiing with friends. In warmer weather, she sailed. She started using words like “divine” and “delicious” (not referring to food). Imagine her parents speaking that way! Already she had traveled a great distance from them.

Merrick’s best friend from fourth grade on was Pookie Vanderlin, who attended Bryn Mawr also. And in the spring of 1958, when both girls were finishing their junior year, Pookie got engaged to Walter Barrister III, commonly known as Trey.

This Trey was a Baltimore boy, a graduate of Gilman and Princeton who worked now in his family’s firm, doing something with money. So over summer vacation, when Merrick and Pookie and their friends gathered on the Whitshanks’ front porch to smoke Pall Malls and talk about how bored they were, Trey was often there as well. He seemed to keep a very loose schedule at the office. By the time Red got home from his summer job, at four p.m. or so—contractors’ hours—he’d find Trey lounging on the porch with the others, a pristine white cardigan tied oh-so-casually around his shoulders and his feet encased in leather loafers with no socks (the first time Red had ever seen this practice, although unfortunately not the last). Later they’d all go out and do whatever they did in the evenings. Since Red was the one telling this story, there was no knowing what Merrick’s friends did, but presumably they ate in
some joint and then caught a movie, maybe, or went dancing. Late at night they would return to sit on the porch again. It was an unusually spacious porch, after all, so deep that they could stay dry there even during a rainstorm. Their voices would drift up clearly to the two front bedrooms—Red’s bedroom and his parents’. Red often leaned out his window to call down, “Hey! Some of us have to get up in the morning, you know!” but his parents never uttered a word of protest. Junior was probably gloating: all those shiny-haired, nonchalantly graceful boys and girls on his porch, when their folks had never invited him and Linnie to
their
porches, not on a single occasion.

The young people were pairing off that summer. Senior year was approaching, and this was back when girls tended to marry right after college. Merrick seemed to have not just one boy in attendance but two, neither of whom Red knew well. They were a few years older than he and they sort of resembled each other, so that he was always getting them mixed up. Besides which, he had trouble believing that anyone could be seriously attracted to his sister. Merrick was skinny and ungainly, with the Whitshanks’ definite jaw that looked better on the men than on the women, and that summer she was wearing her hair in a dramatic new style, flaring out on the left side but pressed flat to her skull on the right, so that it looked as if she were perpetually being buffeted by a strong wind. But Tink and Bink, or whatever their names were, seemed quite taken with her. They called her “Bean,” short for “Beanpole,” and you could tell by their teasing that they were trying to win her favor.

Her father asked her, once, “Now, who is that blond fellow? With the crew cut?”

“Which one?” Merrick said.

“The one who was complaining about his golf game last night.”

“Which
one
, Dad.”

From this, Red gathered that neither young man had particularly
impressed her. Also: that his parents, or at least his father, had been listening to those porch conversations with more interest than Red had realized.

Meanwhile, Pookie was getting down to the fine points of her wedding. It was less than a year away now, and an event of such scale took some planning. A date had been set, and a venue for the reception. The color scheme for the bridesmaids’ dresses was under deliberation. Merrick had been asked to serve as maid of honor. She told her parents it was bound to be a bore, but her mother said, “Oh, now, I think it’s nice of Pookie to choose you,” and her father said, “I don’t guess you realize that Walter Barrister the First founded Barrister Financial.”

Red had started noticing that any time it was a girls-only gathering, Pookie had a tendency to speak of Trey belittlingly. She mocked the loving care he gave to the sheet of blond hair that fell over his forehead, and she referred to him habitually as “the Prince of Roland Park.” “I can’t come shopping tomorrow,” she’d say, “because the Prince of Roland Park wants me to go to lunch with his mother.” Partly, this could be explained by the fact that her crowd liked to affect a tone of ironic amusement no matter what they were discussing. But also, Trey sort of deserved the title. Even during high school he had driven a sports car, and the Barristers’ house in Baltimore was only one of three that they owned, the others in distant resorts that advertised in the
New York Times
. Pookie said he was spoiled rotten, and she blamed it on his mother, “Queen Eula.”

Eula Barrister was stick-thin and fashionable and discontented-looking. Any time Red saw her in church, he was reminded of Mrs. Brill. Mrs. Barrister ran that church, and she ran the Women’s Club, and she ran her family, which consisted of just three people. Trey was her only child—her darlin’ boy, she was fond of saying; her poppet. And Pookie Vanderlin was nowhere near good enough for him.

Over the course of the summer, Red heard long recitals of Pookie’s tribulations with Queen Eula. Pookie was summoned to excruciating
family dinners, to stiff old-lady teas, to Queen Eula’s own beautician to do something about her eyebrows. She was chided for her failure to write bread-and-butter notes, or for writing bread-and-butter notes that weren’t enthusiastic enough. Her choice of silver pattern was reversed without her say-so. She was urged to consider a wedding gown that would hide her chubby shoulders.