The Barn House (4 page)

All of this had happened two blocks from James's house. I could do little but mumble:
Wow. No kidding. Unbelievable.
It was always tough to top a good El Rukn story. Whatever difficulties I might have in my comparatively tranquil part of town were nothing compared to what James and his wife had seen. Yet by his own lights he was an ordinary fellow, neither beaten nor bitter, who was merely trying to lead an ordinary middle-class life.

I asked James why he stayed. He offered practical reasons at first. He and Diane liked old houses; the neighborhood was near the lake; the purchase price had been laughably low; he felt certain the neighborhood would turn around soon.

None of this seemed very convincing. Surely there were easier ways to make money than buying a house in a free-fire zone. I pressed him a bit.

Eventually he came clean. It was as I suspected: The house was part of his personal crusade. “Chicago doesn't have many substantial black communities,” he said. “If only black people could recognize what they had and try to develop it. By our sacrifice in living here we're showing it could be done.” He was going to reclaim the south side, starting with his own house. A mad hope, I thought then (it seems less so now). As I prepared to leave he spoke confidently about getting up on the roof to fix the leaky slate. He was, it seems hardly necessary to say, a city guy.

You see the pattern. City guys had a mission. It wasn't a mission that necessarily made a lot of sense to anybody else. Considered objectively, in fact, a reasonable person might say it was completely stupid, quixotic, dangerous . . . I could go on for quite a while. But it was what they wanted to do, and by God they were going to do it. These are my people, and when I tell my story, it's their story, too.

S
ome insight into Mary's and my relationship may be gleaned from the fact that it took me a good two weeks to realize she was gorgeous. I had hired her in the spring of 1978 to work as night supervisor at the little company I ran that produced the student publications at Northwestern University. I had no ulterior motives; she was well qualified. A short time later I mentioned the fact that I'd signed her up to one of the guys on the production crew.

“Is she cute?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said.

Incredulous laughter erupts at this point whenever I tell the story. Mary then jumps in with her side: “I knew I had a tendency to fall for authority figures, so I was relieved when I met Ed. I thought,
I'm not going to have a problem with
this
guy.
”

A week or so after she started, the student newspaper went on hiatus with the approach of finals and Mary began working days. One afternoon I sent her on an errand to a local print shop. About a half hour after she left I got a call from the printer, whom I'd known for a long time.

“So who's your friend?” he asked.

“That's Mary,” I said.

“Man, she's a
knockout.
”

“Yeah?” I resolved to pay more attention. This wasn't all that difficult. Mary was, in fact, a strikingly attractive woman. The immediate impact, it must be said, stemmed from the fact that she had a killer figure, but it was the details that sealed the deal. In those days her hair was long and blond (it's darker now), and she wore it up in a French braid; tendrils invariably worked loose and framed her face. The effect was enchanting. She had, in addition, a cheerful if somewhat mercurial disposition and a musical laugh, plus at times a rueful little smile that would melt the hardest heart. Mary, for her part, says her opinion of me shifted when I began wearing shorts to the office—we were pioneers in business casual. I think it's also fair to say she found me amusing. One thing led to another; by July we were a couple.

We didn't get married till nine years later. We must have broken up and gotten back together twenty times. The problem was that temperamentally we were opposites. She was organized, assertive, and quick; I was scatterbrained, diffident, and slow. She could multitask; I would get absorbed in the job in front of me and ignore all else. She was acutely aware of her surroundings and the feelings of others; as may be evident, I was often in a fog. What she found particularly maddening, I think, was that I could be plenty observant when I wanted to be—I noticed, for example, when the
Chicago Tribune
redesigned the serifs on its headline font—but for the longest time couldn't remember what she liked on her hot dog. (For the record, it's lettuce, tomato, and celery salt.)

What kept us together, I think, was the realization that, notwithstanding our differences, we made a good team, and that however unhappy we sometimes were together, we'd be unhappier apart. We were both stubborn perfectionists. For all her organizational skills, Mary didn't have a clear idea of what she wanted to do in life; for all my absentmindedness, I did. She felt I would take her places she wouldn't go herself; I knew the trip would be vastly easier with her along. Somewhere around year eight of our relationship we wallpapered a bathroom together, commonly considered a litmus test of compatibility; it came out fine. I proposed to her on a boat in Lake Michigan. After the wedding we moved into a newly built town house on the near west side with a magnificent view of downtown; I liked it well enough but considered it just a staging area. We decided to have a third child in December 1992, bought the Barn House soon after, and embarked on the great adventure of our lives.

 

“
T
he house defeats people,” our friend Mike had told us when we came to visit that frosty morning following our first walk-through. The Barn House lent itself to cheery pronouncements of this sort, most of them, as in this case, well founded. We found a door with the paint half stripped off, a handful of fancy glass doorknobs in a box in the basement—tokens of projects bravely if a bit cluelessly begun (normally one took the door down first), then abandoned once the magnitude of the task sank in. The house's history, to the extent we could piece it together, reinforced the impression of doomed struggle. We learned of great plans come to nothing, and hopes that had gone unfulfilled.

The current owners, an older couple, had gotten married shortly before buying the house. As a young man the husband had been a trombonist with Gene Krupa's band
¹²
(Krupa was a legendary jazz drummer from Chicago); at the time they bought the house he was employed by a printer. The wife had a job with an insurance company. They'd intended to renovate the house, but her company went bankrupt soon after they completed the purchase and his income didn't permit any but emergency repairs—which began, moreover, even before they moved in, when the furnace failed and a radiator cracked during a bitterly cold December, filling the back of the house with three inches of ice. The furnace having been replaced and the radiator disconnected, for a time they continued to entertain hopes of doing some of the simpler restoration work; at one point they'd had some balusters made to replace those missing from the elegant front staircase. But he'd never worked up the nerve to install them, and from what I could tell (I found them in a stack on the landing), they wouldn't have fit anyway. No further progress had been made. Mary glanced at the wife during a lull in the closing at the lawyer's office. She was crying.

The owners prior to the older couple had been Paul and Carol Sills. Paul, among other things, had been one of the founders of The Second City, the improvisational comedy troupe. Like many latter-day occupants of the Barn House, the Sillses had had some notion of fixing it up, a task made more urgent by the guy from whom they'd bought it, who'd pulled down the plaster in the living and dining rooms and gotten as far as hanging drywall, but not taping or painting it, before halting the project and selling the house in the wake of getting divorced. The Sillses had finished the job and in addition had undertaken numerous repairs in an effort to stabilize matters—Carol told me the list ran to nine single-spaced pages. The house needed more than repairs, though; it needed to be rebuilt, which was beyond their means. After a few years the Sillses relocated to California and rented the house to boarders—the neighbors remembered those days as the time the hippies lived there. It was the Sillses, I learned, who'd removed the house's fancy doorknobs in preparation for a never-completed refinishing project. The ones I found, plus a few others elsewhere on the premises, were apparently just the leftovers. Someone had stolen the rest.

As the preceding may suggest, fixing up an old city house wasn't the sort of project you undertook if your goal was immediate, or possibly any, gratification. Two kinds of problem arose. I've already mentioned the exogenous issues, as it were—crime, neighborhood neglect, and so on. Often equally trying, however, were the difficulties for which one could thank the previous owners of the house.

A gentle word needs to be said here. Virtually everyone who purchases an old house is certain the previous occupants were idiots who performed critical repairs with duct tape, vandalized desirable features during harebrained remodelings, and generally let the place go to hell. I myself entertained such thoughts once or twice. At these times I reminded myself that my predecessors had done enough right to keep the place from getting torn down, which, judging from the condition of some Chicago neighborhoods, where you half expected to see tumbleweeds, was a considerable achievement. Still, come on. When the Great Building Inspector called the ex-owners of the Barn House before the bar of judgment, his first question was going to be:
So, guys. Whose bright idea was the beam?

The beam was the first thing you noticed when you walked into the kitchen at the rear of the house. It was a massive unfinished timber extending across the ceiling, perhaps fifteen feet long and eight inches wide by a foot deep, with heavy wooden posts supporting it on either end. It gave the kitchen the appearance of a hunting lodge. To judge from the patch marks on the floor, someone had removed a load-bearing wall in the kitchen and replaced it with the beam.

Idiosyncratic construction methods always invited suspicion, however. A few weeks after taking possession we asked a structural engineer named Bob to inspect the house. Bob was a large, soft-spoken man with the unflappable air one prizes in an engineer. He regarded the beam with the expression of mild interest you see in a doctor who's just found a suspicious lump. He made a few measurements and asked to be taken to the basement. The basement was divided into a warren of small, scrofulous rooms such as might have been used to torture prisoners in some ghastly Balkan republic. After a brief exploration Bob found the room he wanted, took more measurements, then waved his hands in midair.

“There's nothing here,” he said.

He had me there. But I didn't follow him—you could find nothing lots of places.

Bob pointed to a spot on the basement ceiling. One of the posts in the kitchen, he explained, came down immediately above. If it were to be of any use as a structural support, there needed to be a corresponding post in the basement to carry the weight of the building down to the ground. No such post had been provided. All that was keeping the top of the house from collapsing into the basement was the kitchen floor planking.

“Oh,” I said. It was always the way. A suburban design faux pas might mean that the previous owners had bequeathed you purple toilet fixtures; in a city house you had to solve the problem with structural steel. I added another item to what was already a long list:
Fix beam.

The house bore traces of many such dubious improvements. The owner prior to the Sills family, we learned, had been the proprietor of an auto repair shop. He'd poured a large concrete slab in the backyard to build a garage for his business. How he expected to get this venture past the zoning inspectors was unknown, but then again it was Chicago—with a few pesetas in the right pockets he could probably have gotten permission to build a rendering plant. Unfortunately for him, though no doubt to the relief of the neighbors, he'd had to sell the house before he could bring this scheme to fruition. But the slab was still there, with bolts still sticking up around the perimeter for walls that had never been built.

We decided, mainly because all the other owners we heard from denied responsibility, that the auto repair guy had also installed the second-floor deck that now hung off the back of the house. Whoever had done it had nailed the supports to the roof of the one-story addition immediately below without sealing up the holes. On the scale of inadvisable things to do in a house, this was one notch below checking for gas leaks with a match. By the time we saw it, water had been leaking in for the better part of fifteen years. A corner of the ceiling had fallen in and the floor below was sagging—the framing had rotted. The back of the house stank of mildew.

Still, the auto repair man had done one other thing that, while it hardly redeemed him, at least inclined me to cut him some slack. One day, we learned, he'd noticed a brass memorial star for a fallen U.S. serviceman in a sidewalk that was being torn up some blocks away. The star commemorated Sgt. Carl T—, U.S. Marine. I have no idea who Sgt. T—was, apart from the fact that he had died in Okinawa in 1945, and probably neither did the auto repair man. However, he felt it was his duty to preserve the sergeant's memorial and had made it his business to do so, setting the star neatly into the concrete in his backyard—one of the odder sights in a house crammed with oddities. Nonetheless, I thought I knew what the auto repair man had been up to. No doubt patriotism and so on had been part of it. But in the back of his mind I suspected he had nurtured the thought:
Here is a link to the past, lost but for me
.

Anyone who fixes up an old house understands that impulse. It wasn't that some famous person had necessarily lived there, the occasional brush with celebrity notwithstanding. Mostly it was just the opposite: Here was where someone had built a life, and as far as anyone knew this was all that remained—their contribution to the enterprise in which we were somehow all engaged. That made the house a precious thing, a window on an age that had otherwise slipped away. It brought out your inner archaeologist. Just when you were fed up with leaky roofs and sclerotic pipes and at the point of calling in the bulldozers, you'd haul up on some dusty artifact from days long past, and instantly your mind would be as afroth with questions as if you'd found a fragment of cuneiform in some
tel
in the Mideast:
What was it for? What did it mean? What were these people
thinking
?
And sometimes, seeing as this was a house in the city:
What went wrong?