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 tha
t 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.
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.