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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 Li
“I’m here,” Junior said, appearing next to Li
“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 pla
“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.”
Li
“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 Li
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 Jea
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 Li
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 Li
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 Li
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.