IN 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.