“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.