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 insome 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
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 insome 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
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