The Barn House (29 page)

Lee and I concluded our business and returned to the car for the trip back to the north side. We drove in silence for a time. “I guess you saw I was on relief,” Lee said finally. I said nothing. We never discussed the matter again.

Friday, July 15.
Porch balustrades finished, look fabulous. Go to building supply store for duct parts for master bedroom, find what I want in ten minutes. Back at house lay out pieces, write detailed note to Pete explaining how to install. Call city about request for waiver on electrical work. Inspector says he talked to boss: “At first he said, ‘That's not how we do it.' But then he said, ‘Ah, hell, give it to him.'” Convey gushing thanks.

Sunday, July 17.
Stop at house in afternoon to see how Pete doing. Unbelievably, still doesn't have master BR ducts right, defying expectations of male superiority in spatial reasoning. “Gimme the nut driver,” I say, show how supposed to go. Leave on errand; when get back still isn't right. Get up on ladder and fix myself; while at it redo several return ducts where Pete's attention apparently drifted. “Huh,” he says later.

Saturday, July 23.
Arrive at house to find Chester has propped up front porch roof with two-by-fours, disassembled fabulous balustrade, taken down pillar, sawed six inches off bottom. “Chester, what are you doing?” I shriek. He says blueprints showed railings thirty inches high; as installed only twenty-four inches. Ask to see prints. Drawing of entire house in fact shows thirty-inch railing, but refers to detail drawing further back in sheaf. Thumb through drawings, now bedraggled after months of use, discover detail drawing torn out. Retrieve my copy of prints, show Chester detail drawing—indicates twenty-four-inch railing. “You got it right the first time. If it were wrong we would have said something,” I say. Chester looks stricken. “My head is cabbage,” he says. Puts porch back like it was, although line on pillar six inches from bottom shows where reattached.

 

B
y the end of July we'd finally sold our town house and had to be out by early September. We now turned to postponed details such as woodwork. We'd saved the house's original trim during demolition, thinking we might be able to clean and reinstall it, and in fact the doors, magnificent multi-paneled affairs that looked like they belonged in an English country manor, had come out of the dunk tank looking pretty good. But the baseboards and window trim, I realized on close inspection, were hopelessly splintered—we had no choice but to buy new. We might have used stock molding, I suppose, but never seriously considered it; we hadn't come this far to cheap out on the finishing. On the other hand, we also had neither the time nor the money to get new woodwork milled and installed before move-in day. I decided that once the drywall had been hung, I'd have the interior painted white to seal the walls. We'd get to the millwork when we could.

Monday, August 1
. Chief and I work at house till late. On way home tire goes flat on Lake Shore Drive. Pulling over I discover two problems: first, flat; second, seriously low spare. Past midnight, nearest gas station half mile away. Car pulls in behind mine—it's Chief. Gets out silently, forages in trunk, then approaches with grin, carrying flashlight and battery-powered air pump, come to save my sorry ass again.

Wednesday, August 3.
Chief and I finish last of intercom cabling, other odds and ends before drywall. Tony has moved Tom to different job site. “It's kind of strange with Tom not being here,” Chief says. “Then again, a lot of times it was kind of strange when he
was
here.” Air of constant crisis has subsided in any case. Take numerous photos of electrical conduit, of which very proud. On arriving home discover no film in camera; by time I return, drywallers have covered everything.

 

T
he Mexican drywallers had made an initial appearance in early August and shown up in force a few days later, the empty bottles of Woda Sodowa seltzer water left in odd corners by the Polish carpenters giving way to the tamarind soda preferred by the Mexicans. I'd long since come to terms with drywall. In my youth, no doubt influenced by my father, a self-taught plasterer, I considered it emblematic of shoddy construction and the decline of the West. However, my sense of the rightness of things had had to adjust to reality: Drywall, done properly, produced work not easily distinguished from plaster (ignoring the occasional nail pop), with the decisive advantages of being cheap and fast.

The Mexican drywallers now proceeded to demonstrate how it was done. As a kid I'd helped my dad hang gypsum board as an underlayment for plaster; it'd take us an hour to cover perhaps thirty square feet. In that time the Mexican drywallers would have finished half the house. There were two crews—the hangers (who affixed the drywall to the studs), followed by the tapers (who covered the seams between boards with paper tape, then ladled on copious quantities of joint compound, commonly called mud, which they troweled smooth and sanded flat). None of the hangers was taller than five feet eight or weighed more than 160 pounds, yet they tossed around four-by-ten-foot pieces of drywall as though dealing cards.

Saturday, August 13.
Ricardo the taper starts. Explain major challenge, replacement of curved ceiling in service stairwell—basically quarter-toroidal helix. No idea how to accomplish using flat drywall.
De nada,
says Ricardo.

Monday, August 15.
Hangers conclude their part of stairwell ceiling—soak quarter-inch-thick drywall in water to soften, slice at one-inch intervals so will bend, then mount to ceiling with one million screws. Still pretty lumpy.

Wednesday, August 17.
Don't arrive at house till five; Ricardo and helper still there, work till eight. No ladders, walk around on stilts. Helper muds seams with ten-inch-wide applicator. Ricardo says planned on staying in Chicago six months, still here after eight years. Now buying house in suburbs. Ladles vast amounts of mud onto stairwell ceiling. I ask, you sure this will work?
De nada
, he says.

Monday, August 22.
Upstairs AC not cooling, although compressor and air handler running constantly. Take cover off air handler, find giant block of ice. After study of manual, deduce Pete has run returns into side of air handler, not bottom as specified, so air isn't drawn past cooling coils, allowing condensation to form ice. Splice two more returns into bottom of air handler, solves problem once ice melts, though takes all day.

Wednesday, August 24.
Meet with painters at house about spray-painting interior. Hoped to pay $1,000; after haggling agree on $3,400.

Friday, August 26.
Ricardo finishes mudding in A.M.; do a little touchup. Staircase ceiling a work of art.

 

O
n the last Saturday in August, we left for Door County, Wisconsin, on a brief low-budget vacation, stopping at the Barn House en route. The floor guys were installing oak flooring in the master bedroom using sleepers (crosswise strips) rather than plywood underlayment, which I knew would be trouble and would eventually necessitate my having them tear the floor out and do the whole thing over—but we'd worry about that another day. Right now life at the Barn House was about to enter a new phase.

W
e moved in on Labor Day weekend. The three-man moving crew was supervised by a wiry, long-haired young guy who drove his crew hard. I wasn't on hand for most of the work—I was engaged in last-minute preparations at the Barn House while the movers loaded the truck, then cleaned up at our old home while our possessions were off-loaded at the new one. Mary told me it had been a long day—at the end of it, one exhausted mover refused to take another step. The unforgiving foreman had fired him on the spot, which was all very well, but we were left with our piano sitting under a tarp in the backyard.

That night after we were in bed Mary jabbed me awake—she thought she'd heard a noise coming from downstairs. I groggily roused myself to investigate. After shuffling to the top of the stairs and flipping on the light, I looked over the railing into the beady eyes of what was surely the ugliest creature on earth, which crouched on the landing below. It was roughly the size of a rabbit, with gray fur, a narrow ratlike face, and an obscenely long, hairless tail.
⁸¹
I had no idea what it was, but it clearly had teeth, no doubt sharp. We stared at one another for a long while without moving. Finally I called to Mary in a low voice and asked her to bring any weapon she could put her hand on, which turned out to be a fireplace poker, plus my work boots—I figured if I was going to take this thing on, no sense losing a toe. Thus prepared, I advanced on the critter, which retreated into the narrow wall cavity for a long-gone pocket door. Cornering it there, we called the police. Two uniformed patrolmen arrived by and by.

Peering into the creature's hiding place, one cop informed me that it was a possum. I was nonplussed. I was a city guy; my experience of possums to that point had consisted of reading Walt Kelly's comic strip
Pogo
.

“You should call animal control,” the cop said.

“When does animal control open?” I asked. We were now about a half hour into Saturday.

“Monday morning.”

“That doesn't seem like a practical plan.”

Just then two plainclothesmen arrived from the tactical squad. Unlike the beat cops, these were men of action. One of the tactical guys directed the available adults to arrange packing boxes in a sort of gauntlet leading from the possum's lair to the front door, then waved a two-by-four at the animal in a manner calculated to alarm. The possum promptly scooted out the door and down the front steps.

The incident epitomized the first few months following move-in, during which we didn't so much reside in the house as camp in it. The place was at best 60 percent done. It lacked the most basic amenities, including a complete bathroom or kitchen. The rooms (including the bathrooms) lacked doors or woodwork, the openings merely framed with construction lumber. Most of our household goods were stacked in cryptically labeled boxes in what would someday be the living room. There were no window coverings of any kind; the lighting consisted of a few $3 fixtures and bare bulbs. We slept on mattresses on unfinished floors; Mary rose early each morning to take a shower at her sister's apartment two neighborhoods north before heading off to work. Her tolerance of disorder had never been high and she was in a perpetual low-grade froth. I, on the other hand, had adopted the put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other mind-set of a refugee fleeing the Khmer Rouge: First we'll do A, then we'll do B and C and so on in the bleak expectation, or anyway hope, that somewhere in the vicinity of step quadruple-Q we'd achieve normality.

We told ourselves the kids were too young to grasp the rudeness of their surroundings. However, one Saturday night after his bath, Ryan, now almost five, observed while getting toweled off that the bathtub (which had no faucet, only a length of half-inch copper pipe projecting from the wall) was in one room, the sole operating toilet was in a different room downstairs, and the house's only sink was in a third room, the kitchen. “Dad,” he said, “that's
weird
.”

It turned out the possum wasn't the only variety of wildlife to have found its way into the house. We also had mice, who presumably had taken up residence at some point during the long interlude when the principal barrier to intruders was the blue tarp. At night we heard them scampering in the walls; I looked up from the table one evening to see a little gray head peering out of an electrical-box opening in the kitchen wall. The following evening Mary spotted a mouse darting across the kitchen floor and, moving at an impressive percentage of the speed of light, squished it against the wall with a board. Later I regaled friends with this tale at dinner: “You should have seen it. That mouse was
two-dimensional
.” Mary didn't find this funny.

N
otwithstanding my preoccupation with the house, ordinary life proceeded in its inexorable way, abetted chiefly by Mary. Our older two kids had now entered preschool, a momentous event. School had always been a concern for us, as for most city families. In 1987, then-Secretary of Education William Bennett had described the Chicago public schools as the worst in the nation, which was easy to believe; in my recollection they hadn't been all that hot in 1965. The city's Catholic elementary schools, once a mainstay, were in decline due to sharply rising costs and falling church attendance—enrollment was down 60 percent, and half had closed. Middle-class Chicago parents typically moved to the suburbs once their kids reached school age.

To counter this trend, the church we attended, Old St. Pat-rick's, had started a new school. The parish was one of the few in the city undergoing a resurgence. Located in a decaying old building on the edge of downtown, Old St. Pat's had had only four registered parishioners in 1983, but its energetic pastor, Jack Wall, had boosted attendance through outreach efforts, such as the “world's largest block party,” an annual summer event that drew thousands.