Barnegat Bay - 22. Chapter 22

Work on the brownstone started almost immediately, near the end of October, and it began with a general clean out. Mom and Dad would go from room to room, saying, “That goes,” “That stays,” “That needs to be burned,” or “That needs to be burned right now!” Or sometimes, “Did my husband – or wife – really say that should be thrown away? Let me talk with him – or her.”

My father had more time to supervise, since Mom had to be in a classroom five days a week, from early in the morning to late afternoon. Then she came home to make dinner. Mary would go to my parents’ apartment soon after she closed my office at five, stopping only to pick up something we needed to eat. Many foods didn’t keep longer than a day. Of course, Ann went with her, the exception being when she was dropped off with my mother first and then Mary went shopping.

“I’m looking forward to us all living together,” she told my mom one evening over dinner. “Everything will easier.”

“There’ll be more steps,” Mom warned.

“I’m sure I’m climbing as many now.”

Dad’s hours were actually longer than my mother’s – nine to five, and nine to noon on Saturdays – but he ran a small office with only two other accountants and a secretary. It was also just a few blocks from the brownstone, in a building on Broadway. Mom didn’t work far from home, either – from her side of Broadway, practically at West End Avenue, to our side, east of Amsterdam. When I was growing up, she’d taught further away and had to take the bus – she preferred that to the subway. “All those steps,” she lamented. Even younger, she never liked stairs.

“And the dirt,” Mary added.

“The subways aren’t dirty,” I countered, “so much as dim and drab.” They were mostly painted the kinds of colors I associated with prisons. But Mary was partly right – even the newest paint was quickly covered with grit.

Still, that wasn’t the reason I didn’t travel that way – it was simply faster to walk. And Mary tried to group my regular appointments to eliminate my doubling back. Though emergencies made their own rules.

So if Dad wanted to get away from his job, he just needed to nod to his coworkers, take the elevator downstairs – or walk the four flights – “You know it’s easier going down,” – and then stroll over to see what the guys were doing.

“He almost always tells us it’s going well,” Al reported. “And how much faster than he expected. He thought it would take a year, and it’s not even two months. And we’re already on the second floor.”

That was the “parlor floor,” the one up the stoop and above the street level rooms that would become my office. In those, the guys mainly had to move things out, clean a bit, and paint. Because it had once been a kitchen and its adjoining workroom, there was no fancy wallpaper to scrape, and with our present furniture and a few added lights, the front room would become our reception area and the back one my examining room, lab, storage area, and everything else. It also needed its old stove and ice box hauled away, the bathroom between the rooms needed fresh paint, and some of the shelves in the old walk-in pantry needed to be altered to fit in our filing cabinets. We could have made other improvements, but – as with the rest of the house – we were keeping the changes as few as possible to save money and time.

The reason for the added wall lights is the front area only had two windows, they were relatively short, and they faced the darker street. The rear room had taller windows, looking out on the garden, and they let in more sun. Still, I’d have to pull the curtains while giving an exam.

The biggest job on the parlor floor, besides adding better wiring – which was true of the whole house – was making a kitchen from the rear third of what had been the dining room. After you came up the stoop to the front door, you passed through a small entryway with another door – for winter insulation – and then you faced a narrow hallway that stretched to the back of the house. That hallway was repeated on every floor besides the top, and with an open window – or front door – helped with summer ventilation.

On the parlor floor, just left of the entry, were double, sliding doors to the living room – we weren’t going to use to the fancy, French-sounding name. That room was separated from the dining room by another pair of sliding doors, so if you were having a large party, or a small concert, you could turn the two rooms into one.

The dining room also looked out on the garden, which was as long as the house and backed against the garden of a brownstone whose front door was on 82nd Street. But the two windows would now be in our kitchen, leaving the dining room with no outside light.

“I don’t like that,” my father said, and it didn’t seem to matter that their present dining room – which they’d had for almost twenty-five years – also had no windows. That was actually a “dinette” off the kitchen, the diminutive French-sounding “dinette” somehow being acceptably pedestrian.

Their dinette also had double doors to their living room, but they didn’t glide elegantly into the woodwork. They just folded back to give the dining table more light. Other daylight came from the far end of the narrow kitchen, which was separated from where we ate by a pair of head-high cabinets. You walked between them to reach the cooking area.

“Couldn’t we build something like that?” my father asked, surveying the brownstone’s dining room. “Instead of taking the wall all the way to the ceiling? That way we’d get light in both rooms.”

“Let me look at some magazines,” Mom suggested. “And see what other people are doing.”

“Other people” were the rich folks, who still had money and could afford architects and interior decorators to do their thinking. Still, my mother was a great believer in research.

Building the new kitchen was also going to be our biggest expense, though even the best kitchens weren’t fancy because the “best people” didn’t go into them. That’s what servants were for. We were also ready to delay buying anything besides a new stove and refrigerator. The heavy sink from downstairs would be lugged up and be replaced with something smaller that would be fit my lab.

We’d need a worktable for the kitchen, too, and cabinets for dishes and food. The ones from downstairs would be a good start, but Mom felt we needed more. They also only went to eight-feet high, to the ceiling of the lower floor. The parlor floor had meant-to-impress twelve-foot ceilings, which also helped ventilation. So building an eight-foot wall to separate the new kitchen from the old dining room seemed reasonable.

“But do you really want to smell what we’re cooking while we’re trying to eat?” Mom asked.

“We’ve been doing it all our lives,” Dad replied.

“I know. But since we’re building this kitchen, I thought it could be fancier.”

“Are our friends s going to be fancier?”

“No,” Mom admitted.

“And even half this dining room is larger than the area we use in the living room on holidays, when there are more than five of us.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” Mom defended. “And the dining table and sideboard Mrs. Morris left will still fit in.”

“If we take out a couple of leaves.”

“And refinish everything.”

“Absolutely,” my father agreed. Then he waited. “But?” he went on.

“Nothing,” my mother finally agreed. “You’re probably right – the dining room will be too dark if it only gets light from the living room. Those windows are twenty feet away.”

“More, when you add the bay.”

“And we’d always have to keep the double doors open.”

“Why were you planning to close them?”

“Well, we’ve never had a piano before. So if someone wants to play while someone else wants to eat – or study, since we’ve always used the dining table for that – the doors would have to be closed.”

Dad needed to think about that. At first, he hadn’t planned to keep the piano, since no one in our family played. But the first time Mary saw the house, she opened the dusty keyboard lid and started to play a waltz My parents were both surprised and charmed, and we all applauded when Mary was done.

I knew she played because I’d heard her at Claire’s house. Claire played, too, and – growing up – they’d helped each other learn.

“I had a better teacher,” Claire remembered, “but Mary practiced more. So she was always showing me shortcuts.”

Even with the piano, we weren’t worried about running out of space. Everything from my parents living room – and ours – couldn’t fill the area. “And the sideboard’s moving from the dining room,” Mom reminded us.

There had been two sideboards to match the twelve-foot table – a low one and a taller hutch. Plus a dozen upholstered straight chairs. We were keeping eight to surround the shortened table and putting the other four along the wall in the hallway. The extra table leaves would be stored nearby.

Above the parlor floor were the two floors of bedrooms, seven in all. The room that might have been an eighth, on the lower bedroom floor, was the main bathroom – really the only full one in the house. Each bedroom opened onto a hallway, but the rooms also had connecting doors. So you could walk from the front of the house to the back without ever going into a hall. Again, that helped ventilation.

Oddly, none of bedrooms had closets. Mom said that wasn’t the fashion when the brownstone was built. So we either had to build some or keep the bulky wardrobes. For the moment, that was Dad’s plan.

“Maybe you could paint them to match the walls,” Claire suggested. “They might blend in.” The wardrobes were presently dark oak or mahogany.

The top floor was largely open but with the same lower ceiling as the street level rooms. The bedrooms had ten-foot ceilings. A hallway wasn’t needed on the top floor because the stairs opened directly into the room. That made it the widest in the house, almost eighteen feet.

“This was the playroom,” Mom remembered. “Though the oldest child was in her twenties when the family moved in.”

“And the youngest?” Mary asked

“Five. Mrs. Morris said her last son was born when she was forty.”

“Let’s not wait that long,” Mary told me – smiling.

At the back of the top floor were three tiny bedrooms and a cell with a toilet and a sink. “For two servants and a nanny,” Mom decided. “No mother of ten was expected to raise them all by herself, even with the older girls helping.”

“What did the boys do?” I asked.

“What do boys ever do?” Mom replied, grinning. “Play.”

We laughed at that, but I didn’t entirely believe it. When I was ten, I was looking after my sister.

Soon after the top floor was cleaned, Spence had a talk with my parents.

“I know a way to save you twenty-five dollars a month,” he began carefully.

Since twenty-five was what my parents were paying each of the guys every week, it wasn’t a lot. But Dad still asked how.

“By letting me sleep in one of those rooms.”

“I’m not sure you could fit,” Mom joked. “They’re barely six feet square.”

“That’s enough to squeeze in a cot, and there’re a couple of them there – I’ll pick the best. And if I were staying here, I’d save a lot of walking.”

It seems he’d been listening to Mary.

“And where would you eat?” Mom asked. “I know you get meals at your boarding house.”

“Mostly dinner,” Spence admitted. “I don’t get up early enough for breakfast, and I’ve grabbed lunch with the guys at the school caf.”

“And weekends?”

“If I wasn’t working some kind of odd job, I’d sleep late. But I couldn’t afford to be that lazy, so I usually found something. And since so many of my jobs were washing dishes, I was always offered leftover food.”

“But you’re handyman now,” Dad said.

“Yeah – but we’re all at Mary and Doc’s on Saturday nights, so we each bring something. And I’m sure they’d let me keep a little food there.”

“He can cook, too,” I said.

“Barely.”

“He makes excellent popcorn.”

“How much are you paying at the boarding house?” my dad went on.

“Five dollars.”

“A day?”

“A week. I could never afford that per day,”

“But that includes room and board.”

“A small shared room, and I’ve told you about the meals. And my landlady gives me something off because I eat so little there. And even here – where they guys bring their own lunches – one of them usually makes an extra sandwich, and I give him a quarter.”

“Cheaper than the Automat,” I vouched.

“Still,” Dad said, “you’d be giving up more here and getting less.”

“But I’d have my own room, and that’s never happened before – not in my life. And I know the bathroom isn’t much, but it’d be fine.”

“We’d have to get you a better bed.”

“A cot’s okay – honest. I sometimes sleep on the dock in Barnegat.”

“He does,” I assured them. “He could probably sleep on steel.”

My parents listened to all that, and then Dad laughed. “This is like interviewing someone for a job. And I haven’t done that for years.”

“You’d really be helping me out,” Spence went on. “And I can go higher than twenty-five...”

Dad laughed again. “Twenty-five is fine.”

“And don’t worry about your meals,” Mom added. “At least, your dinner. If Mary and I can feed two men, we can feed three. I managed three children for half my life.”

“Thanks,” Spence told them. “Though I’ll give you something towards the food. I know Mary and Doc do.”

“Doc makes a little more than you do,” Dad understated. “Despite his intentions.”

“But I’m really not spending anything,” Spence insisted. “Since I’m never sure when I’ll have work again, it’s like the summers – I save everything I can to pay for room and board for the rest of the year.”

“Well, you’re all saving us money by working as hard as you do. And as soon as the four of us and the baby are living together, we’ll be cutting our expenses.”

“Then I can sleep here?” Spence asked.

“Of course,” my father assured him. “That was never a question. It was just fun to see you worried.”