“A doctor. She’s going to start medical school in the fall.”
“A doctor,” he marveled. “It figures. Very, very smart kid. A friend of mine, I showed him one of her letters, and he says, No little girl wrote that. It must have been her mother, he says.”
“Edith wrote it. I can assure you.”
“That’s what I told him! That’s exactly what I said! You could tell it was a kid—a terrifically super-smart kid.”
“Please come in and wait.”
“Oh I don’t think I’d better. It’s kind of crazy to stop by like this, isn’t it? Rude, maybe? All unannounced?”
“I think it’s nice. And I’d be happy for the company. Nobody else is here but everyone should be arriving shortly. My mother’s just stepped out, she’s helping a neighbor, my father’s due home from work, and Edith will be back from school.”
“Thanks, but you see I better be on my way. Long road.” He stuck out his hand in farewell. “Tell Edith I know she’ll make a wonderful doctor. She already was a great help to me when I was a patient. No, actually, actually, just tell her an old soldier—”
They did not complete their farewell handshake. “You can tell her yourself. Here she comes now …”
Yes, here came Edith, overloaded with books but walking down Inquiry with that strong and purposeful walk. It was wonderful timing, for this was an encounter Bianca wouldn’t have missed for the world. Even Edith—unflappable Edith—was surely about to be dumbstruck.
And yet Edith wasn’t—quite. Bianca called out “We have a visitor” as Edith reached the front walk, and you could see Edith’s eyes, behind those ugly, practical, imitation tortoiseshell glasses she never removed, peering appraisingly at the man on the porch. She marched up the walk. “Hel-lo,” she said.
Ira Styne talked even faster than before, again withholding his name: “I should have telephoned first instead of dropping in unannounced but I was in Detroit for the first time in my life and I remembered the name of the street, Inquiry, you see I wrote you a couple of times, when I was in the Army, years ago. I suppose I should begin by identifying myself: I’m Ira Styne.”
He extended his hand.
Edith did not immediately take his hand. “Corporal Styne, what on earth are you doing here?” she said. Then she shook his hand and said, “Well, it’s way too cold to stand out here, my sister should have invited you in—”
“I did, I did—” Bianca said.
“Ira Styne, come in, come in.”
An invitation to enter—such as Bianca had offered—could be refused; but Edith, in her no-nonsense way, converted it into an order and the former Corporal Styne clearly was one to obey orders. Hobbling rapidly on his cane, he followed the two of them into the house. Bianca saw his eyes move to her stomach. He hadn’t realized her condition until now.
Even the living room held cardboard boxes, though most were stacked in the bedrooms upstairs.
“Forgive the look of the place,” Bianca said. “As you can see, we’re moving.”
“Yes,” Ira said. “I saw the ‘For Sale’ sign. I guess I got here in the nick of time.”
“What they call the eleventh hour,” Edith said.
“Please sit down,” Bianca said. She made a little joke to put Ira at ease: “Inexplicably, Edith hasn’t yet boxed up the couch. You see, she’s in charge of the move. And she’s very efficient.”
“I’ll bet she is,” Ira said, but he did not sit down. Instead, in his scratchy voice, he repeated to Edith much of what he’d already said to Bianca—about how grateful he had been for her letters and how ill-mannered not to answer them and how rude to arrive unexpectedly. Bianca had met a few girls and women who might compete with him, but she’d never met so apologetic a man.
He was in the middle of pointing out, for the tenth time, that he should first have telephoned when Edith interrupted: “I don’t know what to call you. I think of you as Corporal Styne.”
“Please call me Ira.”
“Sit down, Ira.”
Ira sat.
He said, rapidly, “You see the thing was, I didn’t remember the address, only the street. I thought it was 2753 but I wasn’t sure. But I remembered that you’d written that you liked living in a house that was a prime number. So the question was: is 2,753 a prime? So I go round the corner, there’s a luncheonette, the—”
“The Red Rose,” Bianca supplied.
“That’s it. And I get out a piece of paper and I divide 2,753 by every prime up to 60 and everything has a remainder so I figure it has to be prime.” And Ira actually removed from his pocket a piece of paper and unfolded it and held it up. It was covered, top to bottom, with calculations.
And Edith thought a moment and said, “You didn’t have to go higher than 47, Ira. Because 53 squared is 2,809.”
Why did Edith always have to say things like that? Why—when the guest in their home was so proudly holding up his page of calculations—did she have to notify him that he’d wasted his time?
But Ira did not seem deflated or resentful. He looked happily dazzled. “I never was much of a one for higher math,” he said. And added, “You can do that in your head?”
“Let’s have some coffee,” Bianca said.
“I’ll make it,” Edith said.
“I’ll make it,” Bianca said.
She listened in from the kitchen. Ira lived in New Jersey. He had driven all the way to Detroit to look at a house. His aunt—sister of his long-deceased father—herself had recently died and bequeathed him her house, which was in Palmer Woods.
The house, Ira went on, must once have been quite nice. (“I’m sure it is, Palmer Woods is where the swells live,” Edith said, which—so often the case when Edith employed slang—rang strangely. Who called them swells? And yet, with her fact-establishing tone, she might have been saying, That’s where the Irish live or That’s a Polish neighborhood.) Anyway, his aunt, who had died an old maid, had kept twelve cats and the filth and wholesale destruction were indescribable. Having carefully examined the house earlier today, Ira had determined to sell it immediately. He would begin the long drive back to New Jersey tomorrow.
Then Mamma came home. She was often at her suspicious worst with strangers and unexpected events, but from the very first moment she was warm and welcoming. He had turned up at last: the mysterious soldier who had sent her thirteen-year-old daughter five dollars. It was like something out of the movies—first the arrival of the money, then the ultimate arrival of the man—and Mamma loved the movies. Ira began a whole new round of apologies and she cut him off—graciously, wittily. She invited him to supper, and though he declined, he seemed honored (a word he repeated a number of times) by the invitation.
Over coffee, at Mamma’s attentive urging, more of Ira Styne’s story emerged. He’d grown up in New Jersey. His family was Jewish. He was currently unemployed. He’d been working until October for his father-in-law—or ex-father-in-law, for Ira had become a divorced man in October. He had been separated from his wife, Judy, for more than two years, but he’d continued to work for his father-in-law, who owned a furniture business in Morristown, New Jersey. Ira loved his father-in-law, who had urged him to stay at the job, all the while hoping Ira and Judy might reconcile. But once the divorce became final, Ira had felt the need to move on …
“I think the endless drive must have scrambled my wits. I’m not usually such a blabbermouth about myself, especially with complete strangers.”
“But we’re not strangers,” Mamma informed the Jewish stranger in their living room. “We’re your friends,” she said, and smiled her lovely smile. Who was this woman?
And yet in a way Mamma wasn’t being merely hospitable—she was acknowledging a sort of truth. For it seemed the Paradisos were not total strangers in Ira’s imagination. He had already pointed out, a number of times, that Edith had sent him long letters—but their manifest degree of detail, like the tenacity of Ira’s memory, was little short of astonishing. He recalled how Bianca h
ad studied painting under a man who wore a toupee (“You’re right, it was Professor Ravenscroft!”) and how Uncle Dennis adored science fiction and how Edith had received a testimonial from Needles for Defense. He recalled Mamma’s spearmint leaves and Papa and Nonno listening to the Tigers and Stevie playing in the alley. As they sat among cardboard boxes, in a house they would soon be vacating, Ira transported them to a distant and seemingly happier time. “Do you still make Edith’s favorite dish, Shipwreck?”
Mamma laughed joyously, and said that, yes, she did. Her laughter ushered in a moment of such pure lambent happiness that not even Edith’s obsessive fact-loving need to set all records straight (“Actually, I’ve grown very partial to Chinese food and my favorite dish is moo goo gai pan, but I still love Shipwreck”) could do anything to tarnish it.
And then Papa came home. He, too, was clearly heartened by this unexpected visitor. “You’ll stay for supper,” he told Ira, who, hardly pausing, nodded.
It wasn’t long, naturally, before Papa turned the conversation to the house in Palmer Woods. “You’re going to sell?” he asked Ira.
“That’s right.”
“How much?”
“Beg pardon?”
“You sell the house for how much?”
“The realtor I talked to today, he said I could probably get twenty-four thousand.”
“Twenty-four thousand?” Papa said. “How many bedrooms?”
It seemed Ira hadn’t bothered to count. “Four,” he said. “Or maybe five. What you have to understand is: the filth. You can’t believe the filth.”
Was there an attic?
Yes, with a separate little room, but the cats had been up there, too. The whole place reeked so bad, it was difficult to breathe.
What kind of heat? Ira didn’t know, but there were radiators. What kind of roof? Ira wasn’t sure but—oh yes, it was slate. A garage? Yes, a two-car garage, and it was probably more habitable than the house. And a fireplace? Yes, there was a fireplace—actually two.
“Edith, you go fetch the guest a glass of wine.”
This meant two glasses, of course, for Papa obviously would join the visitor.
While Edith was off in the kitchen, a silence dropped over the living room. Papa was ruminating. This was obvious to everyone; it would have been indecorous to speak.
When Edith handed him a glass of wine, Ira said, “Did you make this yourself, Mr. Paradiso? I remember Edith writing me that you made excellent wine in your basement.”
Usually this was a topic upon which Papa expatiated eagerly, but he merely nodded. He wasn’t about to be sidetracked. He was thinking. He sipped from his glass and said, “Mr. Styne, you are still a young man and the question for you is: do you want to be a fool, or not?”
Ira did not appear to regard this as a rhetorical question. He, too, sipped his wine, deliberating a moment, then said, “I think I’d rather not.” And laughed nervously and much too loudly.
“Then you don’t sell.”
“Don’t sell?” Ira said.
“You put four thousand into that house, you sell it for thirty-five thousand. Maybe more. I know the street.”
“Thirty-five thousand,” Ira said. “But you don’t know how filthy and disgusting it is.”
“You see the filth, I see the house.”
“Well, Mr. Paradiso, I know you do renovations. If you’re thinking you could—”
Papa interrupted him not with his voice but with an imperial lifting of his hand. It was a gesture like a traffic cop’s, halting oncoming traffic, but for Bianca it always evoked something else: a Roman emperor, as glimpsed in a movie. Ira’s voice trailed off.
“You think I’m looking for work?” Papa said. Papa tucked in his chin and lowered his eyebrows. The expression he trained on poor Ira, who was squirming, combined pity and scorn. “I have far more work than time. Far more work than time. No, I give you names of reliable people, good workmen, if that’s what you decide. I’m not looking for business from you, a guest in my house. That’s not why I give you advice over a glass of my wine. No. You’re young and I’m trying to save you from being a fool. A buffoon.”
Another hard silence fell. Ira sipped deeply, uneasily from his wine. “But would you be willing to go look? At the house? Give me some more advice? You see, I don’t know what I’m doing,” Ira confessed. “I don’t know the city. It’s as if I’ve arrived in a foreign land. Would you go over there tomorrow with me? Just tell me what you think?”
Papa deliberated once more. He was enjoying himself, but poor Ira didn’t seem to recognize there was mischief in this magisterial sternness.
“I’ll go over Saturday morning.”
“But I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Saturday morning,” Papa repeated. Saturday was three days off.
Ira paused, drained his wineglass, laughed in a way that sounded like a hiccup, and said, “You’ve got a deal.” He added, “Now I do intend to pay you for your time.”
“Of course you will,” Papa replied.
Ira soon found a motel in Highland Park that rented not by the day but by the week, which was a good thing because, as he pointed out, he might be in town “a couple of weeks.”
Clearly, he would be much longer if left to his own devices. It was apparent at once to everyone in the family that Ira Styne was hopelessly incompetent. How had he ever worked successfully in the furniture business?
Somehow, each of them was drafted into serving as helper on one of Ira’s ever-growing list of tasks. First, a moving van was needed and of course Stevie—the last family member drawn in—was conscripted: Turk’s Trucks was just the company to haul away the junk inside the Palmer Woods house. According to Papa, this was a heartbreaking business, because Ira’s aunt had been a woman of not only expensive but exquisite taste: the house was full of once-gorgeous couches, chairs, rugs, curtains, that the cats had ravaged. Papa identified a few items that might be repaired and sold, perhaps to whoever eventually bought the place, but most were assigned to the junk heap.
Papa found someone to rip up the carpeting. It turned out many floorboards were water damaged and he arranged for someone to fix the plumbing as well as the floors. He’d vowed to stay out of the process, but it was just the sort of project that called him irresistibly: the restoration of a dilapidated but at bottom truly splendid house.
Even if Papa had been far more hard-hearted, it would have been difficult to resist Ira’s fumbling pleas for assistance. Ira had confessed it the first day—he’d arrived in a foreign land. He knew nobody in Detroit but the Paradisos, and he was forever dropping in. Nor could Papa fail to notice that Mamma was crazy about Ira, or have failed to appreciate what an unforeseen blessing his arrival was at this particular juncture—the final days before the move from Inquiry to Reston—when Mamma might be expected to fall apart. Ira’s gaze was trained forward, and he inspired Mamma to look forward. Because they both faced pressing questions of interior decoration, Ira was happy to escort Mamma to the paint store, the wallpaper store, the hardware store. And given Ira’s curiosity about all those interesting-sounding dishes Edith had mentioned in her letters, it was hardly surprising that he sat down to suppers of Shipwreck, Drowned Tuna Loaf, Slumped Pork, Smothered Liver … And was it possible that Mamma found it regenerating to open a friendship with someone who hadn’t known her on that black day when she’d been revealed as a shoplifter? Wasn’t this, too, a fresh start?
Because the house in Palmer Woods was so close to Middleway—less than a mile—it was easy for Ira to drop in on Bianca as well. She was the artist of the family, and he wanted her advice about what colors the rooms should be. He drove her to the house one February afternoon while a few irresolute snowflakes dotted the air. In addition to all his other huge expenses—he must have invested a couple of thousand dollars already—Ira had hired teams of people to scrub the house from top to bottom. Even so, the place was musty. “Sorry about the smell,” Ira apologized. “Your father says we won’t get i
t out completely until spring, when everything’s been repainted and we can open it up completely.”
Still, even in the shape it was in, with scraps of old carpet heaped in the corners, and missing floorboards, Bianca could see what Papa had seen before he’d stepped inside the place: the expansive, solid bones of a home that could be truly beautiful.
It was a little odd—in a good way, a sweet way—to wander through this somewhat ghostly house alone with Ira Styne. Outside, snow was in the air. Inside, two burdened people—a pregnant woman and a man on a cane—circulated from room to room. Ira was not handsome but he’d cleaned himself up a bit (he’d looked pretty ratty that afternoon he first showed up shivering on the front porch) or she’d gotten used to his looks. In any event, he had a wonderful face—an invitation to any portraitist. Rembrandt, peering into the mirror on waking, must have daily thanked the Lord for being given something even more precious than a handsome face: a soulful face. Graying Ira, on his cane, had much to be grateful for—and he seemed grateful.
Perhaps it was the cane, or just something about his expression, but Ira powerfully evoked for Bianca those days when she’d hugged her portfolio while walking up the stone stairs to Ferry Hospital, days when the eighteen-year-old girl artist had ridden streetcar after streetcar, always observing, observing. Perhaps that’s why, this morning, knowing she would be seeing Ira, she’d put on the amethyst locket that Henry Vanden Akker had proudly offered her before shipping out to the Pacific. Ira seemed to bring her closer to Henry, to whom one night she gave herself, knowing he would never return, and Ira brought her closer to the funny sad boy, Private Donnelly, with the bandaged face and amputated foot. On this gray winter afternoon, the promise of snow lent their desultory conversation a richness, a hidden reserve of lusters, as she followed Ira from room to room in this empty house in which, not so long ago, a dozen cats must have roamed, mewling weakly, ravenously, as their mistress lay dead. Bianca felt oddly jittery: the sharp liveliness she always felt in the company of ghosts. The emptied house was all but calling out to her. And the air contained, as well, the peculiar, not unwelcome tension she felt whenever she and Ira were alone. He studied her so closely. It was as though he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Bianca talked about the various colors she might paint the rooms, if this were her own house, and Ira wrote down everything in a little notebook, nodding obligedly.
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