The Book of Old Houses (2 page)

Chapter
2

M
y name is Jacobia Tiptree and when I first came to
Maine I took modern bathing facilities for granted. Tubs, showers, sinks with their faucet handles so cleverly and usefully marked
Hot
and
Cold—

These, I'd believed in the depths of my innocence back then, were the ordinary amenities of life. And when they got broken I thought people could fix them.

Other people, I mean; ones who understood stopped drains, leaky pipes, and shutoff valves that when you turned their knobs—or in my case when you threw all your weight into breaking their rust encrustations—responded by shutting off something.

Instead of just snapping off in your hand, as the handles in my old bathroom did the first time I tried turning them. Next came a moment of stunned horror followed by a geyser so forceful, it hosed all the mildew off the places where the blackish stuff had flourished for decades, way up there on the bathroom ceiling.

And then I called a plumber.

Sadly, even plumbers could do little but stare helplessly when confronted with pipes so anciently decrepit, they belonged in a museum. Probably my bathroom was regarded as the absolute height of modern convenience when the nearly two-hundred-year-old house was modernized. For one thing it eliminated, you should excuse the expression, the backyard privy.

But seventy-plus years later, the bathroom in my old house was not much more than a closet with running water. I finally did find a fellow to replace some of the fittings, so you could take a shower without having to go down in the basement to turn on the hot and cold. But you could still only take a bath if you wanted to fill up the bathtub with a bucket.

And if you wanted to sit in the tub, which I didn't. Call me crazy, but I'm a big fan of bath water that doesn't have other people's personal molecules floating in it, and I especially draw the line at seventy-year-old molecules.

As a result I'd filled that tub repeatedly with enough hot bleach to sterilize a dozen operating rooms. But I still couldn't get comfortable in it, until one day I just went up there and took a sledgehammer to it.

And although I failed spectacularly in my attempt to remove the hideous old fixture—swung hard, the hammer bounced back up off the cast iron with a sound like the ringing of some massive gong, nearly taking my head off on the rebound—may I simply say right here that just trying to destroy an old bathtub with a sledgehammer turned out to be a heartwarming experience.

So I demolished the rest of the bathroom instead.
Wham!
went the cockeyed old wooden shelves, their peeling paint stained by ancient medicaments and scarred from decades of use.

Crash!
went the towel racks some long-ago do-it-yourselfer had fastened to the plaster without bothering to find any wooden studs to secure them to first, so anything heavier than a single wet washcloth made them fall down by themselves.

And finally,
kerblooie!
went the pedestal sink, its basin so unspeakably chipped, stained, and rusty that for the last year or so I'd had to close my eyes just to finish brushing my teeth.

“Lovely,” said my housekeeper, Bella Diamond, appreciatively, coming in to view the wreckage.

Once, the sounds of mayhem I'd been creating would've made her call an ambulance. But nowadays she knew the score and just came running with the whisk broom, a dustpan, and—this being Bella—a steaming pail of hot, soapy water.

“Yes,” I replied, pleased that I'd remembered to shut off the water before smashing the sink. Plaster chunks littered the wooden floor, which someone had coated with a lot of thick, dark varnish about fifty years earlier.

I don't know which I like less in a bathroom, wooden floors or old varnish. “Now we can put a new bathroom in. And we'll open the wall on one side to make it bigger,” I said.

Presently we had to stand in the bathtub to get the door closed, and to open the tiny window it was necessary to squooch tightly up against the antique cast-iron radiator and bend into a pretzel shape.

And don't even get me started on the whole idea of big radiators in tiny bathrooms. For efficient use of space you might as well put a woodstove in there; then at least you could burn all the old magazines in it.

As for a medicine cabinet, it was a milk crate on the floor, and if you cared to use a hair dryer you were out of luck unless you felt like running an extension cord from the hall; ditto your electric toothbrush.

Not that there was room for one of those, either. But the adjoining room was plenty large enough to nab a few square feet from, partly because, like all the rest of the bedrooms in the old house, it had no closets.

“We can push all the pieces out through the window,” I told Bella, “and the junk man can collect them.”

To get rid of that sink I was more than willing to bend into a pretzel shape, and to stay that way for months if necessary.

“The tub,” I added a bit less cheerfully, “will be something else again. Maybe we can hire a team of fellows to remove it.”

I was starting to realize that my fit of sledgehammering might've opened a can of worms. Because besides being hideous, that bathtub was far bigger than the doorway opening.

So no amount of turning or angling had a prayer of getting it out in one piece. Also it probably weighed a ton; the fellows would all have to be related to the Incredible Hulk.

Thoughtfully I raised the balky window sash, tearing only a few of my more important back muscles to do so, and peered down. The sidewalk leading to the back-porch steps lay almost directly beneath. I made a mental note to shout “Look out below!” when the sink parts exited.

But the fact that they would exit at all was encouraging. And I was sure I could find some way of getting that tub removed, too, even if we had to swing a wrecking ball in here and haul it out with a crane.

“A vanity cabinet,” I fantasized aloud, turning back to the demolished room and imagining where I would put one of these exotic items.

Pedestal sinks are meant to conserve space but in my opinion consume it; the only way you can put anything beneath a pedestal sink is if you attach one of those awful little gingham skirts to its rim, whereupon it will look spiffy for ten minutes.

“And baseboard heating,” I said optimistically. Taking out an old cast-iron radiator is nearly as difficult as bashing up a bathtub. “Plus maybe a towel warmer?”

My arms were still vibrating from the impact of the hammer. Still, I hadn't gone completely crazy; I'd left the commode in place, for instance, figuring I could remove it last and install a new one as an early part of the remodeling process.

Strategy: in a very old house you may think you need books on remodeling, but what you really need is Sun Tzu's
The Art of War.
That radiator might've looked harmless just standing there in the bathroom corner, but I knew it intended to resist its own removal by the heating-system equivalent of nuclear winter.

And speaking of conflict, please don't talk to me about how I was destroying venerable antiques. Because first of all, 1930s plumbing isn't venerable; it's intolerable.

On top of which, do you know how much it costs to get an antique tub out of a house, transported to the place where they promise they will put a brand-new, sort-of-porcelain-ish surface on it, and then get it back in again and up a flight of stairs to your bathroom once more?

Enough to put that disgusting old object on the moon, that's how much. And afterward you can only clean it by wiping it very tenderly with the same kind of extremely soft cloth you're supposed to use for polishing your eyeglasses.

Which never would've worked with Bella around. She was the kind of housekeeper who believed dirt was a manifestation of moral rottenness; her daily cleaning tools included a wire brush and a jug of carbolic acid.

Although at the moment she wasn't cleaning anything at all. Instead, while I caught my breath from my exertions and regarded the mess I'd made, she gazed past me into the mirror on what was left of the wall above where the sink had been.

Amazing, that her reflection didn't break the mirror. Bella was smart, honest, hardworking, and funny as hell. But she was also so ugly, people around town said she probably had to sneak up on a pail of water to get a drink.

Now, in preparation for cleaning that god-awful bathroom one last time, she took her henna-red hair out of its rubber band and twisted it in again, skinning it back even more tightly from her long, pallid-complexioned face.

“All right,” she pronounced ominously, brandishing the whisk broom.

Her grin of anticipation exposed big, bad teeth, and the look in her bulging grape-green eyes was one I'd seen once in an old science-fiction movie, just before the team of intergalactic space warriors cranked up their flamethrowers to exterminate the giant radioactive bugs.

“Now, Bella,” I said, hoping she wasn't planning to bring a flamethrower in here.

I didn't own one but I did have a heat gun for removing the thick layers of paint that clung to nearly every surface in my old house. And behind all the plaster walls, the ancient wood was so feathery-dry that you could light it with a match.

“Don't go too wild,” I cautioned, glancing past her at my own reflection: lean, narrow face, stubborn chin, and large eyes with dark eyebrows that other people called wing-shaped.

Not gorgeous, but at least my looks didn't cause small children to hide behind their mothers. I shoved a dark straggle of plaster-dusted hair behind my ear with a grimy finger.

“Bella, what were you and my dad arguing about down in the kitchen this morning?” Their voices had woken me.

“Your father couldn't find his own backside with both hands and a flashlight.”

Which was not exactly an answer. I squinted into the mirror. Bits of sink wreckage clung in my hair with the plaster dust, and the elastic-strapped safety glasses I'd worn while swinging the sledgehammer had left deep grooves in my face.

Also it occurred to me suddenly that I'd just destroyed the only shower-taking apparatus in the house. Not deliberately, mind you, but a couple of times that sledgehammer had zigged when it should've zagged. If you turned on the water now, the resulting flood would probably drown all the mice in the basement.

“Yes, but . . .” I began.

My father, an explosives expert and ex-federal-fugitive who was for many years suspected of murdering my mother—he hadn't—lived alone in his own small cottage a few blocks from here on Octagon Street.

But lately he'd been spending most of his time at my place, where he made himself useful at a variety of old-house chores while at the same time alternately annoying Bella and making her laugh so hard that she had to sit down.

“Your father thinks he knows what's best for everybody,” spat Bella, wiping furiously at a spot on the old pine beadboard paneling that went halfway up the bathroom walls.

The rest of the walls—what remained of them, anyway—were brightly papered in a long-outdated design featuring silver swans swimming tranquilly on a background of Pepto-Bismol pink.

I didn't have the heart to tell Bella that the beadboard was bound for glory, too, along with the old wallpaper, which I didn't even plan to bother steaming off the rest of the plaster before I got rid of it. Crash, bash, gone in a flash was
my
plan.

But just then a car pulled into the driveway. I left Bella rubbing her knobby hands together in
über-
hygienic glee at the prospect of never having to scour that bathtub again—by the end she'd been employing a product called Kapow! that was so strong, in a pinch you could use it to loosen the mortar between chimney bricks—and went downstairs to find out who the visitor was.

The car in
my driveway was an older red Saab I'd never seen before, with Rhode Island plates, a pleasant-looking middle-aged man behind the wheel, and a duffel bag on the backseat. He got out, blinking behind his horn-rims in the bright late-August morning.

His blue button-down shirt was open at the collar, the knot of his striped tie loosened, and his sleeves rolled up over his forearms. Stretching gratefully in the onshore breeze, he brushed thinning brown hair off his forehead with a tired gesture.

“Hello,” I said. He looked up, surprised.

“Hello. Are you Jacobia Tiptree?”

Might be,
I felt like replying as another car tore by. It was a snazzy red Mazda Miata with a young blonde woman behind the wheel. The blue scarf tied around her head let her pale hair show prettily, and the movie-star-style sunglasses she wore increased the overall impression of glamour.

And money; this was not the kind of person we generally saw a whole lot of around Eastport, even in summer. But she was gone before I could wonder much about her.

My visitor approached the porch steps. If the Miata driver's looks shouted
cash,
his yelled
brains.
And something else; smart, dark eyes, pale skin with a bluish hint of five o'clock shadow, a drawn expression that hinted strongly at grief . . .