The Cat Who Brought Down the House

Chapter 6

Qwilleran had mixed feelings about Pleasant Street. Residents included some of his best friends, important in the community and known for intelligence and taste. They lived in large houses set well apart on one-acre lots –frame houses—painted white and lavished with white jigsaw ornamentation.

To Qwilleran, with his eye for contemporary, they looked like a collection of wedding cakes! Yet, the street had been photographed often and featured in national magazines as a fine example of Carpenter Gothic.

They had been built by the Campbells in the nineteenth century, and while the residents owned their dwellings, Burgess Campbell owned the land. That fact gave him a baronial interest in the neighborhood and the well-being of its occupants.

Now, Qwilleran felt it behooved him to take a closer look at Pleasant Street. He would bike, pedaling his vintage British Silverlight. With his slick red-and-yellow bike suit, yellow bubble helmet, sun goggles, and oversize moustache, he had been known to stop traffic on Main Street. (On one occasion a car back-ended another at a traffic light.) So he approached Pleasant Street via the back road.

It was a cul-de-sac, with a landscaped island at the end for a turnaround. The five houses on each side had broad lawns, and the serenity of the scene was enhanced by the fact that there was no curb-parking. Each dwelling had a side-drive with garage and visitor parking in the rear. There was a Wednesday-morning quiet: children at school, adults at work or doing errands or volunteer work. Others would be pursuing their hobbies. A contralto could be heard doing vocal exercises. The distant whine of a table saw meant that the woodworker was making a Shaker table.

Qwilleran biked twice up and down the street then stopped at the entrance to appraise the whole. No two houses were alike, yet they all had a vertical silhouette. There were tall narrow windows and doors, steeply pitched roofs over a third floor. Some had turrets. All had a wealth of ornamentation along roof lines, balcony railings, atop doors and windows.

Before leaving the scene he braked his bike and scanned the streetscape through squinted eyes. He was reluctant to admit that it had a kind of enchantment, like an illustrated edition of a book of fairy tales. Its residents included businessmen, two doctors, a college lecturer, an attorney, a professional astrologer, a musician, and an artist! Perhaps Burgess could explain the lure of Pleasant Street.

Qwilleran had time to take a quick shower, drop some crunchies into the plate on the kitchen floor, and wolf down a ham sandwich before his appointment with Burgess. Then, a few minutes before three o’clock, Koko rushed to the kitchen window. He sensed that a car was turning off Main Street, crossing the theatre parking lot, and meandering through the woods to the barn.

Qwilleran went out to meet it and saw the two front doors fly open. A dog jumped out the passenger door, followed by a man in lecture-hall tweeds. The driver, in jeans and T-shirt, emerged with an expression of rapt wonder.

“Hey, man! That’s some kinda barn!!”

Burgess said, “Qwill, this is Henry Ennis, chauffeur par excellence. Hank, you can pick me up at four o’clock.”

“Make it four-thirty,” Qwilleran suggested.

The driver said, “If you want me earlier, call the library. I'll be studying there.”

As he drove away, Burgess explained, “Hank is a scholarship student from Sawdust City. I reserve my second floor as a hostel for MCCC students without cars, who can’t go home every night.”

Burgess employed students part-time to read aloud –from research material, the New York Times, and student papers for grading.

Qwilleran said, “Okay! The tour starts here... On Sunday night parking will have to be here in the barnyard, and space is limited. So guests should be instructed to car-pool.”

Burgess made a note of it on a small recorder.

“Actually, this is the kitchen door, so someone will have to direct them around the barn to the front entrance. It’s a stone path, so women will find it kind to their high heels. I'm assuming it will be a dressy occasion... I suggest that guests assemble in the bird garden before going indoors. There are stone benches and flowering shrubs, and I think we can get Andy Brodie to play the bagpipe for a half hour.”

They went indoors, and Qwilleran conducted them through the large foyer, where the receiving line would be stationed... through the dining room, where Robin-O'Dell would have the refreshment table set up... past the snack bar with its four stools for guests who like to sit and lean on their elbows... through the library with its comfortable seating... and into the living room with its large sofas.

Burgess asked, “Where are the cats? I can tell they’re here—by the way Alexander is breathing.”

Qwilleran said, “They’re on the rafters, which are forty feet overhead. They’re watching every move we make.”

When all the decisions were made, and all the notes were recorded, they sat at the snack bar for cold drinks, and another story was taped for Short & Tall Tales.

HOW PLEASANT STREET GOT ITS NAME

In the nineteenth century my ancestors were shipbuilders in Scotland—in the famous river Clyde at Glasgow. When opportunity beckoned from the New World, my great-grandfather, Angus, came here with a team of ships’ carpenters considered the best anywhere. They started a shipyard at Purple Point, where they built four-masted wooden schooners, using Moose County’s hundred-and-twenty-foot pine trees as masts. These were the ‘tall ships’ that brought goods and supplies to the settlers and shipped out cargoes of coal, lumber, and stone.

Then came the New Technology! The wireless telegraph was in; the Pony Express was out. Railroads and steamboats were in; four-masted schooners were out. In his diary Angus said it was like a knife in the heart to see a tall ship stripped down to make a barge for towing coal. There was no work for his carpenters to do, and their fine skills were wasted.

Then a ‘still small voice’ told him to build houses! It was the voice of his wife, Anne, a canny Scotswoman. She said, “John, build houses as romantic as the tall ships—and as fine!”

She was right! The New Technology had produced a class of young upwardly mobile achievers who wanted the good life. Not for them the stodgy stone mansions built by conspicuously rich mining tycoons and lumber barons! They wanted something romantic!

So Angus bought acreage at the south edge of Pickax and built ten fine houses, all on one-acre plots. Although no two were alike, their massing followed the elongated vertical architecture called Gothic Revival, and the abundance of scroll trim was the last word in Carpenter Gothic.

And here is something not generally known: The vertical board-and-batten siding was painted in the colors that delighted young Victorians: honey, cocoa, rust, jade, or periwinkle; against this background, the white scroll trim had a lacy look.

Today we paint them all-white, giving rise to the “wedding cake’ sobriquet.

When the time came to put up sign boards, Angus was at a loss for a street name. He said, “I don’t want anything personal like Campbell or Glasgow... or anything sobersides or high-sounding... just something pleasant.”

And Great-Grandma Anne said with sweet feminine logic: “Call it Pleasant Street.”

“And folks have lived there happily ever after,” Qwilleran said as he turned off the recorder. “I don’t even know who my grandparents were, so I'm envious of a fourth-generation native.”

“I wanted to make it five generations,” Burgess said, “but it didn’t work out. I grew up with the girl next door and we were good friends. I always thought we’d marry some day, but she went away to college and never came back. Now she has three kids that should have been mine. But her parents still treat me like a son-in-law. And I treat students who lodge with me on the second floor with fatherly concern.”

Qwilleran said, “They’re very lucky! I hope they all turn out to be a credit to you... and how do you feel about the people who own the houses on your land?”

“We work together to keep Pleasant Street pleasant, solve problems, and so forth.”

“Has the California contingent arrived?” Qwilleran asked casually.

“They’re due this afternoon,” Burgess said. “My housekeeper, Mrs Richards, periodically goes over with coffee and cookies—in the guise of neighborliness but actually because she and I are burning with curiosity. The moving van arrived Monday. Since then, Fran’s helpers have worked around the clock, unpacking and getting everything settled. The house looks as if they had lived there for weeks!”

“One question,” Qwilleran asked. “Do you know anything about the Thackeray family?”

“I certainly do!” was the prompt answer. “Thelma’s father was a potato farmer who struck oil—as the saying goes—during Prohibition. Her brother was a veterinarian who believed in holistic medicine, and the Thackeray Clinic was one of the finest in this part of the country. I took Alexander to him for regular checkups. Dr Thurston’s love of animals was such that they looked forward to visiting him. He was healthy and an outdoorsman and should have lived another ten years at least, but he fell to his death while hiking alone on the rim of the Black Creek Gorge. Tragic! The pity of it is: There are nasty rumors in circulation—which I prefer not to repeat.”

A horn sounded in the barnyard, and Qwilleran walked with his visitors to the car. “One question, Burgess. Fran said the reception was for adults only—”

“Ah, yes! There’ll be a party at the Adams house for the six kids in the neighborhood, ages seven to ten. Mavis’s two teen daughters will supervise. They’re accustomed to working with youngsters. They tell me there’ll be games with prizes, movies—such as Disney’s Lady and the Tramp and/or The Incredible Journey. Music will be Sixties-style. Refreshment—four kinds of pizza and make-it-yourself sundaes... The Adams girls are very well organized and very responsible... And I forgot—favors to take home. Chocolate brownies.”

Qwilleran said, “Sounds better than the champagne reception.”

Alexander gently nudged Burgess toward the passenger door of the car, and they drove away.

The next evening Qwilleran and Polly would be dining at the newly named, newly decorated Grist Mill. She always dressed carefully for such occasions and had phoned the restaurant to inquire about the color scheme. It was jade green. So she would wear her dusty rose suit.

She reported this vital information to Qwilleran during their nightly phone-chat.

By a strange coincidence he was writing a think piece on green for his next ‘Qwill Pen’ column. He boasted that he could take any noun or adjective and write a thousand words about it. Now the word was green. First... he made notes:

·

It’s the fourth color in the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, GREEN, blue, violet. Why is it more talked about than other colors?

·

In big-city phone directories there are hundreds of Greens—and a few Greenes.

·

Yet, there has never been a President Green in the White House.

·

Why is blue more popular in clothing and the home? How do you feel about green jeans?

·

Why does Santa wear red instead of green?

·

Why do crazy kids dye their hair green?

·

Green trees fight pollution. Green veggies are good for you.

·

Green rhymes with mean. Monsters are green eyed. Nobody likes to be called a greenhorn. “It’s not easy being green,” according to the song.

·

We have green alligators, green snakes, and green grasshoppers. Why no animals with green fur?

“Yow!” came an indignant comment. It was a reminder that it was eleven o’clock and time for a bedtime snack.