With her sister riding shotgun, Elizabeth got her introduction to the unfashionable East End, as Alice called it. They drove north out of the neighborhood on Twenty-fifth Street and Nine Mile Road, past small clapboard houses and imposing prefab housing projects.
"Dad hates that I live here," Alice said. "He thinks that I'm going to get shot to death by drug dealers or gang-raped by a herd of marauding crackheads. Really, it's a pretty good neighborhood as long as you're not stupid. I can't believe the way Mom and Dad go on about it. You'd think that there were constantly bullets flying through the park instead of frisbees. I swear, all you see is people playing with their dogs or walking their babies in strollers. And the gaslights and brick sidewalks are so romantic." She sighed. "I wish we had grown up in Church Hill."
"Wasn't it a total slum when we were kids?" Elizabeth asked. "It wasn't until the last ten or fifteen years that it even began to look as good as it does now."
Alice shrugged. "Yeah, but at least it would have been more interesting than the suburbs. Don't you remember how we were bored all the time? Oh, turn here!" She waved her arms around. "That's the U-Haul place." Even through the smeary windshield, Elizabeth had seen the orange trucks and was already braking.
At last, the trailer was returned and the truck parked in the dream spot which had opened up in front of the house when Bob had left for the hospital. Elizabeth was tired and freezing because the heat in the truck had chosen this day to malfunction, and was more than ready to get a hot beverage and collapse onto any reasonably soft horizontal surface. She announced her intention of doing so when they entered the front hall again. She looked at her miserable pile of boxes, particle board bookcases, and the futon on its dinged up frame, and couldn't face carrying them upstairs to whatever corner of the house she would be calling her own.
"No, I have to give you the tour. At least a partial one." Alice relented when she saw her sister's stubborn look.
Alice drew her into the living room and her protests died away into a faint, echoing "Ooo." The huge room was five hundred square feet or more, and the ceilings had to be fifteen feet high. Dusty Victorian furniture, gnarly in more than one sense, was clustered here and there in conversational groupings and a fire crackled in the grate between two simpering caryatids in pink marble who supported the mantelpiece on their dimpled hands.
Elizabeth turned slowly in a circle and took it all in. A broad, beveled pier glass stretched from floor to ceiling between the two front windows and reflected her oddly. Long, long ago, someone had scratched a date on the glass with a diamond. She stood on a hand-knotted rug, worn down to its warp threads in a few places, that lost its geometrically flowered self in the far corners of the room.
"Isn't this great?" Alice pulled her through the portiere curtains to the next room. Here a grand piano, not a baby grand like their grandmother had, but a real concert grand, stood in one corner and a gilt harp fully as tall as the girls stood in another.
"This is the music room," Alice said unnecessarily.
There was more heavily carved furniture, including lute-backed chairs, of course, and the musical motif was picked up by the wainscoting that crept around the walls. The wallpaper was flocked with enough gold felt instruments to fully equip a black velvet orchestra, which could have been led by the velvet Elvis hanging over the fireplace. Instead of hanging the Velvis on a hook, someone had merely wedged the rod from which it was suspended over the top of a properly hung portrait, obscuring all but the heavy gilt frame.
The Velvis portrayed Elvis on the cusp of a comeback, a jumpsuited, TV special Elvis who had seen the last of the slim, Sun Records days, but was nowhere near the puffy Elvis of the end times. The painting was well rendered, but still, it was a velvet Elvis.
"That's Dirk's," Alice commented when she saw Elizabeth's appalled look. "He got it on a vacation to Mexico. His then lover bought it for him and even though he had enough sense to ditch the guy, he won't give up the Velvis. Believe me, I've suggested a ritual burning out in the backyard."
The next room back was the dining room, which even dwarfed the living room. A table long enough to seat fifty extended the length of the room, with the head of the table tucked into a bay jutting out into the side garden. The window was glazed with a stained-glass and very sybaritic Bacchus who was nibbling grapes and swilling wine amid a pack of nubile maenads. A ping-pong table occupied an otherwise empty area where another dining table had probably stood. Along the walls stood sideboards which had once groaned under the weight of entire game animals on silver platters, but were now reduced to holding ping-pong paraphernalia and the odds and ends set there by the residents walking through.
"Do much entertaining?" she asked.
"I don't even know enough people to fill this room," Alice said. "And I know a lot of people."
"Oh, awesome." Across the hall from the dining room, Elizabeth discovered the library of her dreams. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with glass fronted bookcases, filled with mysterious leather-bound books she could barely wait to get into. She hoped that they hadn't all been eaten up by mice and mold, or that they weren't all fakes just for showing. She pulled open one of the glass doors and breathed the heady scent of leather and old paper. A gentle tug on the spine of a Shakespeare quarto rewarded her with the volume slipping into her hands. She flipped it open and ran her fingers across the heavy paper. The edges of the creamy pages were only slightly yellowed by time and unmarked by mildew or mouse's tooth. She carried the volume over to the window and examined it carefully in the remaining daylight.
Alice came up behind her. "Remember? You're tired and cold? You want to lie down? How long are you going to be in here?"
"Look, this is an 1890 edition." Elizabeth traced her fingers across the Roman numerals on the title page. "How could it possibly look this good?"
"Well, duh! Obviously nobody's ever read it. I know you, you'll be in here for hours. Let me show you the kitchen and your room, and then you can come back here and waste as much time as you want."
Elizabeth reluctantly closed the book and looked around her. Soft gray light filtered down from the windows to reveal a room which was as close to heaven she could imagine. Large comfortable chairs and hassocks were placed strategically under brass reading lamps. Several ladders on tracks provided access to the upper shelves. In one corner stood a yellowed globe in a dark wooden stand, and a schoolmaster's desk held an unabridged dictionary that was a foot thick. Reluctantly, she returned the book to its proper place and followed her sister back to the kitchen.
Alice crossed an expanse of ancient linoleum. Like the carpet in the front room, its pattern of interlocking vases and flowers was completely worn down in places, most noticeably between the sink and the fridge. She filled the kettle at the sink and set it on an old gas stove, then began to root around in a glass fronted cabinet. "Is mint okay?"
"Yes," Elizabeth said absently, too stunned by the Brobdingnagian scale of this room to care about her tea. On consideration, she realized that the kitchen could hardly be less oversized than the huge dining room. A web of extension cords spread out from the light fixture in the ceiling to the various appliances lining the counters. "Are there no outlets in this room?"
Triumphantly waving a tea bag, Alice withdrew her head from the cabinet and retrieved a mug from the dish rack. "No. Evidently when they originally did the wiring in this house, there were no such things as electric kitchen appliances, so they didn't put in any wiring for them. The trust that owns the house hasn't updated the wiring either, except to have an outlet put in for the refrigerator. We keep asking because we know it's not up to code, but they say they can't. This was the first house wired for electricity in Richmond, and so the fuse box, which is the scariest thing I've ever seen, belongs on an historic registry and they aren't going to change it."
"They'd put the fuse box on the Historic Register?"
"Don't laugh, the local historical society picketed the city to keep them from replacing the switch box for the first traffic light in Richmond, two blocks from here. Anyway, I got Mickey, this electrician I was dating, to look at the fuse box and he just turned white and backed away gibbering. There're these old copper coins in there as big as your fist."
The kettle whistled and Alice set the tea to steeping. She continued, "It doesn't seem to be really unsafe. As long as you don't try and run the microwave and the toaster oven at the same time. I got Mickey to figure out all the current loads and how much we can load up the circuit."
"What happens if we overload the circuit?"
"It kicks off, but then it usually comes back on again in a few minutes. If it doesn't, then we go down to the fuse box and hit it with a newspaper and curse. Then the power comes back on."
"Oh, okay. What's the plumbing like?" asked Elizabeth, wishing she had asked before. She began to have a sneaking suspicion that there was probably a very good reason why it was so cheap to live in this house. Like maybe you had to go outside to use the toilet.
"Oh, the plumbing is great," Alice assured her. "We each have our own bathroom and the bathrooms are just gorgeous. I mean, the tile is old and could use a little work, but the fixtures are wonderful. We have the original claw foot tubs and these art deco toilets with tanks up at the ceiling. They aren't exactly silent flush, but you get used to it."
"What about heat?" Still looking for a catch, Elizabeth considered the fire in the parlor and the prospect of hauling wood all through February. She and Alice had done that for a number of winters when her parents had gone on a woodstove kick, which she knew would never have lasted so many years without the child labor. She looked out through the back windows to see if she could spot the mammoth woodpile that would be needed to heat the house, but she saw only a simple garden.
"Didn't you see the radiators? We'll have to use the fireplaces some, but there's this huge boiler in the basement. It was a coal boiler and there's still a pile of coal, like, five feet high and twenty feet wide down in the basement, but it was replaced with a gas boiler maybe forty years ago, so we don't have to shovel coal or anything. The trust sends someone out to inspect it a couple times a year too. If you're worried about the thing exploding, you can stop."
Elizabeth nodded and sipped her tea while she looked around the kitchen. The glass in the doors of the cabinets sparkled and the counters, although battered and scratched, squeaked with the scent of 409. A week's worth of dirty dishes did not hide the red and white surface of the fifties dinette. Elizabeth was touched. "Did you go on a cleaning binge for me?"
"Oh no, this is all the guys' work. They're really anal about the kitchen. I'm not allowed to clean because they say I can't do it right. Personally, I think that Bob has had one too many semesters of microbiology and with Dirk, well, it's just a thing, honey."
"Tell me Dirk is his real name." Elizabeth smiled into her tea.
"He says so. But he won't let me see his driver's license.he claims the picture is unfit for human eyes." Alice finished explaining the house rules about which food items were communal (coffee, milk, bread) and which were off limits (Dirk's cranberry juice cocktail and Bob's meats) and described the various allowable permutations of simultaneous appliance usage. When she saw her sister drooping, she said, "You won't remember all that, but it's okay. Just ask before you turn more than one thing on. The laundry is down in the basement, which is through that door." She pointed to a narrow door beside the refrigerator.
"What's in there?" Elizabeth pointed to another, larger door with a glass transom.
"That's the butler's pantry," Alice said grandly. "If only we had a butler! Dirk says he's looking for the perfect houseboy, but he hasn't had any luck yet." She opened yet another door to reveal a winding staircase. "Here are the back stairs. Follow me."
Hastily sucking down enough tea so that it wouldn't spill when she walked, Elizabeth followed her sister upstairs. The back stairs were not very prepossessing. They were all knotty, unfinished wood and dimly lit by a few bare bulbs which revealed walls spotted with marks at waist height where a handrail should have been. Alice opened the door at the first landing and they stepped into a long hallway.
"This is the floor for people who like boys," Alice told her. "Bob lives up on the third floor. This is your room." She indicated the nearest door which had the glass transom that looked to be a standard feature throughout the house. "I know you'll like it. You get a view of the back garden and there's even a little porch."
She opened the door and formally bowed her sister into a room which reduced Elizabeth to making more cooing noises. The room was airy and bright despite the gloomy and fading light outside. Brass radiators like she had seen downstairs were cast with a floral pattern. A window seat lined with pink cushions was built into the wall beneath a tall window with a deep sill. An enormous four poster bed with a canopy, curtains, and clawed feet more human than leonine, matched an elaborately skirted vanity and dresser. A chaise lounge stood before a fireplace edged with the same pink marble as in the living room, but with elegant columns instead of caryatids. Brightly patterned rugs were scattered across the heart pine floor.
Elizabeth kicked off her shoes and settled herself into chaise lounge, from which she admired the room. Best of all."Built in bookcases! I've always wanted built-in bookcases." She greedily eyed the nearly empty bookcases in the walls on either side of the fireplace. Over two-thirds of her belongings were books and she had never had enough shelf space before. She took another sip of tea and began mentally arranging her books on the shelves.