from Renovation: A Love Story
The Mystery House
My girlfriend Jill and I first saw the big brick Victorian row house in December 1999. It was in an old Baltimore neighborhood and had sat abandoned for nearly a year.  It was such a wreck that most prospective buyers walked in, took one look, then promptly walked out.  The place had been owned by a notorious fraternity for one riotous decade. We didn’t know this at the time. You couldn’t tell from the outside how bad the inside was. Three stories tall, made of pumpkin-colored brick, with three bays on every floor and a witch’s-cap tower at its foremost corner, the house was the jewel of the block—or had been. It seemed the kind of place that might have grand rooms, secret passageways, ghosts. I imagined Jill and me roaming it from basement to attic, flashlights in hand.

We love old houses. This one seemed to have everything we’d talked about. A small for-sale sign sat like an afterthought in one dusty bay window. For two days I had phoned “Imperial Realty” without getting any answer. There was no street address for the company, no listing in the phone book, and, apparently, no answering machine. Like the company selling it, the house appeared to be a mystery.

Jill and I had been looking at houses for several months. In fact, we started looking just one month after we started dating. This is not to say that Jill had agreed to live with me. She had agreed to nothing more than helping me look for a place and, if need be, fix it up. But it sounded like, it felt to me like, she had agreed to move in with me. Let me confess: I am a disaster when it comes to my heart.  I am voluble, impulsive, and unreasonably optimistic. A few years before I met Jill, my second marriage crashed and burned after a bumpy flight of only four years. I then promised myself I’d never again rush headlong into love.

The truth is, I didn’t slow down after my second divorce. In fact, before the divorce was complete, I’d already moved in with a woman who was, apparently, as crazy as I. We lasted two volatile years and then she kicked me out. I congratulated myself on not having asked her to marry me. By the time I met Jill, I thought I had grown fairly cautious. But the facts don’t lie: I knew I’d buy a house—any house—if Jill would agree to move in with me. I had convinced myself that I’d made enough mistakes to know whether or not Jill was the One for me. Everything about her made me feel I’d made the right decision. She was the least judgmental person I’d ever met. She was also very funny. And though she had some health issues, like hypoglycemia and chronic headaches, she didn’t complain and was game for just about anything.

One afternoon, as we drove past a Dumpster brimming with junk, she yelled: “Turn around! We’ve got to dive that Dumpster!” We did and came away with some old windows. Never mind we had no house to put them in. Both of us were avid junk collectors, stock-piling switches and lights and corbels and hinges and all kinds of doohickeys we hoped to install in a grand old manse someday. Jill also enjoyed sneaking into abandoned houses with me. In one, I had hiked myself through a broken window in order to scout out the place. The next thing I knew, Jill was right behind me, whispering, “This is so cool!” In another abandoned house that reeked of skunks, she fell through the floor—up to her thighs. This made her laugh. I was crazy about her.


It was late afternoon when she and I arrived at the mystery house. Unlike other historic neighborhoods we’d visited, this one seemed fairly safe. Anyone from Baltimore will tell you, this is a city of neighborhoods—meaning a two-block walk can take you into a very different place. I had driven through this neighborhood plenty of times. Saint Paul Street was the nicest it had to offer, a canyon of once-grand and still impressive three-story row-houses. I feared it’d be too pricey for me.

It was early December and very cold, the sidewalks deserted. The snow hadn’t arrived yet but was due any day now, the sky muddied with clouds. “Holy cow!” Jill said when we pulled up to the house. “Why is this thing still on the market?”

Who could say? It was winter; it was an old house in an old neighborhood. There were a hundred good reasons why nobody had snatched it up. Still, I felt I had accomplished something in bringing Jill here, as if I had ferreted out a rare find. It delighted me that she was so happy.

Up to this point, nothing much in my life had gone according to plan. I had made so many wrong turns, I couldn’t say where I’d end up next. Buying a house seemed an answer to my aimlessness. It would anchor me. And it would keep Jill in town. A few years earlier she had followed her boyfriend to Baltimore from Detroit. When she ended their thirteen-year relationship, she seriously considered returning to the Midwest. Then she met me.

“This place is huge!” she exclaimed. She yanked at the padlocked bicycle chain wrapped around the big brass pulls of the double doors. “I guess nobody’s home?”

“Probably belonged to an old lady who died,” I guessed.

Jill peered through the beveled glass of the front doors. Just inside the locked doors was the vestibule, then another door: a big generic slab that blocked our view inside.

Unlike the row-houses farther downtown, this one had a small front yard of weeds and a perimeter of ivy strangling the rusty remnants of the original knee-high iron fence. The massive front steps were red sandstone. The windows of the tower bay were as tall and wide as doors. Standing on tip-toe and cupping our faces to one huge window, we peeked through a gap of the papered-over windows: we could see cheap furniture and high ceilings and one room that opened into another and then another. We saw on the most distant wall—surprisingly far away—a bold blue and gold fraternity insignia painted above the hole of a ruined fireplace. A stop sign tacked to a nearer wall caught the waning light from the bay’s transom windows and glowed like a warning: STOP. Strewn across the dirty wood floor were shards and lengths of wood, disgorged plastic bags of fast food, tangles of dirty clothing, gutted sofa cushions, a few shutter panels from the windows, over-turned office chairs, orange traffic cones. . . . What had happened here?

As we walked around to the rear, in the cold shadow of the building’s brick expanse, the house seemed to go back a long way. The place was so big, I could hardly imagine handling it, much less owning it. It’d be like owning a whale as pet. “Can you believe this?” Jill said, running ahead. “Maybe we can get in through the basement.”

The back yard was brick-walled on the street side. The wall extended sixty feet or more and had two decaying wood gates. We entered through the first and were surprised by the mess. The junk-cluttered yard was on its way to becoming a dump and there was so much lumber and broken furniture crammed under the porch, it’d take half a day to pull it out. We inspected the waterless hot tub and its load of garbage: a beer keg, a rusted seatless bar stool, a narrow cabinet with a louvered door, pulpy cardboard boxes, and other dark things we weren’t going to touch. Curiously, the weedy yard was riddled with heel-sized holes: moles, we decided. Or gophers. Yard work? We could do that. Neither of us imagined that these were rat holes.

Behind us stood a defeated-looking dogwood tree on one side of the yard and a tangle of old rose bushes hunkered on the other. The wood fence between us and the neighbor’s yard was slumped under the weight of a long mound of ivy. Rats, I would learn, love to nest under ivy. At the far end of the yard was the brick carriage house. It was so large it had a small chimney. Its windows had long been broken out and boarded over. Had we gone inside the garage we would have found sixteen empty beer kegs piled next to a four-foot-tall dirty-white heap of Victorian tile—the ruin of the house’s master bathroom.

But it didn’t occur to us to enter the garage. We were distracted by the house’s three-story wooden porch. It had once been glorious, with its multi-mullioned windows mounted in sliding wooden frames as big as garage doors. But now, its green paint was faded nearly to a pale blue and its striped canvas awning hung in shreds like the flag of a long-ago defeated people. Many of its old wavy-glass windows were broken.

The basement door was locked. So we hiked up the rickety porch stairs and gaped at the furniture and garbage on the other side of the glass. The porch door was padlocked--not that anyone could have opened it, so much junk inside was pushed up against it. Among the porch clutter we saw a big Deco-chromed 1940s refrigerator—maybe this was the original. Was the house filled with similar treasures?

This much was clear to me now: the house would go cheap. And, no, it hadn’t belonged to an old lady, at least not recently.

When I was a child, one of my biggest, private thrills was to come upon a gumball machine that had gone haywire and would, for a penny, keeping on giving: I’d turn the key again and again, gumballs dropping into my palms until my pockets and cheeks were bulging. Why hadn’t anyone emptied the machine before me? I’d wonder. Finding this old house was a similar thrill. Maybe we had hit the jackpot.

A more cynical person would have had other thoughts, no doubt. It didn’t occur to me to worry about the condition of the house or all the work such a wrecked behemoth would demand. I’d never done carpentry and knew nothing about wiring or plumbing or plastering. In eighth-grade wood-shop, I’d earned a “C” for making the most pathetic, lopsided box as my final project. Like everything else I’d done, I had made no plans for the project and had moved as fast as I could to complete it.

All I could think of now, as Jill and I gaped at the backside of this grand old place, was that I’d lucked out and found both the woman and the house of my dreams.