Cry of Angels

9

9 AS IT TURNED OUT, JAYELL HIMSELF SOLVED THE PROBLEM. IN A drunken tear, he abruptly announced, "Hell, I know what she wants is a plain old ordinary house, so by God, why don't I just build her a plain old ordinary house! What's she want, one of your Ranchero models, a Tara, a Magnolia Manor?'' He ripped through the drawings and magazine clippings piled on his office desk. "All right, I'll build her the ordinariest house—what do I care? She's the one got to live in it, right? Ain't that what the salesmen say? I'll build such a box it'll get the Smithbilt Silver Medallion!" Em Jojohn chuckled. "You couldn't build a house that looked like a house." "Here it is." Jayell snatched a picture from the stack. "This is what she really drooled over. A converted barn, that's what's big this year. A New England barn converted into a house. Je-sus, would you look at that thing!" "You got a problem there," said Em. "Ain't too many New England barns around here." 100 B O O K O N E Jayell slammed down his bottle. "My God, Em, don't you know anything? That's what makes it fashionable! People don't want the original thing, they want reproductions! Some slick advertising guy puts a gimmick like this in a magazine, and people say, 'Oh, ain't that cute?' And right away want one like it. Only when they find there ain't too many dairy farmers ready to evict their cows and fill their barns with fools, there's a new reproduction market created. Hell, it's the whole secret of the antique business. Yessir, we'll build her a barn first, and then convert into a house. Them Marble Parkers will be frog-ass green with envy!" "Marble Park?" I said. "Are you really going to build up there?" Jayell winked. "Made a down payment on a lot this morning. Don't say nothing to Gwen." "How them folks going to take to having a barn up there in them ranch styles?" said Em. "Oh, listen, no problem there. They wouldn't stand for nothing really good, of course. But some cutesy notion like this, why it'll just fit right in. Juice up the neighborhood just enough to look 'clever,' but not far enough from mediocre to make 'em uncomfortable. Be cheaper too, when you think about it. I got enough barn salvage to reproduce one hell of a barn!" The lot Jayell had bought was at the end of one of the newly paved subdivision streets. We trooped up there, the three of us and the ragged crew from Jayell's shop, and he roved over the site, laying out the house. And from what I saw, Jayell was right; the plans he outlined would fit right in with the carefully contrived mood of architectural freedom in Marble Park. Mostly the brick split-levels predominated, plus the predictable Southern "mansions" with fluted wooden columns, but there were several scattered attempts at buttoned-down striving toward the avant-garde: two or three circular houses, a three-story obelisk with only ground-floor windows, and one fine attempt at a castle, but the sun porch gave it away. Marble Park housed the granite executives, textile managers, bankers and others of the town's elite. It was a world of frantic golf and determined bridge parties, of dollar-down cabins at Lake Lorraine. They were the country clubbers, the Little Theater boosters, symphony supporters, Friends of the Library, a scant generation from corn 101 A C R Y O F A N G E L S huskings and quilting bees, but in there solid as boat payments, Spocking their children, trying. Slowly the house began taking shape, and it was plain from the start that this was to be the strangest house Jayell ever built. It was a perfectly conventional, heavy-beamed barn, so devoid of Jayell's usual touches, his bizarre shapes and flying angles, that it might have been lifted straight from a Grandma Moses painting, so old-timey that it seemed to age as it grew from the ground. But if the house looked simple enough to the rest of us, for Jayell it was a torment, a crucible. He was relentlessly on the move, searching out the tiniest...