Not that he said this aloud, of course. “Hmm,” he said aloud. And “I see.” And he took the blueprints from Mr. Brill and studied the elevation. He turned to the sheets beneath to look at the floor plans. He said, “Mm-hmm.”

“What do you think?” Mr. Brill asked.

Junior said, “Well …”

It was not a grand house, of the sort that you might expect a man like Junior to covet. It was more, let’s say, a family house. A house you might see pictured on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, plain-faced and comfortable, with the Stars and Stripes, perhaps, flying out front and a lemonade stand at the curb. Tall sash windows, a fieldstone chimney, a fanlight over the door. But best of all, that porch: that wonderful full-length porch. “It hit me,” was how Junior would put it later. “I don’t know; it just hit me.”

So he told Mr. Brill, “I reckon I could do it.”

Why hadn’t he simply built an identical house for himself? Red’s children used to ask. Copied the blueprints and built his own? Red told them he couldn’t say. Then he said that maybe it had had something to do with the site. Bouton Road was prime real estate, after all, and by 1936 most of the lots there had been bought up. In those days of no air conditioning, houses in Baltimore wore thick, dark awnings that shrouded the windows nearly to the sills from May to October of every year, but awnings wouldn’t be needed with all those tulip poplars. Besides, the way the house would occupy that particular property, perched at the top of a long, gentle slope: where else could it show so well?

So Junior built the house for Mr. Brill.

He built better than he’d ever built anything in his life. He niggled over every pantry shelf and cabinet knob. He argued against any request that struck him as cutting corners or lacking in good taste. Because taste, really, was the secret of Junior’s reputation. How he came by it nobody knew, but he had the most unerring nose for anything pretentious. No two-story columns for Junior! No la-di-da portes cochères, with their intimations of chauffeured limousines gliding up to let their passengers off! When Mr. Brill dared to broach the possibility of a U-shaped “carriageway” out front, Junior all but exploded. “Carriageway!” he said. “What in tarnation is that? You drive a Chrysler Airflow, not a coach-and-six!” (Or that was his report of the conversation, at least. He may very well have exaggerated his own outspokenness in the telling.) Then he went on to fantasize, at length and in loving detail, how visitors would approach the house. The driveway should run to the side, he said, for the sole use of the Brill family. Guests should park down on the street. Picture how they’d climb out of their cars, raise their eyes to the porch, start up the flagstone walk while Mr. and Mrs. Brill stood waiting on the porch steps to welcome them. Oh, and by the way, those steps should be wooden. It was wrong to have anything else. People thought of wooden steps as buckling or peeling, but when they were properly cared for there was nothing handsomer than a wide set of varnished treads (a bit of fine sand mixed into the varnish for traction) rising to a wooden porch floor as solid as a ship’s deck. Such steps took work, took money, took vigilance. Such steps signified.

Mr. Brill said he completely agreed.

Junior spent almost a year on the house, using all his men plus some he brought in from outside. Then the Brills took possession, and he went into mourning. Ordinarily a talker — his customers tried to avoid running into him when they had any place urgent to get to — he fell into a deep silence, and moped, and took little interest in the job that followed the Brills’ job. It was Junior himself who revealed all this, years later. (His wife was not very forthcoming.) “I just couldn’t believe,” he said, “that those folks got to live in my house.”

Luckily, it turned out that the Brills lacked handyman skills. When the first frost came, they telephoned Junior to say that the heat wasn’t working, and Junior had to drive over and bleed their radiators. He could have shown them how to do it themselves, but he didn’t. He went around to every room with a radiator key, and when he was finished he slipped the key back into his pocket and told the Brills to call him again if they had any more trouble. Pretty soon he was stopping by on a more or less weekly basis. The windows — outsized — required special screens and storm windows with finicky hardware, and he was the one who arrived spring and fall to supervise their installation. Like a love-struck groomsman who hangs around the bride long after the wedding, he kept inventing excuses to pop in. He dropped off a can of touch-up paint and then half a box of leftover floor tiles. He double-checked a lock that he had oiled just the week before. He came and went at all hours, using his own keys if nobody was home. Any telltale sign of wear he discovered sent him into a tizzy — a chip in the plaster or a hairline crack in a bathroom sink. He behaved as if he’d merely lent the house out and the borrowers were mistreating it.

One of Red’s earliest memories, dating from age three or so, was of clambering down from his father’s truck while Mrs. Brill stood waiting on the back stoop, a cardigan clutched around her shoulders. “Don’t you go running off again if you don’t hear it first thing,” she told his father in a shrill voice. “I just know it’s going to get quiet the minute you step inside.” That had been a squirrel in the attic, Red recalled. “She was a real nervous Nellie,” he said. “She thought every animal she met was out to get her, and she was always smelling smoke, and she was scared to death of break-ins. Break-ins! On Bouton Road!” Most damning of all, she never really warmed to the house. She complained that it was too far from downtown, and she missed their old apartment with her ladies’ club a stone’s throw away. Granted, there was a ladies’ club on Roland Avenue, but that wasn’t quite the same thing.

What made it worse was that Mr. Brill traveled frequently on “bidness,” as Junior called it, leaving Mrs. Brill with no protection but their two spoiled boys. (Junior attached the word “spoiled” to the Brill boys every time he mentioned them, although he never offered any concrete examples of spoiled behavior.) The boys were in their teens and weighed at least as much as Junior did, but it was Junior Mrs. Brill telephoned whenever she heard a noise in the basement.

And Red could just about bet that Junior wasn’t paid for his trouble. The Brills took him for granted. They addressed him by his first name while they remained “Mr.” and “Mrs.” Mrs. Brill descended on him each Christmas just as she descended on her yard boy and her cleaning girl, arriving at his door in her puffy fur coat with a basket of store-bought preserves. Her car purred out front; she never stayed to visit, although she was always invited.

Junior lived in Hampden, mere blocks away from the Brills but a world apart in atmosphere. He and Linnie rented a two-bedroom house that sat several feet below the level of the street, which gave it a huddled look. They had two children: Merrick (a girl) and Redcliffe. Oho! this might lead some to say. Was it possible that the Whitshanks’ mysterious family origins might have included some Merricks? Or Redcliffes? But no, those were just Junior’s notion of names that sounded genteel. They implied illustrious forebears, perhaps on the mother’s side. Oh, Junior was forever thinking up ways to look like quality. And yet he kept them in that sad little house in Hampden, which he didn’t even bother fixing up although he could have done it better than anyone.

“I was biding my time,” was how he explained it years later. “I was just biding my time, was all.” And he went on changing the fuses in his beloved Bouton Road house, and tightening its hinges, and chasing off various birds and bats without the least sign of impatience.