A Builder’s Tale
Chapter Fifty-One
A New Millennium.
Christmas came and departed … The year 2000 arrived… And many thought hurrah, a new millennium, even as a few cantankerous ‘computer savvy’ Beauvillians, retired members of the historical society, and news consumers from the library, the Jabber-Jabbers, argued that the new Millenium would not start until 2001 … One ‘know it all-expert’ reasoning at another. “It begins with 2000.” …. “Absolutely not! It begins next year!” Meanwhile, Y2-K2 hovered.
This ‘Great’ question occupied these few, and also the members of a club at the High School, but passed unheralded in most of Beauville. Everywhere on the National News for over a year, but rarely mentioned by Joe Beauville since the previous January. Now with the date approaching/arrived, when it was mentioned by fellows like the financial Faber, Joe Beauville said little. No one cared! Nor did ‘Y2K - the end of computer electronic life on earth/chaos’ make it to MacGuilties, not even to the Dunce cap. Conrad wrote no poems about it, and Janet Wainwright composed no tunes.
Beauvillians had more important things to worry about. Like…When the Ice would melt! Y2-K2 passed over and through it all, a tidal wave either never there or never cresting.
Still… Most Americans, most Beauvillians, believed they had entered a new century… Just as those alive one hundred years before believed, they had entered a new century in 1900. However, this new century was different. It was also a new millennium, meaning Mankind was leaving (seen through the eye of western civilization) The end of the Dark Ages, The Norman Conquest, Feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Inquisition, Henry the VIII, Elizabeth the First, The storm swept sinking of the Spanish Armada, Shakespeare, the Age of Exploration, Early colonialism and the West with its associated continent assumptive plunder, Mercantilism, Political Economy, The Birth of the United States, Slavery, The Industrial Revolution, The Cotton Gin, Napoleon, Tecumseh, the USA’s early Indian wars, Andrew Jackson, The Trail of Tears, The Forty Niners, John Brown, The Civil War, Horace Greeley’s Western Territorial Expansion, The Race of the Railroads across the continent, The Robber Barons, the Klondike Gold Rush, Booms and Busts, Panics and Crashes, William Randolph Hearst and the Yellow Press, The First World War, Edward Bernays, The Great Depression, World War II, The Atomic Bomb, The Fifties, The Sixties, Assassinations, The Fall of the Berlin Wall, Assorted US Instigated Coups, Bill Clinton’s de-industrializing end to America’s Moment In The Sun, Ross Perot’s Giant Sucking Sound… And the entire human psychotic mess of creativity, mendacity and theft of past millennia behind.
Not to mention what had transpired in the rest of the world… The East, and South, the underdeveloped third world that occupied the do-gooders of the sixties, China, India… No longer 3rd, these regions of the world were rising. The new millennium was going to belong to them. The USA’s tools, the IMF and The World Bank, would not be able to force debt on the rest of the world forever. It seemed inevitable that at some point, Austerity would rise up and slap the USA for its presumptive view that the USA was and must remain ‘the world’s essential nation’ with its dollar the World’s remaining reserve currency for the 21’st century…too! Or so Americans believed…
The year 2000, the start of a new millennium in human history, is also an election year in the USA, And the most powerful nation the world has ever known, according to the advertising, is about to have an extreme boondoggle of an election that brings in the supreme court, hanging chads, and deep chicanery, and victory for the compassionate conservative George W Bush, who will receive fewer votes than his opponent, and who will soon be stuffing socks in his pants and strutting about, attacking Iraq, and then declaring victory for a war the USA will lose almost twenty years later.
In 2000, few Americans see through the picture to the reality of their nation. And only a very few sense the future of lost freedoms, homeland security, and war that will arrive with 9-11.. Francis Fukiyama has recently written The End of History. Celebrating… That The United States is the only Super Power… Empire Drums Beat out commands for the world. China is not considered a threat. It is still an economy that the USA believes it can control, manipulate and plunder because of USA demand. The American People believe that the USA is number 1… invincible.
At the dawn of the new millennium thoughts of mendacity and war, preeminence and profit fill the head the coming new Vice President, Dick Cheney, as he manages George W Bush, the ‘compassionate conservative’ candidate for president’s campaign while searching for the perfect vice president who will turn out to be Himself…Dick Cheney! But that is another story, and a horror story at that.
Yikes, if you thought about it. Few did…
For most it was just another January, cold with snow, as the Y2-K2 problem arrived and then departed, and nothing happened… Just another bit of news… Noise skat marking the news trail… like the dung of animals in the forest. As computers, data centers, banking, and the whole shebang of electronic America continued unabated as before, despite two years of dire warnings.
January 1st and Happy New Year, with the new millennia and the past ignored by most, and certainly most in Beauville…work continued on Chateau Daphne… Secure in funding and without a client’s rush… So far so good… ‘Let’s finish her!’
The short cold days of January had little impact on the men working on the new house on the ‘Pointe’, except for the dark on the way to work, and dusk on the way home. Life was shorter, people slept more, and the daylight hours were consumed by labor, as fires roared up the mansion’s Chimneys, as new furnaces fired, and fans forced air, and boilers heated, their pumps combined with valves throughout the house, alerted by thermostats to send heat… Hot liquid glycol, into zones that heat the many rooms where concrete and light-crete slabs, containing plastic tubing, then spread and radiate the heat throughout the thermal mass… Eventually heating air and objects, people, with heat rising from the floor. Wilson referred to his heating systems as hybrid… because he was reluctant to place heat underneath hardwood floors, for fear of winter shrinkage, instead using forced air in the vast hardwood expanses of his homes, which also allowed for summer (once unnecessary, it was the North or had been) air conditioning.
Not yet installed, in waiting for the end of January, the hard wood slats were stickered, bundled as shipped, all about the great room for acclimation, to be installed in late January - early February during the lower humidity of a Northern Michigan winter… When the humidity was thirty percent instead of the fifty to one hundred percent that would arrive in summer and might cause a hardwood floor to expand and buckle (where insufficient provision was allowed for expansion) waiting to shrink again the following winter.
During summer, expansion was inevitable, and Wilson had found that the best plan was to lay a floor tight in winter, glued direct to the underlayment with construction adhesive, with expansions slots available specific for a floor’s summer movement… Producing a floor as tight as possible with its seasonal expansion/contraction mitigated by voids at the bottom of the drywall and other added wall coverings… Everything moves, including houses.
(On an Abernathy project, all walls and ceilings received 5/8” drywall, regardless of the final surface, paint, paper or paneling, except in areas of tile or marble, or potential damp. Then the drywall was replaced by wonder board, a cement board impervious to rot or damp decay… And in areas of final marble, where there was sometimes mesh and troweled concrete, instead of wonder board and thinset epoxy.)
This January, unlike the previous year with Tim Steven’s death and the following job closure with its flapping Tyvek limbo, it is toasty in Chateau Daphne. Warm, comfortable and sometimes surreal, as the contrast of inside out and outside in asserts across the large expanses of Great Room glass. Where on one side it is warm and toasty, and on the other it is cold and calm, or cold with wind and blizzard buffeting the glass… Carpenters high on ladders and on scaffolds, stripped down to t-shirts, sweaty, working on the molding, the false ceiling beams and braces and adorning trim… Their heads close to the ceiling, where the temperatures are eighty and sometimes ninety… only feet and inches away from the flexing glass holding back the outside snow and blizzard … Dripping sweat and calm inside… Howling blizzard out… Inches away… Surreal…
Unlike the previous year, no one suffers from frozen fingers, unless forced outside for some short and necessary task. It is certain Chateau Daphne will now be permanent… From top to bottom, where at its base, the catacomb wine-room emerges with the mason’s troweled mud and plaster, inlaid stone and brick, to form false vaults and ceiling.
The mason’s mud and odor damp drifts upward, climbing the stair, then past the unfinished kitchen, rising up to the Great room’s twenty-one-foot ceiling, where the humidity level approaches that of a Greenhouse. Here, this mid-January 2000, with sweat dripping from their chins, the air from the risen heat hot about their heads, inches from the ceiling and inches away from a howling gale and a blizzard’s swirling snow so dense that all outside is white, and the cedars, pines, and patio, either dark shadows or invisible, Dick and Randy work atop a scaffold assembling their best version of ceiling-horizontal, busy-busy, fabricating false beams that will border rectangles that will, when finished, shadow and define the great room ceiling, with can lights centered and in larger rectangular expanses equally spaced, dependent on layout… Their craftsmanship is unnecessary, but for principle and perfection’s sake, because the inverted hollow beams were twenty-one feet off the floor, where no one but the bugs would see them… except where the trimmed beams are visible from the crossway bridge, connecting 2nd floor South to North.
The two men, unable to conceive of building sloppy, even if only those changing light bulbs or removing spider webs will ever see their craftsmanship, have spun sideways for a break, and are speaking to one another… Meaning Randy is telling a silent Dick, “You’re the man now Dick, The man. The Chippewa’s Flim-Flam Man… A Flammer… what’s that like?”
Dick grunts. “The dog did it. If it weren’t for that mut dropping that old head at Bloom’s feet last year, none of this would have happened. I would not have stripped the shed. I would not have buried the trash in the water line… And no one would have ever been fooled by Grandad’s… Or Dad’s history.”
“Good work,” says Randy.
“It wasn’t work. It was an accident,” says Dick. “The Great Spirit, can’t you hear his laughter?” Dick smiles at Randy.
“You’re the man now, Dick… I cannot believe it…You! Part of the committees, future seats on the boards. Damn, Dick, you’re movin’ on up. Randy hums.
“Stop it,” replies Dick. “Just stop it!”
“Move-in on up,” repeats Randy. Up, up, up. How’s that girlfriend…”
“It’s me, not her,” says Dick. “But you know, Randy….”
Below, Wilson has noticed the chatting and the morning’s small progress. He shouts up at them,
“Chat at break, no talking.”
Both men scowl down. “Right,” shouts Dick as he and Randy ignore Wilson... Wilson sighing, wishing he had said nothing, and moving on to check on details lower to the ground. He does not need to climb up and examine Dick's or Randy’s work. Though some late evening alone, he likely will.
Chateau Daphne is filled with activity. In some areas, men still frame and alter…fix. In others, drywall and its finish, continues. In the many bathrooms… Above the heated slabs, tile and marble men have shut off the heat so it will not be too hot for marble, mud and epoxy setting. And up high, there are others following Dick and Randy with additional layers of trim installed across the great room’s busy ceiling. It Is ‘old saddle’ trim time and the same and similar crown molding installation is ongoing everywhere except for utility rooms throughout the house…This to be followed by head and base blocks and a three-part detailed base board.
As usual, Randy is jabbering and Dick is working while occasionally paying attention when Randy’s jabber becomes too annoying. Like now.
“You know, Randy, I’m going to build that new house. I am going to ask Wilson for that plan. I have a woman… Randy!” Dick’s face twists, half smiling, a loopy expression spreading out and up from the corner of his mouth, meeting eyes that say he does not believe it. And he doesn’t…but ever since that Honey Darling… what could he say… If wishes were horses, then beggars would… “And I’m riding… Randy…Me.”
During the bitter cold that descended on January and the new Millenia, Daphne and the Master Mind II became cold, then colder… Too cold, and too much of an adventure, as the romance faded and Daphne’s plan to live aboard until she could move into her finished house became unrealistic. The yacht, tightly closed because of winter, developed odors from the chemicals in the holding tanks. Its fiberglass walls became wet with condensation, with the built up moisture fogging the windows, dripping and freezing, creating jack frost patterns on their surfaces. The freezing and thawing and the early winter rains causing leaks to occur where fittings fastened, a result of expanding and contracting ice.
A bucket here… A slip and crash there, when Daphne, who still drank, but less, imbibed too much.
Outside, winter bubblers prevented The Master Mind’s hull from crushing. But, as the main dock and side slip entry access became treacherous, causing Daphne to slip, and to imagine, slipping and plunging into the frozen water. While shivering in her (not in winter) live aboard luxury, her olfactories filled with chemical holding tank additive poop retardants, Daphne decided she needed somewhere else to live.
With her condominium sold, her first thought gazing upward at her new home, near completion on the outside, was of living in the garage apartment (Wilson’s project space) while it was finished. This would have been a nightmare for Wilson and everyone else… Something Daphne did not think about as she left the early morning gloom behind her, entering her home’s light and heat, removing her hood and jacket, her gloves and scarf, and stamping her boots upon the floor, with some workmen noticing and others ignoring, most oblivious and one shouting “Watch it!” as he spun a board sideways-vertical at head height, sending it skyward up to Dean and Randy, beneath the ceiling.
“The Master minds dripping. I need a different place to live. I thought, admiring my new house from the marina. Why not there? Why not? How soon will the apartment above the garage be finished?”
The thought of this sent Wilson into Daphne-shock. At first, he was not sure what to say. But then he replied. “No, it won’t work. Don’t think about it. It is a bad idea!.. Until the building is finished… Until all that needs happening is the necessary touch ups that I have discovered are completed and the ones you will discover once your living in the house are adjusted… fixed.” Repeating for emphasis… “No, it’s a bad idea until everything is finished!... You might like it, but the distraction will be too great for the workmen. They will work more cautious, slower, some will want to chat instead of working. You would become a hindrance to your home’s completion. You should rent a place for a few months… If the boat has become burdensome… unpleasant… dangerous?”
So Daphne went searching for a place in town. And while looking she moved into a small suite overlooking the bridge, a summer condo set-up, rented out by the week for winter, located in the Wink & Nod condominium hotel, a Burtelsby attempt at old that failed and leaked almost as much as her boat was leaking… (And would, until she had the Master Mind II’s fittings recaulked in springtime)
As for the Burtelsby building… It was hopeless, as The Wink and Nod proved unsuitable and unlike the representations in the summer brochure photo, with drapes unfurled, tumbling to a breeze and bright sun penetrating. Her rooms were cold and random hot… the temperature varied. She experienced areas of two hot next to heaters, and too cold elsewhere, where overwhelming damp cold concrete condensed dark with mold smudging and snaking its corners, A result of The Wink and Nods poorly designed and installed indoor pool, which without enough ventilation and enclosure produced too-too much humidity.
Adding to this, there was the social side of things as Daphne soon learned that her new digs were unpleasant on the weekends, when a quiet Beauville winter main street switched gears to becoming noisy weekend main drag Beauville, as the village filled with skiers… Outside her windowed balcony and down the street, late into the night, drunken inebriates from the up for some weekend skiing and downstate escape crowd, having one last round, finishing off at the channel bar.
Adding to this, she found the clanging bells annoying when the bridge, while charming for the bundled tourist, opened and closed for the small ice breaker keeping the channel open, west toward Lake Michigan and east towards Lake Arnaud. Clang, clang, clanging until boat traffic ceased with the ferry’s last excursion, the time variable depending on the year, and weather, and the possibility of a Titanic iceberg moment.
Complaining, Daphne had mentioned her unsuitable accommodations to Janet Wainwright one evening in late January as Daphne provided another tour of her home, explaining progress, the women discussing plans for summer in a half-lit Chateau Daphne filled with the finishing odors of epoxies, sawdust and oil paint… whistling here and there as night descended… where caulk was still required, or an exterior hole and vent remained unsealed.
As the two women conversed and gazed out at the silent empty marina with its dock lighting unsuitable for navigating winter’s piles of ice and snow, the Master Mind solitary, and out of place, glowing in the expanding dark. Janet said “I have an idea” and then she had suggested that the closed up North wing of Deer Haven might be suitable until Wilson finished Chateau Daphne’s guest apartment.
The North wing…With its southern corner and main room, a part of Deer Haven that had met the Pumpkin Fire and was now re-insulated and weather tight, but too expensive for Janet to heat…1000 square feet explained away as unheated and too much, unnecessary for her and Conrad, who were this year cocooned by a rare winter spent at Deer Haven, the result of belt tightening from the recent, still expanding, economic smash-up.
“It would be perfect and private for you, if you don’t mind sharing the kitchen and the wanderings of my occasional besotted Conrad… Plug in a hotplate, bring your coffee pot. You will need to chip in for the added electricity. We are stretched this year.”
“I understand.”
“Why don’t you spend the night with us? You can examine in the morning.”
Daphne never went back to the Blink and Nod except to collect her things. And along the way, she found a new/old piano for her new house.
At the far end of the North wing, covered in a dust cloth, and down the hallway from her heated areas, separated by another hallway and two doors… unplayed forever, but still shiny beneath its cloth, there was a Bosendorfer. When questioned about “another piano”. Janet had said, “Oh that, Cathlene left it to me in her will. It was in her cottage in the club. I haven’t played it in years. It came from the Music school, I think. Why don’t we move it into your new house, temporary or you may have it. Cathy won’t mind…” and laughing. “We’ll see it’s tuned and serviced. It’s a good piano.” And it was… And Daphne paid for it.
Then the women waited for a sunny day to bother Wilson, who shrugged this assignment off as just one more hassle, sending Dean and Ron headed out in a late cold January am to disassemble and load the instrument into Deans truck, and hall it back to Daphneyland. This occurred with only a few mishaps… the piano legless sliding towards the water stopped by a small cedar, and a sideways tipping, almost crashed, slipping, sliding, plunging from the landscaped stone stair disaster, saved by Deans braced back before it happened, and Ron running inside to find additional help to save Dean’s back, before it broke.
Saved, undamaged… less so Dean, The Bosendorfer was reassembled in the living room of Chateau Daphne accompanied by grumbling from the workmen, carpenters and painters, who would now need to cover the ‘Damn Thing’ and move it about as the floors were installed, and finishing continued for the rest of the project… One more owner’s silliness. A Fucking Piano!
And more than that. Because after the piano had been tuned, on occasional afternoons Janet and Conrad and whoever might be about, wandered next door to visit Janet’s new acquaintance, now friend, Daphne …Just next door, ‘The Wonder on the Pointe’… “You’ve got to see it.” … And these visits, Daphne’s notoriety, “her pluck” and her “resistance” as Janet put it, extended the process of embedding Daphne deeper into Beauville, its rumor mill, fabric and reality. Society, adding to the Daphne of the Point… the White Deer legend?… Janet manipulating the piano, and the few men still post work lingering departing as soon as possible with no appreciation or desire to listen to Janet’s Bosendorfer banging. At Chateau Daphne ‘Classical Wainwright’ could clear out the locker room with ease.
“It is because they lack exposure,” said Janet one afternoon. “Remember those Leonard Bernstein concerts? I shall teach your workers… Your Team…’My Team’, as Cortland called them… Awareness…
“Such a good idea you had… Moving the piano… Daphne. And getting rid of Cortland, too!”
And a sign went up without Wilson’s approval. Thursday,
‘Quit work early. Free concerts for my Team… With Janet Wainwright, as available. DAPHNE… This week, Beethoven. Next week… Bach and Berlioz… Saint Seans… Charpentier. For Easter, Faure’.’
“I am going to need to practice,” said Janet.
“Who are they, who’s singing,” said the men working on Chateau Daphne as they read this notice…. Who?... a few of them recognizing Bach from church and Beethoven from high school… But many thinking country tunes, and finding no Berlioz or Beethoven, Saint Seans or Charpentier, country rocking or nasal laments anywhere… Nothing like the tunes they listened to on their work commutes past woods and water. ‘America Great… Betraying Woman… Floozy’s, Drunks, Me, me, me… It was the whiskey…young men, young women, screeching of life’s pain, before they’ve known it.
It was Randy who asked Wilson. “Is this necessary... required? Are we paid if we leave?” With Wilson shaking his head, saying, “No and yes, your task is finishing the house, not listening to Wainwright. But you might enjoy it. She’s a sight, hammering on a piano.” And Randy already knew this. It was impossible not to if one had lived in Beauville long.
After the first bars of the Moonlight Sonata, most of Daphne’s ‘team’ left, and this ended the music instruction lectures, with Janet finishing to open spaces and tolerant friends. But her piano playing continued until her house was finished. Every so often, unscheduled, when the mood hit her, usually in the afternoon, for anyone who cared to listen. And this was fine with her ‘team’ because as soon as the notes began, her team departed, a chance to quit early, probably get paid, race off to MacGuilties and have an extra shot or two as the increasing winter light nudges and tugs at spring… A symbiosis, but not the instructive or show off symbiosis Daphne and Janet had intended.
Never the less, within a few weeks Janet was back in the saddle, and not the one for her horse, playing first show tunes, and after these folk songs, Joe Hill, Peter Paul and Mary… The Beatles…Joanie Mitchell. And a surprise to all, a few days later if you had walked into Chateau Daphne you would have met the Blues, Showboat and Old Man River, and the workers of ‘Team Daphne’ surprised to hear Janet Wainright’s mournful howls merging into the occasional shriek, a few of them remained for a time sipping afternoon beer, as Janet Wainright moved lower, like an old cello, slowly singing of ‘the blues in her belly’.
A few days later it was Brubeck Jazz, and some of Team Daphne clapping. The approved selections were noted. Plans were made for a late spring concert with the Janet Wainwright and the assembled ladies of the ‘pumpkin patch’, aka ‘fire crackers’, instruments and chorus for an “It’s finally finished party.” … And… Once again there was a deadline… Janet and Daphne, selecting then suggesting the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. ‘An event for Beauvillians’… winter and summer and all year round. Before the tourist came…
Remembering her assignments and the enthusiasm for Beauville, and the reporting on Daphne and the Crash the previous August, Janet contacted CNN who in an election year had lost its enthusiasm for Beauville, no longer regarding Beauville newsworthy (15 minutes) any longer, Unless she could manage… Bush, running as the peace through strength President, and Al Gore running as the inventor of the internet, as the .com boom evaporated. Appearing on her Beauville stage… And this was Not Happening!
Bush and Gore… Two frauds… Neither of whom would be visiting Beauville…Ever!