AUGUST 16, 2023 – About three weeks later, I boarded Amtrak in St. Paul, bound for Penn Station in New York City. It was during my aerophobic phase. I had to fly a fair amount on my job, and for crying out loud, I’d had to fly many times during all the years I’d been away at school. There was my global odyssey in 1981 involving all kinds of long-distance flights, many of them to and from remote regions of the world. I’d flown to Utah and Colorado numerous times on ski trips, to Florida every year to visit my in-laws but still, despite all the time in the air, or maybe because of it, I had developed a debilitating fear of flying. On the occasion of serving as family emissary to Rutherford, I simply could not get myself on an airplane.[1]
At any rate, the long train trip gave me ample time to ponder what I would encounter at my destination. What I didn’t then appreciate was how much I’d need the return train trip to decompress, to digest, to deal with everything I would encounter out East, particularly the revelation that Cliff couldn’t tell me over the phone.
I arrived in New York late the next day and stayed overnight at Jenny and Garrison’s Upper West Side apartment. The next morning I rose early, found my way down to the Port Authority Terminal and caught a bus over to Rutherford. I was fully prepared, I thought, for my purpose—a mission to assess, suggest, cajole, and what else, I wasn’t sure.
I alighted from the bus on Orient Way and hiked up Highland Cross, my usual approach to the Holman Corner. I walked in trepidation of my reaction to the charred remains of what once was a showcase mansion. Through the leaves of late summer, the big gray, coarsely stucco fortress appeared. The third floor was all but gone. Only remnants of the dormers remained, and over the stub-ends of charred rafters, a hodge-podge of blue tarps waved in the breeze. In place of second story windows were large sheets of plywood. I walked slowly past and around the corner of the commercial buildings to Cliff’s store.
“Eric, what’s happenin’!”
“Great to see you, Cliff.”
“Wow, am I glad to see you!”
We had barely exchanged greetings, when UB himself appeared. He was in an ebullient mood and greeted me with a broad smile, twinkling eyes and a hearty handshake.
“Hi, Uncle Bruce!”
“We’re recovering,” he said, dispensing with any kind of normal greeting.
“You’re sure looking great,” I said. He did look remarkably well.
“But the house ain’t lookin’ so great.” Cliff laughed from behind the counter. After a some light conversation about my trip out to New Jersey, Cliff asked, “Bruce, you gonna take Eric on a tour of the house—or rather, what’s left of it?”
“Yeah, okay,” said UB abruptly, heading straight for the door. I followed him out onto the sidewalk and around the corner. UB led me into the “billiard room” entrance, which was lightly barricaded by old metal contraptions and an orange sign on the door that the borough inspector had placed there to warn against the dangers that lurked inside. Just inside the doorway was an enormous pile of trash, mostly papers, five feet high and 25 in diameter. The room itself had sustained very little damage . . . from the fire, that is—UB had ruined the once elegant room years before when he installed a cheap, ugly, “dropped ceiling” made of acoustical tiles to hide the original high, coved ceiling. We then proceeded into the dining room, and from that point forward, as I had anticipated, I experienced various emotions, from sadness to extreme sorrow, to horror and finally, anger.
On the first floor, there had been no smoke, no heat, no fire, only cascading water, washing away, as it were, all the contents, which, I would later learn from Cliff, had been scooped up, shoveled out, and thrown into one big dumpster after another. Like a long-abandoned, very haunted house, the once grand abode stood silent, vacant.
It was the first time, of course, I had ever seen the house empty and the first time I had ever imagined it so. Thirty years before, the many grand rooms of the house had begun a decline into unkempt living and storage—mostly storage—areas. Seven years later, the dining room was a lost cause, and the front parlor was not far behind. Only the library and the hallway were in some kind of presentable order. Another eight years and trash had filled every square foot of floor space in the parlor, which UB had taken over as his first floor domain. Just two years more and the rubbish in the parlor was four feet high. Another year and the parlor was such a sight to behold, any description would have been met with pure disbelief.
Ironically, untouched by time and the fire was UB’s sign in the first floor powder room—small but attractive quarters back in its day. Hung above a grungy hand towel was an angry message, posted years before for the benefit of caregivers when Gaga was alive. Written forcefully with a black Magic Marker going dry, the dictate read, “UNLESS YOUR NAME IS BRUCE, HANDS OFF THIS TOWEL!”
No one knew how the house had appeared just before the fire, five weeks before my visit: no one but UB, for no one besides him—not even Cliff—had ever been allowed into the house since Gaga’s death.
I surveyed the damage. The thick, solid mahogany of the dining room had been heavily bleached by cascading water. The Tiffany lamps, the French tapestry—all completely wrecked. The heavy, mahogany pocket doors with bright, decorative brass plates between the panes—hopelessly swollen into the walls. The oak parquet floors—buckled badly every which way. All was bleached, stained, wrecked and ruined. Like a murdered soul that becomes an apparition to haunt the living, the once elegant rooms of the first floor of the house cried out in pain and sorrow. I heard the voices of my great-grandparents, George B. Holman and Ethelyn Huntley Holman, who had built this castle grand, who had elegant taste and high regard for that which was fine and refined. What now would they think? I wondered.
We ascended the mahogany stairs at the center of the house opposite the entrance. These too had been a statement of style and craftsmanship, until, of course, UB carpeted them and later bolted over them, the two inclinators for Gaga. (For the same cost, an elevator could have been installed where the servant’s stairs were.) Now the stairs were utterly ruined and covered with thin layers of mildew. Each step I took, up the first flight, across the landing and up the second flight, pulled my sorrow ever deeper, until I reached the second floor. There I found the aftermath of smoke and flame.
UB led me into his bedroom where the disaster had ignited. Ironic, I thought, that it took a four-alarm blaze to give any of us entry to a room that no one had been permitted to see since time immemorial. Here charred timbers gave testimony to the appetite of fire. With our eyes we followed the blackened path of the blaze, along the ceiling, out the door, across the open center area—tongues of flame reaching into each of the other rooms until it found a draft—and the staircase leading to the third floor.
We walked up the long flight to what had been the third floor. There is where the fire had danced and partied until extinguished by high-powered hoses. Nearly all the roof was gone, and most of the interior walls as well. Broken slates lay scattered across the floor, and charred remains of rafters poked up into the sky like mutilated limbs reaching out in distress.
About this time, a voice from the stairwell called out to UB. “Hello . . . Frank [not his real name]?” UB yelled back. I recognized the name from the latest telephone conversation I’d had with UB before I’d left Minnesota.
“Yeah, Bruce, it’s me,” the man answered, as he emerged from the stairwell. He looked like an old-fashioned nightclub owner—slick, complete with a prominent gold necklace. My defenses were up. “ I gotta have another look here. You yourself gotta know that to represent your interests I have to have a good feel for da damage.”
“I’m glad you’re looking out for our interests,” UB said, much too cheerfully, I thought. “Frank, I’d like you to meet my nephew from Minnesota—Eric.”
Out of civil habit, I shook hands and looked him in the eyes, which, I noticed, were slightly crossed. “Glad to meet you. Minn-ah-SOTA, heh?” By the way he pronounced my home state, I could tell it wasn’t a household name for him.
He was a blowhard know-it-all from the get-go, and I was surprised that UB, usually distrustful of outsiders, was so friendly toward him. Everything Frank said was prefaced with, “I don’t have to tell you,” or “You know as well as I do,” or “We both know.” I was then informed that Frank was the “public adjuster” who apparently had foisted himself onto UB’s misfortune ostensibly to represent UB in the process of collecting insurance money.
“I don’t have to tell you that these insurance companies are all about playing a game,” said Frank. “ That’s where I come in. I know how to play the game—I’ve been playin’ it for 27 years now.”
“Hmmm, huh,” murmured UB, adding a surprising “Wow!” at the end.
“And what’s your take?” I asked Frank.
“My fee? Just 8 percent.”
“Eight percent of the claim payout?”
“Yeah. That’s a steal now, because we both know your uncle is going to do a lot better this way than if he had to deal with those insurance guys alone. And remember—Eric? Is that the name?”
“Yes, Eric,”
“Remember that this is New Jersey.”
By this point, I liked Frank even less. I wanted to be rid of him but UB asked another question. “With fall coming fast, then winter—how long do think it will take for the renovation to be completed?”
“That depends on a lot of things,” said Frank. “For instance, settling the insurance claim, how long it takes to get bids, and how much you’re willing to pay the inspector.”
The last item stuck in my ear. “What do you mean, ‘pay the inspector?’” I asked.
“Well, you know, if you pay the regular fee, it will take the inspector whatever time it takes him to get out here, do the paperwork, and write the permit. But if you pay him a little extra, we can move the timing up.”
I was dumbfounded. Frank was right. This was New Jersey, not Minnesota.
Just then, another character appeared. UB introduced him as “Duane [not his real name, either], the builder recommended by Frank, and whom UB had hired to clean out all the debris after the fire, and possibly to reconstruct the roof of the house. “Duane” was the opposite of Frank—soft-spoken and not one to dress for success. I couldn’t make much of an assessment of his abilities, but it didn’t help his cause any that he had been recommended by Frank.
The four of us then toured the house together. When it came to the mahogany, Frank favored the crowbar approach. Duane’s suggestions were less radical, but in the end, he assigned little chance to the success of an attempt to salvage it. I knew better than to be surprised, but that didn’t diminish my disappointment.
After the tour, we gathered in the driveway on the west side of the house, where Duane presented a roof shingle display. It featured a high-end, fiberglass, imitation slate shingle, which seemed to be a reasonable alternative to the costly slate that had covered the destroyed roof. The proposed color was “Colonial Gray.” UB offered no negative reaction, which surprised me, since he was reliably contrarian. However, after the group’s express consensus seemed to be, “Yeah, looks great,” UB mumbled, “How about red? I think red looks good.” At once the rest of us threw cold water on that idea, just as the firemen had flooded the flames. UB offered no resistance, but I knew his color preference wasn’t a dead idea.
As we migrated around to the main driveway, the strangest thing occurred. In Duane’s presence, Frank said to me, “Say, can I talk to you for a minute?” We edged away from Duane and UB to obtain some privacy, whereupon Frank twisted up his mouth so that his words would have to squeeze through an opening to one side. “Say, you should probably get another bid, just to make sure this guy [Duane] is on the up and up, you know what I mean? Just a suggestion, but I’m here to look after your interests. You know that.”
Frank’s job was to get the most he could out of the insurance company. When it came to retaining a contractor, however, I didn’t know how it was that Mr. Nightclub Owner was “looking out for our interests.” No one works for free, I thought, and somewhere, somehow, Frank stands to make a buck from all of this—a hidden buck, perhaps, like a kickback of some sort, but a buck nonetheless. And why would Frank suggest another bid if Duane was, in fact, Frank’s man unless it were all a set-up . . . (Cont.)
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] The fear of flying had long-gripped my sisters, particularly Nina and Jenny. Jenny went so far as to enroll in a Northwest Airlines course to help allay her fear of flying. It had marginal effect. Gaga absolutely refused to fly, though she had ample opportunity to do so, given Grandpa’s long-distance convention circuit. (She either stayed home or they drove in the case of at venues along the Eastern Seaboard.) I do believe UB himself had also developed a degree of wariness about flying. Was it the fear gene—or was it an over-active imagination that some of us had in common? Grandpa flew as often as a bird and never gave it a second thought. Mother never hesitated to jump on a plane to visit New Jersey—or to fly back to Minnesota when she’d had enough of New Jersey. I do remember an occasion at the airport, however, when my parents were seeing me off to school, and a DC-10, the latest new airliner, taxied past the gate. Mother—the former aeronautical engineer—muttered almost to herself, “Now that airplane is not meant to fly.” In any event, somehow I’ve since managed to conquer my fear of flying. So have my sisters.
