On the southwest corner of Broad and Buttonwood Streets in Mount Holly, New Jersey, there looms a three-story Queen Anne. The base of the house is ringed with bricks painted beet red, interspersed with windows staring with dusty faces at the untended mulch. The columns supporting the wrap-around front porch as well as the smaller side porch are carrot orange and spinach green. The first two stories of the facade are squash yellow, while the third story features more of that orange. In short, the house at 48 Broad Street is the colossal hybrid of all the vegetables you never liked.
Those third-story windows are framed by gables so steep they should be against the law. Above them, on the roof proper, a trio of bony chimneys jut from the landscape of those lethal slopes. When you spot those chimneys from the sidewalk, it almost seems like they defy physics by not sliding off. Even if they did, it wouldn’t make a difference, for all three of the chimneys lead down to bogus fireplaces. Where the fireplaces should be are instead big square spaces of plastic brick facades.
Indeed, if you were wondering if there existed a physical manifestation of patience, obstinacy, and mischief, the house at 48 Broad would be your answer. It possesses all of those traits in abundance with the square footage to match. A tall leafy tree stands squarely in front of the house and stretches just a tad higher than the highest eave. But the house couldn’t care less. First of all, the tree’s colors actually compliment the house’s complexion in the fall, and in the winter, when the tree is only a skeleton of its normal self, the house endures. It provides at all times what that tree could only provide, at best, a few months out of the year: shelter. The house also knows that when it’s time for one of them to go, it’ll be the tree. You see, there used to be a tree just as big at the side of the house, the Buttonwood side. And then, on a sleepy August Sunday, a hurricane blew through. The winds uprooted the tree and toppled it, not into the house, but into the street. Eventually the tree had to be removed, and the part of the sidewalk torn open by the roots had to be repaved. The house? It wasn’t fazed.
In the spring of 1986, when the story collection called 48 Broad takes place, there lived a motley brood of nine called Roggebusch. Actually, some were Roggebusches, others were Petersons, and yet more were Roggebusches who used to be Woodses. More on them in separate posts.
By now I’m sure you’re dying to know what it was like inside this place. In future posts I’ll delve into more detail on each room, but here’s an overview. Let’s start with the third floor since that’s where a lot of fascinating shit tends to go down. This floor features three bedrooms and a large carpeted bathroom, plus a few small doors leading into the underside of the roof. At the northeastern corner you’ve got the blue room. When I say blue room, I mean blue from top to bottom. The ceiling, walls, shag carpet, all sky blue. This is where the story collection’s main character, Barry Roggebusch, sleeps. This is also the room haunted (in a good way) by the ghost of Bunny Stringfellow, the child prodigy violin player who was a student here a century ago, when this place was a music school.
Directly across from this room is a bedroom that’s not very remarkable. Like most of the third floor, this room has tan walls with a hard coffee brown carpet. See what I mean about that blue room? It really stands out. And actually, there is one neat little thing about the opposite bedroom: One of its two closets is actually not a closet but a space beneath that proverbial roof.
Between these two rooms is a narrow alcove leading to a window facing north, overlooking Broad Street and facing that tree head on. I can’t think of a time when anyone actually walked into this alcove to take in the view (or lack thereof).
Working our way down the hall toward the south end of the floor, there’s another bedroom quite like that previous one. Right outside the hall of that room is another little roof door. This end of the third floor is the part of the house most susceptible to the noises of whatever lives inside the roof. No one is ever sure if it’s squirrels, raccoons, what. They don’t know. All they know is, sometimes they hear something(s) scampering around up there. Also right outside this room is an alcove with a window overlooking Buttonwood Street. A desk takes up most of this space, but not many people use it. For the most part it’s a repository for unwanted miscellany.
Finally, we reach the south end of the third floor with the great bathroom. Featuring plush tan carpeting, this bathroom’s got everything: Shower stall that doubles as a steam room, Jacuzzi bathtub, double sinks, the works. Oh yeah, and a small fridge for beers. Next to the toilet is yet another small door opening into the roof. No one ever opens it.
The only catch with the third floor is the complete lack of insulation. That means the temperature up here is going to be pretty close to whatever the temperature is outside. Summers can turn the third floor so sweltering that the only solution is to set a fan to full blast at the foot of your bed. Even Bunny sweats if it’s hot enough, so what does that tell you? And the winters? They give Pluto a bad name. When you step out of that steam room shower, all dripping wet, you may as well be stepping into a meat locker. You can’t dry yourself fast enough, for it’s the only effective way to warm up before you bolt for the little oscillating space heater in your room. There are radiators on the third floor, but they don’t work. The hot water that pumps up from the basement into the first and second floor radiators doesn’t quite make it to the third floor. For whatever reason, this problem never gets fixed.
Now let’s head down the stairs, shall we? While walking down from the third to the second floor, you’re heading toward the north end of the house, the same end whence I began my description of the third floor. So I’ll begin the second floor tour accordingly. As soon as you reach the bottom of the stairs, you won’t help but notice yet another desk that no one uses except to store shit on, set up against the Broad Street-facing window right in front of you which, like the window right above you, no one ever takes advantage of. This window isn’t in a skinny alcove or anything. It just has a desk piled with stuff which, in addition to that tree, would sap most people of the desire to look through it.
While standing at the bottom of the stairs, to your immediate right is another bedroom in the same manner as the second two described above. That is, sometimes it’s been a bedroom. At other times it’s been a TV room or a music room. It depends what year we’re talking about, but in the spring of ’86, it was a bedroom. And even if you’re a natural shut-in, you can’t help but enjoy the view here. This room features four windows facing Broad, plus another facing Buttonwood.
Okay, let’s head down the hall. No doubt everyone in the house will hear you when you do so. Why? Whereas the third floor is carpeted, albeit thinly, the second floor hallway is all wooden floorboards. The Roggebusches did not restore or reinforce these floorboards in any way when they moved in, so they groan and creak with perfect complacency. As you head down, you’ll’ve barely passed the third-floor stairway to your left when you come to another bedroom. This isn’t carpeted, but there is a rug taking up most of the room, with a wooden floorboard border on all sides. It has two windows facing Broad, plus a window facing the house next door to the immediate west. This last window leads out to a flat roof that wraps around to the front of the house. A few of the more vain Roggebusch siblings utilize this to sunbathe. That house next door, by the way, is occupied by an elderly bald guy whom the Roggebusches began referring to as Boss Hog their first night here. Perhaps a more accurate moniker would’ve been Boss Cat, as this guy hordes dozens of them. A few of the Roggebusches eventually faced up to climbing into one of this guy’s first floor windows and found that pretty much the entire floor was being used a giant litter box.
Getting to the next bedroom would require walking almost the entire southern half of the house, and you’d still have the master bed and bath after that. Before we reach that area, let’s stop right next to this second bedroom where you’ll find a rather large wardrobe closet. It’s got two more windows facing Boss Hog’s place, one straight ahead as you enter, plus another down a side nook to the immediate left. If the second floor hallway groans under your feet, the wardrobe floor all but growls. The boards in this room are of a lighter color and drier texture. Add to that the walls that seem to hug you whenever you walk in, and only hug you tighter the more you dawdle over your choice of garb. Actually, the only person who utilizes the wardrobe for her clothing is Faith, the step/mother of the household. Otherwise, only Barry uses the wardrobe to have some privacy for when he calls his mom on Sunday evenings.
Okay. Now down to the other end of the floor, past the stairs leading to the first floor, past all the books and the degrees hanging on the wall, and we arrive at the last room before the master suite. This room is used by two people. First you’ve got Frank, the patriarch of the household, using it as his home office for the consulting work he does for the Department of Energy. Then you’ve got the room’s permanent inhabitant: Baltimore the finch. Baltimore resides in his own little three-story wooden cage over on the far side of the room, facing Boss Hog’s place. The cats across the way naturally go nuts whenever they spy Baltimore through the opposite windows. If not for the windows and the whole cage thing, they could leap across and gobble up Baltimore without shedding a single fur ball.
Separating the so-called master suite from the rest of the second floor is a wood-patterned plastic accordion door that’s only closed at night and is otherwise folded back during the day. You’ve got the bathroom dead ahead and a set of stairs to the immediate right leading down to the kitchen. Diagonally to the right is the master bedroom. Here are the two interesting features about that room. First, on the other side of the bed from where you come in, right by the window facing Boss Hogg’s, you’ve got a door that these days opens up to a closet. In the before times, though, this was a stairway leading up to the third-floor bathroom. In fact, the stairs are still there, but the doorway at the top is all boarded up. The other, and still usable, trait about this room is the little nook just off the room proper. It’s the southern-most point of the second floor, directly over the back porch, and therefore looks over the backyard, the garage and driveway/basketball court, alley, and the back of the house on the other side of the block. It’s kind of like a little think tank and is mainly used by Faith. She’ll come in here a few times a week, usually when Frank’s teaching at Temple University, and read and otherwise just, ya know, think. Her eyes would be pointed out at the backyard, but her brain would be pointed in just about every direction except external.
Now if you were to retrace your steps a bit, heading back toward the center of the second floor, where the wardrobe closet and second bedroom are, opposite them you’d come upon the stairs leading down to the first floor. First you’d have a small set of stairs taking you to a landing and bay window overlooking Buttonwood Street. This is where that one tree used to be that the August hurricane wiped off the map. Making a U-turn, you’d find the next set of stairs, the longer set, leading down to the first floor. Since we started the third- and second-floor tours from the north end of the house, we may as well do the same for this floor. When you reach the bottom of the steps, make a right.
Dead ahead you’ve got two sets of double doors. The first pair’s got fancy-patterned glass and a small wooden-floored space separating it from the second pair of doors, which leads you outside onto the front porch. We’ll get to that porch, as well as the more relevant side porch, in a bit.
Walk backward almost to the stairs, and on your right you’ve got the music room. Both Frank and Faith are musically inclined people, one of the things bonding them from the beginning being their mutual love for classical music. And both can play a mean piano. When they’re entertaining guests, or when there’s nothing much on the tube, they come in here and play duets and whatnot. When she wants to think but is tired of that think room upstairs, Faith will come in here and play some classical tunes. There’s also a xylophone, which Frank has owned for years. Besides classical, Frank’s also into jazz. In fact, he got into jazz decades before he developed any interest in Mozart, Bach, et al. As early as high school, Frank was earning bread as part of a jazz band. During the summers of his college years, he and the boys would play on cruise ships to Europe. One of his fondest memories includes staying in Bremen, Germany while one of his pals was recovering from appendicitis. That meant an extended stay, gratis. The music room also contains one of those phony fireplaces I mentioned at the beginning.
Opposite the music room is where Frank spends most of his spare time these days: the family room. In here you’ve got his lounger sitting next to the massive bookcase he had custom built. Most of these books are nonfiction and history, a lot of those, in turn, concerning World War II. Frank was born during the same hour the Nazis marched into Poland on September 1, 1939, the beginning of the war. A couch separates Frank’s lounger from Faith’s high-backed leather chair. The 21-inch TV sits in an entertainment center that features both a VHS and Beta VCR on the shelves below it. To the side you’ve got Frank’s whole stereo setup. Just about every morning without fail, he brings his breakfast of bacon, egg, and toast into the family room, plops himself down on his lounger, and listens to classical music while reading the Philadelphia Inquirer. Behind the entertainment center and stereo setup is the second fake fireplace, and to either side of that are a pair of floor-to-ceiling bookcases. On the other side of the room, behind the chairs and couch and right up against the window looking at the front porch, is a clavichord. Not sure what that is? It’s basically like a little piano, but it sounds a bit more tinny. It’s been around quite a while. Mozart played one, for instance. Frank’s not very partial to it, but Faith plays it now and again. When no one’s around. It helps her think. I know I make it sound like Frank and Faith are the most partial to this room, but there is one person who spends more time here than them: Barry. As a budding movie buff, Barry takes advantage of the two-VCR setup and records a lot of the movies that his dad and stepmom rent.
Now let’s get down to the most unique room in the house. Leaving the family room and heading southward, you’ll pass on your left both the bathroom as well as the door leading out to the side porch. That bathroom has the only stained glass window in the house. And the side door? It’s used more than the front door by far. No one really uses the front door at all unless it’s to greet someone who doesn’t know any better, such as the pizza boy or the postman. Anyway, once that side door’s on your left, you’ll have on your right a room known as the pool room. When the Roggebusch brood first moved here in January of ’83, they brought with them a pool table. That lasted all of about a year or so before the seven boys inflicted enough wear and tear on it to render it completely useless. So it got earmarked for the landfill, but that room has ever since been known as the pool room. In reality it’s sort of like a secondary family room for the boys. Frank and Faith never go in there, but they did have a set of wooden cubbies built so the boys would each have a place to hang their coats and backpacks and otherwise store whatever stuff they wanted. This room also has a 21-incher as well as a VHS. The entertainment center is set up against the windows facing Boss Hogg’s house. One more component sharing shelf space with the VCR is a Commodore 64. Perhaps I should’ve mentioned that first when we came in here, for the Commodore is used with the TV more than the cable is, much to the dismay of Faith. Opposite the cubbies is the third and final fake fireplace.
Before I proceed with the second half of the first floor, I should mention something about the music, family, and pool rooms that make them a bit different from such rooms in just about any other house you’ve ever been in. It’s how you get into them. It’s not hard at all to go in and out of these rooms. Quite the contrary, the doorways separating them from the hallway are huge, easily four or so times wider than your average doorway. Even though they’re almost always open, they can indeed close thanks to thick wooden doors that slide together and which otherwise are permanently slid back into the walls on either side. Weird, huh? Remember, this was a music school in the before times. When classes were in session, the students needed privacy from the racket coming from the other rooms.
Past the pool room you’ll find the pantry, and beyond that the kitchen. On your immediate right upon entering the kitchen you’ll see a chord that, when tugged, rings the little bell hanging over the kitchen doorway. Since Frank’s the one who prepares dinner, he’s the one who pulls this sucker at 7 p.m. almost every night without fail. Above the kitchen sink you’ve got that massive window offering a full-on view of Buttonwood. Now if you were facing that sink and then turned around, you’d see an island right in front of you with four pedestals on the other side, and then on the other side of that, you’d see the other half of the kitchen taken up by a huge rectangular wooden table. Yes, this is where those huge dinner feasts go down. Hanging on the wall above the other side of the table is a chalkboard with a chart showing who’s responsible for which chores, and who does their laundry on what day. Also on the far side of the kitchen is a door opening up to that staircase leading to the master suite. While still facing the table from the sink, diagonally to your right you’ll see a closed door. That leads down to the basement. Let me finish up the first floor before I get to that. Only one room left.
Turn left and continue making your way through the house. The next door opens up to a sort of a multi-purpose room. The main reason people use it is to do their laundry. You can see the washer and dryer over on your right, under that window facing Boss Hogg’s. But just as important, this room holds an additional two refrigerators and a freezer chest. Yes, you read that right. This house has got three refrigerators as well as a big white freezer chest. If you’re wondering why, that could only mean you’ve forgotten that seven males live here. Well, eight, if you count Frank.
Okay, now let’s get back to that basement. Actually it’s not much to look at. When you reach the bottom of the narrow wooden stairway with a brick wall on the right side and a wooden wall on the left, you’ll find a concrete pathway surrounded by ponds of dirt. And that’s the smell that dominates 48 Broad’s nether region: earth. The walls, as well as those high-up windows staring at the mulch, are coated with earthen dust. It permeates the air to such an extent that when you finally come to your senses and get the heck out of there, you’ll see, by the kitchen’s harsh fluorescent light, a coating of dust on your skin. There are a couple of bare bulbs hanging from the low ceiling, but it’s just as hard for them as it is for you to penetrate the air. Frank has a wine rack down here, which contains many more spaces than wine bottles. Although to be fair, he has got several vintages from the sixties. He also stored down here several boxes from the move in January of ‘83 that he told himself he’d deal with later. As of the spring of ’86, later hasn’t arrived yet. The handyman George Taylor keeps tools and supplies down here. Otherwise, no one ever really comes down here except for the two youngest boys, Barry and John. After seeing an action-packed movie, they’ll don bath towels as capes and take up sticks as swords and go down to explore and spar imaginary foes and eventually each other.
Now let’s get the heck out of here before we gag. The side door’s got a porch where Frank likes to sit in the afternoon after he jogs the usual three miles, eating peanut butter on bread and slurping soda water. It’s a relatively small porch compared to the front of the house, which features a porch that wraps around the side facing Boss Hogg’s. It’s funny, though. No one ever really takes advantage of all that space. Well, Barry and John do sometimes, if they’re tired of having sword fights in the catacombs. There are chairs out there, but since no one uses the front door, no one thinks to go out there. The only exception is Frank, who sometimes likes to sit out there just for a change of scenery from the side porch. Barry sometimes joins him if he’s home from school. Another time Frank likes to sit outside is at night. If there’s nothing on TV and/or Faith wants to watch something he’s not interested in, Frank will make himself a scotch and soda and sit out by himself on whichever porch suits his mood. He won’t sit in one of the chairs, mind you, which he’d do after a jog, but out on the steps, where no part of the house can get into his peripheral vision. He keeps his booze, by the way, in the top shelf of the broom closet in the kitchen.
The back porch is completely different from the other two. Opening up from the laundry/freezer chest room, the back porch is closed in with several layers of transparent plastic. It’s a small space, even smaller than the side porch, and it’s taken up mostly by junk. The family dog Gorbie (short for Gorbachev) sleeps out here in a basket, and that’s probably the most practical use the porch serves. Over to the right is what used to be a bathroom. The toilet’s still there and everything, dead by rust for who knows how long. No attempt is ever made to resurrect it. The door to it pretty much stays shut all the time.
The front and side yards aren’t much to look at. Each features a patch of fenceless grass on either side of the walkway. The side lawn is where Frank does his push-ups and sit-ups after his jogs. The backyard? Now that’s a yard. It’s huge and has a picket fence on all sides the color of 1000 Island salad dressing. When it snows, it makes a perfect battlefield on which to build forts and have epic snowball fights. The boys still talk about an hours-long snowball fight they had during their first winter there. During the warmer months it makes for a terrific whiffleball field.
On the far side of the backyard, just outside the fence, is a driveway and garage. The side of the garage, in fact, forms one part of the backyard’s boundary. Frank and Faith never use the driveway for their cars. They park along the curb at the side of the house. Nah, the driveway is mainly a basketball court. Inside the garage, which has the metal-latticed windows boarded up from the outside, George Taylor keeps most of his gardening supplies. On the other side of the driveway is an alley that connects Buttonwood on your immediate left to High Street, way down out of sight to your right, on the other side of the block. That’s where the church is, which tolls on the hour every hour and strikes a single note every half-past.
