Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [67]
“CANNOT EASY NORMAL DIE”
BY CARLIN ROMANO
University City
If every block in Philadelphia had only one resident, Isaac figured, lots of things would be different. Parking would be easier. Mail carriers would stop screwing up. Next-door neighbors too dumb to pack their garbage in plastic bags might disappear, because you wouldn’t have a next-door neighbor.
Isaac saw the downside too. Infrequent block parties. A pathetic neighborhood association. Ratcheting up of that lonely feeling Isaac used to get when he lived in Vermont and wondered how people in isolated houses survived the big snowstorms.
One-person blocks might even stir up aristocratic leanings, a sense of “to the manor born” that might lead people to consider getting their streets closed off, and their fiefdoms turned into separate municipalities.
Anyway, it was just empty, abstract theorizing, because so far as Isaac knew, he was the only person—at least in University City—with a block of his own. And even the neighborhood historian couldn’t tell him exactly how St. Irenaeus Square—not that it was a square—had turned out that way.
“There used to be a stable there, where your house is, in the late nineteenth century,” ventured Mildred, the old woman with semi-encyclopedic knowledge of Spruce Hill, at the last block event to which she’d limped her way. “I think that put some potential builders off.”
Another theory, ventured by Irina Butova, the realtor who’d first showed the structure to Isaac years ago, was that his unique, detached, slope-roofed oddity of a house had been built in defiance of neighborhood logic.
401 St. Irenaeus Square, after all, sat surrounded by backyards. To Isaac’s right, when he exited his house, lay the well-maintained yards of the celebrated Queen Anne homes on Spruce Street, the area’s architectural gems. To his left, beyond his own impressive yard with sixteen trees, loomed the leafy expanse formed by the backs of Pine Street’s solid row houses, the first two being the lovingly manicured creations of Derek Gombrowicz, the friendly architect who owned them.
In front of him, as he opened his door, sat the back of the mighty twin that ended the string of Queen Anne houses along Spruce Street as it headed west. Behind him, outside his bedroom window, lay the backyards of South 42nd Street, several of them regular venues for frat parties, on which Isaac sometimes eavesdropped during slow nights.
“Is quiet and full of peace like cemetery,” Irina had joked when she’d shown it to him three years before, right after it had been cleared of its student tenants. They’d messed up the house so badly, Irina explained, that it remained on the market for a year before Christy Greenfield, one of Isaac’s old lovers (he’d always liked realtors), referred Isaac to Irina as a match made in heaven. Irina had been in one of Christy’s courses at Temple’s Real Estate Institute, and then been a trainee at Plumer when Christy was still there. They’d kept in touch.
Christy knew both her client and colleague well. Isaac, a former foreign correspondent for the Inquirer in Russia, came with no wife, no kids, lots of boxes, papers, and books, and a complete indifference to interior design. His ideal look was used bookstore, circa 1950. He wanted a house with a porch or veranda so he could, like literary heroes from the past, sit on it in a chair made of natural materials and look literary. He preferred weeds and overgrowth to a regularly landscaped yard, thinking (incorrectly) that onlookers would mistake its choked anarchy for a lush Italian garden. He refused to do housework or gardening of any kind, remarking once to Christy that such impulses had died with his father’s generation.
Irina, for reasons Christy didn’t understand, had ended up with the 401 St. Irenaeus listing even though she mainly worked Russian neighborhoods in Northeast Philadelphia. It had something to do with the owner two back being Russian before it had been sold to the University of Pennsylvania. As listing