A Death in Belmont. Sebastian Junger

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       SIX

      ELLEN JUNGER, Belmont, Massachusetts:

      “It was quite early. I heard the bulkhead door slam, and I heard him go downstairs, I was still in my nightgown and bathrobe, and I hadn’t gotten dressed yet. I heard him come in, and two or three minutes later I heard him call me. So I opened the door to the cellar, and I saw him down there at the foot of the stairs and he was looking at me. And he was looking in a way that is almost indescribable. He had this intense look in his eyes, a strange kind of burning in his eyes, as if he was almost trying to hypnotize me. As if by sheer force of will he could draw me down into that basement.”

      My mother knew almost nothing about Al at this point; it was only two or three days into the job, and they had never even been alone together. She stood at the top of the stairs looking into Al’s eyes and wondering what to do. What is it, Al? she finally said.

      There’s something the matter with your washing machine, he told her.

      My mother thought about that. Al had been in the house only a couple of minutes and the washing machine wasn’t even on. Why was he worrying about it? He was supposed to be outside building a studio, not in our basement worrying about the appliances. It didn’t make sense. Clearly he wanted to get her down into the basement, and clearly if she did that things could go very wrong. My mother told him that she was busy, and then she closed the basement door and shot the bolt.

      A few moments later she heard the bulkhead door bang shut and the sound of Al’s car starting up. He drove off and did not come back for the rest of the day. My mother didn’t tell my father about the incident because she was afraid he would overreact and cause a scene, but she decided that when she saw Russ Blomerth the next morning, she would tell him she didn’t want Al working on the property anymore. The next morning my father left for work and this time the whole crew showed up for work—Mr. Wiggins, Russ Blomerth, and Al. My mother got ready to confront Blomerth, but when she saw Al, he was so friendly and cheerful—“Hi, Mrs. Junger, good morning, how are you?”—that she hesitated. Was she overreacting? Did she really want to get a man fired for the look in his eyes?

      Al had a wife and two children to support, and in the end my mother didn’t say anything. She decided to wait a few days and see how things went. The weather was already cold when the crew poured the foundation, and the first thing Blomerth did was erect a wood frame over the work site and cover it with heavy plastic tarpaulins. That way they could keep the cement warm with diesel heaters so that it would cure properly. Al dropped by every day to fill the heaters with diesel, and once the foundation was finished, all three men showed up to start framing out the walls and roof. Blomerth and Wiggins were the expert builders, and Al was the laborer of the crew, the heavy lifter. “He wasn’t much taller than I am, but he was absolutely the strongest man I ever saw,” my mother remembers. “I mean, he wasn’t muscle bound, he was just strong. I don’t think he was wildly intelligent but he was clever. No, ‘clever’ isn’t the right word. He knew his way around.”

      The work on the studio stopped over the holidays, though Al came out every day to fuel the heaters. One bitter night he stopped by as usual, but this time he brought his four-year-old son, Michael, and his eight-year-old daughter, Judy. Al finished with the heaters and then came in to introduce his children to my father, who was sick in bed with the flu. My father was born in Germany and had an accent, and Al said that if he spoke to Judy in German, she would understand because her mother was German as well. My father said a few words to her, and then Al wished him well and took his children back out of the house and drove away. My father still didn’t know about the incident in the cellar, and it occurred to him that Al’s last name, which was DeSalvo, meant “safe” in Italian, and that it was a fitting last name for someone who seemed so solid and dependable.

      That was the only time that Al was ever in the house, although occasionally my mother would go out to the studio and have lunch with him when he was there on his own. Al never gave her the sort of look he had in the cellar that day—a “bold male look,” as my mother described it to my father years later—but there was still something about him that made my mother uneasy. She gave private art lessons at home, and every week a teenager named Marie came by in the afternoon to learn to draw. One afternoon Marie arrived before my mother, and she let herself in to the newly finished studio to wait. It was a warm day, and she was dressed in a madras shift, and Al must have noticed her through the plate-glass windows because the next thing she knew, he was standing next to her. You must be the model, he said.

      Marie was sixteen years old and easily embarrassed. Oh no, I’m just the student, she said. Al put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. But your waist is so small, you’ve got to be the model, he insisted. Marie struggled between feeling flattered that an older man was paying attention to her and terrified that it was a form of attention she couldn’t stop. Right at the point when she began worrying what was going to happen next, my mother walked in. There’s Ellen! she said and broke from Al’s weird hug. She ran over to my mother and told her what had happened, and my mother got her settled at her easel and then went outside and told Al that she didn’t like what she had heard.

      Aw, she’s just a kid, she’s so cute, Al said. I just wanted to hug her.

      My mother told him that she didn’t want anything like that to ever happen again. It was the last time she left Marie alone in the house with Al.

      The studio was finished in mid-March, the day after Bessie Goldberg was murdered. There are photographs, however, of the studio with an open metal toolbox on the roof and an oak free fully leafed out in the background. That means that some sort of work went on into May, though my mother’s memory is that Al was not involved. My mother’s memory is that the day after Bessie Goldberg was killed, Russ Blomerth took the photograph of his crew and my mother and me in the finished studio, and then Al left the job for good. The studio had a flagstone entry and a lovely winter garden that took in sunlight from the southwest through floor-to-ceiling French doors. It had a tile floor and big triangular windows in the eaves and a domed Plexiglas skylight that brightened the room even in midwinter. Along the south wall my mother set up her big wooden easel, and along the east wall she had a worktable with a glass top on which she could mix her colors. Marie continued to come in the afternoons for lessons, and I have dim memories of her struggling with charcoal and paper while my mother simultaneously kept an eye on me and on her and got dinner going in the kitchen.