Chapter 1 - Mr and Mrs

National Merit

Mr. Ryan did not know what to make of these two boys his daughter was spending so much time with. They were decidedly not the neighborhood kids Rebecca played with as a little girl. And just as well because little Suzy with the overalls exited junior high as little floozy with the halter top and hotpants. Jamie Huntsman, that sweetie who used to share cookies with Rebecca when the other boys weren’t looking started sulking in junior high school and has not stopped since – first in death metal t-shirts and now in goth face paint. And having played football in high school, Mr. Ryan knew a few things about the jocks most of the other cheerleaders hung out with. But Ravi Bhattacharya and Lachlan Chen befuddled Mr. Ryan. Who were these academically ferocious boys who had all but kidnapped his daughter into a world of honors classes, SAT preparation, math league and late night study sessions?

Mr. Ryan was the proprietor of Ryan’s Bath Solutions, soon to be expanded to Ryan’s Kitchen and Bath Solutions. His life story can be simplified as such: hell raising youth in Buffalo New York before hitting bottom, getting sober and finding Jesus. God, his wife Margaret and construction jobs saved his life, he would tell the young men in his church fellowship. By any objective measure, Mr. Ryan was being melodramatic. His hell raising was well within the normal American male range, hitting rock bottom was just flunking out of SUNY Buffalo and getting sober meant no longer going on weekend benders with his dorm mates. But church, family and his expanding contracting business gave Mr. Ryan much to be grateful for. He would often marvel at how his life had turned out, recalling how that dumb kid Derek Ryan thought his life had ended when reading the letter from SUNY, “… academically disqualified… overall GPA below 2.0 AND did not have a Successful Semester AND did not follow the stipulations of the Academic Success Plan.” In reality, anyone who could – at the age of twenty – pick themselves up and course correct after such a setback was not a dumb kid in any danger of wasting his life. Mr. Ryan spent his twenties honing his skills on construction sites before getting a home improvement contractor license. He had saved over $30,000 to start his remodeling business with his father-in-law chipping in another $30,000. And business was good. Rochester New York was a hot market in the 1980’s with Kodak and Xerox firing on all cylinders.

Mr. Ryan was determined to spare his children from “making his mistakes,” as innocuous as they ultimately were. After Rebecca was born, Mr. Ryan pledged to be a family man, a church man and a good man. His own father was all of those things and Mr. Ryan was in no danger of becoming anything else, but in his mind, Derek Ryan was a prodigal son who found Jesus and became Mr. Ryan. Mr. Ryan belonged to a men’s fellowship at his church. Men would gather every Thursday night to scrutinize fraught relationships with their taciturn fathers while pledging to do a better job with their own children. A recurring theme that Mr. Ryan picked up was how damaging distant and unexpressive fathers could be for daughters, who would then fill the void in all the wrong ways. When Rebecca was a little girl, Mr. Ryan would smothered her in kisses, name her stuffed animals and tell her how proud he was of her report cards which consisted mostly of B’s. He wanted to be that kind of dad for that kind of daughter. He wanted to be the dad who listened, the dad who understood, the dad who did not judge, with a daughter who did not keep secrets, a daughter who would talk to him about boys, a daughter who could not be pressured by a senior on the football team.

But now, it seemed, Mr. Ryan had an entirely unforeseen situation on his hands. Rebecca, his little girl, was slipping away all the same, not as a result of teenage rebellion or falling in with a bad crowd – contingencies for which he had long prepared – but rather because she had been kidnapped by aliens. Mr. Ryan winced and regretted even thinking the word “aliens.” Christian charity, he had told himself, did not permit racism. It was just that these two boys inhabited some parallel universe of academic pursuits which Mr. Ryan did not even know existed. Local high schools competed in a math league which funneled top performers into regional competitions of which Monroe County fielded an A as well as a B team. Who knew? Mr. Ryan was intimately familiar with high school sports – varsity, junior varsity, sectionals, All-American – but math league? And the preparation that went into it. It was insane! Rebecca would collect a stack of math problems weeks before a scheduled meet – trigonometry, polynomials, quadratic equations, logarithms. She would then power through them under timed conditions – twelve minutes to complete three problems of increasing difficulty. These practice sessions often ended with clenched teeth and tears of frustration. And then Rebecca would be on the phone with either Ravi or Lachlan going through the proper solutions line by line. A teenage girl spending hours on the phone with boys was not unusual, of course. A teenage girl spending hours on the phone with boys discussing trig identities was, however, more than a little weird.

The day before math league meets, the boys would often be over at the Ryan house to do last minute preparations – like the tune up practices before big football games. And the way they trash talked! Mr. Ryan had never heard anything like it. Or he had, but never outside a sports context.

“I made sure I picked all the baby categories this time,” Lachlan said. “Functions, factoring, probability – freshman shit. It’s all graded on a curve and lots of ninth graders early in the year means lots of cannon fodder. I learned the hard way. Upper classman pick conic sections and trig identities. The curve on that kills rankings.”

“You’re robbing the cradle,” Ravi said. “Taking candy from babies. Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

“Uh, I picked functions and factoring,” Rebecca said.

“Oh come on Rebecca,” Ravi said. “We weren’t talking about you. Come on, look at what you’ve accomplished in a year. Lachlan and I have been doing this since seventh grade. This is only your second year out and this year, you are a… a contender!”

#

The mystery of Rebecca’s academic metamorphosis had been debated for years. How did a pretty strawberry blonde – a cheerleader no less, into boy bands and teen romance novels – transform into this scholastic beast? Mr. Ryan never worried about Rebecca’s grades when she was getting mostly B’s. When Rebecca brought home a 93 average in the first marking period of freshman year, Mr. Ryan could not have been more proud. But as high school progressed, Rebecca’s report cards were becoming increasingly concerning. Mr. Ryan first saw the number 100 in the final marking period of freshman year. It was for Earth Science. “Well, I just studied,” Rebecca offered up as explanation. In Rebecca’s sophomore year, Mr. Ryan saw it again. And again. And again. 100, Biology. 100, European History. 100, Math. 100, English. How does someone get a 100 in English? How does someone get a 100 in any subject? Mr. Ryan was floored. He knew, however, exactly how Rebecca was doing this. TV time had disappeared from her schedule. Growing Pains, MacGyver, Family Ties – shows the family used to watch together were now missing a once dedicated fan. Bedtime had been pushed back to midnight and beyond. Family outings were now, for the most part, one person short. And she was now in the constant company of those two boys, Ravi and Lachlan.

But what did he have to complain about? Frank Myer’s daughter, a cheerleader one year older than Rebecca had gotten pregnant and, the rumor is, she’s not sure if the kid will be running the gridiron or shooting hoops. A few years ago, four teens one town over in Penfield wrapped a minivan around a tree in a drunk driving accident. Three died and one was in a coma for a month. She will never be the same. Parents with kids over sixteen – driving age – were worried sick, signing contracts promising to pick up their children from any event where alcohol was served, no questions asked, or even hosting such parties as long as car keys were confiscated. And these were good kids from good families – these were church kids. And then there were the troubled kids. These sorry cases could be self-destructive in lurid and creative ways from petty (and not so petty) crime sprees to hard drugs to reckless driving with no help needed from alcohol. Mr. Ryan’s church fellowship increasingly became a support group as fathers unburdened themselves of the out of control behavior of their wayward children. Members still in control of their children listened quietly as they tried to divine the degree to which each sob story could be a cautionary tale for their own family.

Existential angst of parents with driving age children was a suburban rite of passage. Mr. Ryan considered himself lucky to be have been largely spared. Mr. Ryan always knew where his daughter was and he never worried about her safety. This threesome – Ravi, Lachlan and Rebecca – Mr. Ryan had concluded, could very well be the most chaste arrangement of hormonal teenagers in all of Upstate New York. Ravi was obviously sweet on his daughter, but the kid was such a square, so sweet and so kind to Rebecca that he earned Mr. Ryan’s sympathies if not exactly his endorsement. And Lachlan, the shifty one – he treated Rebecca like a third wheel, an interloper in his long running competition with Ravi and his long term plan for world domination. Like other parents, Mr. Ryan did have to enforce curfews but only because he believed his daughter should get more sleep and weekday study sessions should not go past midnight.

Try as he may, though, Mr. Ryan could not entirely banish a gnawing discomfort at his daughter’s choice of companions. Mr. Ryan would tell himself that such thoughts were not consistent with Jesus’s teachings. But as long as it was in jest and never verbalized, Mr. Ryan would let himself indulge in just a little unchristian thinking. Who are these kids and what do they want with my daughter? What is she to them? A pet project? A trophy? Are they preparing her for some sort of white-slave auction? Rebecca had abandoned old friends, stopped watching TV with the family and now rarely attended church youth group. Here we have a beautiful white cheerleader, five AP classes, 1350 SATs, math league contender. Let the bidding start at 5,000 rupees! An image of an elephant headed demon would flash in Mr. Ryan’s mind. Of course it was not a demon, Mr. Ryan would scold himself. It was just their god, or at least one of their gods. Mr. Ryan first saw the image of Ganesha five years ago at the Bhattacharya’s house, before their son Ravi became a fixture in his family. It was a beautiful tapestry of rich colors featuring a red skinned elephant god bedecked in ornate jewelry sitting in repose on a lotus throne. Back then, Mr. Ryan was transfixed by Ganesha’s exoticism and majesty. But as this deity of intellect and wisdom, this deva of arts and sciences, this god of new beginnings infiltrated his home, Mr. Ryan had to suppress the mental image of Ganesha as a menacing idol, an elephant headed Beelzebub or an octopus armed ogre from The Temple of Doom.

Five years ago, the Bhattacharya’s hired Ryan’s Bath Solutions to redo all the bathrooms in their lake front house – there were seven in total, five in the main house and two in the guest cottage. By a wide margin, it was Ryan’s Bath Solutions biggest contract ever. Mrs. Ryan had actually made the sale when, one afternoon, Dr. Bhattacharya walked over to her nursing station to ask if her husband would be interested in remodeling her bathrooms.

#

When Rebecca was still in grade school, Mrs. Ryan worked on Dr. Bhattacharya’s cardiothoracic surgery team which was then doing pioneering work on stent angioplasty. Even by the standards of cardiothoracic surgeons doing pioneering work, Dr. Bhattacharya was a severe and exacting task master who could, if she so chose, competently do every job on the surgical team. Because “Bhattacharya” was a mouthful, the hospital staff called her Dr. B. But, under their breaths, many would flesh out the letter with a sexist pejorative. With rigor and precision, Dr. Bhattacharya would police all the gut work often treated as perfunctory – preparation, documentation, checklists, pre and post operation assessments, patient files. While her exacting standards, grim demeanor and authoritarian demands may have been assets to the budding field of stent angioplasty, traumatized team members would joke that Dr. B was filling the pipeline with future angina patients. They made dark references to Stockholm syndrome and drinking Cool-Aid. Mrs. Ryan was fully onboard with Dr. B’s vision which she interpreted as deep appreciation for nursing’s contribution rather than autocratic micro-management. Still, when Mrs. Ryan was promoted to a supervisory position in post-operative care, she felt deep relief as if her life could finally go back to normal. Dr. B sent a farewell card to the Ryan residence where she wrote:

My dearest Margaret,

My dependable teammate. My rigorous right hand.

Thank you for always understanding why.

Thank you for never letting standards slip.

Thank you for your healing presence.

You will be missed.

Sincerely,

Mansi Agrawal

Inside, was a $100 gift certificated to Hedges, a fine dining restaurant with spectacular views of Lake Ontario. Margaret Ryan was, for a moment, flummoxed. Who sent her this $100 gift? It was a simple folded card without a prewritten greeting. On the front was a photo of a gold figuring – an elephant statuette sitting cross legged like a fat Buddha. Dr. Bhattacharya? Could it be Dr. B? Her given name was definitely Mansi although nobody at the hospital called her that. Margaret Ryan, née Lewis, could not quite imagine Dr. B writing such a lovely note. Dr. B was always so severe, intense and methodical, as if everything she did had life and death consequences, which, of course, they did. Could this actually be from Mansi Bhattacharya, née Agrawal? The next day, Margaret Ryan, née Lewis, walked up to Dr. B, caught her eye, paused for a moment and quietly mouthed, “Thank you?” inflecting the words as a question.

“No Maggie, I wanted to thank you,” said Mansi Agrawal.

“Is Agrawal you maiden name?” asked Margaret.

“Yes it is,” said Mansi. “I use Bhattacharya professionally. For personal things, I sometimes like to use my birth name.”

“What does the elephant symbolize?” asked Margaret.

“That is Ganesha,” Mansi answered. “He is the son of Shiva and Parvati. He is, among other things, the Hindu god of new beginnings.”

Margaret Ryan, née Lewis, was touched that Mansi Bhattacharya, née Agrawal, would lower her impenetrable professional defenses to say thank you and farewell. So touched, in fact, that she pinned the card with the photo of Ganesha to the wall of her new nursing station, where it has remained ever since.

#

“Derek, you’re not going to believe this,” Margaret said to her husband. “But I think I landed you a big contract.”

“Big contract?” Mr. Ryan said. “I’m all ears.”

“Do you remember Dr. Bhattacharya?” Margaret asked.

“You mean Dr. B, the lady heart surgeon?” Mr. Ryan said. “The one who gave us the gift certificate to Hedges?”

“Yes, her,” Margaret said. “She wants you to go over some evening this week to talk ‘bath solutions’ with her husband. On Lake Road.”

On Lake Road. Mr. Ryan’s eyes widen. Lake Road ran along the northern edge of Webster, right on the waterfront of Lake Ontario. It was the most expensive real estate in town with massive custom homes built on large multi-acre lots right up on the shore of the lake. Taking a drive along Lake Road was a favorite after dinner excursion for the Ryan household. The winding road was lined with trees with intermittent views of the lake offered up by gaps in the foliage. The trees also served to obscure the homes built far from the road, accessed by long driveways or through private cul-de-sacs. What little could be seen from Lake Road suggested the obvious – that these homes were different.

Mr. Ryan’s regular clientele lived in tract homes built to cookie cutter specs – colonials, split levels, Cape Cods, ranches. For most of his clients, Mr. Ryan could size up a job before ever stepping inside the house. He would mentally map the floorplans while pulling into the driveway – twenty one hundred square foot, split level, three bedrooms, one and a half baths, half basement with crawlspace. After exiting his truck, he would quickly process another set of market indicators – late model Honda Accord, Honda Civic (soon to be replaced), new siding (this was key), well maintained lawn, white gravel edging. And after ringing the doorbell, more market data would tumble forth – young couple, no kids, immaculate housekeeping. With this flow of market information, Mr. Ryan would know exactly which binder of marketing material to reach for and what pages to focus on. Recently married, first time homeowner, dual income, no kids (yet) – this was definitely a nest feathering situation and should be an easy and profitable job. The worst jobs were the required rebuilds for old cantankerous couples with a long list of neglected home maintenance projects. These were always big jobs using the cheapest materials, involving tortured negotiations. Mr. Ryan knew his market and he knew it well. He had, however, never been to a house on Lake Road.

The Bhattacharya house was barely visible from the road, built on the lake with access provided by a long driveway cutting through heavy foliage. As Mr. Ryan drove up the driveway, the trees cleared and the house unfolded before him like a curtain opening on a stage. This one had Mr. Ryan stumped. He could not visualize the floor plan. From the front, the house at first looked like a large ranch in the flat roof style. But the rectangular arrangements of stone, wood and glass which composed the house’s shape and structure overlapped incongruously, resulting in multiple rooflines of varying heights making it difficult to determine just how many floors one was looking at. A garage door was open with a silver Mercedes Benz parked inside. The garage was less a garage than a resting room for cars. It had beige wood paneling and was empty of household detritus – just the Mercedes parked on one side and an empty space on the other. As Mr. Ryan parked and gathered his presentation materials, a short man emerged from the garage wearing what could be described as pajamas – a loose fitting grey tunic with matching trousers. On his face was a pair of thick glasses in plastic frames. His hair was a thin tangle of salt and pepper wires. He shuffled over to Mr. Ryan in flip flops with a drink in one hand (Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks). He had a warm grin on his face as he extended his right hand. He was the picture of comfort.

“You must be Mr. Ryan,” said Mr. Bhattacharya in an Indian accent purposely exaggerated for comic effect.

“Please to meet you, Mr. B,” Mr. Ryan said. “You can call me Derek.”

“Pleasure to meet you Derek,” Mr. Bhattacharya said. “You can call me… Doctor Bhattacharya. Ho ho ho!”

Mr. Ryan was relieved. He had heard stories about the super serious and super scary Dr. B and was worried that her husband may be cut from the same cloth.

“I always tell a little joke before telling my name,” Mr. Bhattacharya said. “Because my name is kind of harsh on American ears. Actually, my name is… exactly Harsh. And I’m a fake doctor or the science kind. Not a real doctor of the medical kind.”

“I have to say,” Mr. Ryan said. “You don’t look very harsh.”

“In Hindi, ‘Harsh’ has almost the exact opposite meaning,” Mr. Bhattacharya said. “Come on inside. We’ll get you a drink and talk ‘bath solutions’.”

They entered the house through a garage door which led to a raised kitchen overlooking a large sunken living room with an expansive wall of windows which offered up to a breathtaking panorama of Lake Ontario. The Bhattacharya’s house was the most ornately decorated residence Mr. Ryan had ever seen. Every vertical surface was either a book shelf, a painting or an anchor with something bronze attached. He understood that it was an Indian residence but the only words he could find when describing the house to his wife was that it was like Xanadu or Zanzibar or something out of Indiana Jones.

“Naini, Ravi, say ‘hello’ to Mr. Ryan,” Mr. Bhattacharya yelled in his sing song accent. “Mr. Ryan will be remodeling our bathrooms.”

“Hello Mr. Ryan!” two voices chimed back without the sing song accent.

That was the first time Mr. Ryan saw Ravi, then 11 years old and not yet a part of his daughter’s life. Ravi’s sister Naini was older, junior high school age by Mr. Ryan’s reckoning. The two were seated facing each other at opposite ends of an exceedingly long couch built into a ledge above which stood the kitchen in a split level design. After greeting Mr. Ryan, both children silently fell back into their books. Mr. Bhattacharya took Mr. Ryan on a tour of the bathrooms in the main house as well as in the guest cottage closer by the lake. Mr. Ryan soaked in the construction details, admiring the premium materials which made well-built custom homes so gorgeous. The doors were heavy, held in place by massive hinges with solid metal handles which did not rattle when turned. The floors were either dark hardwood or expensive tiles not carried by Mr. Ryan’s regular distributor. The bathrooms had old but well maintained premium fixtures. They were in excellent condition. Before sitting down, Mr. Ryan had ascertained what the Mr. Bhattacharya had in mind. Most of the house had been extensively renovated into this showpiece, this merger of library and museum in Temple of Doom style. The bathrooms were the last rooms to be finished in Mr. Bhattacharya’s grand vision. At the kitchen island, Mr. Bhattacharya poured Mr. Ryan a Coca-Cola in a tall glass filled with ice, dribbling in the liquid to maintain carbonation – exactly how Mrs. Bhattacharya liked her Coca-Cola served. He then opened an impressively stocked liquor cabinet, grabbed a bottle of Johnnie Walker and topped off his drink, saying, “Don’t tell your missus or it will get around to my missus. Ho ho ho!”

“Harsh, I have to be honest with you,” Mr. Ryan said as he sat down. “Most of the bathrooms I do are on a different scale. I may have to bring in a partner.”

“And I have to be honest with you,” Mr. Bhattacharya said. “You are our plan B because, unlike yourself, our plan A did not feel that he had to be honest with us.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mr. Ryan said. “The contracting business can be unscrupulous.”

“Anyways, my wife insisted on asking Maggie’s husband,” Mr. Bhattacharya said. “She said that if the husband’s standards were half as high as his wife’s, the work will be in good hands. Of course, I did try to explain to Dr. B that husbands can be very different from their wives. Ho ho ho!

“Listen Derek,” Mr. Bhattacharya continued, pausing to down his Scotch in one satisfied gulp. “At one point many years ago, my wife did her first open heart surgery. I think I would much rather be your first custom job than my wife’s first patient. Ho ho ho!”

That evening, Mr. Bhattacharya explained his vision for the bathrooms by referencing a stack of Architectural Digest magazines, coffee table books of Indian art and sketches he had made. They did not touch any of the marketing material Mr. Ryan had lugged inside. Everything would have to be custom built. Mr. Ryan would have to find new distributors to supply materials he had never worked with – teak, ebony, onyx. He would have to upgrade tools and hire more hands. Mr. Bhattacharya insisted that Mr. Ryan take on the job himself and only bring in a partner if absolutely necessary. Mr. Bhattacharya correctly sized up Mr. Ryan: he was an honest family man, the mutual respect of their wives would keep him honest, he never worked on a project of this scale, he was eager to take his business to the next level and he will take the job for the experience, not to overcharge.

As they spoke, Mr. Ryan heard a car pull into the garage. He heard the humming of the engine cut to silence and then the thud of a car door closing. He watched Mr. Bhattacharya look at his empty whiskey glass in mock terror before rushing over to the sink, filling it with water and swishing his mouth in exaggerated motions, complete with cartoon sound effects. In a few swift movements, Mr. Bhattacharya swallowed the water, dumped the ice, wiped down the whiskey glass, returned it to a cabinet and collected himself before walking over to greet his wife. Mr. Ryan saw Naini roll her eyes and shake her head. This was not the first time Mr. Bhattacharya had performed his little pantomime. Mr. Ryan saw a tall woman with dark sunken eyes emerge from the foyer. She wore a sweater and crisp dress slacks – black head to toe – which accentuated her commanding height. Her face was gaunt, intense and grim. Later that night, Mr. Ryan imagined her carrying a giant sickle but banished the thought after realizing that, in her line of work, she may indeed have just killed somebody. She was a head taller than her husband and moved silently and regally. Mr. Ryan noticed the contrast as the short Mr. Bhattacharya shuffled over to his wife in flip flops and pajamas bearing the happiest grin.

“Mansi my love, Mr. Ryan is here to talk bathrooms,” Mr. Bhattacharya said. “We were just talking about the onyx and the idea with the teak.”

“Pleased to meet you Mr. Ryan,” Dr. B said slowly and deliberately after what felt like an uncomfortable pause. “Please don’t get up. I will leave the two of you to finish your conversation… if that’s OK with you. I have some work to finish in the den.”

Husband and wife then exchanged a few quiet words in a foreign language which wiped the grin from Mr. Bhattacharya’s face. Mr. Ryan then saw Mr. Bhattacharya stick out his pinky and lightly rub the back of his wife’s hand forcing a tiny smile to flash briefly on her face. In that moment, Mr. Ryan knew that it was all for her. This house, the panoramic view of the lake, the nonstop remodeling, the ornate decorations – these were all tributes arranged by Mr. Bhattacharya in his long battle against his wife’s grim internal world.

#

“They don’t have a TV,” Mr. Ryan said to his wife. “I’d been through the entire house on a bathroom tour and didn’t see a TV.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me,” Mrs. Ryan said. “I can’t imagine Dr. B watching a sitcom. Maybe PBS or something.”

“The kids were reading books,” Mr. Ryan said. “8pm on a Thursday and the kids weren’t watching the Cosby Show.”

“Cliff buys a juicer,” Mrs. Ryan said. “Rudy and her friend Peter break it while trying to make grape jelly, making a big mess in the kitchen. Vanessa was supposed to be babysitting but was on the phone with a boy. Theo finds the mess and doesn’t clean up saying Rudy needs to learn responsibility but really he was just being lazy. Clair comes home and agrees with Theo making him all smug and happy. Cliff gets in trouble with Clair for buying unnecessary home appliances.”

“Oh wow, now I know why she likes you so much,” Mr. Ryan said. “You do know I’m getting the contract because Mrs. B is fond of you, right?”

“Well, I was one of the Cool-Aid drinkers,” Mrs. Ryan said. “She set high standards and I admired that.”

“I only realized they didn’t have a TV on the drive home,” Mr. Ryan said. “There wasn’t one in the family room and in the master bedroom, facing the bed right where a TV should be, is this huge and kind of creepy mural of an elephant god. It was like something out of The Temple of Doom.”

“Oh stop it,” Margaret Ryan said. “The elephant god is Ganesha. He is the Hindu god of new beginnings.”

#

Mr. Ryan spent almost three months working on the Bhattacharya’s property (jokingly referred to as the Temple of Doom). Mr. Ryan typically worked with one apprentice but for this project, he hired three journeymen carpenters. The work was enthralling. Mr. Ryan was not just installing prefabricated acrylic bathroom fixtures. He had become a craftsman and an artisan, creating something of lasting beauty out of wood and stone. As agreed upon with Mr. Bhattacharya, Mr. Ryan started in the guest cottage for “practice” before moving on to the main house. Mr. Ryan’s skills increased at compounding rates with each completed bathroom. He loved working with expensive new materials and an upgraded set of tools which included a band saw, a jig saw and a stone cutting machine. After the completion of his masterpiece – the bathroom in the master bedroom with onyx shower stalls and a free standing copper bathtub ordered from Italy – Mr. Ryan insisted on circling back to the guest cottage to fix mistakes which only he knew were made. He never did bring in a partner. While the contract made Mr. Ryan’s year, he had little inkling of the untapped market The Temple of Doom would unlock. From then on, half of Mr. Ryan’s revenues would come from Indian doctors, scientists and engineers – mostly in the posher towns of Brighton or Pittsford – who all seemed to be engaged in some sort of home remodeling arms race.