Elizabeth Bohlinger's Astor Street Brownstone House

Elizabeth Bohlinger's Astor Street Brownstone House is the family home that remains a point of shelter and attachment as Brett Bohlinger's life changes around it. Brett returns to its kitchen for a planned Thanksgiving dinner, sleeps beneath her mother’s portrait after a painful rupture, and later moves away while deliberately leaving her mother’s iron bed behind. The house is not simply a place she occupies: it gives form to her shifting sense of what home means, and to the continuing presence of a mother who is no longer there.

A Home and a Point of Comparison

The brownstone is closely tied to Brett’s earlier idea of comfort and security. When she visits a student at an abandoned tenement on South Morgan, the contrast is immediate: the building’s cracked sidewalk, garbage-strewn hallway, and basement apartment are far removed from the private office she once had at Bohlinger Cosmetics, with its plants, refrigerator, fruit, and bottled water. Brett’s response turns the unfamiliar home into a measure of how far her own circumstances have fallen. She wonders why her mother has placed her in this predicament, and resolves that she can endure the job only briefly. The scene is not set at the brownstone, but it sharpens its meaning as the familiar home Brett has lost access to and still measures other places against.

That sense of home becomes explicit on the night before Thanksgiving. Brett and Andrew load a car with a turkey, DVDs, wine, and a laptop, intending to hold dinner at her mother’s house; Brett has already stocked the kitchen with the other supplies. When the car skids on ice, Andrew questions why the meal cannot take place at his loft. Brett recognizes the difference in their assumptions: he never calls the loft their home, and it belongs to him rather than to both of them. Her insistence on the brownstone follows from that distinction. At this point, it is the only place that feels like home to her.

Rooms That Hold Her Mother’s Presence

After the argument that leaves Brett believing she has lost her job, home, and hope, she chooses not to sleep in her mother’s bed. Instead, she drags a comforter downstairs and settles on the sofa. From there, she sees a photograph of her mother taken at an awards ceremony two years earlier, when she was named Chicago’s Businesswoman of the Year. The portrait shows her salt-and-pepper hair in its familiar short style, but Brett sees more than appearance in it: she associates the image with her mother’s wisdom and serenity. She takes the photograph from across the room, places it on the coffee table, and looks at it as she asks whether her mother meant to ruin her life. The gesture brings the portrait into the center of a private confrontation with an absent parent. The house’s rooms hold both the comfort Brett seeks and the anger she cannot resolve.

Later, the house takes on a more festive, shared character. Brad Midar carries Rudy across the threshold while bringing in a sack of dog supplies, and Brett switches on the lamps and plugs in her Christmas tree. The colored lights give the room a warm glow; Rudy promptly trots over to sniff the red foil packages beneath the tree. This small domestic scene places a newly adopted dog, a friend, and a seasonal ritual inside the same rooms that had earlier held Brett’s grief and isolation. The brownstone can still accommodate changing forms of companionship even as Brett’s circumstances shift.

Temporary Shelter and the Thirty-Day Limit

Brett’s continued presence in the house is complicated by the limit on consecutive stays. In February, she counts thirteen straight days there, applying her own rule that the clock starts over whenever she visits Joshua House. Even while she is far away and worried about Zoë’s repeated hospital admissions, Joad Bohlinger’s question about whether she is following their mother’s rules weighs on her. Brett wonders whether her mother would want her to leave. The house thus offers refuge, but not uncomplicated or permanent security: Brett measures her stay against a condition and against her brother’s understanding of their mother’s wishes.

The housing search that follows makes the constraint concrete. Brett drives to Pilsen intending to make a quick pass through the neighborhood and then tell Joad and Brad Midar that her search has been fruitless. Her earlier apartment listings have led her through disappointing possibilities, including places in Little Italy and University Village, and she approaches the South Side with apprehension. The brownstone remains a place she can return to, but the time limit gives her a reason to look beyond it rather than treat temporary shelter as a settled solution.

Moving On Without Cutting Ties

When Brett finds a life in Pilsen, she spends the weekend packing clothes and carrying boxes to the new apartment. On Monday, movers who had emptied Andrew’s loft the previous November return to take a few modest furnishings from the brownstone. Brett considers taking her mother’s iron bed, but it is too large for the small apartment; more importantly, she decides it belongs at Astor Street. She imagines it waiting there for her when she visits, in the way her mother had always been there for her. The bed becomes a practical possession that also marks a continuing bond: Brett leaves it behind not because she has severed her connection to the house, but because she expects to return.

The furniture she does take helps establish how much of her old life can be carried elsewhere. Her old double bed and cherry dresser go upstairs; a loveseat from Arthur Street sits before the fireplace, flanked by mismatched end tables, while a scratched coffee table from her mother’s attic and a thrift-store terra-cotta lamp fill out the room. She also takes four bowls and plates from her mother’s cupboard, along with utensils, pots, and pans. These objects make the move a transfer of everyday domestic life rather than a clean break. Brett leaves the brownstone as her residence, but keeps its material and emotional traces in the Pilsen home she makes for herself. Through that exchange, the house changes from a place of shelter under a stay limit into a home she can visit, carrying forward her mother’s presence without remaining bound to the address.