Chapter Two #2
Everett shook his head. “I thought I’d open up some of those cans you keep bringing me, see if he takes an interest. He might get a tooth for something he hasn’t tried yet.”
There was kindness in this, Cal knew, even while it meant his father had brought home yet another discard.
“You said you wanted to tell me something,” Everett said.
“Becky’s pregnant.”
“Little Tramp, by the way.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s what Mrs. Crenshaw named him. Little Tramp.”
The end of the puppy’s tail shivered.
“I’m more of a Keaton fan myself,” Everett said.
“I’m trying to tell you something important, Pop, some good news. Becky’s going to have a baby.”
As he sometimes did when speaking to his father, Cal put more volume into his voice than necessary, trying to compensate for the mortar blasts that had taken their toll on Everett’s eardrums, each of which had been ruptured probably a dozen times.
But hearing wasn’t presently the issue. Everett just never knew what to do with someone else’s good news.
He wanted to get the pup onto the back porch, put some food in front of him.
“Good for Becky,” he said, hoping that was enough. Apparently, it wasn’t.
“Pop,” Cal said, “you’re going to be a grandfather!”
“Oh!” Everett said, earnestly trying to mirror his son’s enthusiasm. “Then good for me!”
—
The Hanovers, on the other hand, were elated by the news.
Ida and Roman had Becky and Cal over for Sunday dinner at their Dutch Colonial Revival house on London Hill.
They raised glasses in the living room, toasted the baby and new beginnings, then Ida put on some Woody Herman and they sat down to vegetables from the Victory Garden and a black market ham.
When the meal was finished, Becky said she and Cal would clean up, but Roman said he wanted Cal all to himself.
He poured two brandies and handed one to his son-in-law, though he’d never seen him take a drink, then asked him down to the basement. Cal followed.
Except for his medicine ball stomach, Roman was small and compact, like his daughter.
He combed what was left of his graying hair into a thin glaze across his forehead, wore his trousers belted high, tucked in his sport shirts on the weekends.
He had a dry, clipped laugh that was seldom heard and a way of smiling that had nothing to do with his eyes, which peered out at the world from under the protective eave of his brow.
Along with the hardware store in Bonhomie, he owned a lamp store in nearby Fostoria, where he hovered one day a week, and a luncheonette in Tiffin he checked on from time to time.
He was a business owner, not a businessman, he liked to say, always happy to make the distinction.
He lit a cigarillo at the bottom of the stairs.
Switched on the light and walked over to the train set and miniature village he’d been working on for years.
As big as the ping-pong table it sat on, it had little streets and buildings and trees, little people positioned here and there, a papier-maché mountain rising up in the middle, and tracks laced throughout.
“I’ll say it again,” Roman said, glancing at the hot box on his cigarillo, “I’m happy about this baby. ”
Cal thanked him.
“Told your father?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll bet he’s beside himself.” Roman had met Everett twice: at Becky and Cal’s wedding, and at a barbeque the Hanovers hosted in their backyard, where Everett had pulled a lawn chair away from everyone and sat with his back to the fence, rolling and smoking cigarettes.
Prior to that, Roman had known of him only as the somewhat disheveled-looking vet who rode a tricycle around and dug through garbage.
Roman understood the war had done a number on a lot of guys.
Thankfully, he wasn’t one of them—the Armistice had been signed twenty-four hours after he’d landed at Saint-Nazaire—but he’d heard plenty of stories and seen plenty of vets on shaky ground, had seen a man drop onto the sidewalk at the backfiring of a car.
Digging through trash was a little different, though. In broad daylight.
“He got himself a dog,” Cal said. “I don’t know if he’s up for taking care of it, but he got one.”
“That’s terrific,” Roman said. “How are things at home? You and Becky, I mean. They’re good?” Before Cal could speak, Roman answered for him: “They’re good.”
“Yep.”
“Marriage can be a pickle sometimes, can’t it?”
Cal shrugged. “It can.”
“It’s not always a walk in the park.”
Cal swirled his brandy the way he’d seen Roman do. Then he set it down on the edge of the table. “Not always, I guess.”
Roman eyed Cal’s snifter. “That shouldn’t be there.” He held out his hand.
Cal apologized, handed him the snifter, and Roman added Cal’s brandy to his and set the empty snifter on the cabinet behind him. “I find, in a marriage, it’s the differences that sweeten the mix.”
“Ha ha. We do have our differences.”
“It’s healthy to have them. It strengthens the bond.
” Roman picked up the train’s transformer box and turned a switch; something whirred, and the train began to move.
“And now you’ve made a baby,” he said, his eyes following the train.
“What could be better than that? There’s just one thing that concerns me. ”
Cal waited. The train threaded through the middle of the village, disappeared into the mountain, came out the other side. Two full rotations on the figure-eight track before he finally gave in and asked Roman what his concern was.
“You seem content to be a bum.”
Cal forced a chuckle. “Thanks.”
“I’m talking about your finances. By which I also mean my daughter and grandchild’s future.”
As if Cal wasn’t already crunching numbers in his head: his salary at the concrete plant against their rent and other monthly bills; their savings (just over two hundred dollars) against all the things they were soon going to need—baby clothes, a crib, a playpen, a stroller.
Cal wanted to sit down on one of the chairs tucked under the table, but Roman was standing, so he stood.
“We’re doing okay,” he said. And then, his cheeks flushing a bit, “I’m not a bum, Roman. ”
“You’re living in a tiny apartment with your pregnant wife. Over a barbershop,” he added, as if that made it even worse.
My recently pregnant wife, Cal thought. Were they supposed to have moved already? “We’re going to start looking for a bigger place.”
“She shouldn’t have to work.”
“Becky likes working. It’s just a few days a week, and she can stop whenever she wants. We’re getting by fine.”
“You’re twenty-three years old. You have a family now.
How long do you think ‘getting by’ is going to pass muster?
” Roman picked up a mailman and moved him from one side of the street to the other.
He tapped the cigarillo against an ashtray in the middle of the baseball diamond and arrived at his point: he and Ida were going to buy them a house.
They would make the down payment, put the deed in Roman’s name, and pay the mortgage for the first year, at the end of which time—Cal being on more solid financial ground—the deed and the mortgage would become the Jenkinses’.
“Do you care about concrete?” Roman asked.
Cal blinked. Was it a trick question? “No.”
“Quit your job and come work for me. The last two guys I hired, one got called up, one enlisted. It’ll get you out of the plant and be more money. Plus, it’ll be like a family business. I mean, it’s mine, but you’d be part of it.”
So there it was, on the table: a house and a job—so long as Cal planned on being a good husband, a good father, and not a bum.
It was a blueprint, Cal realized, and if it had been presented to him in a different way, he would have felt nothing but grateful.
As it was, he felt grateful and insulted.
He shifted his weight from his low heel to his high one and said, “I don’t know how to thank you. ”
Roman’s eyes and lips glistened with Hennessy. He nudged a switch on the transformer box and the train picked up speed. “Thank Ida for not having a boy,” he said. “I love my daughter, but I always wanted a son.” He grinned. “Seems I got you instead.”
—
They knew if they didn’t squeeze in some kind of honeymoon before the baby came, it might be years before they got around to it.
So that fall they picked a weekend, saved up gas, and drove an hour and a half east to Seneca Caverns, where they descended a hundred feet into the Earth and dragged their hands across cool limestone and dolomite.
Then another hour north to Cedar Point, an amusement park built right on Lake Erie, where they rode the Cyclone roller coaster and the double Ferris wheel; then to Huron, where they stayed two nights in a hotel near the lighthouse.
The combination of being in a hotel room together and looking out the picture window at that vast body of turquoise water made them feel as if they’d traveled to a whole different country.
They nearly had—Canada was just across the way.
They’d glimpsed its shoreline from the top of the Ferris wheel, and it had impressed them almost as much as the stalactites.
—