Chapter Two #3
The house on Taft Street had been purchased from a Sears catalogue in 1916 and delivered to its previous owner in pieces, but you wouldn’t know that from looking at it.
It was a solid two-story house, plum-colored, with a gabled roof, white gingerbread trim, and wagon-wheel brackets framing the entryway.
The backyard was fenced in and had a sycamore and a pair of white birches; the front was planted with hostas and had a young buckeye tree growing in the middle of the yard, just ten feet tall, its autumn leaves bright pumpkin-orange.
The biggest bedroom was at the front of the house, at the top of the stairs.
The room closest to that would be the baby’s room, they decided.
The room at the end of the hall would become the first baby’s room when the second baby was born (for the plan had always been two).
When the Jenkinses stood in the parlor for the first time, in November of 1943, Becky, then just starting to show, pushed up onto her toes and kissed Cal’s cheek, as if he were the one responsible for having brought this marvelous thing into their lives, when she knew full well it had been her parents’ doing.
Taft Street was in a neighborhood called Brookdale, which boasted of no particular architectural style; prefabs stood alongside Craftsmans, Tudors, front-gabled cottages, and ranchers.
Roman’s only lament, he said—because he’d gotten a very good deal—was that Brookdale was dead center between Camden (poor people, Europeans) and Tiller’s Flat (Blacks, Mexicans).
“You’re kind of in the crosshairs here,” he told his daughter and son-in-law.
“Crosshairs of what?” Becky asked, knowing what he meant and not wanting him to get away with his outlandish remarks, but Roman either wouldn’t say or didn’t feel like he should have to explain. Ida shook her head at him.
The residents of Brookdale, the Jenkinses learned as they settled into the neighborhood, were a broad mix of Bonhomienians.
There were families with husbands who worked at the railyard.
Families with husbands who were off in Europe and the Pacific.
Young, childless wives who went off to work five days a week at the refitted canning factory or the refitted textile plant or the packing house a half mile away.
Company buses came and got them. Between their neighborhood and the ones on either side that Roman was wary of, there was—nothing.
No demarcations, no real sense of boundaries, just the streets that officially ended one and started another.
The children—regardless of their color, Becky noticed—spilled over in both directions.
The adults did not. She turned up her social dial when she and Cal took walks through Brookdale in the evenings.
She not only said hello to people but remarked on the weather, or complimented someone’s coat, or their child, or their dog.
She laid a hand across her stomach as she spoke, so that everyone asked when she was due, which led to introductions and handshakes.
Cal followed her lead, and took the opportunity to plug the hardware store, but he couldn’t help feeling self-conscious about his very presence, in the absence of so many husbands.
At the store, he wasn’t self-conscious at all.
He was so happy to be out of J he sold hardware.
Even with Roman hovering, Cal felt as if he’d stepped up to a new level of adulthood he hadn’t known before.
When you worked in a hardware store, people assumed you were smart.
They came to you with questions, wanted advice, and no one seemed to notice when you weren’t quite sure of what you were saying.
Cal was good at faking it. Also, selling hardware didn’t seem that tasking.
He didn’t share these observations with Roman, who wasn’t big on praise and sometimes talked to Cal as if he thought Cal were slow.
Becky, meanwhile, kept her job at Dixon’s Stationery till the end of her sixth month.
Her parents were relieved when she stopped but dismayed when, almost immediately, she began to volunteer at the recycling center two days a week.
There, she saw how the war brought out every type of person in town: young, old, men and women, deacons from the Baptist church, rabbis from both synagogues, even Mr. Deng, who’d been working at Shipp’s Candy Store for as long as Becky could remember and now was shouted at on the street by people who thought he was Japanese—yet here he came with a box of flattened cans and scraps of foil.
The war seemed to pluck at a filament that ran through everyone, a vibration she could feel throughout the day.
At home, she set up a card table and two folding chairs in the extra bedroom at the end of the hall. She put out a votive and burned some sage.
Cal’s voice came down the hall: “What’s that smell?”
“Sage. Need a break?”
They’d been doing so much settling-in work together, one activity feeding into the next.
They’d hung curtains and blinds. Scrubbed down all the baseboards, painted the kitchen, wallpapered the nursery.
Cal was walking around the second floor with a putty knife and a hammer, unsealing windows he’d accidentally painted shut. A break sounded good.
“Would you be willing to sit with me?” Becky asked. “It’s no fun if it’s only one person.”
A first. In the past, she’d always done her “sessions,” as she called her séances, with Janice. But Janice hadn’t been coming around as often lately—either because of her job at Ohio Bell or because she was giving them time to settle into the house, or both.
As Cal sat down, he asked where the crystal ball was.
Becky pointed to the ceiling, meaning the attic—that raw, gabled space that was buttressed with cobwebs, where Cal had just yesterday hauled up several grocery bags of old comic books.
She pulled the shade, lit the votive, and sat down across from him.
“I know this isn’t your cup of tea,” she said, and he said, “Stop,” and, “Just tell me what to do.” She smiled, asked him to close his eyes.
He did. She told him to breathe deeply and evenly, and he breathed deeply, evenly.
He asked if they could hold hands, but she said that would be distracting.
She wanted to try to contact Nikola Tesla, asked if Cal had heard of him, told him Tesla was an inventor who’d recently died.
He’d experimented with electricity, she said, and she wanted to ask him about a machine he’d been working on to end war.
A machine to—? End war, Cal had heard her correctly.
All he had to do, she said, was sit there and focus with her as she made an attempt to communicate with Tesla’s spirit.
Cal soon discovered that focusing on something that wasn’t there—with your eyes closed, no less—was like waiting for paint to dry that you couldn’t see. His thoughts turned to chores, errands. After a couple of minutes, he opened his eyes to see if the séance was still underway.
“Eyes,” Becky said. She was peeking at him, he guessed, through her lashes.
“I don’t understand what’s supposed to be happening.”
“Maybe because you’re not concentrating.”
“I am. I swear. I just—is he going to rap on the table? Is that what we’re waiting for?”
“No.”
“Is he going to speak? Does he speak English?”
She didn’t answer that.
“Okay, okay.” He closed his eyes again.
As it turned out, Nikola Tesla had better things to do in the afterlife that afternoon than pop up on Taft Street and say hello.
That didn’t surprise Cal. What surprised him was Becky’s face when she told him it hadn’t worked.
She looked disappointed. Not overly so, but he could see the letdown in her eyes and hear it in the brush of her voice.
“So it works sometimes?” he asked, a little wary of the answer.
She blew out the candle and raised the shade. The room filled with gray, midwinter light. “I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work at least sometimes,” she said.
How to respond? He was already nodding a little, so he went with that—makes sense—then kissed her on the cheek and collected his hammer and putty knife.
—
For Christmas that year, the Hanovers gave the Jenkinses a grandfather clock.
It’d been made by a company in Cleveland back before the start of the war and had been sitting in a warehouse for two years.
The moon dial had a schooner, and the pendulum bob was stamped with a starburst. Cal and Becky placed it in the parlor and closed the pocket doors against it at night while they were getting used to its chimes.
The Hanovers came over to see the clock (having only seen it before in a catalogue).
Roman found a flaw in the lower glass door and said he was writing to the company.
Ida, taller than any of them, admired the finials and fretwork at the top.
They stayed for dinner. Becky served a casserole she’d learned how to extend with rationing guidelines and they discussed baby names while they ate—until Roman changed the subject to ask them how things were working out with the neighbors.
Becky pretended not to understand. Did he mean the Hautons, to the left? The Neels, to the right?