Chapter Nineteen #3
From what he read in the paper each morning (while eating bear claws and crullers from the bakery), and from what he watched on the Philco he’d borrowed from the store, the rest of the world was still churning, still grinding and throwing sparks.
A polio vaccine had finally been approved.
A place called Disneyland had opened in California (two of Cal’s customers were taking their families all the way across the country just to ride the rides).
Tensions around integration in the South were rising, now that the Supreme Court had said segregation was illegal in schools.
Bigotry seemed to be a right some people thought they earned by paying taxes, and they weren’t about to have that right taken away.
A teenaged Black boy named Emmett Till had been brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman, and his mother had asked that pictures of his body be shown in the newspapers.
Everyone saw his face, his body, what was done to him.
Everyone read about how his killers, a month later, pleaded not guilty and were acquitted by an all-white jury after just an hour of deliberation.
There it was in the news: horrific, inexplicable—and then carried away by other news.
Eisenhower had had a heart attack. The Russians had developed and tested a hydrogen bomb.
And that November, in 1955, an outbreak of civil war in Vietnam, the very country where the U.S.
had been pouring money and depositing troops for the last decade.
The Viet Minh had its hand in the north, the U.S.
had its hand in the south, and when the fuse was lit, everyone just happened to already be there, ready to go.
Cal fell asleep in front of the television some nights and was awakened by the National Anthem.
In the morning, treacly smells from the bakery filled his bedroom.
The baker seemed to think him needy, gave him an entire unclaimed birthday cake that said Happy Birthday, Bob on it.
Cal kept it in the freezer. When Skip came over on Saturdays to spend the night, they thawed and ate pieces of it with whipped cream, never forgetting to wish Bob a happy birthday.
—
Having made sure it wouldn’t be a source of contention, he called the house most nights after dinner to check in with Skip.
If Becky answered, he asked how she was, and how his dad was, and got in a few questions about the condition of the house, just to see if there was anything that needed his hand.
She didn’t mind when he came over to trim the hedges while Skip mowed the lawn. She didn’t mind when he came over to clean out the drainage ditch that ran behind the back fence. She wouldn’t let him climb a ladder to clean out the rain gutters, because she was worried he’d fall.
—
The kids, though. With all this rending, were the kids okay? Parents around the world—the happy and the miserable and all the ones in between—were asking, every day and night, Are the kids okay? Are they making the right decisions? Will their lives be better than ours?
And the question that all the other questions eventually came home to: Do they love us?
Skip knew a couple of different kids with parents who’d separated.
They both said the same thing: it wasn’t so bad; you got two birthday parties, two Christmases.
But one of those kids had had to move to Kentucky with his mom right in the middle of the school year, which had made Skip conclude that having your parents separate might be crummy in a way that double presents couldn’t make up for.
Now that he was one of those kids, he saw how right he’d been.
It stank that his dad lived in a different part of town (in what was actually a pretty cool apartment), and it stank that his mom had to invite his dad to dinner, that his dad couldn’t just show up whenever he wanted.
They hadn’t told Skip much of anything, just that there was a problem and they needed time apart, but neither one of them seemed to have any idea how to fix the problem or how much time they needed.
They weren’t even trying, from what Skip could tell.
It never occurred to him to take sides, because he never stopped thinking of them as one entity, but he wanted to yell at them, like round-headed, red-faced Coach Schneider at school, Work it out, people!
Tom’s situation seemed worse, because his mother had up and left town—but he wasn’t taking sides either.
He was, for a while at least, equally mad at both his parents.
He was mad at his dad for not having any idea when his mom might be coming back, mad at his dad for saying his mom would call (because Felix had assumed Margaret would), and mad at his mom for not calling.
He was mad at his mom for leaving and at his dad for staying.
He was mad at himself for whatever he might have done to make this happen.
He’d even been mad at Skip, at first, because he thought that that crazy blowup, after Skip had spent the night, had been the last straw of something, for whatever reason.
But Felix had assured him his mom’s leaving wasn’t because of anything he—or Skip—had done.
“She’s just decided she wants to live somewhere else for a while.
” That was the explanation Felix came up with, and he added things he wanted to be true that he thought Tom needed to hear.
“She said she loves you and is going to miss you while she’s gone.
She’ll call once she gets where she’s going.
” Which, of course, prompted the question, “Where’s that? ”
Felix took a guess.
Sure enough, the card that came for Tom a month later was postmarked Columbus, as was the Christmas card four months after that, and the birthday card the following April, always the same message following the greeting: Be good, and know I love you—Mom. Never a return address.
Tom carried each card up to his room when it arrived, to read it alone. Later, Felix would see it standing open on his dresser. There for a few weeks, then gone.
“We’re in the same boat, Buckeye,” Skip said, spotting one of the cards before it went away.
Trying to make him feel better, Tom knew, but he smarted a little because he could feel Skip trying to protect him, even in this—when, in fact, their boats were very different.
After a while, the only similarity was the coincidence of the timing of it all, and coincidence doesn’t impress kids much.
When things happened matters far less than how things are, and for Tom, things weren’t good.
He was a tightly wound spring of a kid. Ten years old, short and wiry (evidence of Cal that Felix tried not to see), with a dense head of bright red hair that could be tamed with water and a comb but otherwise hung over his forehead and, half the time, his eyes.
He was broody. He looked people in the eye less and less.
If he mumbled and you asked him to repeat himself, he yelled whatever he’d just said.
He slammed doors and drawers when he didn’t get his way.
He started using all the curse words he’d heard at school.
Felix felt like he was constantly on him about something.
Over the course of that first school year after Margaret left, his grades slipped from A-minuses and B’s to B-minuses, and sometimes to C’s.
His conduct marks went from S to U (Unsatisfactory).
In the “remarks” section of his report card, the teacher wrote, Talks in class.
Doesn’t Listen. Has trouble taking instructions.
When he was signing on the parent line, Felix asked Tom if he could explain why Mr. Holt had written those remarks.
“Because he’s a bastard,” was Tom’s answer.
As Felix saw it, the boy had a lot of anger toward his mother, and she wasn’t here to receive it, so he was doling it out to whomever was around.
How could Felix not punish him? He docked his allowance for this, put him on restriction for that.
Raised his voice, sent him to his room. Was curt with him—just like Margaret had been.
But Tom wasn’t always tightly wound, and he wasn’t always contentious.
At night, he usually settled down and did his homework after dinner, and they watched television together, side by side on the sofa.
He leaned his shoulder against Felix’s sometimes, his feet on the coffee table, a half-eaten bowl of popcorn beside him on the cushion.
They were only down one person, but the house was cavernous with just the two of them.
Tom’s bedroom, at the other end of the hall from Felix’s, felt far away at night.
It would occur to Felix that anything could happen to Tom.
He could come down with some illness in the middle of the night.
He could be kidnapped. Worries that had never been there before.
Sometimes, because he knew it would help him get back to sleep, he got up and looked into Tom’s room, to make sure he was safe and sleeping soundly.
And there he was: sleeping like a stone, Margaret’s red hair tousled around his head, Margaret’s long eyelashes weighting his eyes closed. Anger, Felix knew, was exhausting.
A couple of times, though, Felix was in bed, having not fallen asleep yet, when a stirring made him lift his head from the pillow—only to find Tom silhouetted in the doorway, the nightlight in the hall glowing around him, checking to see if Felix was there.
—