Chapter Nineteen #6
Skip was obliged to stay but not to interact.
Free of his suit jacket and tie, he wandered around the first floor for a while, sampling all the food.
He put a couple of cigarillos in his pocket, then went upstairs and looked at his grandad’s clothes still hanging in the closet, his watch and his lighter in a dish on the dresser.
He got on the phone by Ida’s side of the bed and called Tom’s house. Tom answered.
“I’m holding my dead grandfather’s toothbrush, Buckeye. The one who went camping with us. Creepy, huh?” He asked if Tom wanted to come over.
Twenty minutes later, Tom rolled up the driveway on his bicycle.
Skip let him in through the kitchen. They loaded up on snacks and slipped down to the basement without being noticed.
There, in the glow of the hanging overhead bulb, they beheld the miniature village with its three trains and its papier-maché mountain.
All of it Skip’s now. In the light, dust hung like stars over the streets and buildings.
The ceiling creaked with footsteps. Tom was taking his cues from Skip, and Skip, who’d thought about this moment many times over the years, was overcome with a new reverence for the trains and the village.
The two boys stepped in opposite directions around the table, taking it in.
When they met on the other side, Tom handed Skip one of Roman’s conductor’s hats he’d picked up from the bench, and Skip set it absently on his head.
He brought out the cigarillos, handed one to Tom.
They sank down onto the bench chairs at one end of the table and put the cigars in their mouths, but neither of them reached for the transformer box.
—
The day had been long and somber. Cal, having chauffeured everyone to the cemetery that morning, and then to Ida’s, said he would drive Everett and Skip home at dusk.
He did a double-take when he saw Tom coming up from the basement.
Rather than ask what he was doing there, he offered to give him a ride, but Tom said no thanks and pedaled off on his bicycle.
Cal took his father and Skip to the house on Taft Street, then drove back to Ida’s to help clean up.
When they were finished, there was some conversation about whether or not Becky would stay the night on London Hill, but Ida brushed that off, said she was fine. She wanted to be alone, in fact.
Becky had been moved by Cal’s behavior over the past few days.
She’d never asked him what, specifically, he’d encountered when he’d found her father.
She didn’t want to know, knew only that it had to have been harrowing, and that he’d dealt with the worst of it himself.
Since then, he’d been with her every waking hour, had stood beside her in the receiving line at the viewing, had helped out as much as he could.
When they pulled into the driveway on Taft Street, she reached over and put her hand on his shoulder, gave it a squeeze.
She thanked him for everything he’d done, said she was glad he’d been a part of it; she knew Roman wasn’t his favorite person.
“He could be likable,” Cal said.
“That should be his epitaph.” She leaned over, kissed him on the cheek, and got out of the car.
—
Roman had been streamlining his businesses for a while, in preparation for full retirement.
He’d sold the luncheonette in Tiffin two years ago, and the lamp store in Fostoria the year before.
In his will, he’d arranged for a sizable nest egg to go to Becky, had earmarked some money for a college fund for Skip, and, while leaving the business to his daughter, he’d expressed in his will that he wished for his son-in-law to remain its manager. Everything else, he left to Ida.
By September, Ida was making plans.
She mentioned this to Becky while they shopped at the farmer’s market, downtown.
“What kind of plans?” Becky asked.
Ida touched the asparagus. She touched the bell peppers. “Maybe I’ll see the USA in a Chevrolet. Or finally go to New York to become a lounge singer.”
“At your age?”
“I beg your pardon? I’m sixty-four years young, thank you very much.”
“So you’re going to stand in audition lines? Sing in front of strangers?”
“Look how they react, just because you want to do something out of the ordinary. Rings a bell with someone else’s situation, doesn’t it?”
“Just tell me you’re not going to New York.”
“Of course I’m not going to New York.” Ida picked up a strawberry and blew on it. “I’m going to Florida.”
“When?”
“As soon as I sell the house.”
“You’re selling the house?”
“And moving to Fort Lauderdale. Your father was dragging his heels, didn’t want to ‘get completely out of the game,’ as he called it.
We were supposed to be down there three years ago.
” She caught the attention of the farmer, Mr. Blosier, whose stall it was, winked at him as she bit the strawberry off the stem.
She added one of his pints to her basket.
“You’re not sad, are you? About the house? ”
“I guess not. I’ll miss you, though.”
“You too, pumpkin. You’ll have to come visit. You and Skip. Who knows, maybe Cal too.”
Becky cut her a look.
“How about some cider?” Ida said. She bought them each a cup from the apple vendor. They sat for a minute on the bench circling the War of 1812 memorial fountain, their baskets between their feet.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Ida said of the cider. “So what’s the status of things with you and Cal, anyway? I know I’m not supposed to ask, and I’m not asking anything specific. Just a general update.”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say. The reason I bring it up is because I don’t want you to think your father and I didn’t have our problems. We hit a couple of low spots. I almost left him once.”
“When?” Becky asked, astounded. “What happened?”
“No specifics. Let’s just say, he wasn’t…
original. What I want to tell you is, once it was all out in the open, I had to make a choice about whether or not I stayed, even while I didn’t know if I could forgive him.
I decided to stay, obviously. And it wasn’t just one decision.
I had to make that decision brand-new, almost every day, for a long time. ”
“The decision to forgive him?”
“The decision to stay, even though I couldn’t forgive him. And sooner or later that turned into forgiveness—or something like it.”
“Cal had an affair, Mom.” The only part of the story she would give.
“I know.”
“You don’t. How could you know?”
“You don’t have the market cornered on intuition in this family.
” Ida peered down into her cup as she swirled the grainy cider around.
“I think you’re on the fence with him now, and you’ll fall one way or another, eventually.
Just make sure you fall the right way. You don’t want to end up going through all this and regretting what you decided to do. ”
“Do you regret it?”
“Me? I used to call him so many names. To his face, sometimes. I even called him an asshole once.” Becky’s mouth fell open.
Ida grinned. “I did! Right in the middle of an argument we were having about who knows what. And the look on his face! Not just because of the insult, but because he hated to hear a woman swear. I danced around the room saying, asshole, asshole.” She smiled at the memory.
“Yes, I’m glad I stayed. The whole reason you build a bridge together is so the water can run under it, right?
And not wash the two of you away? Sometimes one of you makes it flood, and then the water recedes.
Your father could infuriate me, but I loved him, and he was always going to be the one I gave it a go with.
So, no, I don’t regret it. I’m glad I stayed. ”
Even in such a moment of closeness, neither woman wanted to tell the other the extent of her husband’s crimes.
No mention from Becky of the illegitimate child.
No mention from Ida of the lipstick on Roman’s neck, or the blond hairs she found on his shirts whenever he came back from checking on the luncheonette in Tiffin.
They kept these things to themselves not because of a misplaced sense of shame or guilt by association, but out of concern for the other’s opinion of the man in question, going forward. Even when one of those men was dead.
The house would sell in January of 1957 for slightly below the asking price.
The miniature village would be disassembled carefully and relocated to the basement of the house on Taft Street, along with some of the furniture Becky wanted but wasn’t sure what to do with.
By March, Ida would be living just north of Fort Lauderdale, in Pompano Beach, in a third-floor apartment overlooking the Atlantic.
She would make friends, and go on dates with fellow retirees, then come home and tell Roman about them, his ashes in an urn on the mantel of the artificial fireplace.
She would remind him now and then of some awful thing he’d done, but when she remembered something funny, from the early days, she’d share that with him too. He never got a word in.
—
Forgiveness wasn’t so great if you were the forgiver, Becky discovered. Forgiveness was supposed to be the high road, but it was low and bumpy—and long.
Still, she was tired of their having lost each other.
It seemed so tragic and stupid. She thought of what her mother had told her.
She thought of how her father’s death had come out of the blue, the way death so often did, and of Everett’s awareness of his own mortality, and of how Everett and Cal had spent a lot less time together since Cal had moved out.
She reminded herself that Cal was the same person she’d wanted to talk to at Fink’s soda counter, nearly fifteen years ago.
He was the person who’d pricked his thumb and howled and laughed—over and over—as he learned how to change Skip’s diapers. And he was still Skip’s dad.
She knew he was sorry. That was never in question.
But to this day, she didn’t know why it had happened.
What was becoming clearer, however—and had probably always been clear to her mother—was that she was looking for understanding where there was none to be found.
She was looking for understanding in an act of wanton selfishness.
Forgiveness, the way her mother had described it, wasn’t something that shot up out of the soil; it had to creep in over time, like a vine.
One night, Cal came for dinner and lingered in the living room after Everett and Skip had gone to bed.
He always sat in the armchair on these visits, while Becky sat in the recliner, the empty couch between them like a neutral zone.
They made guesses at What’s My Line? and talked about the possibility of expanding the store’s square footage by renting the place next door to it, which had been empty for six months.
At one point, Becky made tea, and when she brought the cups in, she relocated herself to the couch and indicated with a nod that Cal join her.
He didn’t kiss her until he was absolutely certain she wanted him to, and for a while they made out on the couch like teenagers.
Early the next morning, they gave thought to his skedaddling before Skip and Everett woke up and discovered that he’d stayed the night.
The kid and the old man could handle it, they decided.
He stayed.