Chapter Twenty-One #2
“I’m the parent who stayed,” Felix said, “so I’m the one who has to contend with it. All the rage, all the testing. All the resentment. All the questions—”
“All the love.”
“Yeah, we keep that in a little jar in the kitchen. I’m the one who has to make every threat and dole out every punishment. I’m tired of being the jerk.”
Bishop, himself not a father, said somewhat chipperly that he had no advice to offer.
But he listened whenever Felix wanted to complain—usually over a beer at Pin King or the pub a few blocks from the furniture factory, near the wood detailing place Bishop had moved on to the year before Felix started climbing the ladder at Van Benton.
“I don’t know how two people raise a kid,” Bishop said, “much less one.”
“He doesn’t ask about his mom much anymore—hardly ever—but he’s got a lot of bad feelings for her. He doesn’t know what to do with them, hurls them at me sometimes, I guess. And you know what really stinks?”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t want him to hate her. I don’t want him telling people stories about her, and I don’t want him carrying around all these bad feelings.
But I also can’t bring myself to tell him anything good about her.
Because I did that, right after she left, tried to cover for her, and she never called him. Because she left him, for chrissake.”
Bishop told him to go easy on himself. He said he didn’t know any parents who didn’t complain. His ex-wife had three kids with her husband, and she’d sounded at her wits’ end on the phone the last time they talked.
“You two speak?”
“Sure. A few times a year, at least, just to catch up. We get along better now than when we were married.” He gave a shrug and a little smile, as if to say, You never know.
Had the look ever passed between them? They’d both wondered, privately.
If it had, their regular proximity to each other through work, back when they worked together, had caused it to fade.
Or their becoming friends had caused it to fade.
Or the look hadn’t been there at all (the easiest and safest conclusion).
They were buddies. Felix was glad for that, and for the ear, and the occasional reassurance.
Glad, and a little surprised at the flicker of disappointment he felt sometimes, looking into Bishop’s eyes.
—
Skip graduated in June of 1962, more than a year after the president had advised them all to ask what they could do for their country.
As far as Skip could tell—squinting in the sun, combing Vitalis through his hair—that meant either get a job or go to college.
He’d taken a required class during senior year called the Exploratory Wheel, where they read and watched slideshows and talked about different career options.
The field of medicine. The field of education.
Finance. Delivery services. They cast a wide net of possibilities, and kids cracked up when one of the slides showed a custodian cleaning offices.
Skip hadn’t seen what was so funny about that.
He also hadn’t really been grabbed by any career option they’d covered.
He’d been sort of grabbed by a couple of options.
Being a lawyer who got to cross-examine people.
Being an architect who got to stand on a street somewhere with his hands on his hips, looking up at a building he’d designed.
But everything that even sort of grabbed him took a lot of work just to become that, years before you even got to start doing whatever it was you wanted to do.
Mostly, or for now, anyway, he wanted a car. Which meant having some sort of job while he saved up for it and figured out what came next.
As long as he had a plan, Becky and Cal weren’t too concerned.
Until he kept replacing one plan with the next.
He’d applied to Ohio State and Bowling Green and had gotten into both, but when Cal and Becky visited the campuses with him, he’d showed little interest, couldn’t picture himself at either school.
He was working at the Esso station by then and had gotten a taste of how money could accrue.
He worked all fall and into the winter, banked most of his pay by living at home, and in March of 1963 he bought a moss-colored ’54 Dodge Coronet he called the Snot Rocket.
Cal said it looked like a very good car to get him back and forth from the vocational college out on Route 23.
Instead, he worked on the loading dock at LeRoy Produce for a while.
He got a place of his own—a little apartment he rented on Early Street that Becky couldn’t stand, because it smelled like his dirty laundry and mice.
She shoved his clothes into grocery bags when she went over, brought them home, washed and folded them.
Cal worried that he had no discipline or focus; college was supposed to have provided those.
“Give him time,” Becky said. Still, Cal sailed the suggestion—more than once—that Skip might come work in the hardware store.
“No offense, Dad,” Skip finally said, “but retail’s boring.
” Then he went and took a job at a lightbulb plant out near the highway, where he moved pallets of lightbulbs around a warehouse with a forklift all day.
—
Like Skip’s before him, Tom’s graduation from Bonhomie High School, in June of 1964, was held on the football field, on a Saturday morning, with the families filling the span of bleachers as if they were there to watch a game. Felix was in the front row with his Minolta.
Cal wanted to attend the ceremony, but he felt like asking Becky to join him would be insensitive, given everything.
And strange. The two of them sitting there, clapping for his secret son.
He ended up waiting for Becky to leave the house that morning to run errands, then driving over to the high school, where he parked and stood off to the side of the bleachers, watching from the chain-link fence.
Becky, it turned out, was already there—a little farther down along the fence.
He walked over and stood beside her, and they watched together.
Skip, meanwhile, was sitting in the Snot Rocket with Theo Bach out in front of school, listening to the names over the loudspeaker.
Almost seventy of them before they got to the S’s.
When they finally called Thomas Aquinas Salt, Skip looked at Theo and they both mouthed Aquinas?
then whooped and hollered as Skip laid into the horn, rousing a spat of starlings from a nearby elm.
—
He and Tom had drifted apart some, of course.
How could it not happen? The two-year age difference had felt like a canyon when Skip was fourteen and Tom was still twelve.
Skip had gravitated more toward Ron and Theo, Vincent and Sam, kids his age and older, and for whatever reason, having Tom around had become a drag.
He never said as much, still called him “Buckeye,” but he pulled away.
Also, around that time, he started shedding things he deemed “kid stuff,” like the tape recorder, and the do-it-yourself radio kit he’d gotten for Christmas but never opened.
Tom had accepted these items like consolation prizes for the hours he and Skip no longer logged together.
In his room at home, he’d cleared his plane and car model projects off the card table, its vinyl top crosshatched with X-Acto knife slices, and plopped down the radio kit.
He’d laid all the parts out, built it, then took it apart.
Then he’d built it a second time to see if it would still work.
He’d used the tools from the radio kit to dismantle the Ampro reel-to-reel.
He’d labeled all the parts, and managed—eventually—to put the tape recorder back together again.
Over time, he did this with other things in the house, some of which he couldn’t put back together (Felix never knew why the radio in his study stopped picking up stations).
He tested the reassembled tape recorder by recording short interview shows where he did all the voices, then erased the results.
When it came time to declare an intended major for college, he would’ve gone with broadcasting or sound engineering, had such things been listed, and went instead with the closest he could come: engineering.
He was then surprised when his father, the furniture-maker turned furniture boss, told him engineering had been his major in college, before he’d switched it to his minor.
“You majored in furniture?” Tom asked, smirking a little.
Business—a nice umbrella major Tom might want to consider, Felix said.
He wasn’t at all ready for this young man with Margaret’s eyes (and, occasionally, her temperament) not to be living under his roof, he was devastated by the idea, in fact, but he knew it was inevitable.
All too soon, Tom, having waited tables at Wickersham’s all summer, bought a used yellow Chevy Corvair, and in no time Felix was following it up I-75 to Toledo to get Tom settled into his dorm room at Toledo University.
—
Bishop brought steaks and a six-pack of Schmidt over on the following weekend, to help lift Felix’s spirits.
Turning T-bones on the grill in Felix’s backyard, he told Felix he was doing all the right things, reminded him he could go see Tom whenever he wanted.
“Think of all the energy you won’t have to spend being aggravated with him,” Bishop said with a smile—and hoping to elicit the same from Felix’s long face.
“Think of the cap that’ll be on the milk bottle when you open the fridge.
Think of the privacy.” For Bishop was still taking care of his mother and father at home.
But he was also thinking of another kind of privacy. And getting ahead of himself, perhaps.
Although perhaps not.
—
In October of 1964, Everett sat down at Becky’s Smith Corona, in his bedroom on Taft Street, and typed:
Dear President Johnson.