Chapter Twenty-Three
In the days following the report, Tom drove himself, the acid-dropping grade school teachers, and a friend of theirs—a dark-haired young woman named Kathy Pascal, from Dayton, who had just started in production at the radio station where he worked, and whose cousin, like Skip, had died in the Tet Offensive—to Washington, D.C.
, to join half a million other people for a moratorium march and rally outside the White House.
They carried signs with the names of fallen U.S.
soldiers written on them, or the names of villages in South Vietnam that had been destroyed.
Tom carried a sign with Skip’s name and rank, and a copy of his senior portrait taped above it.
Inside the White House, Nixon watched college football on television.
This detail would become part of history only because he himself would brag about it later: how completely unbothered he’d been by the people marching outside.
Tom came home. Like old times, they made what Felix used to think of as one of their bachelor meals—grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup—and while they ate at the kitchen table, they talked about work, the recent snowfall, the second moon shot, but not the specific reason Tom was there.
There was nothing, really, to say about that.
They cleaned up and sat down in front of the television.
By chance, his number was in the three hundreds. The relief they both felt was ardent, but subdued.
“Do you think she’s watching?” Tom asked a little later.
Felix tried to remember the name of Tom’s last girlfriend, the one he’d been serious about. Then he realized who Tom meant.
He lit a cigarette. They almost never spoke of Margaret anymore.
She came to mind at random times—sometimes Felix even dreamed about her.
And her absence was quietly felt at every one of Tom’s milestones.
Graduations. College acceptance letters.
But for fifteen years, the birthday cards and Christmas cards had been coming to the house on Roswell Lane—the only address she had for him—and at Tom’s request, Felix had been throwing them out without mentioning them.
Why doesn’t she come visit me, if she lives just across the state?
was one of the questions that used to bubble up out of Tom on a semi-regular basis, then with less frequency, then never.
“I don’t know,” Felix said now. “What made you think of her?”
Tom shrugged, his eyes still on the television. “All the moms.” Meaning, all the moms who were watching, worried about their sons. All the moms who were still on active duty, stateside. “You think she ever wonders if I’m over there? You think she wonders if I’m dead?”
For all we know, she’s dead, Felix wanted to say.
The war wasn’t over, the draft wasn’t over, but Tom’s high number put a tentative ease in his heart that he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Moments before the lottery, the thought had flashed through his mind: if we clear this, I’ll tell him.
On the other side of that ultimatum, he was still wondering when, exactly, would be the best time.
The only thing he knew for certain was that there would be no getting it right.
—
Truer words.
Felix couldn’t bring himself to do it on that early December visit, when Tom was only there for the night and had received such good news. And he couldn’t bring himself to do it when Tom came back three weeks later, because it was Christmas.
There were, of course, other considerations that factored into his putting it off.
Now that he’d let it go so long that Tom had become an adult, he’d decided that disclosure, whenever it happened, would have to be full, not partial.
No matter how difficult. He couldn’t with a clear conscience excise from the report his own actions—his own contribution to the marriage that had fallen apart in such a spectacular way.
A half-truth wasn’t a truth. It also wasn’t fair to Margaret, or Tom. Or him, for that matter.
As it happened, the opportunity to tell Tom in person didn’t present itself again until late April, when he planned a trip home the week after his twenty-fourth birthday.
In advance of that, with his resolve as strong as it was going to get, Felix dropped by Becky and Cal’s one evening after work and—in their kitchen, over a glass of lemonade—told them what he intended to do.
They were understandably taken aback, Cal more so than Becky.
For all the thinking Cal had devoted to the matter over the years, he was nervous about how Tom would react.
He felt bad for Felix, and he almost spoke out against the idea—then remembered that he’d never had a say in the matter to begin with.
Taken aback or not, the Jenkinses supported Felix’s decision.
They talked things over with him for almost an hour, and they offered to be there when he told Tom, if that was what he wanted.
Felix thought about that for a moment and said no.
Not at first, anyway. He had to do this alone, just him and Tom.
—
For all their trepidation, for all their certainty that telling Tom would cause an upheaval worthy of an emotional backlash—they were right; it did.
Felix pushed it till the last full day Tom was in town, then suggested the two of them take a walk around the quarter-mile stretch of Lake Meyer.
Something they hadn’t done since Tom was a kid.
It was a Thursday, early afternoon. The air was crisp, the sky mottled with mackerel clouds.
A handful of people batted around in the water near the picnic area.
Felix and Tom walked the narrow path around the horseshoe bend and ended up—at Felix’s suggestion—sitting on a large rock that sloped down into the water.
A popular drying spot for turtles, but the turtles were nowhere to be seen.
As Tom leaned back on his elbows and crossed his sandaled feet, he knew something was up.
An announcement of some kind. His father seemed jittery, talkative, like he’d had too much coffee.
He was great at skimming stones but was throwing one splunker after another.
“There actually was something”—splunk—“that I wanted to talk to you about.” Then Felix embarked on a preamble that had a lot of fits and starts, and wove in more than a few apologies before Tom even knew what the topic was.
Out with it, Tom wanted to say. Let’s get the show on the road.
And because he knew it was now or never, Felix spoke his opening lines.
—
Tom had never been in a serious car accident but knew two friends who had—two separate accidents—and they both said the same thing: most of the moments right before and during the collision were all but erased, their memory of the event fragmented, their sense of time muffled, their hearing wonky when they tried to re-piece it later, so that the whole thing kind of whaa-whaa-whaa’d.
That’s sort of how it went for Tom. The afternoon was like one long collision.
As he was tossed around in slow motion from one point of impact to another, pieces of him breaking off and floating around him, his father whaa-whaa-whaa’d, and then they moved on to the secondary crash site, driving in the most awkward silence of his life across town to Taft Street, where Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins whaa-whaa-whaa’d.
Tom heard every word, but his brain, afterward, let go of remembering what it was like to sit there and listen to all of what they were telling him, on a rock, on a couch.
Now that we’ve just cracked your identity apart, let’s dive in. Whaa-whaa-whaa.
He practically had tire tracks across his stomach when they were done. Nearly had to brush broken glass out of his hair. But in memory, listening to it all became one big, horrible thud.
—
Back the crash footage up a little. He’s surprised by the gay thing—but it’s not a bad surprise or even a lasting one.
It’s 1970, after all. It’s only shocking because of how he’s always seen his father; change the lens and it starts to make sense, in a way.
It’s not like a second wife or even a girlfriend had ever come into the picture.
He’s fine with his father’s being gay—or somewhat gay, or bisexual, his father doesn’t use any of these terms, leans, instead, on words like preference and proclivity—however you word it, once the shock wears off, Tom is fine with it, and it might even be a fascinating thing to discuss, in and of itself.
But it turns out that’s just the first sharp turn in the road.
In the room with the grandfather clock he knew so well as a kid, he pieces together what happened when.
He appreciates the shock they had to deal with, in advance of the shock he’s having to deal with.
But that’s a hell of a lot of recovery time, on their part.
A hell of a lot of lead time too. All three of them in on it.
Four, if you count his mother. And he counts his mother.
Speaking of her:
What they’re saying is, this is sort of all her fault.
What they’re also saying is, this can’t all be blamed on her.
They tell him, too, that they don’t want him to resent Mr. Jenkins. Tom wants to tell them to stop talking, let him figure out the resentment later. He wants to go over to the mantel and look in the mirror, and at Mr. Jenkins, back and forth about a hundred times.
Mr. Jenkins, who’s telling him his father is still his father. In front of his father, whom they’ve all just told him isn’t his father. There’s one for the wha-wha pedal.
Mrs. Jenkins is blowing her nose into a tissue and saying something about how close he and Skip always were as kids—like he needs to be reminded of that. Maybe she’s worried he’s about to tell them all to go to hell. Maybe he is.