YOU’RE SAYING THAT WAS THE ROOM?”
Jack asked me the question. I had pointed to a window on the first floor of the Cassingham Elementary School building.
“I can’t be sure, but it seems like it was that one, or the one next to it,” I said.
“I can’t believe you were drawing a picture of a woman in a bikini,” he said.
“Why can’t you believe it?” I said. “Just because we were in third grade?”
“I saved you,” he said.
“You definitely saved me,” I said.
We were about ten minutes into our walk—that’s how long it had taken us to get from his house to where we were standing now, on the sidewalk in front of the school. He had a grin on his face; he was much more full of energy than he’d been the night before.
“Why were you drawing a woman in a bikini anyway?” he said.
“I think it was because of Rose LaRose,” I said.
Rose LaRose was a stripper. Not that, in third grade, I’d ever seen her perform. There was a burlesque house in downtown Columbus—Gayety Burlesque—and the Gayety used to take little display advertisements in the three daily papers that Columbus had at the time, the Columbus Citizen, the Columbus Dispatch, and the Ohio State Journal. They weren’t big advertisements—maybe an inch and a half or two inches high and a single column wide. For readers who were interested enough to look, the ads announced which striptease artists were performing during a given week. I was a reader who was interested enough to look.
The Gayety couldn’t show much in their ads—usually just a tiny and almost certainly outdated photo of that week’s stripper leaning back in a sultry pose, maybe running one of her hands through her hair. The strippers weren’t nude in the ads—they customarily had pretty substantial halter-style tops on, and bottoms that contained considerably more fabric than shorts you see on the streets (or even in airport boarding lounges) today. Because the metal photo engravings of the strippers tended to stay in newspaper composing rooms for years at a time, to be used over and over, and because the pressroom machinery of American newspapers of that era usually made it look as if photographs were being printed on pieces of Wonder Bread, the strippers in the Gayety advertisements often bore as much resemblance to smudged inky fingerprints as to beautiful and enticing women.
Didn’t matter to me. I was a big fan of those little Gayety ads. And Rose LaRose—a dark-haired and curvaceous touring stripper—was my favorite. I didn’t care about what was on page one of the paper, but I always ripped it open to see if Rose was in town.
Which led, one day in Miss Kellstadt’s third-grade class, to me opening my notebook and attempting to draw, on a lined page, a picture of a woman in a bikini. I drew the legs, I drew the bikini bottom, I drew the torso, I drew the neck…
And then I heard Jack.
He was making a kind of half-whistling sound; “psst” doesn’t quite do it, but you get the idea. He made the sound again.
He was sitting next to me (in third grade we had moved back to adjacent desks after being separated the year before), and he had seen Miss Kellstadt coming down the aisle. He had also seen what was in my notebook.
I looked up, saw Jack motioning with his head toward Miss Kellstadt, and—this was a decision I had to make in an instant—drew a smokestack on the neck of the woman in the bikini.
Out of the smokestack I drew thick smoke.
So what was on that page in my notebook was the body of a woman wearing a bikini, and, where her head should have been, a big smokestack doing what smokestacks do.
Miss Kellstadt stopped at my desk. She looked down.
“What’s that you’re drawing?” she asked me.
“A factory,” I said.
“A factory,” she said.
She stood over my desk for a second or two.
Then she moved on, and did not mention it again.
“I did save you,” Jack said now, on Cassingham Road, as we looked at the building. “I don’t know what she would have done if you hadn’t changed the picture.”
“I’d almost bet that was the room,” I said, peering across the front lawn toward the window.
HE’D THOUGHT THE INACTIVITY—SITTING around the house, spending so much time in doctors’ offices and hospitals—had made him sluggish. That was the reason he’d wanted to walk through town with me: to recharge himself physically. At least that was the stated reason.
As we walked together, though, I could sense something else going on. He was revisiting his life—our lives. Every corner we came to, every street we turned upon, took him someplace different, from one juncture or another of his years on earth. A movie projector could not have provided more vivid pictures. I could tell in the way he looked around. He was seeing a story.
It was a warm spring afternoon. “Boy, I don’t know what was wrong with me last night,” he said. “I was really wiped out.”
“Second floor,” I said, gesturing toward the junior high school building. “‘LJR in ’84.’”
“I think I really believed it could happen,” he said.
IT HAD BEEN DURING THE KENNEDY-Nixon presidential campaign of 1960. We’d been in eighth grade that fall, on the second story of the school building. Some of the students wore Kennedy buttons, some wore Nixon buttons, most, I suppose, wore no political buttons at all.
But Jack had made his own. “LJR in ’84.”
He’d sat down and figured it out. Under the Constitution of the United States, you had to be thirty-five years old to be eligible for the presidency. The first presidential election after his thirty-fifth birthday, he had calculated, would be the election of 1984. He’d be thirty-seven that year.
He was as self-effacing a boy as I’d ever known—he just didn’t show off, ever. But something had gotten into him, and he’d worn the button most of that fall. The L stood for Louis; he had been born Louis Jack Roth, he always disliked the “Louis,” but it must have worked for him in the context of a political slogan, because “LJR in ’84” it was. Wearing that button in 1960.
“Why’d you do it?” I asked him now.
“I think I was just really excited about the presidential campaign,” he said. “There’s probably a time when you believe what they tell you about any kid being able to grow up to be president. I guess I thought I was giving myself an early start.”
“Did other kids ask you about it?” I said.
“Mostly about the ‘ ’84’ part,” he said. “I had to explain to them that 1984 was my first eligible year.”
“And you got that letter from Rockefeller, too,” I said.
His smile widened. “I’d forgotten that,” he said.
I hadn’t. Around the same time as “LJR in ’84,” he had written a letter to Nelson Rockefeller of New York. He’d either read about Rockefeller in a magazine or seen him on television, but in his bedroom on Ardmore Road he’d written a letter to Rockefeller saying that he hoped to go into politics someday, and Rockefeller had written back, wishing him luck.
“It was always on the refrigerator door,” I said to him.
“My mom told me I should put it there,” he said, falling silent for just a beat before continuing. The Rockefeller letter would have been about two years before her death.
“She said it would be good for everyone who came into our house to see it,” he said.
“I remember the stationery being kind of embossed, or engraved,” I said. “A dark blue official seal, I think, maybe some gold. Was he governor of New York at that time?”
“Right on our refrigerator door,” Jack said, marveling now at the thought: a letter from a Rockefeller, starting out “Dear Jack,” in the cramped kitchen of Mildred Roth.
“I WISH I COULD RUN EVERY DAY,” HE said.
He was looking up the street, at the route he knew so well—the running route he would follow after work and on weekend mornings.
It’s something he had done for so long without even thinking of it in terms of being one of life’s pleasures. It was just a part of his day. But now that it was gone—now that he was too worn out to do it…
“Now, there’s something our dads never did,” I told him.
He laughed at the very thought. Irvin Roth, or Robert Greene Sr., dashing through the streets of Bexley in running clothes? Not any more likely a sight than the two of them wearing robbers’ masks and holding up the Buckeye Federal Savings and Loan. Sticking up the bank would never have occurred to our fathers, and neither would going out for a brisk run.
“I think it was just a more sedentary time,” Jack said. “Once you became an adult, you didn’t run. You pretty much sat still.”
“Well, men played golf, or bowled,” I said.
“Those were games, though,” he said. “I don’t think I ever saw one father or mother going out for a run when we were kids.”
“If anyone had, they’d have been called ‘health nuts,’” I said.
“Or someone would have called the police,” Jack said. “Any grown man seen running down the street, people would assume he was running from something.”
He stood and gazed once more at the road upon which he so recently had taken his daily runs.
“Anyway…,” he said.
I don’t think he’d gone for those runs only for the exercise. I think it was that he wanted to look at the town every day. He wanted to run through a place that he loved.
THE BASEBALL DIAMOND WHERE GARY Herwald hit the home run was just around the corner, and Jack wanted to go see it.
We’d been in junior high school—right around the time of the “LJR in ’84” button. There had been a game on the diamond in back of the school, a regulation game against another junior high school team, and Gary Herwald, a classmate of ours, a good-natured kid with curly dark blond hair who everyone liked, came up to the plate.
He faced the opposing pitcher and he swung the bat and connected, and the ball flew toward the left fielder, who ran back, and back…
And the ball dropped over the tall chain-link fence that separated the junior high school diamond from the high school athletic fields. Gary had knocked the ball over the fence.
This had never happened before. None of us—no one we knew—in a real game had ever hit a ball over a fence for a home run. We’d all been equal, sort of—equal in the kids’ fraternity of boys who had never hit a home run—and then Gary had changed all that. He had separated himself from the pack. He was a home run hitter now—he had entered that new realm of success, he was someone different by the time he reached home plate. He was there, and none of the rest of us were.
“Were you jealous of him that day?” I asked Jack as we reached the diamond, empty now.
“Of course,” he said. “Everyone was. I was happy for Gary, but I wished it was me.”
It was the first time we had experienced something like that. Later, in the adult world of business and gnawing ambition, we—all of us, everyone who is thrust into that larger and colder world—would go through it time and time again: seeing someone move ahead of us, seeing someone achieve something or be given something that the rest of us can only yearn for. You feel it in your stomach. You sense the sands shifting. Someone has moved beyond you, and you are witness. Someone has become something different—something better—than what he or you had been before. And all you can do is watch it happen.
“I asked Gary about it once,” I told Jack. Gary was in sales for a company up in Cleveland, and I would run into him every few years.
“What did he say?” Jack asked.
“I asked him what he was thinking about as he was running around the bases after the ball went over the fence. And Gary said, ‘Probably that I’d never be able to do it again.’”
“That’s Gary,” Jack said. “He would say that.”
“He said he meant it,” I said. “He said he never hit another home run in his life.”
“I never even hit one,” Jack said. “I don’t know what’s worse—never hitting a home run, or hitting one and knowing that it’s never going to happen again.”
We stood near home plate and looked out at the diamond, and at the fence that at the time had seemed so far away, on a spring day like this one.
HE WANTED TO TRY THE TRACK. IT WAS A part of his after-work running routine—when he would hit the streets of Bexley he would at some point run onto the high school track through the open gate just off Fair Avenue, circle it a few times before running right out the gate and back to the streets—and today he told me he’d like to go there.
So we did. No running this afternoon—just a slow counterclockwise walk, passing by the home grandstand, continuing beneath the football scoreboard, on past the visiting team bleachers. There were a number of people jogging resolutely around the track, and Jack and I stayed close to the outside edge, so as not to get in their way.
“Did you ever see the brick?” he asked me.
“You told me it was there, but I never have seen it,” I said.
“Let’s just walk the track one time around, and I’ll show you,” he said.
We found an opening in the fence at the northwest turn of the track, and Jack led the way to a plaza in front of the high school building. The plaza had been constructed in recent years, on a place where before there had been only grass; its presence was intended as a fund-raising effort and as a way to help preserve the heritage of the town.
The bricks that formed the floor of the outdoor plaza were carved with names of generations of students who had gone to the school. The opportunity to have one’s name carved into a brick was for sale; I think the price was fifty dollars to have a name cut into one of the smaller bricks, with larger stones costing more. Usually a brick contained one person’s name, beneath which was his or her graduation year; in some cases entire families signed up together.
Jack had done what he’d done on his own. He had told us about it only when the brick was already in place.
“It’s right up here,” he said now. “They really put it in a good location. Right near the front sidewalk.”
I followed him. He walked on the plaza—many bricks had names on them, many others did not; this was by definition a work in progress. The idea was to keep adding names for the next hundred years and beyond.
“Here,” he said.
I looked down. It was the only brick with an inscription that wasn’t a person’s name, or a family name.
ABCDJ
1965
“I just thought it would be nice,” he said.
“It is,” I said.
“Something to show that we were once here,” he said.
WE WERE ON OUR WAY TO HIS OLD HOUSE, and he said, “I think this is almost the exact place where Jerry Hockman said hello to us.”
Every step he took, every direction he looked, he was finding something. He was touring his past, he was an archaeologist on a deadline not of his own making, excavating long-lost joy. I was probably the right person for him to have with him; I was the one person in the world who wouldn’t have to ask him about his references, including the Jerry Hockman reference.
It’s funny how a kind gesture from someone can stay with you—how the smallest choice a person makes can resonate over the years. The reverberations of cruelty and gratuitous meanness, we often hear about—absence of mercy tends to make the history books. Yet it can work the other way. Fleeting moments of kindness can echo forever.
We were little elementary school kids walking down this same sidewalk when, coming from the other direction, we saw Jerry Hockman. Jerry Hockman, that year, was the high school’s star athlete—older than us, living in a different solar system than us, accustomed to hearing cheers. He had no idea who we were. We were young, invisible.
So here came Jerry Hockman, in his blue varsity letter jacket with the white B on the chest, and to us it was like we were seeing Johnny Unitas, to us it was like we were seeing Mickey Mantle. He had that kind of celebrity, in that town, in that year.
And our paths were about to cross.
What were we supposed to do, at a moment like this? Get off the sidewalk, to let him pass? Offer him words of praise? Ask for his autograph? We hadn’t planned this encounter—what were the rules for such an occasion?
What we did was look down at the sidewalk and avoid his gaze. What we did was fall silent and feel small.
What Jerry Hockman did was speak to us. “Hi, guys,” he’d said. Just that—he acknowledged we were alive. We looked up and he gave us a smile and a nod of his head as he walked past. Tiny choice on his part—ignore the two kids or make them feel special. Tiny choice—and here, at fifty-seven years old, Jack was remembering it.
“We had to ask ourselves if it had really happened,” I said. “We had to make sure we each had heard it right—that Jerry Hockman had really spoken to us.”
“The next day in school, everyone thought we were lying,” he said. “They thought we were making it up.”
“If you’d had to choose only one of the two things—the letter from Nelson Rockefeller or the hello from Jerry Hockman—which would you have chosen?” I said.
“I didn’t have to choose,” he said. “That was the great thing.”
“But if you’d had to,” I said, loving these moments, never wanting this to end. “If someone had made you take one of the two.”
“Definitely Jerry Hockman saying hello,” he said. “We were younger. It was more unbelievable.”
NEXT TO AUDIE MURPHY HILL—ON THE strip of sidewalk between Elm Avenue and Jack’s old front lawn—we debated whether to walk onto the property.
“I don’t think they’d mind,” I said.
“Yeah, but if they look out the window and see two guys walking around their house, it might scare them,” he said.
“We’re not all that scary,” I said.
“Still, I don’t know who lives here now,” he said. “I think we should just look from here.”
So we did. The house, for certain, appeared older—it had been more than fifty years since I’d first come here, since we’d pretended to be Audie Murphy as we hunkered close to the grass and, stick-rifles in hand, crawled up that soft little slope in pursuit of enemy soldiers. We walked east a few feet until we could see the back yard, and I asked Jack: “What was that wooden thing for?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “I don’t think my parents ever opened it.”
It was this strange-looking wooden set of doors—horizontal doors—that extended from the house and into the back yard. They were constructed to open upward—beneath them must have been steps that led to the basement. They always seemed sort of spooky to me. Like trapdoors, literally.
“They must have been here when my parents first moved in, but we didn’t touch them,” Jack said.
Above them and to the left was the window to the breakfast room.
“Your sister Helen really confused me in there when she talked about Chuck Berry,” I said.
Jack laughed out loud—he was doing that a lot today, it was such a great sound to be hearing. “‘Drop the coin right into the slot,’” he said.
The Chuck Berry song “School Days” was out and a big hit on the charts. This was 1957; we were ten. Chuck Berry seemed to be this mysterious and vaguely dangerous figure, a visitor to our ears from a wider world full of potential pleasures and pitfalls the nature of which we could only guess at; his voice had that knowing, nasal curl to it, a little like a leer, and one day the kitchen radio in Jack’s house was on and we were eating Toll House cookies and drinking milk in the breakfast room. Chuck Berry was singing about “right to the juke joint you go in,” and he spat out the famous line:
“Drop the coin right into the slot….”
He rolled the start of the first word: “Drrrop…”
Helen Roth, two years older than Jack, had come into the breakfast room and said to us: “You know what he’s really singing about, don’t you?”
We had looked up, blank.
“A jukebox,” I had said.
“Obviously a jukebox,” Helen had said. “But do you know what he’s really singing about?”
We just looked at her.
“A woman,” Helen had said.
This was the last thing we expected to hear. This staggered us.
“The slot is a woman,” Helen had said.
I have no idea whether she was right. I still think that the line was about a jukebox, and only about a jukebox. But on that day it had been such an unanticipated thing to hear, so salacious and disorienting—that Chuck Berry might have been singing a story about a jukebox but really sneaking a reference to sex into the air inside the Roths’ house…
“The first time I ever flew first class was because of Chuck Berry,” I said.
“I know,” Jack said. “You called me afterwards.”
I had been a beginning reporter in Chicago, assigned to a story in St. Louis, and I’d gone out to O’Hare for the flight to Missouri. Among the other passengers waiting in the TWA boarding area, his guitar case propped up against the seat next to him, was Chuck Berry. It was like seeing Abraham Lincoln.
When the gate agent arrived to begin check-in, I followed Berry to the desk. He had a first-class ticket. So, on an impulse, I paid to change my ticket to first class, too. I just had to ride in the same cabin as Chuck Berry.
I didn’t say a word to him the whole flight. I was seated in the row behind him; I mainly watched him and the flight attendants flirt with each other. When the plane landed in St. Louis, I walked into the airport and went straight to a pay phone and excitedly called Jack.
“Did you find out what ‘drop the coin right into the slot’ means?” he had asked, as I knew he would.
“I didn’t,” I had said. “I was too nervous to talk to him. I wanted to ask him, but I just couldn’t.”
So it remained a mystery, locked forever inside that breakfast room on Ardmore Road. We looked toward the house—toward where that other mystery had been, the wooden set of double doors built parallel to the ground, more ominous and ambiguous even than a Chuck Berry lyric, something seemingly quite conventional, most mundane. But you never can tell.
“MY GYROSCOPE JUST SEEMS WRONG,” HE said.
He pointed toward his feet.
“It’s like sometimes I have trouble keeping my steps together.”
“Your gyroscope, your thermostat…,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
“It’s got to be part of the radiation treatments,” I said.
“The plate from the Toddle House is great,” he said, steering us back to something sunnier. “I can’t believe you found one.”
“Speaking of which, do you feel like going over to where it used to be?” I said. For that journey, no gyroscope or compass would be needed. We could get there in our sleep.