IF YOU’D HAD A POCKET CALCULATOR—not that anyone had pocket calculators back then, this would have required one of those mammoth Univac computers that filled entire rooms, spitting out elongated cards with punch holes in them…
But if you’d somehow had a pocket calculator, and had added up the total number of hours that the five of us had spent together in any of a hundred specific places, including visits to each other’s homes, the winner by a landslide would have been the Toddle House.
I don’t even know how it managed to stay open—there were no tables, no booths, just the counter with maybe a dozen stools. It ran twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year including Christmas, which means someone had to pay three shifts of short-order cooks each day. The cook was usually the only person on duty; it still is a puzzle to me how the revenues that came in from twelve stools were sufficient to keep the Toddle House alive.
To be sure, five of the stools were quite frequently accounted for by ABCDJ. We did our thinking at the Toddle House, and our brooding at the Toddle House, and our conniving at the Toddle House—we didn’t even have to talk much to each other when we were there. The Toddle House to us was a little like a chapel, had any chapel in the world sold cheeseburgers, hash browns, Cokes and slices of banana cream pie.
It was right on Main Street. There were Toddle Houses all over the United States, although they’re gone now. Our Toddle House was on East Main just off Remington Road, and if we couldn’t find each other anywhere, we’d just head for the Toddle House. It was home base. Everyone would show up.
(There was one short-order cook/waitress at the Toddle House who invariably answered the phone with the weirdest, most wavery, quavery, high-pitched, yodel-like shriek: “Toddle House!” It’s not possible to convey the sound of her voice in print—it was like something out of the Swiss Alps, it was like she was summoning an elk or something from the next mountain pass. For years afterward, whenever any of us would meet up with any of the others for a meal, at one point someone at the table would yodel at top volume: “Toddle House!” It was an anthem, that yodel.)
When I first heard the news about Jack—when I received that first phone message from Chuck—I knew what I would have to send him, and it wasn’t a Hallmark card.
JACK TALKED BUSINESS ON OUR WAY TO where the Toddle House used to be. To be specific, he talked about how worried he was about what was to become of his business.
He worked for himself. After many years of being employed by various companies in the wholesale merchandise industry, he had set out on his own, packaging and selling private-label food products to retail operations around the country. I could never really understand how it worked—the ins and outs of that kind of enterprise were foreign to me. But that’s what he did, and that’s what he was on edge about.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “I’m not even supposed to drive a car by myself while I’m getting these radiation treatments, and I hate asking Janice to drive me up to my office.”
“I know it’s easy for me to say,” I told him as we walked toward Main Street, “but you can’t think about business right now. You just have to think about getting well.”
It was, in fact, too easy a thing for me to say—it was too glib. I wasn’t the one who had to pay Jack’s household bills, I wasn’t the one who had to pay his insurance premiums, I wasn’t the one who had to pay the rent on his office space. He had to balance all of those worries at the same time he was fighting the cancer inside him.
“Who ever thought we’d have to think about business?” he said.
“I guess before you leave your first world, you don’t think of yourself as anything other than what you are,” I said. “Imagine us sitting at the Toddle House, talking about office expenses.”
“I still think about that time we saw Mike Ingram at Lazarus,” Jack said.
Mike Ingram had been a guard on the Ohio State football team in the late 1950s. I believe he may have been captain his senior year. Tough-looking, brawny guy. A hero in Columbus, a gladiator in a scarlet-and-gray uniform.
One holiday season Jack and I had been at the F & R Lazarus department store downtown, and we saw, carrying a tall stack of cartons, someone who apparently was working in the Lazarus stockroom. It was Mike Ingram, post–Ohio State football.
We stared—how could we help it? And Mike Ingram stopped in his tracks, looked right back at us, and said, with bite in his tone: “Yeah, it’s me.” Meaning: Go ahead and stare if you must.
Couldn’t really blame him. There was nothing wrong with what he was doing—he was earning some money in the stockroom. But he was out in the world now, he wasn’t where he had been when everything was bathed in sunlight and free of choiceless tedium; he wasn’t in Ohio Stadium, hearing the approving roar from 78,000 people who loved him and his teammates. He had moved past that first of life’s roles, as everyone does. It was his misfortune to have been famous very early; there must have been dozens and dozens of men in their twenties working in the Lazarus stockroom that holiday season, but Mike Ingram was the one destined to attract curious gapers, because he was no longer who he was supposed to be.
“And Mel Nowell at the Union,” I said. The same thing had happened at the Union department store in the Town and Country shopping center on East Broad Street. We’d been in there one day as teenagers, and selling ties in the men’s department was Mel Nowell, who had been a starting guard on the 1960 Ohio State NCAA champion basketball team. The best college basketball team in America: Jerry Lucas, John Havlicek, Mel Nowell, Larry Siegfried and Joe Roberts. And then, not all that farther down the road, he was on the first floor of the Union wearing a shirt and tie, selling ties. For all I know this may have been part-time work for him, and the Lazarus stockroom job may have been part-time work for Mike Ingram. But the game clock in Ohio Stadium had run down to zero for Ingram, the game clock in St. John Arena had zeroed out for Nowell. It was time for Act 2. It happens to all of us.
We could see Main Street straight ahead.
“It’s probably best when you’re a kid that you don’t know that things are going to get complicated,” Jack said. “There’s nothing you could do about it, anyway.”
IT WAS A GOOD THING THE TODDLE HOUSE was always open on Christmas, because we were always there on Christmas (late at night, as the holiday was in its dwindling hours); we were always there on Thanksgiving (early in the morning, before our families began to gather for their turkey dinners); we were always there on New Year’s Day (at noon, as the world and we were stirring to tentative wakefulness from parties the night before). We felt welcome; a lot of times we were the only company the cook had, I sensed that there were nights when, as with the driver of the Bexley bus, we helped break the loneliness of the person on duty. We were voices to fill the air.
We were at ease being silent at times in the Toddle House, yes, but when we did speak to each other we seemed on occasion to say unexpectedly private and heartfelt things, the kinds of things I don’t recall us saying in other settings. I think, looking back on it now, the reason may have been this: On those side-by-side stools at the counter, we didn’t see each other’s faces. We looked straight forward toward the grill, or looked down as we ate our burgers and drank our Cokes, and we could talk without making eye contact. We could say certain things without being required to watch the reaction.
When I heard that Jack was sick there was something I wanted to give him, and I had no idea where to find it. But then it occurred to me that the Internet had to have some salutary reason to exist.
“IT’S SO NICE OUT TODAY, I FEEL LIKE WE should be going up to Moe Glassman’s,” Jack said.
That’s what we would do in the late springtime; that’s what we would do to get ready for summer. Moe Glassman’s was a store on the Ohio State campus that sold clothing to male undergraduates. It’s where we all, before we were old enough to be in college, would go to buy our moccasins. The mocs-without-socks were our definition of summertime. I don’t know how it started.
“What an odd thing, all of us wearing the same kind of clothes in the summer when we were kids,” I said. The old Bermudas, the white T-shirts, the dress shirts open all the way in front, the sleeves rolled up—I don’t know who did it first (although it was probably Chuck), I don’t know who got the idea, but that’s how it always was, and each year it started again with that first hint of summer in the air, and the drive up to Moe’s.
“Imagine if once you got older you dressed the same way as everyone you worked with,” I said. “People looking in from the outside would think you were all nuts.”
“What are you talking about?” Jack said. “That’s exactly what people do when they’re in their thirties and forties and fifties. Look around any business office.”
I guessed he had a point. But shirts and ties and slacks didn’t seem to be in the same league as the mocs-with-no-socks uniform.
“Going up to Moe Glassman’s every spring sort of felt like we were joining a club,” I said.
“Except we were already in it,” Jack said. The old Toddle House was right around the corner.
ONE TIME WHEN JACK WAS IN CHICAGO on business we were on a street downtown when a loud argument broke out. A cab had pulled up close to the curb to let its passenger out; the passenger was taking her time, and the person driving the car behind the cab screamed: “Get out of the street, you…” The words that followed were obscene and ugly to the extreme. Horns sounded up and down the block, the cabdriver took the incident as a challenge and refused to move, more voices were raised, more curses were spat, and Jack and I had stood on the sidewalk thinking about how far we were from home. Even though Chicago had become my new home.
We came from a place where you could get out of a car on virtually any street and take an hour doing it if you wanted, because almost certainly no one would be behind you, and even if someone was behind you on that particular day, he or she would have plenty of room to just pull around. We came from streets where shouting was an unusual event. There were no parking meters, even. None were needed.
Now Jack said that instead of walking the last half block up Main Street to the place where the Toddle House had been, he wanted to cut through the alley. “I’m trying to remember where we always parked,” he said. “I’m thinking there was a little place in back.”
So we headed west into the alley, and he had been right, there was a little paved lot behind the orange-redbrick building, with a handful of sets of painted lines extending from the back wall. You see something like that thirty or forty years later, and it washes over you, you know before you even focus that you’ve been here so many times, you can feel yourself steering your car between the lines and up to the bricks. Even in daylight and on foot this afternoon I could see the headlights from my car beaming against that brick wall; the sun was high in the sky and I was walking, but I could see my headlights hitting the wall in the moments just before I shut them off.
“I don’t know if these lines have had a new coat of paint since we used to go here,” Jack said, looking down.
It used to feel like an overture. Just driving onto this patch of blacktop behind the Toddle House used to have the quiet power of an orchestra warming up before the start of a play, as the actors gathered one more evening.
I HAD FOUND WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR on the Internet.
In those first days after I had heard about Jack, I searched the worldwide computer network, and there it was, for sale in a family-owned antiques store in the deep South.
An old dinner plate from the Toddle House chain—a heavy china plate of the kind from which we used to eat our cheeseburgers and pie.
Before the Internet, I suppose, I never would have found it for Jack. At least not in time.
But there it was, right on the screen, a photo of it.
Around the circumference of the plate were multiple maroon imprints of the little cartoon chef, and the name of the place in that distinctive typeface of off-balance lettering, each letter at a different angle, sort of a jolly, dancing typeface. Toddling, even.
There was a slogan, too. I guess I’d forgotten it. But there it was, right under the words Toddle House on the dinner plate, on my computer screen.
It was about as bashful yet proud a slogan—a slogan without pretensions or imperiousness, yet confident nonetheless—as any you could come up with.
“Good As The Best.”
That’s what the Toddle House had promised. We may not be the best. But we’re just as good as them.
It’s a feeling we understood very well, in the deceptively quiescent middle of Ohio.
PIZZA PLUS.
The sign in front of the building said that was its current name, its present incarnation. Jack and I, having walked around from the parking lot in back, looked in the front window. There were only one or two customers present.
“It’s been Pizza Plus for a lot of years now,” Jack said.
I could see there was no dining counter and no stools; the place had been reconfigured so that pizza ovens and submarine-sandwich heaters were where the short-order grill had been. This was mainly a walk-in-and-carry-out operation, or so it appeared from the outside. The two guys who were working plainly had been born many years after all those days and nights we had spent inside the little structure. They could be excused if they had no idea of what had been here before.
“Forty years from now, the kids who come here now for pizzas and subs are going to look back on this place with the same feelings we have about the Toddle House,” I said.
“I doubt it,” Jack said. “It’s not the same when you carry the food out. It wasn’t the food we cared about. It was the sitting around together.”
“Don’t knock the food,” I said. “The sitting around was great, but think about the Toddle House chocolate pie.”
“There was something about the way the chocolate pie tasted when you had it with a Coke on ice…,” Jack said.
As I looked through the window something came to me—something I hadn’t thought about in years—and it almost made me shudder. I knew immediately I wasn’t going to mention it to Jack.
After we’d gone off to college we would still gather in the summers at the Toddle House. And late one summer night when we were nineteen or twenty, we ran into a guy with whom we’d graduated—not a close friend of ours, but someone we’d known all our lives. He was at the Toddle House with a couple of his own friends, and he was wearing a white shirt and a tie.
We all had sat at the counter. He had a summer job with a funeral parlor; his tasks included going to homes where someone had just died, and helping to carry the body out and transport it to the funeral home for preparation for burial. It was a job that required a somber demeanor while on duty.
Off duty, though, was something else. He had laughed that night at the Toddle House and had told detailed and distasteful stories about what he encountered on the job. He had described the bodies; he had mockingly imitated the family members in their first moments of grief. Part of it, I suppose, was gallows humor; part of it may have been his way to deal with that kind of darkness. And when you’re young, and death has always seemed like something so far off over the horizon, maybe certain defense mechanisms kick in when you suddenly are required to look death in the face on a daily basis.
But I remember how disturbing it had been to sit there at the counter, appetite gone, and hear him, just off work for the night, making too-graphic banter about what he had seen during the course of his latest shift. It wasn’t just the gruesome specifics that were so unsettling, although those specifics were bad enough, and in a restaurant, at that. It was that he was laughing—defense mechanism or not—at the pain he had witnessed. Maybe he was just showing off. Maybe he was trying to make us think he was tougher than he really was. There was a smell of formaldehyde to his clothes.
“Let’s go in,” Jack said, and I said sure.
I HAD ORDERED THE DINNER PLATE FOR him.
It was easy; type his name and address into the computer, enter my credit card number, and it was done.
Within minutes I received an e-mail from someone at the antiques store in the South; apparently it was a small concern, owned by a husband and wife, and the wife was writing to thank me for my business. She seemed genuinely grateful; as far-flung as the reach of the Internet is, it often seems much wider than it is deep. For all the worldwide computer network’s vaunted modernity, in human terms there probably isn’t much difference between the operator of a modest website anxiously checking the e-mail every few hours to see if anyone has ordered anything, and an old-style small-town merchant gazing out the front window all day long, hoping a customer will wander in. I couldn’t imagine this woman’s little company was overrun with orders for items such as Toddle House plates.
She had asked me if I wanted a gift card sent with the plate. I took out a pen and tried various versions of notes that I might have her send to Jack—tried to get the words right, to sum up the emotion inherent in all of this. Nothing worked; we were never people to say out loud what we really felt, we liked to hide it behind a joke, and everything sentimental I attempted to write sounded off-key. The Toddle House had never been about sadness. I thought of the five of us sitting on the stools, all those nights and all those smiles.
That’s when I began to smile myself, and came up with something that I knew would make Jack do the same. I wrote back to the woman at the antiques store and asked her if she could send Jack a card signed not by me, but by her. She said she would.
Thus, when the package had arrived at Jack’s house—the sturdy Toddle House plate safely wrapped inside—this is the note, over the store owner’s signature, that Jack read:
Dear Mr. Roth—
Chuck is not a true friend.
WE WALKED IN. “CAN I HELP YOU GENTLEMEN?” the young guy behind the register said.
Jack was looking up at the wall, where the menu was posted.
“We’re just looking around,” I said.
It seemed small, which should not have been a surprise. There had never been any room to wander around the Toddle House—the aisle between the front window and the row of stools had never been spacious enough for milling about, it was just wide enough for you to walk to where you were going to sit. Still, the way the pizza place was configured now made it almost impossible to fathom how much of our lives had once fit into this room. Maybe that’s what felt so small about it—it was too small to hold all the memories.
“What would a meal cost, about a dollar ten?” Jack asked me.
That was almost, to the penny, the amount I’d been thinking—$1.10 was the figure in my mind. Cheeseburger, hash browns, Coke. It sounded unlikely, until you broke it down. Fifty cents for the burger, thirty-five cents for the potatoes, a quarter for the Coke. “A dollar ten might be high,” I said. “I don’t think a Coke cost a quarter.”
“Maybe the buck ten included tax,” Jack said.
So many times over the years when I’d been in some coat-and-tie big-city restaurant or other—not even restaurants with especially haughty affectations, just one or another out of so many white-tablecloth restaurants in America’s most famous cities charging the going rate—and the bill would come, and I’d look at it, and I’d think about this place. Some restaurants you could have a cheeseburger and lyonnaise potatoes (that’s what they tended to call hash browns with onions mixed in), and a couple of drinks, and you’d end up paying forty or fifty dollars. Maybe more. Inflation figured into it, of course, and a cocktail costs more than a Coke. But no meal like that, no matter how tasty, ever matched what we’d found in here. And forty years later, here we were.
I looked over at Jack. He was still peering around, studying the wall behind the pizza oven, and the guy on duty must have thought he was continuing to look at the menu.
“We’ve got menus you can take with you,” the guy said, trying to be helpful.
“No, thanks,” Jack said. “I’m just trying to figure out if that back wall used to be set deeper.”
The guy shrugged. “It’s been like this ever since I started working here,” he said.
It was as if Jack was trying to take everything with him—he was in search of the ultimate carryout, he wanted to soak in every sight and every recollection, this was a to-go order more valuable than most. “The refrigerator was down there, right?” he said to me.
“Right,” I said softly. “It was at the far end of the counter.”
“Yeah, the pies had that whipped cream covering on top,” he said. “I always loved it when I got the first piece of pie, and I hated getting the last piece.”
“The last piece was sort of soggy,” I said.
“Not sort of soggy,” he said. “A lot soggy.”
He stood there, seeing ghosts—ghosts in moccasins, ghosts with their shirtsleeves rolled up—and then, as he always did to show that something had sunk in, he nodded, once.
He looked over at me. “I should get home,” he said.
“We are home,” I said.
We turned to leave and—not loudly, he didn’t want the guy behind the register to think he was making fun—he yodeled the words.
“Toddle House,” he yodeled quietly, like a long-ago waitress answering a telephone, like a short-order cook summoning an elk.
WE TOOK THE BACK WAY TO HIS HOUSE, through the alley behind the restaurant again. There was a sign on the brick wall of the parking lot; I hadn’t noticed it on the way in, but now we both saw it. SMILE, YOU’RE BEING WATCHED, it said—notification that there was a video security camera.
“Do you see a camera?” Jack asked.
I looked everywhere there might be one.
“No,” I said.
“It’s probably cheaper just to buy a sign than to actually put a camera in,” he said.
Then:
“I’m worried about Janice.”
He didn’t have to explain. This was taking its toll on her, and it could only be expected to get worse. For all the hopeful phrases and upbeat euphemisms the people around Jack and Janice kept using, the reality of where Janice was headed could be summed up in one cold and unambiguous word, and the word was widow. She knew it and he knew it.
“I wish I could tell her that everything is going to be all right,” he said.
He had met her during that period of most people’s lives when, no matter how well or how poorly things may be going, they often feel a little unmoored. The first years out of college, there’s no road map; everyone and everything you’ve depended on seem transformed, it’s not so much that they’ve changed as that for the first time they’ve assumed a different context. You’re not where you were anymore, in all kinds of ways; you’re en route, at a rate and a pace not necessarily determined by you. The people you’ve always counted on to let you know how you’re doing are no longer consistently present, and even when they are present, they aren’t all that sure of how they’re doing themselves.
The twenties and thirties are a time, for some people, when old friends are constantly trying to impress each other with how brilliantly they’re faring in business: to verbally one-up each other. It seems, beneath the brash surface, to be partly a product of fear: If you tell someone you’re doing great in your new world before the person has a chance to ask, then you’re a little less exposed. Maybe.
I don’t recall us ever doing that; I don’t think the five of us ever fell into that trap. But if we didn’t try to snow each other, neither initially were we present in each other’s lives the way we once had been. Jack was a schoolteacher in the Chicago area right out of college, and he got married, a marriage that was brief and less than happy. Chuck was doing well in his father’s business in Columbus; he met Joyce, he and Joyce introduced Joyce’s twin, Janice, to the newly divorced and emotionally raw Jack, and before anyone knew it the two friends were married to twin sisters.
So none of us ever consciously one-upped the others about our successes or lack of successes, but with Chuck and Jack the facts of it were inescapable. Jack was back in Columbus and opened a little bookstore he called My Back Pages, named for the Bob Dylan song. He loved books and he loved the work, loved the independence. Yet Chuck was soaring in the business world, and Jack was living from one week’s bookstore receipts to the next, and they were married to twins.
“I know she’s really on edge,” he said now.
There were always matters that went publicly unsaid about the disparate lives led by the one twin and her husband, and the other twin and her husband. Janice was the love of Jack’s life. I had long known there were material things he wished he could give her.
And now he knew that he was going to be gone.
“They didn’t need surveillance cameras when we were coming here every night,” he said, still trying to find a lens pointed in our direction, still failing to see one.
“I know,” I said. “No one was watching us.”
“Except us,” he said.
SHE WAS WAITING FOR US AT THE FRONT door.
“I thought Greene had put you on a plane to the French Riviera or something,” she said. “You’ve been gone a long time.”
“I’m getting a little tired,” he said to her. “We walked around a lot.”
“Do you feel like eating something?” she said.
“I think I may take a nap for a while,” he said.
He climbed the stairs and as soon as he was out of earshot she asked me, “So how did he do?”
I said he’d done just fine, which was the truth, and even as I was saying it I hated the fact that we were all in this new territory where her question was not only pertinent, but necessary. Just a month before, asking me a question like that would never have crossed her mind.
We sat and talked for a few minutes, and I said I thought I’d take off. On the way out of their house I saw where she had mounted the plate.
We had signed it—that night after all of us had met for dinner at the Top, and then had come back to Jack’s house, Janice had found a thick-tipped black marker and we had all signed the Toddle House plate. Jack signed it first, and when he had finished the rest of us had signed our names around his.
Our signatures, in that bold black ink, stood out against the white of the plate’s china surface. I could see it from across the room—I could see all of our names. Janice had displayed the plate in their home as if it were a piece of priceless artwork, which, in all the ways that suddenly counted, is exactly what it was.