Mr. Franklin was not at fault. He wasn’t speeding. He was in the correct lane. His car was in good mechanical condition. Between the accident and the funeral, Dad walked us down the block to Mr. Franklin’s house. I held onto his right hand, and he carried Byron in the crook of his left arm.
Mr. Franklin was a tall, gaunt man with a hairline that went back like a horseshoe, a crooked nose, and sad blue eyes that protruded slightly.
‘I just want you to know I realize what happened was an accident,’ Dad said to him. ‘There was nothing you could do. Gracie should have looked before she ran into the street after her hat. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened to anyone.’ Dad held out his hand to Mr. Franklin.
Mr. Franklin’s hand was trembling violently as he reached to shake my dad’s extended hand. He spoke very softly. He said he hadn’t slept since the accident, didn’t know if he’d ever sleep again.
‘Don’t be hard on yourself,’ Dad said. ‘It could have been your wife. It could have been me driving home from the hardware store on a Saturday morning.’
There was no way Dad could have done more – I don’t know if I could be so generous in similar circumstances – but what he did wasn’t enough. Mr. Franklin had a nervous breakdown, lost his job as an accountant with the Grain Exchange. He stopped driving. His family left him. He stayed home alone and drank all day. On the first anniversary of my mother’s death Mr. Franklin put a gun to his head and ended his pain.
Dad had a married sister in Kansas City; my mother had one in Chicago and one in Milwaukee; and Grandma Palichuk lived only a ten-minute drive from us. Each of them volunteered to take Byron and me, to care for us and to raise us as their own.
And some good cases were made, the best by my dad’s sister in Kansas City, my Aunt Noreen, who was married to a lawyer, lived in a five-bedroom house with a swimming pool, had only one child, a girl, Phoebe, and was desperate for a son, but unable to bear any more children. No one considered for a moment that Dad might want to raise his own sons.
But my dad, big awkward rough diamond that he was, refused all their offers, even ignored Aunt Noreen, who, after being turned down, threatened to sue for custody on the grounds that Dad lacked the ability to care for us properly. It was about ten years before Dad forgave his sister for that threat. He intended to look after us himself, he said. And when Dad says something, he means it.
It wasn’t easy. There were housekeepers, play schools, and day-care centers. There were babysitters who did exactly that – sat – often having friends over who ate everything not locked up. There were housekeepers who drank, who entertained boyfriends, who quit on a moment’s notice, stealing whatever they were able to carry.
There were also some wonderful women who tried to be mothers to Byron and me, some hoping Dad would take a fancy to them if they were nice enough to us and kept the house spotless. Others simply loved children. One was a middle-aged lady named Mrs. Watts, a black woman whose family had a cottage on a lake some fifty miles out of Chicago. She took us to the lake for two weeks when I was eight and Byron was six. Dad came down on the weekends and slept in a hammock on the porch of the cabin, and we went fishing and boating and collected rocks and shells. But Mrs. Watts’ mother became ill and she had to go look after her instead of us.
It was Dad who enrolled me in Little League, where I immediately showed skill and power beyond my years.
‘Did you ever play ball?’ I asked him.
‘I used to play in a commercial league when I was a teenager. I played third base with all the grace of King Kong. The thing I did best was get hit by the pitcher. The ball didn’t hurt so much because I have big bones. I’d lean over the plate and dare the pitcher to hit me, and often enough he would.’
We muddled through. By the time 1 was in first grade I’d mastered the washer and dryer, the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher. We went to school in clean if unironed clothes. I did the dishes as soon as I got home from school. Byron learned to cook, first out of necessity then for pleasure. I can see him standing on a chair in front of the stove, five years old, frying pork chops, boiling carrots that I had cut up, salting, peppering, shooing me away if I tried to help. We got our share of burns and scrapes and cuts, but we were truly scared only once. When I was six, I reached up and put my finger under the knife as Dad was slicing bread for Sunday morning toast. I still have the scar. There was blood everywhere, and Byron kept a washcloth pressed tightly about my finger as Dad hurried us to Emergency, the cloth turning raspberry colored in spite of the pressure Byron put on it.
‘How long will he be on the disabled list?’ Dad asked the doctor after he had stitched me up. ‘This boy’s the star of his Little League team and he’s only six.’ I was pale and still snuffling a little. My knees were like water, and I didn’t feel the least like a star baseball player.
The hand recovered, and I roared through every league I played in. Our high-school team won twenty-seven games in a row my freshman year and, though we lost in the first round of the Illinois State Championships, I was voted outstanding player.
Afterward, my coach told me a scout from the White Sox had been in the stands for a couple of games.
‘Didn’t want to put any pressure on you, Son, so I didn’t tell you. You’ve got a big-league future in front of you, or I don’t know my baseball players. You’ve got all the tools. Speed, a strong arm, and a good eye will make up for your lack of power. You’re gonna be a great one.’
Had he not told me about the scout because he knew I didn’t play well under pressure? Or hadn’t he noticed? I’d gone 0–5 in our tournament loss, and made an error.
I was in my second year of high school the day a Cadillac the color of thick, rich cream pulled up in front of Mrs. Grover’s Springtime Café and Ice Cream Parlor. Our main street was paved but narrow, with six feet of gravel between the edge of the pavement and the sidewalk. Dust from the gravel whooshed past the car and oozed through the screen door of the café.
Byron and I were seated at a glass-topped table, our feet hooked on the insect-legged chairs. We were sharing a dish of vanilla ice cream, savoring each bite, trying to make it outlast the heat of high July.
It was easy to tell the Cadillac owner was a man who cared about his car. He checked his rear view carefully before opening the driver’s door. After he got out – ‘unwound’ would be a better description, for he was six foot five if he was an inch – he closed the door gently but firmly, then wiped something off the side-view mirror with his thumb. On the way around the Caddy, he picked something off the grille and flicked it onto the road.
He took a seat in a corner of the café where he could watch his car and everyone else in the café which was me, Byron, and Mrs. Grover.
The stranger looked to be in his mid-thirties. He had rusty hair combed into a high pompadour that accentuated his tall front teeth and made his face look longer than it really was. Across his upper lip was a wide coppery-red mustache with the corners turned up and waxed, the kind worn by 1890s baseball players.
Though everything about him was expensive, down to the diamond ring on his left baby finger, he looked like the type who didn’t like to conform. I guessed he had grown his hair down past his shoulders when he was a teenager. His hair was now combed back, hiding the top half of his ears and the back of his collar. He was wearing a black suit with fine gray pinstripes, a white-on-white shirt, and shoes that must have cost three hundred dollars.
‘I’d like something tall and cool,’ he said.
‘I have pink lemonade,’ Mrs. Grover said in a tiny voice that belied her 250 pounds. She had waddled halfway from the counter to his table, but