The author with actor Tom Fadden in "What the Dickens."
Centennial
By Dick Cummins
This is the third and final installment from a work in progress.
It wasn’t long before my mother started getting her money’s worth out of those acting lessons because she had me auditioning for all kids’ parts in all the theaters on the Monterey Peninsula. I got them too and the best one was not even a part in a play, but a movie. It was filmed down on Cannery Row and called Clash in the Night based on a Broadway play and it starred a mean actress named Barbara Stanwyck who yelled at me. My mother said this was probably because there was a beautiful new actress in the picture, an actress who was getting all the attention Miss Stanwyck expected.
My father had never come to any of the plays I was in, probably as a matter of principle, but he did drive us to most of the USO shows I MC-ed at Fort Ord. That’s why when he developed an avid interest in movie making, my mother got suspicious. He’d drive us down to the set every day and stand behind the rope line on Ocean View Avenue to watch scene rehearsals and takes.
“The only reason you come down here is to gawk at Miss Monroe,” my mother said on the way home one afternoon.
“Well she is something to look at Elizabeth. And I’m not quite dead yet you know.”
“Be that as it may then,” my mother replied, and at the next stoplight she got out of the car and began walking up the hill toward home alone.
*
There were lots of treasures in my father’s green Army footlocker—little golden gloves the size of watch fobs from his boxing and an old Spalding baseball. It was rolling around in his sock tray and I could make out the fading autographs of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and my father’s name with “Won 7-6” behind it.
Then I found a box of balloons hidden in a folded sock ball and blew one up, tying off the funny end so I could play with it.
*
“WHERE THE HELL DID YOU GET THAT?” my father yelled when he surprised me bouncing it around in the living room. My mother heard him yelling and came in from the kitchen just as he craned me up by a belt loop and over his knee. Then for the first time in my life, he brought his powerful hand down again and again while I kicked and screamed bloody murder.
“Please stop Russell,” my mother said softly, holding her hands against her ears like muffs. “He doesn’t know what they’re for! Please stop won’t you?”
“I’ve told him a dozen times to stay out of my things—he’ll remember it now!”
“But you’re really hurting him Russell—don’t you understand this is about us—you and me? Don’t take it out on him…”
Whatever she was talking about made him stop, and trying to catch his breath, he craned me back over the couch, laying me face down on my stomach.
“Stop crying,” he said, breathing too hard and then picking up my balloon toy off the floor, he squeezed until it burst—their irreconcilable differences squirting out between his fingers.
*
It was no surprise that my father tried to sleep sitting up in the living room after that, my mother explaining that he couldn’t breathe right lying down in their bedroom—but I knew better. Sometimes I could hear the scratch and clack of his Zippo lighting another cigarette, pacing the floor, worried about what would happen to us when he was gone.
And because it was not in his nature to apologize, no matter how much he may have wanted to, or needed to—not in words anyway—he bought me an expensive Rawlings baseball glove, too big for my hand. Every night he patiently rubbed linseed oil into the glove, tying it closed with string so the baseball inside would form a perfect pocket. I stabbed at the balls he tossed me, but the glove was too heavy, a lobster claw on my small hand, not a ball glove at all.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Like everything else, you’ll grow into it.”
But I wasn’t so sure.
*
“You did fine,” my father said driving home from Little League tryouts. “That one you tagged got some attention. Saw the Toy Town manager make a note on his clipboard.”
But manager attention or not, when the 1951 Little League season team rosters were printed in The Herald, my name was not on them.
“So next year,” my father said, handing me back the paper.
For a week I was slinking around the house like a spanked retriever because I knew even though he tried not to show it, my dad was disappointed that I was obviously not a chip off the ole block. Another miserable week went by and then my mother picked up the phone in the kitchen.
“It’s Toy Town,” she mouthed, her hand over the receiver—then beamed at what she was hearing.
*
“Dad! Dad! Somebody moved away—I got on Toy Town—we need to go down and get my uniform! Dad…” I shouted, running into the garage. It was like him not to answer right away, but then I saw his shoes. He was on the floor behind the car, hat upside down, saliva pooling under the corner of his mouth and the butt of a cigarette burned out in the blister between his fingers.
*
“I guess you’re the man of the house now,” my mother said softly, shaking his ashes out under the pepper tree in our back yard, the one he’d planted, still no tears. I was wondering why she hadn’t cried yet, not even when the ambulance driver didn’t bother turning on the siren driving away to the hospital with my father in the back.
“Why can’t you cry? Didn’t you love daddy too?”
My mother continued spading in the ashes.
“I loved your father when you where born. You won’t understand this now but we were walking up some stairs before you were born and he said “I just can’t do this—I’ll have to give it a try,” so we walked over to the courthouse and got married. I still had faith in love then—what I thought was love. But then something happened as the years went by. I think that for all those years in the Army your father never had a relationship with a woman—just relations I suppose, something I hope never happens to you, honey.”
She was right about not understanding what she was saying of course, because I was only eight, man of the house or not.
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