Tommy

by William Illsey Atkinson

  Hamiltonians are justly proud of their city. Bigger places sneer at it as lunchbucket, and it’s true that the north end is six square miles of smoke. But there’s zero unemployment and a deep tax base. Trim parks dot the city, residential blocks are gracious with big elms, and the downtown’s full of owner-run businesses. Citizens stride with zest and smile at strangers.

  In December 1950, crowds gather before toy-store windows to see model trains puff through plaster landscapes. Tommy lifts his sons to his shoulders one at a time and, reflected in the plate glass, sees their glowing cheeks and guiltless wonder. There it is, he thinks. Why I let myself get shot at.

  Twice a week there’s an open-air market whose tables groan with fruit from June to October, root vegetables from October to June, and meat and poultry all year round. There’s strong, dark honey and home-made jam, pumpkin, mince, and apple pies, rich bread. Behind the tables sit the farmers, dignified and shabby, whose presence fills Tommy with deep gratitude. By the grace of God he is working, fed, and sheltered. By greater grace he has escaped the farm.

  Though Hamilton is grimy in places, it has history to burn. Streetscapes drip with Victorian gingerbread or are foursquare with Regency stone. Across the street from Tommy’s redbrick sits an elegant 1830s row. Eugene Victor Illsey and his fellow boosters hate such antiquity and want it demolished, but Tommy cherishes an affection for the old architecture. Modern is not the only style: all great cities have a place for low- and high-rise, aged and new. He even likes the north end, whose mills to him are dark but not Satanic. The mba in him perceives the wealth they make; the engineer in him looks past their grim exteriors to uses that are complex and admirable.

  And something else is happening in the north end. Academics will document it in another four decades, Tommy sees it clear in 1951. The north end is renewing itself. Without a penny of government help, postwar immigrants from Holland, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Greece have transformed the grim company housing that borders the mill yards. Home after home shows fresh paint, swept steps, clean curtains. Beneath the pavement lies rich alluvial soil. Yard by yard, hand-swung picks are turning oil-stained asphalt into backyard farms. Tomatoes and zucchini, hollyhocks and roses riot in neighborhoods where the boosters want wall-to-wall freeways.

  The pale old men in power are blinkered. Theirs is the stiff unchanging world of Emily Post, whose armor is dress. For ladies: gloves, hats, veils, and straight-seam stockings, dresses or skirt suits with ankle-length hems, white worn only from May to Labor Day. For gentlemen: snap-brim or porkpie hats, dark suits or jackets, wool pants and Argyle socks. A wealthy man may wear a vest.

  Rigidity in dress compels a parallel rigidity in thought and action, Tommy thinks. While such hegemony lends structure, it blocks the very progress that the boosters say they crave. It hamstrings the young till they themselves are boosters, empty of all ideas not given them by the old. Every booster in Hamilton wants progress. None of them will tolerate the mess and pandemonium of change.

  Yet social issues don’t concern Tommy day to day. Every month brings small pleasures: green summers and crisp Decembers; work, and a drink after work; the kids’ artwork and report cards; Bet’s soft breathing beside him in bed. Paycheck, family, freedom, peace: these are the great things. Tommy looks at the cover of Saturday Evening Post and recognizes Mr. and Mrs. Atkinson and their boys. He even considers smoking a pipe, but decides against it. His father smoked a pipe.

  Eugene Victor Illsey lends Betty his ’38 Oldsmobile, a maroon sedan with grey cloth seats, to go on Sunday drives. Atop the escarpment lies a countryside of fertile farms and weathered outbuildings, small stone chapels and twisting two-lane roads. Bit by bit it’s being carved into housing, but the county still has fewer than a hundred people per square mile and has not yet suppurated into malls.

  One Sunday, a parkway with views across a valley leads them to a little place called Ancaster. Bet knows it, having taken a tramway to its summer homes when she was a girl. Tommy loves it on sight. Its woods and creeks remind him of Aurora.

  The old car bumps them along dirt lanes bordered by big oaks. One lane leads to a brand-new subdivision that’s emerging from an apple orchard. On a street that’s nothing but two ruts, Tommy halts in front of a quarter-acre lot near a ravine. He and Bet gaze at it, then at each other. Their decision is wordless. This rough flat field will hold their home.

  Ideas tumble into Tommy’s head as they’re driving back to the apartment. He and Bet discuss them with the kids asleep in back. A smallish place to start with: living room and kitchen, one bedroom for the adults and another for the boys. In five years a double addition, master bedroom and dining room. Not only will Tommy draw the plans, he’ll build the thing, except for plumbing and excavation. California architecture, airy and modern, tweaked to fit a northern climate. A bungalow, because Tommy’s had two lifetimes’ worth of climbing on the ladderways of Bataan. Bedrooms at one end, living room at the other, bath and kitchen in between. Vertical siding, one-by-twelves with one-by-two batons to seal the seams. Aluminum siding won’t rust, but it dents; red cedar won’t, and it’s soaked in natural chemicals that keep insects and fungi at bay. A breakfast nook with a Murphy table — What, dear? Oh, a table that swings up into the wall when not in use. Big windows, lots of storage, hardwood floors —

  We’ll need a mortgage, Bet says, and Tommy’s heart sinks. He knows what’s coming. More servitude.

  I’ll talk to Daddy, says his wife.

  Jim Koyanagi helps him with the house design. He’s a sharp young architect at the office, a nisei, whom Tommy takes under his wing. Jim is half his age but the two of them make an instant team. Tommy explains material science to Jim — kips, moments, elastic modulus. Why would an engineer help an architect? Jim asks.

  Enlightened self-interest, Tommy says. The more you know materials the less likely you are to produce an architectural monstrosity that some poor engineer goes crazy trying to prop up.

  One evening, Jim stays behind to help Tommy with his house plans. I like your design sense, says Tommy. It’s classical.

  Classical? You mean like Palladio?

  More like Tokagawa Shogunate. Edo stuff.

  You’re shitting me. You spent years on a ship with a million of my relatives trying to kill you and you’re telling me you like our architecture?

  Your architecture wasn’t trying to kill me. And it’s beautiful. Spare, clean, solid, nothing wasted. Relaxes you just looking at it.

  Jim’s silent for a while. Then: You don’t carry a grudge?

  Never did, never will.

  Not even when they dropped bombs on you?

  Not even then. They’re a wonderful people, Jim. They were led by iron-fisted, brain-dead fools is all. So were we a lot of the time. MacArthur’s steered them toward democracy and that’s changed them for good. We beat each other bloody but we respect one another. Now we’re allies, friends even. I always thought the Japanese were an admirable enemy. Their courage and discipline were at least as good as ours.

  But Pearl Harbor? Okinawa?

  Hell’s bells, Jim. Everyone makes mistakes.

  Five hundred bucks gets the quarter-acre lot, and a word to Daddy gets the mortgage. Tommy knows the old man’s done it for Bet, not him. He’s simply the sperm donor. Years later, when Tommy’s in his seventies and a grandfather himself, he will overhear a young husband say: Strange how a man not good enough for the daughter can sire such perfect children.

  He has the foundation dug and the concrete poured as soon as the ground thaws. When footings, slab, and walls are cured he drives to the site one cold Saturday, hefts a ten-pound sledgehammer, and sweats for fifteen hours knocking wooden formwork off the hardened walls.

  This is asinine, he thinks. We do it this way because we always have. No reason why formwork couldn’t be steel instead of plywood. You wouldn’t even need to remove it when the concrete sets. It woul
d stay part of the wall.

  Tommy lowers his sledge. You could do more than that, he thinks. Thin steel formwork could be a structural part of the wall, not just a way to keep in concrete. A sandwich wall: steel bread and concrete filling, each part pulling its weight. Stronger for a given thickness, thinner for a given strength. Now there’s an idea worth exploring.

  At the moment, however, there are another five hundred square feet of wooden formwork to knock away. Tommy lifts his sledgehammer with a groan.

  Tommy works every waking hour. He wakes to thoughts of work, works at the office, goes home to change, drives to the house site, works on the house, drives back to the apartment, collapses into bed, and dreams about work. It’s endless.

  But by Hallowe’en the shell is complete. The twin-pane windows are in, the first domestic double-glazing in North America. They’re flanked by louvered doors to let in air. The sweet-smelling siding and its seam batons are tacked down and the roof is sealed with tar and gravel. Late one Sunday, Tommy snugs home a final slot-head screw, rises painfully from his crouch, and taps the front door. It swings smoothly and clicks shut. With an overwhelming sense of relief, Tommy knows his new house is secure.

  But the admirable Japanese have a saying: when you’re nine-tenths done, you’re only half done. So he works and works some more, putting in the electrical, the drywall, the floors. There are times when Tommy, having knelt for six straight hours nailing down cherrywood tongue-and-groove, bawls like a baby when he goes to stand. But stand he does, and then he sits down to have his brown-bag sandwich and his thermos of coffee, and then he kneels again to work. He designs and measures and cuts the cabinets, screws on their endless doors and hinges. He paints ceilings and walls until he’s cross-eyed from the lead fumes.

  Tommy and Bet have made love twice in the last five months. But this is war, right? You sail on. Launch your CAPs and hope the Zekes don’t splash them. Flank speed into the wind and hope the kamikazes miss. Get the cabinets in your sights and blast the buggers out of the sky. Screw hinges instead of your wife.

  The worst thing is the fireplace wall. It seemed so simple to detail the whole west elevation as rough-cut sandstone. A sixty-pound chunk of the stuff costs pennies, and that’s what Tommy’s capital is down to. So: Get a truckload, bust it up, and mortar it in. Simple, right?

  Wrong. The three words bust it up, for instance, encode more days of swinging that back-destroying sledgehammer. Patience, he thinks: this too shall pass.

  And one day it does. It’s all complete. The west wall and the firebrick behind it, the butter-hued travertine on the hearth; the living room cabinets, hand-cut to fit the ragged sandstone; the cupboards, ceilings, windows, floors, and countertops; the kitchen table, plumbing, furnace: done. Time to leave the cabbagey apartment.

  A long tall semi and two workmen load the Atkinsons’ possessions in an hour. Tommy feels like the heavyweight champion’s tagged him when he sees how little he’s accumulated in forty-two years. One double and two single beds, all second-hand; nine chairs, none upholstered; two dressers and a rickety kitchen table; a wedding-gift buffet; eight boxes of cracked dishes and stained books; twelve boxes of mended clothes, frayed sheets, and mismatched placemats. It doesn’t fill half the truck.

  So what? He’s still a young man, vigorous and ambitious, eight years short of fifty. There’s time to acquire things. He shoos his family into a car that’s older than his marriage, points it west, and drives into the future.

  There’s still much work, though no longer at a killing level. Tommy’s move-in means boxes to empty and break down, vital things like brooms and can openers that lurk in the last possible location, stores to find and things to buy. But slowly it gets done. The Atkinsons are suburbanites.

  It’s not yet a cliché. Tommy and Bet never experience the gin-soaked parties, the covens of kvetching neighbors, the stir-crazed housebound weeping over the Electrolux. None of these institutions has had time to form. The neighborhood is newborn: bare earth instead of lawns, hacked-out driveways full of fist-sized gravel, survey stakes still in the ground. It’s August, and the roads are so dusty that a township truck comes by once a week to spray them with tar.

  The rawness doesn’t bother Tommy. It will improve in time. Nor does he mind the urban conveniences he’s abandoned, shops and parks and sidewalks. His family has something better. They, and he, possess the land.

  Tommy swats up Ancaster’s history and geology at the local library. He finds it’s crisscrossed by brawling creeks that have scored steep-sided dales in the escarpment limestone. The creeks brought settlement because they powered sawmills, but the dales were so wild and rocky that the lumbermen wrote them off. Not only were the dale trees hard to reach and transport, but they were also full of compression wood, so gnarly-crossgrained that it shattered saw blades. The lumbermen preferred the flatlands’ straighter trees.

  In summer 1952, the patriarch pines and hardwoods are still there, clasping their crags with crooked hands and canting outward at steep angles. The dale forests are time machines, portals to an ecosystem unchanged for ten millennia. It nourished the Neutrals and Mohawks and it’s what the settlers found in 1789. Some tree trunks are two yards in diameter. Their canopies interlock and starve the ground of light till only moss can grow. Numen inest, Tommy’s Latin teacher would have said: this place is holy. You sense it when you walk there. You feel the Earth-soul drifting through the trees.

  Tommy’s two boys love it. They rise by seven, gobble breakfast, snatch clothes from bedroom floors, and vanish into the summer woods, the screen door banging behind them. It’s easy to do: the dales border half of Oak Hill and come within a hundred yards of Tommy’s house. If Bet’s packed them lunch, the boys stay out till dinnertime, returning bug-bitten and mudstreaked and too happy to smile. Tommy stands over them when they’re asleep. It frightens him how much he loves them, but they’re puzzles. What do they do? Where do they go? What do they fear and hope? He has no idea. He wishes he’d had a father; it might guide him now.

  Still, it’s not all bad. He may not play ball with his boys or even talk to them much, but he’s stayed put. He’s kept his family together. He’s given them the land.

  Tommy takes a leftover siding short and hammers it full of sixpenny nails till it looks like a giant’s hairbrush. He weaves a harness using rope and Navy knots, weighs it down with spare sandstone, and with himself as plowhorse tills and seeds his nine thousand square feet. He builds a carport for the aging Olds and atop it erects that most modern of miracles, a television antenna.

  It’s amazing, the box. Three channels, two in Buffalo and one in Toronto, broadcast from eight a.m. through bedtime. News, drama, comedy, Red Skelton and Perry Como, Ed Murrow and Dinah Shore, ads for cars and pain pills. See the u.s.a. in your Chevrolet! Winston tastes good like a cigarette should! (As a cigarette should, Bet tells the children.)

  Friday nights there’s boxing. A favorite is Sugar Ray Robinson, who’s risen from poverty and continues to defy advancing age. See that? Tommy tells his boys. He slipped a left and counterpunched. Tommy does not say: I had a friend who could box.

  Tommy’s not the only American ex-pat in town. Others are drawn north by the red-hot economy — steelworkers, carpenters, civil engineers. The latter are client leads. Tommy meets them through his in-laws, who are even better connected than he thought. The atmosphere at Mabel’s teas and dinners is relaxed, or as relaxed as possible when Eugene Victor Illsey and Tommy Atkinson share a room. Tommy’s chitchat is highly technical, so the engineers he meets quickly see his brains and expertise. Tommy’s bosses make record profits, though it doesn’t occur to them to give him a raise or even a bonus.

  The fifties sail on. Tommy builds his additions, a master bedroom and a dining room. His house is now a palatial fifteen hundred square feet. Young Tom is in the nearest high school, twelve miles away. When tenders are let for a local high school, Tommy gets the cont
ract for his firm. He tries a new thing for its gymnasium, an expanded beam. He zigzag-cuts the flange of a standard I-beam, moves the two halves up and over, and re-welds them into a new beam with a flange full of hexagonal holes. It carries more weight than its parent beam and spans a greater distance, yet weighs no more and costs next to nothing to produce. Tommy’s employers get a cash award, which doesn’t go to Tommy. He doesn’t care. It’s his achievement.

  But mostly the years slip by without excitement. Tommy prefers it that way. He had nine lives’ worth of adrenaline in the Pacific. Some would find his life humdrum, but its predictability, its small fulfillments, are its bliss. One day, he glances at a book of Betty’s, a morality tale presented as letters from hell. The long, apparently unchanging years of middle-aged prosperity (or middle-aged adversity) make excellent campaigning ground for us tempters, Tommy reads, and shakes his head. Not true, he thinks. I fought a war to make things dull.

  Little incidents mark time like the ticking of a clock. Billy at his eighth-grade graduation, face glowing as he crosses the stage for an award. Crisp Christmas mornings, hearth snapping, pale sun glittering on fresh snow. The fun of a new power mower, a fuming monster that cuts in an hour what took three hours by hand. Coming home, tossing his fedora to its accustomed shelf, pecking Bet on the cheek, settling into his favorite chair with a sigh of pleasure and a scotch. Scanning the paper as Bet cooks supper: all dull, all fine.

  It’s not completely fun. To the west there’s a middle-aged couple, minorities in Oak Hill because they’re childless. Their yard is kept like Better Homes and Gardens, the flowers perfect and the lawns razor-trimmed. When the boys play in the backyard and a baseball, or (worse) a softball, or (worst of all) a football, land in Minnie MacPherson’s garden, there’s hell to pay. Minnie keeps the ball at least a day, releasing it only to a kid who tenders a groveling apology. Some balls she never returns. Bet rarely loses her temper, but loses it one day when Minnie threatens to call the police. Go ahead! she screams. Go ahead and call them! Minnie doesn’t, more’s the pity. Tommy would have enjoyed a chat with the long-suffering local constable.