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And—as before—the Answer Man seemed to be withdrawing, as if on rails. The grayness started to come. Phil fought it with no success.
He came to behind the wheel of the Buick, hearing a tapping on the passenger side window. “Dad? Dad, wake up!”
He looked around, at first not sure where he was. Or when. Then he saw his son peering in at him. His friend Harry Washburn was with him, both wearing identical Red Sox caps. That slotted Phil into place. Not 1937 but 1951. Not a young man with the ink still wet on his law degree but a war vet who was important enough in this part of New Hampshire to be considered a viable candidate for the U.S. Senate. A husband. A father.
He leaned over and opened the door. “Hey, kiddo. I must have dozed off.”
Jake wasn’t interested in that. “We missed the bus because we were playing pepper behind the school. Can we have a ride home?”
“What would you have done if I hadn’t been here?”
“Walked, accourse,” Jake said. “Or hooked a ride from Missus Keene. She’s nice.”
“Pretty, too,” Harry said.
“Well, hop in. I got something in North Conway you boys might like.”
“Really?” Jake got in front. Harry got in back. “What?”
“You’ll see.” Phil looked at the spot where the Answer Man’s table and umbrella had been. He looked in his wallet and saw the C-note, folded small behind his driver’s license. Unless the whole thing had been a dream—and he knew it hadn’t been—he supposed the Answer Man must have put it back. Or maybe I put it back myself.
He drove home.
The TV was a great success. The rabbit ears would only pull in WMUR out of Manchester (the picture sometimes—well, often—obscured by snow flurries), but once Phil put up the antenna, the Parkers could indeed get two Boston stations, WNAC and WHDH.
Phil and Sal enjoyed evening shows like The Red Skelton Hour and Schlitz Playhouse, but Jake did more than enjoy the television; he embraced it with the all-in fervor of a first love. He watched Weekday Matinee after school, where the same old movie played all week long. He watched Jack and Pat’s Country Jamboree. He watched Boston Blackie. He watched ads for Camel cigarettes and Bab-O cleanser. On Saturday he and his friends gathered as if in church to watch Crusader Rabbit, The Little Rascals, and thousands of old cartoons.
Sally Ann was first amused, then uneasy. “He’s addicted to that thing,” she said, with no idea this parental cry would be repeated for generations to come. “He never plays catch with you when you come home anymore, just wants to watch some junky old Hopalong Cassidy movie he’s seen four times already.”
Jake actually did want to have a catch sometimes, or hit behind the garage when Phil slow-pitched to him, but these occasions were rarer than they had been. In the pre-TV days, Jake would have been waiting for his dad on the front stoop with his glove on and his bat propped beside him.
The truth was Phil didn’t mind his son’s loss of interest as much as Sal did. When the Answer Man told him that Jake wouldn’t play organized ball—no, not even in high school—his mind had first jumped (as any parent’s would) to dire possibilities. Now it seemed the reason was more prosaic: Jake was just losing interest in baseball, as Phil himself had lost interest in learning to play the piano when he was about Jake’s age.
Inspired by shows like The Lone Ranger and Wild Bill Hickok, Jake started to write his own Western stories. Each came with an exclamation mark and bore titles like “Gundown at Laramie!” and “Shoot-Out at Dead Man’s Canyon!” They were lurid but not half-bad… at least in the opinion of the author’s father. Perhaps someday he would be a writer instead of an outfielder for the Boston Red Sox. Phil thought that would be a fine thing.
Blaylock Atherton called one evening and asked if Phil had thought any more about running for the Senate, perhaps not this time but what about ’56? Phil said he was considering it. He told Atherton that Sally Ann wasn’t crazy about the idea, but said she would support him if that was his decision.
“Well, don’t consider too long,” Atherton said. “In politics we have to think ahead. Tempus fugit, you know.”
“So I’ve heard,” Phil said.
One Saturday morning in February of 1952, Harry Washburn came into Phil’s closet of a home study, where Phil was going over depositions for an upcoming trial. He was alarmed to see a streak of blood on one of Harry’s freckled cheeks and more on his hands.
“Did you hurt yourself, Harry?”
“It’s not mine,” Harry said. “Jake has a nosebleed and it won’t stop. He got blood all over his Roy Rogers shirt. Top to bottom.”
Phil thought that had to be an exaggeration until he saw for himself. On the Zenith’s round screen Annie Oakley was shooting it out with a bad guy, but none of the four or five little boys was paying attention to anything but Jake. His favorite shirt—his Saturday morning cowboy-watching shirt—was indeed soaked with blood. So was the lap of his jeans.
Jake looked at his father and said, “It won’t stop.” His voice was clogged and nasal.
Phil told the other boys to watch the show, everything was fine, five-by-five. He kept his voice level, but the amount of blood he was looking at scared him badly. He took Jake into the kitchen, made him sit down and tilt his head back, then filled a dishcloth with ice cubes and pressed it to the top of the boy’s nose. “Hold it there, Jake-O. It’ll stop.”
Sally Ann breezed in from a trip to the IGA, saw Jake’s blood-soaked shirt, and drew in breath to scream. Phil shook his head at her and she didn’t. Kneeling beside him, she asked what had happened. “Did one of your friends punch you in the nose playing cowboys?”
“No, it just started. There’s blood on the floor but I didn’t get any on your blue rug, at least.”
“I gotted it on me, too,” Sammy Dillon said. He and Harry had come into the kitchen. The other boys were standing behind them. “But I warshed it off.”
