The single overhead bulb cast little light on Carole’s empty room; it was not really an apartment, more of a ‘housekeeping room’, with a shared bathroom and kitchen. But the bulb did cast a shadow on Sam’s own four year old face that frowned back at him from the frayed photo. It was a child’s image with puckered lips that had already swallowed life’s bitter pill. Carole’s face in the photo as she knelt next to him brought a tightness to his throat after all these years. She wore somebody else’s smile around an unfiltered cigarette which hung languidly from her lower lip.

An old stamp or a partial address on a torn envelope often reveals more than several pages of the letters they came in. For Sam, it was the photographs he found among Carole’s letters and effects after her death. Ironically, he was his mother’s only official ‘next of kin’. What had made her leave him at such an early age had nagged him most of his adult life like something caught between his teeth. Maybe her death would reveal what her life couldn’t; that people act differently during wartime. They marry and have babies in a hurry with war looking over their shoulders. The photos stirred emotions in him about his childhood he had forgotten or suppressed. Would the pictures from his past shed light on his life after Carole? Would it explain his own failures as husband and father?

She had insisted he call her ‘Carole’ instead of mommy. Even now, Sam often wondered if it was his fault when his mother walked out of his life. And was it her fault when he left his own son? He understood now that she couldn’t stay when she could no longer pretend to be the big sister instead of the reluctant mother and wife. What excuse did he have?

How narrow her cheeks in the photo were more a blush than applied rouge. Plucked eyebrows formed arches over the blue-green pools of her eyes. She was a handsome woman in her fitted but unadorned shipyard overalls, her auburn hair tucked into a roll and covered by a polka dot bandana. She could have inspired the poster for the Rosy the Riveter defense worker during WWII. But not the one for mother of the year.

Dorothy Anderson adopted Sammy from Carole with the explanation that his mother was busy helping build the large battleships for the war effort. Dorothy had started out by providing care for the baby Carole and his father had built during furlough from the war. Somehow, Sam didn’t remember his mother as the heroic defense worker, but vaguely as the woman who visited once a week at the Andersons and performed the toilet ritual with him.

“Oh, Sammy, look what time it’s gotten to be. Stay on the toilet until you’re finished. Dorothy doesn’t want any more of your accidents. Carole is going to get something from the car. I’ll be right back.”

“But I don’t have to go, mom…Carole. Please don’t go, Carole.”

Dorothy Anderson welcomed Sammy into her life on the condition that his diaper days were over. Carole visited Sammy weekly at the Andersons who lived up the Columbia River. She capped her two hour visits with the toilet ritual she had devised to escape his crying and tantrums when she left. She pulled down his sailor suit pants, and set him on the cold toilet seat. She coaxed him to do what he rarely could do. Finally, she patted his bare thigh, gave him a kiss, and promised to return.

Sam recalled as an adult how he’d listened from the bathroom window as she marched still again out of his life in time to the driveway gravel’s crunch. And each time he believed her promise to return until he heard her re-enter her world with a laugh to the co-worker who drove the getaway car. The motor purred and the gears shifted, moving the tires over the gravel and away from him and the toilet.

Each visit was a repeat of the same routine. Diapers reemerged as part of his life when the toilet would no longer accept his deposits. When Carole pretended to return, he pretended to believe her. And they still pretended to be a family.

Sam never knew which ships Carole riveted, but he knew she worked in the Kaiser shipyards on the Willamette River. Dorothy called war babies the coffee break from life when the men took leave from the war. Like many young mothers, Carole was too restless to stay at home with Sammy. The pay was good, and the work was diverting. The idea of daycare was still new.

“When is he coming back, Carole? Why is he staying away so long?”

“Your daddy is in the Army, Sammy. Protecting us and our country.”

Sammy had not yet been introduced to his father whose return address on a picture was somewhere in the South Pacific. He was island-hopping, Carole explained. And when the war was over, he kept hopping, right past them to somebody else’s address. He went missing, but not in action like a lot of the men. And their family became a casualty of the war. All that remained was a picture of him in an Army uniform.

Everywhere you looked there were men in uniforms. Except Dorothy’s husband, Ralph. Around the house he wore bib overalls with one pant leg folded up. There was a picture of him in a sailor’s uniform over the fireplace, not unlike Sammy’s, where both pant legs were full. But now he had a crutch where the leg used to be.

Dorothy Anderson took in Sammy as much for the money as to help working women in the war effort. When her dresses became full with child, she quit her daycare service to plan to care for children of her own. Except for Sammy. Sammy was special. She wanted to construct her own family with Ralph, who had several war-related disabilities, but only the missing leg was covered by veteran’s benefits. The Andersons shared housing with Dorothy’s parents, Charles and Emily Griswold.

As he pieced together his past life in Carole’s dim, unheated room, Sam read a message in a familiar handwriting on the back of the photo of himself:

“Carole, have you ever considered adopting Sammy out? For his and your own good? He and Ralph really do hit it off. Let me know, we could help.”

Sam could only imagine what Carole’s initial response had been:

“Listen, Dorothy, he’s my kid and I think I know what’s best.”

And maybe when she left him, she finally did know what was best. Unlike when he left his own son during one of the nation’s next wars in Southeast Asia.

When they retired, Mr. and Mrs. Griswold adopted a lodge made of old growth logs on a large serene lake north and east of the Columbia River. Sunlight barely penetrated the cedar and fir trees which covered the grounds. Moss had taken over the cedar shingles of the lodge’s roof. The Griswolds took care of the grounds and the building for the wealthy lodge members. The war had brought a sharp decline in the number of the members’ visits.

Pictures of him at the lodge with the Andersons and Griswolds brought back pleasant memories of how the blue of the lake contrasted the green of the trees and the smell of the tree pitch when the sun hit it. He even recalled his delight with the springy feel of pine needles underfoot on the way to the small wooden dock where he learned to fish and swim.

Little Sammy soon learned that the Andersons and Griswolds had little patience for tears and tantrums. They expected children to be seen and not heard. His tantrums stopped when he realized Carole’s heartstrings were either frayed or broken. Besides, he lost his audience when she returned to her rivets and her co-workers’ laughter. At the lodge his caretakers left him mostly to himself as they receded into their worlds.

Mr. Griswold’s fingernails bore the accumulated grease of a long mechanic’s career. His domain was the car and tool shed where he kept everything in peak condition. The shed’s cement floor had a lubrication pit, surrounded by walls of tools and hoses for air and water. An old John Deere tractor sat to the side with various machine parts strewn about. He jealously guarded his freedom to tinker amidst the smell and feel of machines, as he relived his memories as a soldier in France during WWI. To personalize his surroundings, Mr. Griswold kept an old vacuum tube radio next to the Lodge owners’ shiny Packard touring car. Escape was complete with the sound of the ball game from the Packard’s soft leather seats.

When he brought the sedan out for a spin, Mr. Griswold let Sammy ride the running boards for a few feet. The smell of gasoline, combined with the sun on pine pitch blended with the hum of the sleek black car whose monster headlights crowned large, sloping fenders and the big chrome hood ornament.

Conversations with Mr. Griswold were brief. Sammy’s “hello, Mr. Gwiswold,” with what many considered his disarming lisp, always brought the same retort:

“Git”.

Mrs. Griswold warmed to the role of grandma, as she waited for her daughter’s first child. She was the heart of the operation and her tenderness offset her husband’s crustiness. She conducted the lodge’s oversized kitchen with the percussion of pots, pans and spoons, always orchestrating sumptuous smells and tastes. She preferred the wood burning stove, but there was an electric range available for the now rare guests’ dinners.

“Sammy, you can lick the bowls and spoons, but don’t ruin your appetite for dinner, do you hear?” She called to him over the radio with news of the war and daytime variety shows.

“Yes, Mrs. Gwiswold.”

Dorothy Anderson prepared for motherhood by watching out for Sammy, but her serious care-giving she reserved for husband, Ralph. Even when she whispered, everyone heard her half crying, pleading with him not to drink so much from the bottles strewn around their upstairs bedroom. Sammy thought the medicine was for the pain caused by his lost leg. Later, he realized that was also what Mr. Anderson thought.

“If you’ll just carry that tackle box and the poles down to the dock, Sammy, I’ve got all I can do to carry our lunch and my sack here.”

Ralph and Sammy spent a lot of time together down at lakeside in the summer when it wasn’t raining. It seemed to calm Ralph as much as the long pulls of medicine straight from the brown-wrapped bottle. And it did them both good. He showed Sammy how to bait a hook and put weights on the line and watch the bobber in the water.

“No need telling the whole world just how important this medicine is to me, Sammy.”

“It must really hurt, Mr. Anderson.”

When they were through fishing, or when Mr. Anderson’s medicine was finished, the boy and the one-legged man headed back to the house just in time for Mrs. Griswold’s dinner; the menu depended on the ration cards or the catch and what was growing in the garden. On their outings, Mr. Anderson was ever gentle and never yelled at Sammy. Sammy carried the tackle box and the poles back, but Mr. Anderson always managed the string of trout in one of his hands while guiding his crutches. He thanked Sammy for his help and gave him a fatherly pat on the head.

Sam put the picture back into the album, placed a few more items into a box and reached for the light switch. He paused in Carole’s room and took in her space and smells. He thought back on the silly toilet rituals. And of the war’s end when his father returned with wounds you could see and those you couldn’t. He had a clearer picture now of his own past. He could understand now how brave Carole was to exit his life and how generous the Andersons were to fill in for her. He sighed as he took the box, turned the light switch, and closed Carole’s door. Would he ever be able to open a door that had been closed to a son for whom he had never been present? Would his son someday ask similar questions of him?