I watched the tourists from Ike’s bedroom window as I changed into my Boy Eisenhower costume, from the hard boots up to the strange collar that pinched my chin. I hung my regular clothes in the closet and went downstairs to work.

I was eleven. My job was to play catch all afternoon, a lazy lob across the Eisenhower Boyhood Home’s thick lawn into Malcolm’s glove. Malcolm wore a drab get-up and a wool cap that he said itched like dead raccoon. He was the middle-aged alcoholic whose job it was to play Eisenhower’s Father.

My real father had abandoned us. There had been this bad stretch. He drove away one night while we slept, taking our family’s only car. He and my mother were historians working in the Eisenhower Presidential Library across the ceremonial oval from the Boyhood Home. The Home stood in a stand of elms, a simple small-town house with white paint and black trim, striped awnings and a porch swing, set amid the limestone giants that made up the rest of the Eisenhower Presidential Library campus.

As a kind of daycare, my real mother had arranged this job to occupy my time while she finished her research and drank margaritas with our landlord. On most days, my mother brought me lunch, dragging along my baby sister June, who would try to play catch. Then June would cry and they would leave.

Malcolm and I played catch in the hot sun until lunchtime.

To relax between bouts of catch, Malcolm enjoyed cassette tapes of rainforest sounds and whale songs on a boom box hanging from a nail on the back porch. By this, the third week, I’d heard his whole natural library. Desert Windstorm. Migrating Whales. Mud Volcano.

I’d drink a Coke on the back steps and listen, usually, but that day I went for a walk around the grounds instead, a short tour of my own among the tourists. I suppose I’d intended to visit my mother, but I went the other way, toward the Place of Meditation, where General Eisenhower, his wife Mamie, and a son rest in peace in air-conditioning under white marble slabs.

Despite the name, the Place of Mediation looked like any other chapel, pews facing a pulpit, stained glass glowing red. A stream of water fell from the wall onto some bronze leaves and dripped into a moat that encircled the family’s marble sarcophagi.

I kneeled before the tomb and prayed for myself. I stayed in that position, inside the chapel silence, the quiet fountain dribble, the air-conditioner breath.

A group of tourists broke my solitude. They threw open doors and snapped pictures, talked loudly. Parents and children, a grandmother in an electric wheelchair: her big wheels moved across the blue carpet with a slight whirr.




Back at the boyhood home, Malcolm was miffed. I was late. There was catching to do.
“This is all very un-Leo-like,” he said. Leo was the other kid who played Eisenhower, on alternate days. Leo was a year older than me, and he’d been Ike for three years. I was younger, new, and beneath his notice. “Everything’s out of order now, out of balance,” Malcolm continued.

I tried to apologize but Malcolm was having none of it. He was different now than before I left. His breath smelled like rubbing alcohol.

“I’ve made a decision, Aaron,” said Malcolm. “Because from my observation you really aren’t at Leo’s level actor-wise, which is fine, I’ve decided that you aren’t going to play Boy Ike any longer, as of now.”

“It’s not up to you,” I said. “The lady told me...”

“That’s all very well and fine,” said Malcolm. “However, my mind’s made up. From now on you are Boy Milton, after Milton Eisenhower, Ike’s brother. Don’t be so quick. Don’t jump to conclusions. Milton Eisenhower is a very respectable role, too, perhaps almost as good as Dwight. Milton was an important person, a very important person. You can read up on him inside. Don’t worry, the costume you have will be sufficient for the role of Milton, though you could try something different, maybe a different color of suspenders, a bowler hat.”

“Can we still play catch?” I asked. “Does Milton play catch?”

“Yes. Milton plays catch. The catch is historically accurate,” he concluded. “But Milton Eisenhower throws left-handed.”

“I’ve been throwing left already.”

“Then throw right, for God’s sake. We need some change around here. Change is part of the universe, man.”


It rained all the next day. I searched the sunken window wells of the Boyhood Home’s basement for toads and spiders. Malcolm sat on the basement stairs and lit another cigarette.

“All right, you can be Ike again,” he said. “You don’t have to be Milton anymore. It was wrong to make you Milton.”

He took a flask out of his back pocket and took a drink, then exhaled.

We played catch when the rain let up, although it never fully stopped raining. The baseball was stained green with wet grass. It was slippery. Malcolm took more sips from his flask. He began dropping the ball when I threw it, and was throwing wild pitches way over my head and to the side, into the hedges.

“Go get the ball, boy,” he said each time.

For his last throw, he wound up like a professional pitcher and sent the ball flying over the hedges into the oval.

He cursed. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he said. “Get your damn ball.”

I parted the hedges and crossed the sidewalk. The ball had come to rest in front of the bronze statue of Ike. It was a tall and friendly representation of the man, hands on hips. I admired the statue for a little while. Bronze Eisenhower work his personally-designed “Eisenhower Jacket,” and his bald head glistened with rainwater.

When I returned with the ball to the yard, Malcolm was gone. His tape player was gone. His mitt was gone. I stood on the bare patch of grass his boots had worn away. Tourist faces stared down from the parlor window, sad to see the historical accuracy fading away.




After changing clothes upstairs in Ike’s preserved bedroom, I stretched out on his bed and stared at the light fixture. The door downstairs closed and locked solidly. Through the bedroom window I watched the woman who played Mother of Ike walking toward her car. We didn’t have much commerce; she took tickets and wore gingham inside while the men bonded in the yard.
I watched her drive away.

“Hello?” I called to the empty house. “Hello?”

Fueled by mischief, I went from room to room, touching all the furniture and other objects as if they were mine. I was really feeling like Dwight Eisenhower by now. When I returned to the bedroom, it was night. I had to hang up my clothes in the closet for Leo, my understudy. There were two pieces of rope hanging from the closet ceiling, one for the light and one for a door I’d never noticed. Since no one was around to tell me no, I pulled it too. Dust rained down and a ladder slid to the floor. Naturally I climbed up.

The attic smelled like my father’s books. It was unfinished, a long wide room with a slanted ceiling centered on a chimney. Instead of a floor, boards had been run along the rafters. Dust had settled everywhere. A little light came through the window from the parking lot.
Walking down a board I examined the nails coming through from roofing, and the decaying mud dauber nests attached to the rafters.

I found an old shoebox in the corner. Approaching it, I felt the cold water of excitement chill my blood. I thrilled at the possibility of discovering something forgotten, some object that I could claim as mine, or at least pretend, for a moment was mine. An artifact. Already in my life I’d found scraps of pornography and loose change in such places as attics and basements and low cupboards. I instantly understood that whatever was in the box had been laid in by Eisenhower, at my age, for me to find. It would be a sign. It would redeem this horrible summer, the suffering that I had to pass through. I suffered most intensely in those few seconds—lifetimes—between noticing the shoebox and opening it.

The box, of course, was empty. Stupid shoebox.

Hours passed before I figured out how to get out of the building, through a basement window, crawling through the well. Soil and wet leaves glistened on my hands and knees as I started to walk home across the silent campus. Crickets hopped across the oval sidewalk and nighthawks called to each other above streetlights.