The Time Keepers

Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

T HE FOREST GREEN–AND-brONZE SIGN THAT READ “ T HE G OLDEN H OURS ” had been in Bellegrove for as long as anyone could remember. Nestled on the ground floor of a white brick building on the corner of Main Street and Maple Avenue, the store had become a part of the village landscape, just like Butler’s Shoes and Kepler’s Market.

Its windows were filled with tall, graceful grandfather clocks of varying shapes and sizes. The walls displayed mounted clocks with different sized numbers and fonts. Antique tables upheld elegant mantel clocks positioned in the center, some in gilt bronze with florid details and others in ebony or rosewood. There was even the occasional clock made of hand-painted porcelain. Grace’s favorite was a delft blue-tile clock that had sat in the shop for over a year, before Tom brought it home and surprised her with it for Mother’s Day.

The shop had been a large part of her life almost from the moment she began dating Tom. Founded by Tom’s father, Harry, Grace soon realized that the store was the very heart of the Golden family. And while over the years she envied that her husband could retreat to such a peaceful workspace when she was frazzled at home with two young children, Grace had come to see the Golden Hours as a place that restored not just watches and clocks, but also broken men.

Grace knew Tom had spent countless afternoons at the store as a little boy. Early in their courtship, he’d confided in her how his earliest memories were of sitting quietly next to his father and being surrounded by the unique rhythms there—the sound of a second hand moving with each tick, the chime of bells on the hour, or the soothing pulse of a pendulum swaying in its window box. When he was ten years old, his father gave him the task of winding each clock with its own special turnkey. Harry imparted to his young son that turning the clocks was one of the most important rituals of the day, for it kept them powered up, pushing each minute, then hour, ahead.

Now, as her husband approached forty, Tom had become even more self-reflective and soulful. Sometimes he would tell her that he felt he was still sharing the space with his dad, despite the fact that Harry had recently passed away in a nursing home for veterans fifteen miles away.

Grace would always be grateful that her late father-in-law changed the course of her husband’s life for the better. The man helped get Tom back on track just before they began dating, offering him a job at the family store, not because he thought Tom had an eye for clocks or a talent for repairs, but because he saw that his son had lost his way.

While Tom had been a good student and even an Eagle Scout, by the time he was eighteen, he hit a rebellious streak. His family’s tight-knit values felt provincial and insular. And while it had faintly amused him as a kid to introduce his predominantly Irish-Catholic friends to the tradition of Sunday bagels or matzo ball soup, as a teenager he just wanted to be like everyone else. He grew his hair longer and combed it back with Brylcreem. He played loud music his parents hated, like Elvis and Little Stevie Wonder. He concentrated less on his senior-year studies, finding more interest in extracurricular activities like smoking cigarettes behind the A&P and riding the secondhand Triumph Tiger motorcycle he had bought to impress girls. Even the toughest punks who had called him “Jew boy” when he was in grade school were impressed with his transformation.

After taking four years to graduate from a two-year community college, Tom contemplated joining the army. He was confident his father, who had been a World War II veteran, would be pleased that he’d decided to serve his country and finally shape up after spending years drifting away from his full potential.

But the conversation ended up quite differently from what Tom could have ever anticipated. On a warm Saturday evening in the spring of 1963, he and one of his buddies, Bobby O’Rourke, went down to the Ace Hardware Shopping Center to join a group of friends to race their motorcycles.

After he and Bobby struck their engines and barreled toward the finish line, Tom lost control and found himself wiping out on a turn. Thrown to the pavement, his leg was crushed beneath the Triumph’s heavy metal frame.

Tom shattered his fibula in eight places, causing him to have a permanent limp and pain whenever it rained.

His parents had met the ambulance at the hospital. The doctor read the X-ray with a grave look on his face and informed them that Tom would need to stay in traction at the hospital for the next two months, and even if the bone did fully heal, he would probably always walk with a limp.

When he awoke from surgery, Tom was dreading how his father was sure to react. But Harry very much surprised his son. “This dumb accident just might have saved your life,” he told Tom.

With the thunderclouds brewing in Vietnam, Harry had been nursing a concern that America might end up in a war there, like it had in Europe in the 1940s and Korea a few years later. Having himself experienced the horrors of war, the terror still sometimes returning to him at night when he found himself reliving the scene of him witnessing his best friend Jimmy getting blown up when he stepped on a land mine only a few yards away, Harry now felt more relief than anger over Tom’s accident. Now his son would be medically exempt from any future fighting.

Tom’s friend Bobby O’Rourke, who had bragged about his victory in the race that night as Tom was being lifted into the ambulance, would enlist a few years later.

Bobby passed his medical exam with flying colors, only to die a year later in a jungle outside Nha Trang.