She loves Joseph Cotten in Gaslight but thinks William Holden is the sexiest man ever. When I was fourteen, Picnic came on one night and she asked me to watch it with her, then told me how she saw it as a teenager and fell in love with Holden after he, the dark and mysterious man who drifts into a small Kansas town, gets drunk at the Labor Day picnic and takes his shirt off and dances with Kim Novak.
She especially loves movies and TV shows about cops or prisons or men doing bad things and getting caught and punished. If I happen to call her while she is watching one, she picks up the phone and says, “I’ll call you when this is over,” and hangs up.
When we were boys—my brother and I—and we’d come home summer nights after playing Kick the Can or Ghosts in the Graveyard, before we were allowed to take a bath, she’d send us to the laundry room to take off our dirty clothes, strip to our underwear. As we’d head down, she’d always shout after us, “Taking it off here, Boss!”
Only years later, when I saw Cool Hand Luke, did I realize she was quoting the line Paul Newman and the other prisoners had to say to No Eyes when they wanted to remove their shirts.
She reveres Edward R. Murrow. When I was thirteen, there was a special on PBS about his life. She made me watch it with her. As the show ended, she looked at me and said, “Cotten was the sexiest. But Murrow? Oh, he was the most handsome ever.”
# # #
Summers we were ghosts in the graveyard. The game was simple: Every kid save one transformed into a ghost. The neighborhood, our graveyard. The game begins when the undead child is sent away from home, told to disappear. Then the ghosts come a-hunting. The ghosts look to capture the one among us who is not a ghost—the one who is undead—and change him into a ghost before he can reach “safe,” reach “home.” Victory depends on defying the ghosts. Evasion. Elusion. Finding home.
# # #
Omertá.
After he died, silence descends. Silence and fear. My twin poles: my binary black holes. I live in fear of upsetting my mother, of even uttering my father’s name. I believe that even by saying his name, I might kill her. Or she might kill me.
#
Three of us remained. Three atoms that retreat to the outer edges of our chamber. A nuclear family flawed, reduced. We drift apart. Unable to bond. Not knowing how. Survivors who stagger into a shelter or a bombed-out ruin, each eyeing the others from our shadowy corner. Wondering. Calculating.
He died and we never spoke again about him. Every once in a while, I’d find the courage to ask about him. Every once in a while, the question nagging in my head—How did he die?—would become too much and I’d forget the rules and ask.
#
My mother, at the kitchen table, playing solitaire.
The shuffle, the cut, the deal to herself.
Depth of summer, dead of winter, she is forever dealing. The only other thing alive in our kitchen, the radio atop our refrigerator. It’s always on.
My grandmother carried a transistor radio the size of a pocket Bible. The two panels bound together with a thick rubber band. Come bedtime, she’d place it beside her on her pillow and keep it on all night, tuned to WGN. The talk shows, the call-ins. She never slept much. Most nights she’d walk room-to-room, look out the windows, into the night. She was like that, she said, ever since her mother died. But she had that radio, always on. When I was a boy, she told me, “The voices remind me I’m not the only one out here.”
But my mother’s radio was forever tuned to WIND. “Chicagohhhhh’s wind!” is what the men say when they have to identify themselves. “Five-sixty on your AM dial.”
April 1970.
Even now, there are songs I hear—songs that make me think of then.
If you could read my mind, love, what a tale my thoughts could tell. Just like an old-time movie, ’bout a ghost from a wishing well . . . You know that ghost is me.
Then another song. A woman has had a man leave her. The woman ends each day the way she starts out, crying her heart out. One less bell to answer. One less egg to fry. One less man to pick up after.
Another song. Stones would play, inside her head. And when she slept, they made her bed.
Another song. The first line is like a word problem. Something I’m not at all good at. By the time I get to Phoenix, she’ll be rising . . . Each time, I wonder who the woman is that this man has left behind. And how fast is he moving away from her? Vanishing. She’ll find the note I left hanging on her door. . . . By the time I make Albuquerque, she’ll be working. . . . But she’ll just hear that phone keep on ringing off the wall.
Songs of loss. Of missing men. Of men leaving. . . . Leaving, on a jet plane. Don’t know when I’ll be back again. . . . Already I’m so lonesome, I could die. . . .
Even now, there are songs that can make me cry. Like “(They Long to Be) Close to You.”
I’m not afraid to admit it.
On the day that you were born, the angels got together, and decided to create a dream come true . . . Aye, da-da-da-da-di-i-i-i-i-i-i-ie, close to you.
I remember riding my bike in the alley, singing that song and thinking that that girl liked me. That she was going to lift me up and take care of me. In the summer, those days long as the Crusades, I’d ride my bike everywhere. It was a way to keep moving. I learned to look forward to the day after Independence Day. Get up early, ride the neighborhood, scan the gutters for duds. That endless search for what we called the non-pops. Gather them up. Stuff them in my pockets. Then unroll them all. Scrape the powder in a pile and throw a match at it. Pfffft! A flash and a cloud of smoke, and then—gone.
I lived for that.
#
My mother comes home one afternoon that summer. My brother and I are sprawled on the floor, watching a show about a beautiful woman married to a man who makes her hide her true self. She has magic powers. A good witch. My mother says to us, “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about why we’re going. This is Uncle Dick’s treat. And you are not getting to go on a vacation because your father died. But—would you like to go to Disneyland?”
I think, Are you kidding me? I can’t get there fast enough!
Three memories of that trip:
1. I eat pancakes cooked in a silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head.
2. We never see Mickey or any of the characters. I start to think that they don’t exist. Then, on our last day in the Magic Kingdom, we come upon a lone figure shambling along in what looks like a soiled oversize bathrobe. Turns out he’s one of the Dwarfs. Not one of the famous ones, like Dopey. One of the C-listers. My mother grabs the little man, pushes my brother and me in front of him, and snaps her Instamatic.
3. My mother, my brother, and I squeeze into a small car that is borne by means unseen down a dark path. The Haunted Mansion. A restraint lowers, locks us in. I feel the machinery underfoot, pulling us forward. A driverless car, yet we move. As our car makes its way toward the end of the ride, we come to a stop in a shadowy room.
Still, I can see something. There’s just barely enough light. Yes, there it is: our new family. The three of us, reflected in the mirror before us on the wall.
But I look again, and there, in the mirror—in the car with us, sitting between my brother and me—is a ghost of a man. Hair, crazy. Teeth, cracked and black. Clothes but shreds, full of holes. For a moment, I think the man is real and I try to hide my fear.
Our car passes from the mirror.
The ghost is no more.
Halloween. After he is dead. My brother says he wants to be Dracula. My mother sews his cape and makes a kind of royal, count-like medallion for him by tying an old broach to some thick red yarn. She slicks his hair with Dippity-Do, brings it to a point on his forehead. My brother completes the transformation with a pair of ninety-nine-cent plastic vampire teeth he buys at the Kroger.
I tell my mother I want to be a bum. She digs up one of my grandfather’s suit vests and one of his cast-off hats. I wear the vest over a T-shirt. She gives me a pair of old trousers. They�
�re my grandfather’s, too. He’s so short that even though I’m a boy, they are almost the right length. I wear the bottoms of them rolled. Then I cinch them around my waist with a length of frayed twine, knotting it tight.
In my mother’s basement, there’s a photograph she took of my brother and me standing on the back porch in the dying light, winter’s chill already in the air. Her two sons, transformed. Her elder, one of the living dead. Me, a tattered, meager man doomed to wander without a home.
# # #
Halloween night, the rain always came. Winter’s advance troops.
Chicago in winter? Not for the faint of heart. Even now, I go back for Christmas and I can’t take it. “Your blood has thinned,” my mother always tells me. “That’s what happens when you leave.”
I step beyond the terminal, into the air outside O’Hare, and it’s like inhaling shards of glass. And then there’s the snow. Endless shoveling. People get nutty about it. After a storm, people emerge blinking but single-minded, their only thought to dig out their cars, buried in drifts before their homes. And then, when they finally free their cars, they drag old kitchen chairs out to mark their places. Stake their claim. Drive down a Chicago side street in January. Amid the snowbanks, chair after battered chair. Like so many thrones for Old Man Winter.
Chicago. I am of that place. Spires loom. The sky, a soiled shroud. Even as a kid, I knew it was my Old Country. Where leaves get trapped and battered in dark gangways. Where cabbages boil in every kitchen and bitter steam stains dim windows. Where old Polacks nurse Old Styles in taverns on Ashland Avenue and, outside, women wait huddled for buses grinding streets that stretch to the horizon. From my grandmother’s attic, I could see the garbage dumps beyond the railroad tracks. They had been filled years before I was born. Covered with new soil. Sodded with fresh grass. New land. And pipes were stuck here and there, spewing fire. Burning off the methane. At night, I’d stare out the window, watching pale blue flames flicker like hopeful campfires of settlers on the prairie.
#
Winter, my mother always kept the house as cold as possible. “Put on a sweater,” she’d say whenever I tell her I am cold.
I am cold every day. Some days, I wear three sweaters and two pairs of socks, sitting there in the basement with my brother, the afghan pulled over us, watching Hogan’s Heroes. Imprisoned men having fun.
At night, my mother would drop the thermostat to fifty-nine. I’d sleep in a knit hat and socks.
In the depth of winter, mornings still black as sin and the wind blowing jagged crystals of ice-snow against the bedroom window, I’d go downstairs for breakfast and my mother still would not raise the thermostat. What she’d do instead: Turn on the oven and open it. I’d pull my chair in front of it. Eat my breakfast and stare at the flames.
One night I couldn’t stand it anymore, and on my way to bed I turned the thermostat up. To sixty-two.
The next morning I come into the kitchen, and as I sit down she plants herself before the oven and blocks my warmth.
“Did you touch the thermostat?”
“No.”
“Don’t gaslight me,” she says.
I look at her.
“Do you know what gaslighting is?”
“No.” (I’m ten. What does she want?)
“It’s a movie,” she says. “It’s all about this man who tries to drive his wife crazy by dimming the lights in their house, and whenever she asks, ‘Is it getting darker in here?’ he says, ‘No.’ And she starts to lose her mind. But this detective, Joseph Cotten—oh, you know I’ve always had the biggest crush on him—saves her from her cruel husband. Turns out not only is he trying to drive her mad, he’s also leading a whole double life outside the home.”
She looks at me.
“That’s gaslighting,” she says.
“I didn’t do anything,” I say.
I went out into the frozen morning. School. The only sound the crunch of my boots on iced-snow and the scream of another Final Approach.
#
Final Approach.
Over and over, that’s all we heard.
Life in the shadow of O’Hare. ORD—what this land was before the airport was: orchards. Men took it for the airport’s original name: Orchard Field. The origin of ORD. Acres and acres of apple trees. As a boy, I rode my bike to O’Hare, circumnavigated its fenced-in perimeter. That’s how I found the forgotten orchards. A patch of the past. In the fall, their apples rot unwanted. All that remains. That and the cemetery. Graves at the far edge of a runway. Chain-link fence. Weathered, worn stones. The remains of settlers. Germans. Some Swedes. Their church was here. After the war, men came with money, bought out the flock, tore down the church, built our runways. Yet the dead remain. Unless you know where to look, you can’t see them.
Today, still, when I fly to Chicago, I search out the gravestones during my descent. Final Approach. A game I play. My landmarks, the graves. Then I know I am home. ORD.
#
Jets rattle our kitchen window. In the wake of each departure, the disturbance so strong we cease speaking.
“Hold that thought,” it seems my mother always says whenever I try to speak.
One day, while I’m waiting for her to cook my lunch, my neat round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon, another jet rumbles overhead. My mother slams her wooden spoon against the counter.
“This home is a flight path,” she says, and walks out of the room, the stove untended.
Eventually, she is drawn to it, to the world of airport jobs.
O’Hare. A world of transit. Of long-term lots and frontage roads, of courtesy shuttles, of men in flight.
When I am ten, she takes a job as a cashier in the gift shop at the O’Hare Marriott. Walking distance from our house. When I miss her, I go to see her. But she is unaware. I stand in the lobby, hide behind a column or a wingback chair. Somewhere I can watch her ring up people, make change.
Hertz came later. Her job is to hand out agreements to businessmen. Circle the relevants, ask the men if they want additional coverage, highlight their penalties for late returns. I become drawn to O’Hare. The Marriott has a shuttle, and in the winter, as a young boy, I hitch rides. I make friends with the driver, cut a deal to be a porter. Men appear and I carry their baggage. Sometimes they tip me. I buy a bad-tasting hot dog and roam the airport for hours, watch jets ascend and descend. I come to love the terminal. It feels better than home.
#
In the weeks after he is dead, I sit on my mother’s bed and watch as she and her brother work their way through my father’s closet. Whatever suits my uncle wants, he hands to my mother and she stuffs them in her Glad bag. Black. Huge. The kind you use to get rid of the dead leaves. The clothes my uncle rejects, my mother tosses into a cardboard box, and a few days later she tells me to carry it out to the front stoop.
“What are we doing?” I say.
“Goodwill is coming.”
“What’s that?”
“You can wait if you want, but it never comes when it says it will.”
“Are you Good Will?” I say.
“I am.”
# # #
Mail continues to come for him.
ROBERT CHARLES HAINEY
915 C PETERSON AVE
PARK RIDGE, ILLINOIS 60068
I ask why.
“Junk mail,” my mother says. “Computers,” she says. “They don’t care.”
For years after, whenever I can get home before my mother, I pluck out the pieces sent to him. Bills, newsletters, solicitations. Envelopes with little plastic windows, his name framed, on display. I hide them in a blue Keds shoe box beneath my bed. Nights when she is not home, I carry the shoe box out to the back porch, bury the letters in the bottom of our family’s trash.
#
It’s the fall after my father has died. I’m in first grade, September. The air still warm with summer’s afterburn. I come
home from school. My grandmother is working the stove. In the months after my father’s death, she and my grandfather stay with us. They want to keep an eye on my mother.
I hold a picture that I drew that day: two large white candles, one on either side of the paper, each attached to a large yellow candleholder. Small orange flames burn steady from their wicks. Between the candles there is a coffin, propped atop two black wheels.
My grandmother asks, “What is this?”
I tell her we were told to draw a picture of our father.
My grandmother crumples up my portrait and stuffs it deep into the trash. She squeezes my arm, kneels down in front of me on the linoleum.
“Don’t ever tell anyone about this. Don’t ever tell your mother what you made. Or what I did.”
#
How his death hung over that house.
It’s part of what I know to be true—your absence is greater than your presence.
# # #
1970. The first Christmas without him.
Father Clark sets up a Christmas tree next to the altar, blocking out Saint Joseph’s shrine. There are no ornaments on the tree, only pieces of white paper, paper-clipped to the branches. Like paper snowflakes, waiting to become. After Mass, my mother plucks one off. “What’s that?” I ask, and she tells my brother and me that we’re going to make a care package for a bum. We all said bum back then. Back then, any man without a home was a bum.
Father Clark has started a neediest fund and our church has adopted Pacific Garden Mission, deep in the city. We sit at the kitchen table as my mother unfolds the piece of paper that still smells of mimeograph. She reads the name of the man to herself, and then she hands the paper to my brother, who hands it to me. In black ink, a man’s name is written. Below are mimeographed purple instructions saying that the best gifts to include are toothbrushes, toothpaste, disposable razors, warm socks, knit hats, long underwear. NO AFTERSHAVE.
My brother and I watch our mother pack our gifts into a box. Her fists crumple old newspaper into loose balls. Something to prevent breakage. Then she slides toward my brother and me a Christmas card and a pen.
“Write something,” she says.