After Visiting Friends, Page 5

  For a long time, I stare at the card, unsure of what to write to this man I do not know. I’m mystified at how to begin. “Dear sir”? “Dear Mr. Bum”? I write simply, “Merry Christmas.” As I’m about to sign my name, something else trips me: Do I sign “Love, Mike”? If I write “Love,” am I betraying my father? Will I anger my mother?

  I scribble my name and poke the card back to my mother. She seals it and says nothing, just drops it into the box.

  “Why can’t bums have aftershave?”

  “They’ll drink it. That’s what they do on skid row. Hold this down.”

  I put my hand on the lid as she cuts the tape. I say, “Where’s skid row?”

  “Where bums live.”

  “Why there?”

  “Because they’re lost men.” She pushes our box to the center of the table. “There,” she says. “That looks like it will stay closed.”

  For years afterward, whenever my mother drives us into the city and we pass by the giant red neon cross-shaped sign for Pacific Garden Mission, I stare at the men standing in line, the men waiting to be fed. Their eyes never meet mine. I look at them all. I think about what they were. Whom they left behind. I scan their faces, thinking that someday I will see my own. That I will see his.

  # # #

  Maybe my father knew he would never return. Never walk through the kitchen door again, hang his suit coat over a kitchen chair, make a pot, listen to the percolation, watch the sun rise, wait for us to wake to find him.

  At some point, doesn’t every man think of not returning?

  The pack of smokes? The carton of milk? The errant errand?

  And if he did return, what would be the same?

  Summer of ’72, an F2 tornado hits in the night, tears a hole in our roof. Rain pours in. A deluge. Water runs down the walls, seeps into the floors. We spend the next two days, the three of us, ripping up gray, soggy carpeting and the padding underneath, dumping it in the alley.

  “We have to get to the floorboards,” my mother tells us.

  A day or two later, men come in. They break holes in the walls. They’re looking for rot, they say. “Before you can go on,” one of the men tells me, “you gotta make sure your walls are strong.”

  Come the fall, the house is different. Each room, remade. Fresh paint and carpeting everywhere. Wall-to-wall is my mother’s mantra. And the shades of the ’70s, shades of earth and canned vegetables, now rule. The thin gray carpet in the living room is replaced by thick pile, the color of an Idaho potato. If my father were to enter their bedroom, only the bed remains unchanged. Cherry. Four-poster. The carpeting shag now, pistachio green. If he walks in the back door, into the kitchen, slipping in like he always did—the walls, once white, now papered over in a print of avocado and lemon. Carpet—something my mother tells me is “indoor-outdoor”—covers the linoleum. Everything reskinned. Only the clock, built in to the wall above the sink, goes untouched. Slim black hands circling a tin face.

  After the repairs are made, I cannot sleep. I ask my mother to put the kitchen back the way it was. I am convinced he will return and, opening a door on a home he no longer recognizes, he will believe he is in the wrong house and he will leave us, to go on searching for his home.

  # # #

  I walk with my grandfather on a summer night, the summer my father is dead. We walk through the alley of the Kroger grocery store. In the setting sun, the bricks turn a deep, warm orange, like the color of that powder you mix with milk to make the “cheese” of macaroni and cheese.

  My grandfather is a quiet man. He holds my hand. We walk in silence. It will be this way, always.

  For the rest of my childhood, I want from him what I want from any man in my life. A voice. Someone to talk to. Someone who will tell me the knowledge I should know, tell me of the ways of the world, guide me. An arm around my shoulder.

  At the end of the alley, I stop at a manhole. Years to come, this will be home plate for baseball games back here with boys.

  The manhole cover is not solid but a grate, metal bars maybe an inch apart. I am on the edge, not wanting to stand on it, afraid I will fall through the spaces.

  My grandfather holds my hand. Somewhere at the bottom, in the darkness, I can see myself. I let go of my grandfather’s hand, kneel down on the edge of the grate. I find pebbles on the pavement. I drop one into the dark hole, then another, and a third. My reflection, shattered. Ripples on the black water.

  My grandfather presses more stones into my palm, says to me, “Maybe your father will catch one.”

  # # #

  In junior high, I see a story in Newsweek about the USSR. This is around the time Brezhnev is fading. 1979. The story has two photos: One shows a wall of grim, stiff men standing shoulder to shoulder on a reviewing stand. It’s a May Day parade in Red Square. They are cloaked in heavy woolen coats and homburgs. Some dress like military men. On the far end of the stage, a man salutes an unseen crowd.

  Next to this photo is its duplicate, except: The Saluting Man is gone. Where he was, now there is nothing. A red circle around the spot where he stood: placed by the magazine—a red circle to highlight his void. The caption informs readers that party officials have removed him. “Purged,” they call it. The man never lived.

  Everyone in the USSR knows his nonexistence is a lie, but no one will say anything.

  What is a purge but a collective agreement not to speak of the dead? Complicit silence. The mind, however, still remembers.

  I marvel at the brazenness of Brezhnev: Did he believe he could force an entire people to agree that this person didn’t exist? Surely everyone knows that the photograph has been doctored. That a man with a name and a past and a family is now deleted.

  And yet it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what the Soviet people thought, it didn’t matter what the world thought, and it certainly didn’t matter what a boy in Chicago thought. Life, I learned then, belongs not to the just but to those who do whatever they must do in order to maintain their vision of reality. I had more in common with those Soviet citizens than I knew. I learned never to mention the name of the nonperson. I worked to crush my desire to know him and smother my instinct to keep him alive.

  #

  In the end, he lived on in scrapbooks. Six of them. Brittle, faded pages bound with string. Out of these fragments, over the years, I created his narrative. And my narrative.

  I discover the scrapbooks when I’m eight, wedged in a cabinet beneath the bookshelf. They are my father’s life, created by his mother. The books stop when he marries my mother. From boyhood to newspaperman, his mother kept the evidence of a life lived. First-grade report card. Cub Scout awards. Elementary-school class photos. Ticket stubs for football games (the scores noted on them). Birthday cards. Mother’s Day cards he made for her. High school prom photographs. The first stories he wrote for the Tribune. Stories about him from the Omaha-World Herald—such as the one from 1947 detailing how, as a boy of twelve, he delivered an award-winning essay (“What New Horizons I See”) at the dedication of a Reclamation Bureau dam in the Republican Valley. There is a photograph of him and his mother, the caption saying, “Bob, a seventh-grader, says he hopes to be a newspaperman.”

  I live in fear my mother will catch me. I have this idea that she will take my reading of his scraps as a sign of disloyalty. I go to him in secret and in silence, and in my time with him I try to make him whole again. Reconstruct him. The books are my talismans, my way to conjure him. Maybe I could not raise him from the dead. But with these scrapbooks, I could bring him to life.

  #

  What will be left of us when we are gone? My father? Bits of faded newsprint amid sheaves of crumbling construction paper. Serrated-edged black-and-white photographs shot by Kodak Brownies. A boy of six, on his back porch, hugging his black dog, squinting into the great American Dust Bowl sun of 1939. A book of scraps. Brittle pages. It was left to me to reassemble him. I learned to make sense of the remnants, to find meaning in the missing pieces. A man of
paper.

  The more I touch it, the more it crumbles.

  # # #

  That fall, she signs up for figure-skating classes at the park district field house.

  I ask why.

  My mother tells me that if she could live her life over, she’d want to come back as an Olympic figure skater. She says, “I just think it would be the best life ever.”

  All through that fall she learns to skate.

  “I’m learning the ice,” she tells me one morning. “Getting familiar with it. That’s what we call it.”

  I come home from school and she’s in her solitaire chair. But there are no cards on the table. She’s just sitting there, her right arm before her, motionless and bright white.

  “I fell.”

  She tells me she made a bad turn. Something in the ice. One of those things, she says.

  “I tried to catch myself.”

  She moves her arm. There’s a slight grinding sound, plaster on wood.

  I ask her if I can sign it. She tells me no. She wants to keep the break clean.

  #

  Sometime after that, I’m reading the paper and I say to her, “What’s a mia?”

  “MIA,” she says. “Missing in action. It’s a soldier who is not dead but not found.”

  “So where are they?”

  “Missing.”

  “Are they ever coming home?”

  “No. But no one will tell the family the truth. This way, the family can believe they are still out there, somewhere.”

  # # #

  It’s Christmas that year. We’re at the mall. My mother goes her own way. My brother and I head for the toy department. On the way there, I see a woman, dark-haired, in front of a glass case. In it, she has metal bracelets. I pause.

  “C’mon,” my brother says, and he keeps going.

  The woman says, “Would you like one?” and hands a bracelet to me. A man’s name is engraved on it.

  “That’s the name of a man,” she says. “He might have a boy at home, just like you.”

  She tells me that the bracelets are for men who are missing in Vietnam.

  “Wouldn’t you like to keep a man’s memory alive? Maybe you can get your mother to buy you one for Christmas.”

  “My mother says these men are never coming back.”

  The woman yanks the bracelet off my wrist and says, “If you don’t leave right now, I’ll report you.”

  #

  When I got older, nine or so, I began to ride my bike to his cemetery.

  Three and a third miles, door to gates.

  The first time, I wandered, searching stone-to-stone. A man cutting grass tells me to go to the office.

  A woman there asks if I am lost.

  “Just looking.”

  “No one just looks here,” she says.

  I tell her I am looking for my father.

  She points to a big book on the table near the door.

  “Get that,” and she pulls her black-framed glasses to her face, from the silver chain around her neck.

  It’s a heavy ledger. So big I can’t get my arms around it. I end up dragging it across the floor. Dead weight. The lady sits behind the counter, watching me, smoking a thin brown cigarette. When I get close to the counter, after what seems like a forever haul, she reaches down. Ashes fall in my eyes.

  She turns page after page and then takes out a map of the cemetery. She makes a blue X and then a dotted line from the office to the X. “There you go, Captain Kidd,” she says. “A treasure map.”

  #

  I’ve always wished my faith were stronger. Like the four men who punched a hole in the roof of the house, tied a rope around their crippled friend, then lowered him in where Jesus sits, preaching. Imagine—Jesus, cross-legged on the floor, and descending from above comes a man, twisted, trussed up, broken. Jesus considers the cripple and then looks toward the hole where his friends peer down. They tell Jesus that men blocked them from entering the house but they were determined to place their withered friend in His healing presence.

  I have often prayed for such faith.

  Our Father, who art in heaven . . .

  Aren’t in heaven?

  How many times did I puzzle over that?

  And if my father aren’t in heaven, where are he?

  As a boy I longed to be a prophet. Saturday Vigil Masses, I knelt beside my mother, my mouth musty with His body melting to paste on my tongue. Watched the purpled incense smoke rise into the unseen reaches of the dim and darkened dome. The bishops’ hats high in the rafters, fading. Changing to dust in the spaces above us. The threads that bind brim to crown failing. And me, kneeling, still. Praying for alms and supplication. Sureness of mission.

  #

  My mother. She left the Church when I was still a boy. Something, she said, about the Parable of the Prodigal Son. “It’s just not fair,” she said. “Stories like that.”

  # # #

  Not to say I have not had my doubts. Consider the story of Matthias. Christ, crucified. Judas, suicided. And Peter gathers the remaining apostles.

  “Men,” he says, “Judas now dwells in the Field of Blood, flat on his face, his bowels spilt out of him. Rejoice. Yet, it is written—to witness Resurrection, we must make our body whole again.”

  In other words, they are only eleven. But they must be twelve.

  Peter points to two men he has found—Matthias and Barsabbas. Tells them to kneel before them. Lots are cast. Matthias in. Barsabbas out. Just like that.

  And since the whole story is taken on faith, what do you believe? Does Barsabbas get off his knees, humbled? Stand in the dirt as they link arms around Matthias? Or does he walk away filled with rage, spitting at dogs? Cursing what could have been, if only the Lord had willed it?

  #

  What signs have you pretended you did not see? Looked askance, away? Given in to that voice inside: “Stay on the main road. There’s nothing that way!”

  And yet—we wonder.

  What if how we are told it happened is not how it happened? What if the story we have been told is just that? A story. Not the truth.

  Each of us has a creation tale—how we came into the world. And I’ll add this: Each of us has an uncreation tale—how our lives come apart. That which undoes us. Sooner or later, it will claim you. Mark you. More than your creation.

  All my life, I’ve felt the story I was told about how my father died did not add up.

  Here’s the story I was told by my mother. And it’s not like we sat around and recited this story. I had to pry this out of her. I was ten and I could no longer stop the questions in my head. I defied omertá. I asked her to tell me the story of how he died. We were in the kitchen. It was January and it was growing dark, even though it was only three.

  “He was working late, and on the way to his car, he had a heart attack.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Some police officers found him.”

  “Was he dead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did they take him to the hospital?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why didn’t the police come and tell us? How come Uncle Dick came and told us?”

  “Because the police found his press pass and called the paper and someone there called Dick.”

  “But why didn’t the police come and tell us he was dead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s what they do on TV. They always do.”

  “I told you: The police found his press pass, so they called the paper. Then, because the guys at the paper knew Dick, they probably thought it would be best if they called him first.”

  #

  The story never makes sense to me. Not that I say that to her. But there are holes.

  #

  Careful where you step.

  #

  So I do what I know best: I keep quiet. But I think about it all the time—about that night. How many nights did I lie in bed, the sound of my little washing-ma
chine heart churning in my ear, trying to picture him, a crumpled mass on damp asphalt. Facedown. Blood on his head from where he hit it, going down. An arm twisted beneath him. Dead man, alone in the night. Helpless. Abandoned.

  Does he feel it coming? A dizziness? Shortness of breath? A shooting pain. Air won’t come. He steadies himself against the hood. Touches his hand to the metal. Tries to breathe. He drops to a knee. And the other. He presses his face to the cold metal of the car. He’s squinting hard, trying to squeeze away the pain. . . . Black.

  # # #

  My senior year of high school, I’m eighteen, working on a term paper. I have to go to the main library down in the city, since it has a full collection of Chicago newspapers on microfilm. The library in my neighborhood has only the Tribune and the Sun-Times, not the Daily News and Today.

  I look up my father’s obituaries. I’ve never seen them. I don’t even know if they exist. But I figure the Sun-Times would have run one. Here’s what it says:

  Then I look to see what Uncle Dick’s paper, Chicago Today, printed:

  And then I find this in the Chicago Daily News:

  The Today obit claims that my father died “as he walked” in the 3900 block of North Pine Grove after he had “just left the home of a friend.” In the Daily News obit, they report that my father died “while visiting friends.”

  I’m sitting before the microfilm machine, squinting at the screen. Friends? Who are these friends? And why have I never met them? And the 3900 block of North Pine Grove is five miles away from the Sun-Times building.

  #

  Buttons pushed. A light flashes. Gears grind. My prints emerge. I put them in the box beneath my bed and never mention my discovery to my mother. But I think about it all the time.

  #

  And now, every night, instead of conjuring my father dying alone, now I see this alternate, secret narrative: him, friends, far from home, late at night . . .

  The week before I leave for college, I drive to the Cook County offices and buy a copy of my father’s death certificate. On some level, I was trying to prove to myself that he was indeed dead, because a part of me always believed that he simply ditched out on us, faked it all. So when the clerk gives me the death certificate, I have a small thought that he’s not dead at all—because his name is misspelled: Someone has written HANEY, then at some point corrected their error by jamming in the missing “I.”