After Visiting Friends, Page 6

  I go to a coffee shop across the street, get a booth in the corner, and study the document for clues. The first thing I learn: My father didn’t die of a heart attack. Also, contrary to what my mother has told me, he was, in fact, autopsied. The official cause of death, as determined by the coroner: “Spontaneous rupture congenital (cerebral) aneurysm, anterior communicating artery.”

  Then there’s the fact of the hospital to where he was taken: “American—D.O.A.”

  American Hospital—now Thorek Memorial Hospital—is on the city’s North Side, five miles from his office. Not exactly the closest hospital for two cops to take a man they find lying on the streets downtown. There are at least three hospitals that are closer.

  The second curious thing is the time of death: 5:07 a.m.

  My uncle was at our house less than two hours later. Which means he must have moved pretty fast.

  I hide the death certificate in the shoe box beneath my bed, along with the copies of the obituaries, and then I do what I know best to do. I go silent. Omertá.

  Until a few years ago, when I turned thirty-five.

  For most of my life I have believed I was never going to outlive my father, that I would never make it to thirty-six. I believed his sentence was my sentence. So when I turned thirty-five, I cracked. My doctor called it a functioning breakdown.

  That sounded about right.

  During the week, I worked among the living. But the weekends I passed in solitude. By day, I wandered the city in silence. At night, I sought out old-man bars, places I knew I’d see no one and could drink alone late into the night. Every day, I had it in my head that this day could be the day. And yet rather than energizing me, mortality froze me. I wanted to live but felt powerless. I felt fate had already decided. I was already locked in a box. Somehow my father had tricked me into taking his place. My own Houdini.

  Volunteers from the audience? Someone to test the box in which I will seal myself and then escape? You, young man. Excellent. Step right up!

  Somehow, he deceived me—then vanished. And I—I remained, trapped in my father’s box.

  5

  OLD HAUNTS

  In August 2003, I go home for my grandmother’s birthday. But I am determined to do some reporting as well. And question my mother.

  My mother is the half-hugger. Whenever I see her, she can only give me a one-armed hug. It’s like having that guy from The Fugitive for a mother.

  I land at O’Hare in the early evening and call her. “Last American,” the only words she says, even though this has been the drill for the past twenty years when I come home at least three times a year and walk out to the curb and stand under the last American Airlines sign and maybe ten minutes later the Regal pulls up. I hear the tunk! of the trunk popping as she sits inside. I drop my bag in the carpeted cube, note that her emergency kit is still there: flares, Band-Aids, an orange distress flag to hang on her antenna in case she is buried in a snowdrift—even though she has no antenna.

  I slam the trunk and walk around, open the door.

  I lean over, peck her cheek.

  “Hi.”

  One arm goes around me, pats me on the shoulder.

  “Hi.”

  #

  We drive the seven minutes home. Past my old high school.

  Tackling sleds on the practice fields, silent in the setting sun.

  #

  We get to the house and don’t say much. She has a pizza for me from one of the take-out places. She always does that for me. I pull a High Life from the refrigerator. She always does that, too.

  We don’t talk about much—work for me, the grandkids for her.

  The silence kills me. I want to ask her about everything I’ve come to town for—but I decide to wait. It’s late now—9:30.

  I tell her good night.

  As I close my bedroom door, I hear the banging—one of my mother’s routines. Each night before she goes to bed, she dumps the ice cubes from the ice-cube maker into the kitchen sink.

  “I like to keep my ice fresh,” she says.

  She never uses ice.

  But every night she pounds the plastic tray against the side of the sink, and the ice cubes clatter toward the drain’s black mouth. Maybe, for a moment, she’ll stare at the dark outside, at the small oak outside her window that clings to its dead leaves all through the long winter. Bark, dark as creosote’d field posts. Maybe looking, too, at the fragile wood carving she keeps on her windowsill. Don Quixote. She got it forever ago, a gift from someone I do not know. Long as I can remember, she has stationed him there, astride his small beast. His helmet, broken. That was my fault. Sometime when I was a boy, I was playing with Don Quixote and dropped him. Ever since, I’ve never touched him and he’s never moved from that place above the drain where she keeps him, standing sentry.

  # # #

  The next morning. I find her at the kitchen table in her Solitaire Chair. Her Crosswords Chair. Her Jumble Chair. Head bowed, filling in the boxes, letter by letter. Words, solved. Words as solutions.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  I pour my coffee, sit down perpendicular to her.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “That damn sump pump was going all night.”

  My mother is obsessed with water levels. Her bedroom is above the sump pump. It churns away in the basement, in the dark, through the night. Pushing her overflow down. Keeping her safe.

  “I don’t want a flood,” she tells me.

  “You’re not going to have a flood.”

  “Well,” she says—and she says that word in a way that’s so damning.

  I go into her basement. I look at the hole, the dark water up to the stone lip. I tell her everything’s fine, not believing a word of what I’m saying. I mean, do I look like a sump-pump specialist? Like I can read water tables? But her? Twice a day, she’s in the basement, looking for leaks.

  “You don’t understand,” she says. “If it all came flooding in, it’s a disaster.” And she descends. She doesn’t trust me. She stalks around, slippers and robe, flashlight poking lazy streams of yellow light into her corners. Tracing the walls for signs only she seems to know. Palms to the stone.

  “We’re safe for another day,” she says when she reappears.

  “Does anyone else have these problems?” I ask. “Your neighbors?”

  “None of them run their pumps. Look out back at their plots. See the water sitting there, rising up? I’m the one who pushes everything down.”

  Her puzzle waits half completed. As a boy, I would find her crossword unfinished and look to see if I could give her any words. To this day, she has me send her the puzzle from the Sunday Times. I tear it out, then come Monday, drop it in the mail. No note. Just the puzzle. If I forget, she calls me, late in the week, says, “I didn’t get your puzzle.”

  She looks over at me now and says, “You know I have to ask you this, so don’t get angry.”

  “What?” And I know what she’s going to ask me. But I make her ask.

  “Your boxes in the basement? Can you move those one of these days?”

  Every time I’m home—the same question. When I moved to New York all those years ago, I left six boxes in her basement. High school yearbooks. College papers. Some photos. Battered apple crates from Thompson’s, where I weighed fruits and vegetables for picky old women who always looked at me as though I were overcharging them. It was a good job. The worst part was cleaning out the Garb-el on Sundays. The Garb-el was the trap—a garbage disposal where we trimmed all the lettuces, dumped all our bruised and rotted fruit. The trap was built into the floor of the back room, three feet by three feet and just as deep. I had to get on my knees and dig all that muck out. The stench was horrible. I’d pour in a jug of bleach, try and neutralize the muck. And I’d excavate the peaty mess with the ice scooper I’d snatch out of the ice machine. It was all good training. I learned early that sometimes you have to dig through garbage to get anywhere.

  When I left for New Yo
rk at twenty-five, I went with two suitcases, nothing more. I thought I’d be back in Chicago at the end of my six-month internship. So I asked her, Can I put my boxes here? She said sure.

  Her basement is enormous. And there is nothing in it, save for one small corner opposite the sump pump where there is a metal storage rack. Her Christmas wrapping paper is on it. Her suitcase for the trips she takes a few times a year, a cruise or a bus tour through Europe. She loves bus tours in Europe. She has this whole system for her vacations—months before she leaves, she starts sorting her clothes and underwear into “good” and “not good.” The “not good” being frayed, worn, torn. She packs this group for the trip. Each day, she wears a pair of the frayed underwear and then at the end of that day leaves it in the garbage. “One less thing to pack for home,” she says. “It’s great.”

  And then there’s my six boxes. That’s it.

  “You know I have to ask,” she says.

  “Mom, there’s nothing in your basement.”

  She tilts her head down, eyes back to her crosswords. Goes silent.

  “I just don’t understand it, Mom.”

  She doesn’t raise her eyes, even. Just the scratch of the pen adding letters to boxes.

  “I’ll take them to UPS today.”

  She looks up.

  “No. Leave them. Just leave them. It’s fine.”

  That’s what she always says when she’s decided our conversation is finished: Fine. And then she gives the air a little horizontal slice with her hand. The thread, severed.

  #

  I come downstairs later and find her with her ironing board set up outside the kitchen. A week’s worth of my work shirts, white and damp, hang near her. She loves to do laundry, loves to iron. She told me once she liked it because “you can see what you accomplish.” Living alone, she doesn’t have much laundry or ironing to do. Whenever I’m about to come home, she’ll call me.

  “Are you bringing laundry?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it. I—”

  “Please. You know how much I like it.”

  And then it’s me, stuffing a week’s worth of dirty laundry into my bag for the flight to Chicago.

  Anything to find common ground.

  #

  Back when she had just married my father, she and Lorraine, my godmother, would call each other while they were doing laundry. To make the time go faster, they would have ironing races. Whoever finished all her husband’s shirts first was the winner.

  When I heard that story from Lorraine, I asked her, “But how did you know the other person was finished?”

  “What do you mean?” Lorraine said.

  “You were on the phone. So how could you actually see if the other person had won?”

  She looked at me, crazylike. “The heck do you think this is? We would never cheat. We’re good girls from Gage Park High.”

  #

  Ever since I was a kid, I’ve known this scene. This sigh of the iron as she presses on my shirt.

  Sitting at the foot of the bedroom stairs, I’m terrified even now to ask about my father. Part of me still believes that just invoking his name will send her into a rage or spasms of grief.

  I summon my courage. I say, “Iwanttofindthetruthaboutdadandthenighthedied.”

  She folds back one of my arms, brings her iron down on it. Just says, “You know the story.” And she tells me the story again.

  When she finishes, I say, “But—didn’t you ever notice? The story doesn’t add up.”

  I lay it out for her—the obits, the addresses, the “friends.” I’m waiting for her to crack. But she doesn’t. Just the unbroken sliding of her iron and fist, back and forth across the upholstered board.

  “I’ve never heard any of that,” she says.

  “But didn’t you wonder, when you saw the obits?”

  “I never saw the obits.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Dad was dead. Why did I need to read a newspaper to tell me that?”

  The hissss-hohhhhh exhale of her iron.

  “I had work to do that day. Beginning with you and your brother. I didn’t have time to sit around and read the papers.”

  “But the ‘friend’? Or ‘friends’?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The obits say he had been visiting friends. Do you know who they were?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t that strange? That no one ever said they were with him the night he died?”

  “All I know is he got off work and some cops found him.”

  “But 3900 North Pine Grove is nowhere near his office.”

  She looks up from the ironing board. Her face a mask. She never betrays any emotion.

  “Let me ask you this,” I say. “How did you get Dad’s car home?”

  “Dick took care of everything. He identified the body and had it transferred to the funeral home. He told me where to go.”

  “What happened after Dick did all that?”

  “I went to Ryan-Parke with Grampa. Picked out the coffin. Gramma stayed with you and Chris.”

  “And what did Dick tell you about how he died?”

  “I don’t even remember what Dick told me. I think I was just in shock. It’s strange now to think about those days. I haven’t thought about them in forever.”

  “What else do you remember about that morning?”

  “All my friends started to come over. Lorraine. Mary Lee. Diane.”

  She puts down her iron. I hear water gurgle inside as it finds its level.

  “Did you know yesterday was Dad’s birthday?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “He’d be almost seventy.”

  She reaches for another one of my shirts, pulls it tight across her board. For a moment the only sound is her iron. I watch her hand pass it over the material in smooth, strong movements, the wrinkles being erased, pushed out.

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so,” I say meekly. “But you’ll be seventy soon.”

  She turns her face back to the board.

  “If you want to,” she says, “we could take a little driving tour of the places Dad and I used to go when we were dating. Old haunts.”

  “Mom, I would love that.”

  And as I say it, I think about how I underestimate my mother. Maybe she wants answers as much as I do. Underestimating her. Isn’t that the last thing I should do? Just as when my father died, so many underestimated her.

  She brings her iron to a rest on its foot.

  A puff of steam emerges. A little cloud between us, rising. Ascending. Dissipating.

  # # #

  Driving the Northwest suburbs. The two of us, searching for places she and my father went when they were first dating. Joints like the Bit & Bridle.

  When we get to the corner, it’s gone. A Mobil station where it was.

  “Well, that takes care of that,” my mother says. The statement is classic her. Concise. Unsentimental. Final. What I hear is the door closing. A closed, latched, bolted door with no handle.

  We sit silent as she executes a three-point turn and spins us back toward Dempster Street. I want to ask her more. This is why I came here this weekend. But I’m eight years old again, nervous to ask her questions. I’ve spent decades as a journalist—I get paid to ask people questions they don’t want to answer. But here I am, as intimidated as I’ve always been. Are all of us locked into a psychic age with our parents? Me, it’s somewhere between six and nine. I can’t even work up the courage to ask her a single opening question. So the silence congeals here in her Regal. Her Buick.

  My mother still drives a Buick. It’s all she’s ever driven, except for the Monarch that a husband of a friend persuaded her to buy because he could get a deal on it. It spent more time in the shop than it did on the road. Winter nights, she’d send me out of the house to put a blanket on the engine block. And there was the Monte Carlo. That was during high school, the one I crashed. Twice. In six months.
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  Finally, she speaks. “Want to see Talbott’s?”

  “What’s that?”

  “A bar up near Evanston. Dad went there during college and sometimes with the guys from the paper.”

  We get to the Evanston border near the Howard El stop.

  “There used to be an alley around here,” she says.

  She scans the street.

  “I puked in it once.” She pauses. “Not like I was drunk. I’d gone to the Cubs game with Dad and some friends, and I was pregnant with your brother and I was sitting in the sun and at some point I said I needed to go home. Dad stayed, and I rode the El home—we were living up here—and when I got off, I went into that alley and puked.”

  Suffer in silence. In solitude. In the shadows. Don’t let your weakness be seen. And later, maybe, tell a story for laughs. Maybe I’m more her son than his.

  She can’t find Talbott’s either.

  “There used to be a bartender there, Jack Gannon? He was nice. I wonder what happened to him.”

  We drive toward the city limits. The sun is bright and hard and I roll down my window, let some fresh air in.

  She points to a storefront, a used-furniture store.

  “That was my Laundromat when we were first married. Our apartment was around this corner. But you’ve seen that.”

  “I’d see it again.”

  “Really?”

  She pulls up in front of a small apartment building.

  “Which one was it?”

  “The second floor, near the door. See?”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, but I’m not sure. “How long were you here?”

  “A year or two.”

  She eases away from the curb.

  #

  “So who is alive from back then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His buddies from back then. The newspaper guys you all went drinking with. People I can talk to.”

  “So many of those guys are dead, Mike. Every time I open the Trib or Sun-Times, I see an obit for them. A lot of guys who smoked and drank and beat themselves up.”

  “Someone must be left.”