“Well, there’s Wiley. Roy Wiley. And Jim Strong, too. Everyone else . . . I think they’re dead.” She pauses. “Can you believe that?”
#
On our way home, she says, “There’s one more place we can see. Only if you want.”
“What’s that?”
“We could go to the cemetery.”
“That’d be good,” I say.
I can count on one hand the number of times my mother and I have been to his grave. One, the funeral. Two, I was nine and the three of us were on our way home from seeing a movie just up the road about people trapped on a sinking ship. The Poseidon Adventure. I hated when we had to go to that theater. Always passing by the cemetery. His cemetery. I lived in dread that she’d pull the wheel left and spin us into the cemetery: “What do you say we go see Dad? We got some time to kill before the movie.”
Happened only once.
She makes the left now, through the green wrought-iron gates. Maryhill Cemetery.
Part of me can’t believe she wants to do this—see him. But the other part of me has one thought: She’s not going to know the way to his grave. She’s been here three times in forty years.
We’re silent. The Buick rolling slowly through the graveyard.
When she took us here after The Poseidon Adventure, somehow I found the courage to ask her why she buried our father at Maryhill. There were cemeteries in our own town. She told me, “He and I always said we wanted to be in one of those cemeteries where there’s not all that junk and decorations. Lots of cemeteries, they’re full of plastic flowers and gaudy tombstones. So Polacky. I liked this place because all you get is a headstone, flush to the ground. Nothing marring the horizon. It looks like you’re in a big park.”
From somewhere I cannot see, the distant drone of a lawn mower and, closer, a cicada’s desperate ratcheting.
I bolt my eyes straight ahead. If she’s going to miss the fork in the road, I want to spare her the embarrassment of me witnessing her.
She follows the fork, left.
I exhale.
Maybe a hundred yards or so down the quiet road, she eases her Regal to a stop.
She found it.
Before she can unlatch herself, I’m out of the car, headed for his plot. There’s no way I want to see her not be able to find his grave.
A moment later, she is beside me. I can feel her. Not a touch. Just a presence.
Isn’t this what I’ve wanted for so long? My mother to take me to my father’s grave? To confirm to me in her silence, Yes, he existed.
I’m frozen. Eyes fixed on the middle ground. All I can do is stare at his tombstone, flat and gray. Granite. Barely bigger than a shoe-box lid.
ROBERT C. HAINEY
1934–1970
I put my arm around her. My mother, stiff as my arm is awkward.
“Okay?” she says.
“Uh-huh.”
We walk to the car, quiet again.
#
We’re at the graveyard gate, waiting for an opening. Down the street, a brick building. Like a dentist’s office in some small town, or an insurance agent’s. There’s a five-slot parking lot in front and a jumble of tombstones awaiting names.
“Remember when we got Dad’s headstone there?”
“Did I take you?” she says. “I don’t remember that.”
I do. I remember being so alive to the moment. Observing the man, heavy and sweating in a short-sleeve shirt with a pocket protector where he kept a Parker pen with its arrow clip and a calibrator. How he stood too close to my mother as he showed her shades of what he kept calling “memory stone”—black, white, gray.
I felt her aloneness in that decision. What was it? Her pain? Her embarrassment? Her shame? All these years on, I can articulate what I could not then. I wanted to protect her from this man who would not stop asking questions that she did not want to answer. Like when we sat at his paper-strewn metal desk, the three of us together on one side, the man asking my mother what she wanted cut into the stone. And her saying, “I already gave you his name.” And the man saying, “Don’t you want to say something like ‘Husband and Father’?” Her saying, “No. It’s fine.” And her hand, coming down.
#
“How am I?” she asks. “Am I safe on your side?”
She’s looking down the road, away from me.
“There’s an opening,” I say.
# # #
That night, as I close my bedroom door, I hear the crash of ice cubes getting dumped into the kitchen sink. My mother making her rounds. Shutting down the house.
A moment later, the voice of a man unseen—automated, tonally off—echoes throughout her house. System armed! No delays!
Some people count sheep. From the time I was a boy, I have counted possibilities. I have conjured the scene. Night after night, before I fall asleep, I envision his death, complete.
Now I lie in bed and think about what I am up against. So many dead sources. Not just the guys he worked with, but foremost Uncle Dick and Aunt Helen. They were both Christian Scientists. In 1994, he had a heart attack. They called the healer. He died. Helen got a tooth infection, and it just went from there.
I was angry with myself for letting fear hold me back. I should have talked to them when they were alive.
I roll over and stare out the window. Listen to the dull hum of traffic on the tollway, cars driving north. Sometimes I think about my father driving home in the night. What if he’d made it to his car? What if he had been driving the Kennedy, 4 a.m.? Is he able to pull over? Does he spin out of control? How does it happen?
Cars, driving north in the night.
Once, I was a boy in the back of my mother’s car. We were coming home from the Loop. It was night. I watched the headlights of cars behind us. People gaining on us. People passing us. Somewhere between the Morton Salt billboard and the Budweiser billboard, the headlights of one car veered off the freeway and the car slammed into a light pole. Then, fire. I said nothing. Just watched the flames grow smaller and the wreckage recede as our distance increased, as our mother drove us toward our home.
I roll over. The bed creaks. It’s the same bed they slept in when he was alive. All the furniture in the guest room is their bedroom set. The mattress so saggy that sometimes I think it is left over from then, too.
When I am twelve, I sneak into my mother’s bedroom and rummage through her dresser, desperate to find pieces of him. In the top-left drawer, beneath some leather gloves and her First Communion prayer book and her rosary beads, I discover the remains of my father’s wallet. What he carried the night he died.
She never knew I found it. I was always careful to put it back just perfect. Part of my education in restoration. Another trait I learned early: stealth. To search and not be seen.
I get out of bed and turn on the bedside light—an ornate oil lamp that my father’s grandparents used in their sod house. It has a base of claw feet and a glass globe with a Currier & Ives wintry scene painted on it. A family in a horse-drawn sleigh, going silently through a cold white world. When my mother and father got married, a relative gave it to them as a gift.
I open the top-left drawer. Faint perfume. All her life, my mother has torn scent strips out of magazines and tucked them in her sweater drawers. The scents all blend together.
I find the remains of his wallet and, like a novitiate in a reliquary, gently lay out each piece on her afghan. How many times have I done this—placing and replacing, arranging and rearranging, these objects. Looking for his story to reveal itself.
• A photo of my mother, brother, and me standing on a bridge at the Morton Arboretum. The red stripes on the side of the Kodacolor print say Oct. 68. Dead leaves carpet the ground. Over my mother’s shoulders a small sapling, its leaves bright yellow. My mother wears an Irish fisherman’s sweater. She has her arm around my brother. I’m off to the side.
• December 1965. Another Kodacolor photo. My brother and I sit on a kid-size rocking chair. Green velvety curta
ins behind us. I’m excited. I can tell because I’ve turned my hands into a tangle of fingers and I am smiling. There’s a gap in my smile, like a jack-o’-lantern’s. A few months before, I ran face-first into the knob of the kitchen door. A couple of years later, my brother and I will be playing a game with this rocker. We call it Pirate. We turn the chair upside down and stand astride the rails, one arm raised high, imaginary sabers in hand, like mutineers at the bow of their galleon. One night, I fall and hit my mouth against the rail with such violence that my remaining front tooth gets impacted. My father scoops me in his arms, wraps a dish towel around my bloody face. My mother screaming: Car keys! The hospital! Get your coat, Chris! And my father, me in one arm, reaches down for the rocking chair and on his way out the door heaves it into a snowdrift on the back porch, where it stays the rest of the winter, appearing and disappearing as the snow falls, melts, and falls again. Until spring, when it is there, alone and untouched on the patio. One day, I came home and it was gone.
• December 1966. My brother and me, sitting on the staircase landing, both wearing red velour sweaters over white turtlenecks. Miniature versions of the Beach Boys or the Smothers Brothers.
• My mother, black and white, 1953. White blouse, pearl cluster. Beautiful. Seventeen.
• My brother’s first-grade class photo. 1968. His smile is the happiest, biggest grin.
• My brother’s second-grade class photo. 1969. His adult teeth have started to come in.
• My kindergarten photo. No front teeth. Toothless grin.
• Black and white: my brother, age four, in our grandparents’ backyard. He’s wearing shorts and saddle shoes and holding a small baseball bat. His tricycle is beside him.
• Black and white. My brother. A day after he’s born. A close-up. His left hand, curled into a small fist; his right hand touching his ear, like an old man trying to hear something he cannot.
• Sigma Nu fraternity card, issued 3-6-56. On the reverse it’s stamped: Life Subscriber No. 21615.
• Kodacolor, 1964. My brother clutches a stuffed blue donkey beneath our Christmas tree.
• My brother, black and white, on a blanket beneath the silver maple in my grandmother’s backyard. Someone has written in pen, “4½ months.”
• Me. Black and white. December 1964. Handwriting on the frame: “9 months.” I’m in my high chair. Behind me, a spice rack on the wall, empty. I’m raising my right arm, and from out of the frame, a man’s left hand is reaching to touch my head.
• Black and white of me right after I am born. I’ve pulled my hands to my face and I’m knitting my fingers.
• Social Security card. The reverse advises, “Tell your family to notify the nearest Social Security office in the event of your death.”
• Selective Service Registration Certificate dated August 13, 1952, his eighteenth birthday. Number 25-76-34-54. Height: Six feet. Weight: 125. Under “other obvious physical characteristics that will aid in identification,” someone has typed: 1½" oblong birthmark on inside right knee.
• Selective Service System Notice of Clarification, September 22, 1969, V-A Issued by Red Willow County Local Board No. 76. McCook, Nebraska.
• 1970 Chicago Sun-Times ID noting he is Assistant Chief Copy Editor.
• Chicago Police Department Official Press Pass (1970) No. 1747. Ditto, 1969 (No. 453) and 1968 (No. 442).
# # #
I want to talk to my brother about all of this. After our father died, we weren’t so much brothers as prisoners serving the same sentence: life in solitary. Brothers. We were our father’s sons for such a short time.
My brother and I take his children to the playground—probably the first time in thirty-five years that we’ve been on a playground together. He has two children. My nephew, Glenn, is nine. My niece, Eleanor, is four. She was adopted from China. A few months before the adoption happens, my brother visits me in New York. A Saturday night and we go for beers at Corner Bistro. Lousy jazz on the jukebox, some game overhead. But the adoption has been on my mind since he first told me he and his wife started the process. At the time, I could not understand how you love a child who is not your own.
I ask my brother, “Aren’t you scared? You have no idea what you are going to get in the kid.”
He says, “You never know what you’re going to get in life. You have no idea what you’re going to get when you make a child. All we know is that somewhere in the world there is a child without a mother and a father who needs to be loved. And we have love to give.”
He shrugs his shoulders like it’s nothing.
But it isn’t.
#
We sit on the edge of the playground, watching his children run back and forth on a rickety wooden footbridge that connects two miniature watchtowers across a pit filled with cedar chips, and I outline the mystery. I walk him through the holes. Show him that our father died somewhere on the 3900 block of North Pine Grove but we don’t know anyone there. What’s more, I say, that would not be his route home.
“Sometimes Dad would take long drives along the lake,” my brother says. “Remember that?”
“Chris,” I say, “I don’t remember anything.”
“He used to do that with me. He loved to drive along the lake. All the way from the Sun-Times building to Lake Shore Drive to Sheridan Road to Devon Avenue to our house. We did that a lot. He’d take me. And you, later. All of us, we’d go to the newsroom. Remember how he’d do that on his days off, take us downtown?”
“I remember the newsroom,” I say. “But I have no memory of driving with him. I have no memory of him taking us home.”
For a minute, we sit in silence.
“Maybe he was driving home and didn’t feel well and pulled over and he died there.”
“But it doesn’t say that in the obits,” I say. “The obits say that he was ‘visiting friends.’ So how come, in all these years, we’ve never heard from anyone who was with him that night?”
I ask what he remembers of that morning. He tells me that he refused to go to school and went to Julie Slade’s. “Mrs. Slade answered the door and when she saw me, she started crying. Then she hugged me and said, ‘Oh, you poor boy. Why aren’t you home? Does your mother know where you are?’ I said, ‘Can Julie come out and play?’ She said, ‘She’s at school, dear.’ And I said, ‘Oh, right.’ ”
He tells me that he remembers me going to kindergarten that afternoon and how I came home with an armload of cards for him. He remembers the house filled with people and how Uncle Dick and our grandparents talked about what would be appropriate for us to wear to the wake. He says, “I remember we were scared to go to bed that night.”
My brother is silent for a minute, then says, “What day did he die?”
“The twenty-fourth of April.”
“No, what day?”
“Friday morning, the twenty-fourth. Pre-dawn. We were told on the morning of the twenty-fourth.”
“Did you know he was supposed to come talk to my class that day, ‘Life as a Newspaperman’? For days before, he’d been having me bring all this newspaper stuff—things he was going to pass around and talk about. Old marked-up stories that were edited by him. Pasted-up headlines. Weather maps. Wire-service copy ripped off the ticker.” He pauses. “I’ll always remember how much I was looking forward to having him in my class. Dad. You know?”
He looks to his two children chasing each other in a widening circle.
“After the funeral, when I went back to school, Mrs. Zink gave me all Dad’s papers. I stuffed them in my locker. I left them there all year, piled up at the bottom. In June, when I had to clear out my locker, I dumped them. What was I supposed to do, you know?” He picks up a wood chip and tosses it at nothing. “I’ve never told anyone that.”
“What else do you remember?”
“When we walked into the funeral home for t
he family viewing, Grampa Hainey started to cry. And then Mom made us go up to the casket. She was pointing out the flowers.”
“And then?”
“Then they closed the casket.”
The kids are far away now. They’ve left the bridge behind and are stumbling after each other in the summer sun, laughing. Their shadows long and thin and vibrant on the blacktop.
“I remember the funeral at Mary, Seat of Wisdom. Walking into church and seeing Stephie James and Mrs. James on the aisle, looking at us. But I always remember that moment they sealed the casket, the last time I saw his face.”
He stops again. From above, high in the aged Dutch elms and cottonwoods, the buzz of cicadas fills the silence.
And I’m sitting there marveling at the details I’ve never heard before. Decades later, and this is the first time. This is the price of the years we dwelt in silence, not knowing how to communicate. And I hear myself saying, “Let me ask you something else—and before I do, I need to apologize.”
“What do you mean?”
“When Mom told us Dad was dead—do you remember how I laughed at you because you were crying?”
“You did?”
And I tell him the story I’ve carried with me all these years, and he listens and says, “Huh. No, I don’t remember that.”
The thing I remember so vividly, he has no memory of. And vice versa. And part of me thinks, Did any of this happen? Or did we all black out so much of what we didn’t want to remember?
#
My niece, Eleanor, wanders over carrying a shoe box, holding it like she’s at Mass, bringing up the Offertory gifts. Inside, she’s arranged handfuls of pulled-up grass blades and a leafless, broken twig.
“Will you look for cicadas with me?”
Summer of ’73, I’m nine. I stand in the alley behind our house, counting cicadas falling from the sky, thinking that the next time I will see one, I will be twenty-six, married. Thinking, If I live long enough, I will be showing cicadas to my son.
My niece and I walk from tree to tree, their trunks cluttered with copper-colored casings. Old skins. Buried for a generation. Even now, looking to the ground, I see another, crawling out of the dark earth. Clinging to the first firm thing it finds, to what is rooted. Then splitting open. Husks. Maybe this is the way it would be, if Lourdes were real—the roadside littered not with cast-aside crutches, but with the shells of our former selves. Pilgrims all, reborn. Made new.