After Visiting Friends (10 page)

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 curtains 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 look to the playground. The kids run after each other, run back and forth on the
bridge suspended above the pit.

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 the 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.

My niece picks up two cicadas, their wings still curled, wet. She places them in her
box and tells me, “The real name of cicadas is magicadas. That’s what scientists call
them.”

She circles the thick roots, eyes fixed, searching. She tells me she will set the
two of them free before dinner.

“Before it gets dark,” she says. “So they can go home to their mommy and daddy.”

I’ll be sixty next time this happens. Sixty. Will I still be without a son, even then?

Above us, the chorus continues.

#  #  #

In 1972 my mother signs up to be a den mother for my brother’s Cub Scout pack. Every
week, a dozen or so boys, eight- and nine-year-olds, make a mess in our basement,
usually involving some combination of balsa wood, Elmer’s glue, Testors paints, pipe
cleaners.

They’re preparing for Scout-O-Rama, a weekend-long gathering of Scouts held at the
local horse-racing track. Every Scout pack or troop presents a play or stages an event.
My mother has decided the boys will perform a “Meet the Solar System” pageant. One
by one, the boys appear onstage, each holding a painted Styrofoam ball. Some of the
boys are planets. Some, constellations. Some, meteors. Some, comets. One by one the
boys emerge from behind the curtain to tell the audience of parents about their place
in the heavens.

I do not understand the heavens. I do not understand orbits. I do not know about gravitational
pull. I do not know about escape velocity or why stars shoot and why comets streak.
I do not know how to navigate by the night sky.