After Visiting Friends (25 page)

“The turf edition, the final edition, locked at 4:30 a.m. We called it the turf because
it had the final racing info for that day.”

“But what about Bobbie?” I ask. “How’d that start?”

“Young girl, just out of Ohio State. She worked 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. That’s how they
met. Most of the details I know from hearing from other people. Have you talked to
Natty Bumppo? He was a friend of hers on the desk. And Tom Moffett?” he asks. “After
your dad died, Moffett took the slot. He was there for all of it with Bobbie. He lives
in Wisconsin. I always remember his address because he lives on Jail Alley.” He pauses.
“I have a question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“What was it like growing up without a dad?”

“That’s not a short answer,” I say. “Where do you want to begin?”

“How old were you when he died?”

I tell him that I had just had my sixth birthday.

“And your brother?”

He was eight.

I hear him choke up. It’s only for a few seconds, and then he catches himself. It
stuns me so much that I don’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I can’t imagine what would happen if . . . I . . . ”

I tell him how he is a stand-up guy for telling me the truth.

“Haven’t other people?” he asks.

“No.”

#

I call Tom Moffett in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. A woman with a Scandinavian accent
answers. I ask for Moffett. When he picks up the phone, I introduce myself in the
same fast-nervous way. I still haven’t been able to get past my feeling that the other
person is about to slam the phone on me:
My-name-is-Michael-Hainey-and-you-don’t-know-me-but-I-think-you-worked-with-my-father-Bob-Hainey
.

“I remember your old man. But, uh, listen. We’re about to sit down to dinner. Send
me an e-mail and we can make a time to talk.”

Early next morning, an e-mail response:

Mike:

Can you give me a little idea of what you want to know about your father so I can
rack my brain? A lot of years have gone under the bridge since 1970.

Tom Moffett

I don’t want to spook him, so I say that I’m just looking to talk a bit about what
the newsroom was like back then, as well as the local saloons. He writes back:

I’d be happy to chat. A good time is Sunday mornings.

And let me say it here: I worked under your dad for only slightly over a year, but
he was one of the finest newsmen I ever got to know and a human being WAAAAAAAAY too
decent for his own good. I look forward to your call.

#

Sunday morning I get up at six. Jack myself on coffee. Not that I need to. I have
my usual nervousness. Fear that I am taking people back to somewhere they don’t want
to go. I’ve become the Grim Creeper. Creeping up on these people, dragging them into
the past. A past they thought was behind them, forever.

I call Moffett at 8 a.m. I tell him what I told the others: I’m trying to close a
circle in my life. He tells me how he started at the paper in ’68, working the lobster
shift with my father on the copy desk.

“The guys who work at night—your dad excepted—are not as good as the guys in the day.
Drinking hard was encouraged. And when you took your ‘lunch’ at 10 p.m., you usually
went out and had a few snorts. Not your dad, though. I remember he always brought
his lunch from home. But on top of it all, if you’re working those hours, your only
friends tend to be people in the business. And newspaper people are a pretty rough
bunch. What’s more, when you get off work at two in the morning, it’s not like you
go home to bed. You do what you do—go out to the bars and drink some more. Most nights,
we’d spend from two to four in the morning at Andy’s. Your dad liked Andy’s because
it was close to the
Sun-Times
and it was a shot-and-a-beer joint.”

I let him go on this way for almost an hour, and when I think that he’s lulled himself
into security I say, “What happened that night with Bobbie?”

“You know that story?”

“I do.”

“I lied to your mother back then. And I don’t regret it. I was your dad’s alibi. Nights
he was out with Bobbie, I was your dad’s cover story—that he was out for drinks with
me. The morning after he died, your mother called me. She said someone had told her
that Bob had been helping a friend from the paper move furniture in their apartment
after work and that he died doing that. She asked me if that was true. Well, I dummied
up fast. But I also didn’t want
your mother to go snooping around on her own and get hurt. So I told her, ‘Listen,
I’m sure you got more important things to do right now than be calling around to people
looking for what happened to Bob. Let me see what I can find out for you.’ I wanted
to throw her off the hunt, see? Well, the next day, I go to the wake, and no sooner
am I in the door of the funeral home than your mother comes walking up to me, asking
me what I’d found out. I can see your dad laid out dead over her shoulder. I tell
her he died like she heard. On the street. Alone.”

“And she believed you?”

“I think she probably suspected the truth. But I don’t regret the lie. I did what
I had to do.”

“You think it’s okay?”

“I was his friend. What else was I supposed to do? I don’t think the aneurysm was
a surprise to Bobbie or your mother. Bobbie told me that two weeks before he died,
they were on an overnight trip. It was a long drive back and Bobbie suggested they
stay at a motel. Your dad said no. She asked why and he said, ‘Because I don’t want
to die in a motel room.’ I guess he’d had a recent physical and knew that he was not
in the best of health.”

“They went on trips together?”

“He took her to see where he came from, to McCook.”

“How could he pull that off?”

“It was a different time. No cell phones. Nothing. He picks her up, drives.”

“So, how did he die?”

“I’d always heard that it was in her apartment. Whether or not it was in bed, I don’t
know. But I think the best thing Bobbie did was call your uncle. He showed up and
got the cops to agree that he was not found in the apartment but on the street.”

“I still can’t believe cops would agree to alter the scene of a crime.”

“It wasn’t a crime,” Moffett says. “It was a tragedy. And the cops and your uncle
and Bobbie were trying to rewrite the ending. To
keep it from drawing in you and your brother and your mother. Their hearts were in
the right place.”

“Well, I think in the end they made it worse.”

“Maybe.”

“And it was a bad cover story,” I say. “Everything my father and uncle valued in newspapering—good
reporting and editing—in the end, it’s what undid them.”

“No, you undid them.”

#  #  #

Moffett and I arrange to meet the following weekend in Chicago. He’ll drive down.
We agree on a small place in the shadow of the old Water Tower—a survivor of the Chicago
Fire, now sitting like a misplaced chess rook in the middle of Michigan Avenue. When
I arrive, Moffett’s already seated. Stout and strong. Blue button-down. No tie. Hair
like a monk’s, around the base of his skull.

“Well, you’re quite a bit like your old man, that’s for sure.”

Even now, still—a moment of pride.

He says, “I want to know how you found out. After I got off the phone with you, I
was so rattled I called Paul Berning to warn him and he tells me you’d already gotten
to him. We agreed you are a damned good reporter. You got us both to give up the goods.”

I tell him that it wasn’t easy to learn the truth, that he and all of the guys stuck
together.

“Proud of it,” he says.

“Why?”

“It’s what a man does. It’s the newspaperman’s code.”

He gulps some of his tap.

“I’ll tell you,” he says. “When you called me that first night, you caught me off
guard, but I managed to get you off the phone. When you wrote back that it was about
your old man, I told myself, if you had the story, I’d confirm it. Because I know
what it’s like to be searching for the truth and all you get is silence.”

He tells me about family secrets. Tells me that when he was a boy growing up on the
North Shore of Long Island, he always wondered what happened to his mother.

“She went to a hospital ‘for a spell.’ She was gone a long time. My father and my
grandmother, they’d never answer my questions about why she would leave me behind.
It was only years later, after she’d died, that I figured out she’d been pretty damned
depressed most of her life. So when you called, I got to thinking about all that.
About life. About children. About where my mother had gone. I know what it’s like
to seek the truth from others but not be told it.”

#

Lunch is three hours.

We walk out into the hard and clean spring sunlight. Tomorrow is the day he died,
April 24.

Moffett tells me he wants to take me to Andy’s. “Seems only right,” he says, “that
we have one there. You and me. For your old man.”

My father’s bar is a giant horseshoe. Maple. The veneer worn thin, scratched and nicked
by wet bottles and cigarette lighters. The late-afternoon sun highlights the flaws.

Moffett guides me.

“You need to sit right . . . here,” he says. He presses me into place. “Your old man
sat on this stool every night.” He looks down. “From what I can tell, looks like the
same one. This place ain’t changed too much in forty years.”

We order two Old Styles, the clink of the longnecks the only sound. We are ahead of
the rush.

“Andy’s was your old man’s alone place. Boul Mich, Radio Grill, Billy Goat, Riccardo’s—he
went there, sure. It’s where you had to go to do the bullshit of work. Be seen. Make
the scene. But this—this is where he felt secure. Where we could speak our minds and
not fear being overheard by superiors. This is where he came to forget everything.
This was where the pressmen went. Guys from the composing room, too. It was for the
working guys. Your dad and I were both eager up-and-comers, which meant we wore ties,
white shirts, and dark suits. And you watched what you said—except in places like
this, late at night. In here, your dad was probably the only guy in a suit and tie.
But they all considered him one of their own. Your dad was snobby about snobs. Know
what I mean? He didn’t care for guys who put on airs.”

He looks at the bartender.

“The funny thing about this bar is that it is shaped just like the copy desk, and
the bartender is in the same position as your dad was. The bartender is the slot man
and all of us on the rim—here, where we’re sitting—we’re the copy crew. Your dad and
I had a joke about sitting here, drinking, saying that it was nice because for once
he could watch the slot man work.”

We drink our Old Styles.

“I think one of the things your dad and I had in common was that we both realized
the place we were looking for didn’t exist. I think that we both thought we’d joined
a noble profession. I’m not sure he would’ve used those words, but we believed newspapers
aimed at getting The Truth. The late ’60s were teaching us otherwise. I’ve often wondered
what would’ve become of your dad, had he lived. When I was working the night slot,
trying to fill your dad’s shoes, I would summon his memory. For courage. You know,
there’s an old saying that goes something like ‘If you’re a step ahead of the crowd,
you’re a leader. Three steps ahead of the crowd, and you’re a martyr.’ Looking back,
I’d say Bob Hainey was two steps ahead.”

#

Moffett and I say farewell. A handshake that becomes a hug.

I think again about tomorrow. The day of his death. I decide to go to 3930 North Pine
Grove. I make my way on the Howard El line. On the ride, I watch the flicker-flacker
of the three-flats that back up against the rickety tracks. The flicker-flacker as
we speed past, as homes and lives click in and out of view.

And I think of a girl I once knew.

I always called her late at night from my mother’s kitchen. We were both in grad school.
I’m in seminar the first day of spring classes. April. There are maybe fifteen of
us seated around a table and every time I look up she’s pretending she’s not looking
at me but I know she is because I’ve been caught too many times doing the same thing.
And whenever she isn’t taking notes, she gently strokes the underside of her chin
with her new yellow No. 2 lead pencil. I know that, too.

Two weeks later I’m in the library one night, in the reserve reading room, when I
feel a tap on my back, and it’s her. She’s from Louisville. One of those places where
people still believe in horses, and she’s standing there in jodhpurs, a black blazer,
and a white blouse unbuttoned at the neck. Her blond hair is pulled into a ponytail.
She tells me she just got back from riding and has to do the reading for tomorrow.
I say, “Too bad I have the only copy of the book.” She smiles. So I say, “Well, I’m
almost finished, so I guess you can have it.”

“Good,” she says, “if you’re finished, we can leave.”

We dated for maybe three months. April. May. A piece of June. I’d call her late at
night and we’d both whisper, me not to wake my mother, she because she found it romantic.
And then, after ten minutes, she’d always say, “Come over, baby.”

I remember driving through the dark Chicago side streets, heading for the lake and
then turning north on Lake Shore Drive, riding up to Sheridan Road and Evanston with
the windows on the car
rolled down and the radio playing and the warm air of summer-on-the-way swirling through
the car and it seemed I couldn’t drive fast enough and all I could think of was her
whispering, “Come over,” and all I wanted was to get to her apartment.

She lived on the top floor of a three-flat that butted up against the Howard El line.
Late at night when the El swept by, it would roar like you were inside a crashing
wave. It was the spring that some woman had an album out and that was all she wanted
to listen to and when I got there each time, she’d kiss me and then take my hand in
her small hand and lead me to her bedroom where the only light was this blue-green
phosphorescent glow from the stereo that would be playing those songs.