After Visiting Friends (31 page)

I have read this several times since visiting with you and, at times, think I didn’t
listen to him well enough. But, you know what, Michael, I don’t remember ever getting
a letter from Bob after he left for school. I know I would have written him if I had
received one. Perhaps, after getting to school, he had second thoughts. Who knows.
I am a firm believer in “the good Lord has a plan for all of us and everything happens
for a reason.” I feel, perhaps, I have a second chance to make up for any sadness
I may have caused your dad by talking to you. I hope you will learn something about
your dad from this. God bless you and yours.

Veneé

I open her attachment. She has scanned in the page from her 1952 Bison:

Reserved for Bob

Dear Veneé,

There really is very little that I can say here that I haven’t said or written many
times before. You don’t need any more words from me to know how wonderful I find you
to be. I wish and pray with all my heart that the year won’t be forgotten by you!
As I look back on it, I find every wonderful moment I had, I have spent with you.
Everything I remember, I remember because you were there with me. I realize I have
been quite a hog about spending time with you and for that I ask both you and your
parents forgiveness. However, if you were really aware, Veneé, of how really deeply
I love you, you would be more understanding about it. I hope that I will see you some
this summer and a few times next fall
—
between vacations and your other dates. I hope you’ll come to see me next year and
that you won’t forget what I’ve told you and the way you once said you felt about
me. I have thought as much of you for so long, from sophomore to senior as the class
song says. It would be impossible for me to want another. I’ll always remember last
year’s prom, the Xmas prom, New Year’s, Valentine’s dance, the night I asked you to
go steady, the first time I told you how I felt about you, athletic banquet, and all
the places and other things we’ve gone to together. However, Veneé, it doesn’t take
any special event for me to have a wonderful time with you. All I need is you
—
and that’s
all
I
want
!!! Maybe next year at this time, you’ll be a little more decided about the future
and your ring finger won’t be holding a ’52 class ring. That’s all if you’re really
decided, though. Don’t let your folks think that I’m too screwy to wait until you
and I are both sure. But as far as I know, honey, where in this whole wide world could
there be another like you! You are the best, honey. Remember that I’ll
always think that and have for three long years. Maybe it won’t work out for you to
want me and if it doesn’t, I guess I’ll just go back to my old martyr complex and
be a good loser
—
only I won’t feel good about it. Maybe next year at this time you’ll just look at
me and what I’ve said and laugh. That, too, would be o.k. because, as I’ve said, just
knowing and going with you, has filled my poor heart with a fortune of beautiful thoughts
and memories. Just remember, honey, I LOVE YOU!!!
—
Nothing else matters.

Bob Hainey

P.S. Please write next year and let me know what you’re doing and whether or not there’s
any hope for me. I’ll be waiting for you
—
and that I sincerely mean. Maybe someday!!! Bye now!!

I write Veneé. I want to know about his “martyr complex.”

“I’m not sure where the ‘martyr complex’ came from,” she writes, “but, yes, he did
need to be told often that he was a good person. If I didn’t spend all my time with
him, he was hurt. His mother appeared to be very strict. I remember Bob was always
worrying about what others thought about him, such as his remark about my folks thinking
him ‘screwy.’ I guess he really lacked self-esteem as a young man.”

RESURRECTION

Part of me truly believes that if I tell my mother the truth—that my father died in
the apartment of a woman with whom he was having an affair—it will be her undoing.
And ours. She’ll cast me out. And then where will I be? A fortysomething son who has
crushed his mother and broken her heart and lost her love. All because I believed
I had a quest to make. All these years into my search, and I still cannot help but
feel at times that I am the epitome of selfishness. All along I have told myself,
So long as you are in pursuit of the truth, you can be doing no wrong. You have nothing
to fear.

Now?

Fear of hurting her. It’s one thing to be the truth-seeker. It’s quite another to
be the truth-bearer. The delusion destroyer. There’s a reason people don’t like revisionist
historians.

A memory: I am eleven. In the basement. I’m watching TV, and a woman with raven hair
and big dark sunglasses that reflect the camera lights is encircled by reporters.
She’s telling the reporters that her name is Judith Campbell Exner and she wants them
to
know that when John F. Kennedy was our president, she was his girlfriend.

I think, This is impossible. There is no way he would have had a girlfriend. He was
married. He was a father with two children. How can she tell lies about this great
man?

Consider it an early education in image versus truth. An introduction, perhaps, to
men and their infinite ability to compartmentalize.

Do I really want to be Judith Exner to my mother’s memory right now? The thought chills
me.

#

Months go by like this. Twelve or more. Me, unable to find the courage to talk to
my mother. Then: I’m in my office and my assistant sticks her head in. She says, “A
woman named Jan Scott is on the phone. She says she works at the morgue in Chicago.
She says that it is important that you speak with her.”

I have not spoken to her in at least three years. I have not called her, either.

I lift my receiver and say, “Jan?”

She says, “In my prayers, I’ve heard your silence. You’re struggling, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You need to be inspired. Do you read the Bible?”

“No,” I say. “Or, I mean, yes. I mean, I used to. Or have, but I—”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Yes,” I say, surprising myself.

“Sometimes we think we can do it all by ourselves. Across the miles, I’ve heard your
doubt. The silent wail. I know that you’ve stopped your journey. Why?”

Before I even can think, I blurt out one word: “Fear.”

She says, “Fear is the trick of the enemy. And your enemy comes in many robes. But
he has only one face. You know his face. You’ve
seen it many times. You need not fear it. In your heart, you know you will triumph
and you will defeat your enemy with the one weapon that you have inside you that he
cannot touch and that he trembles before—truth. Your enemy fears you because he already
knows that you will conquer him. But he uses fear to confuse you. So you must stay
focused. Because most of all, fear is a lack of focus.”

“I . . . ”

“We are
waiting
for you to tell this story. When I think about the audacity of you, to hold back!
Only God can make that choice. You and I were given to each other for a purpose. The
day I met you, I felt your spirit at work. You didn’t even know your spirit was alive.
But I felt it. I could see you were on a quest for truth. You need to get back to
that quest. There is a new person in you, trying to be born. He’s just barely peeping
out of the box. Are you going to slam the lid down on his fingers, or are you going
to throw the lid off of that dark box and come out fighting?”

“Jan, I—”

“Please hold. My supervisor is here.”

I sit in silence, my receiver pressed to my head, starving for her next words. The
air, dead. Nothing but nothing coming in. Outside, I see two men on the giant beer
billboard that makes my office glow red at night when the neon flickers on and off
in programmed patterns. One of the men is on a ledge, the other is high above him
on a scaffold. Over and over, the man on the ledge throws the end of a rope up to
the man high above him, the man on the scaffold. The man on the scaffold keeps missing
it. Over and over the man gathers up the line and tosses it into the air, toward the
man who cannot grasp it. For who knows how long, I am quiet, waiting. Watching the
rope. Then—I hear a connection again.

“Michael?”

“Yes, I’m here. I wanted to say—”

“I have to go, Michael. Good-bye.”

#  #  #

I tell my brother that I need to talk and he takes me to a bar near his house. He
lives in the suburbs, one of those leafy older ones built along the commuter railroad
lines in the early part of the last century. For the past few years, there’s been
an influx of new money. Guys from the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the Chicago
Board of Trade, making small fortunes speculating on futures. People tearing down
bungalows and center-hall colonials and building homes that are supposed to look like
Normandy châteaus. My brother and his family live in one of the remaining original
homes, a tidy Cape Cod built before the Depression.

He knows the one old bar in town, too. Our regular place we slip out to when I’m visiting.
After he’s put the kids to bed.

We find two stools.

There is something reassuring about sitting side by side with someone. Speaking is
easier.

“I found out about Dad,” I say.

“Was he murdered?”

“No.”

“A woman?”

“Yes.”

I tell him about that night, about everything that happened before the doorbell rang
that morning and our mother raised the shade.

My brother takes a drink of his beer.

“Does Mom know?”

“I wanted to tell you first.”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“The truth. I guess? I mean, I have to.”

I take a drink of my beer.

“What do you think she’ll say?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Brooke says that deep down a woman always knows. That even if she gives
no outward sign, even if she doesn’t want to admit it in the moment, a woman knows.
Brooke thinks that it won’t be a shock to Mom.”

“Maybe. But . . . ”

“I know—it’s a big maybe, right?”

“It is.”

“Do you think I shouldn’t tell her?”

“I think you need to be careful how you tell her.”

“What do you think of him now? Are you mad at me?”

“Why would I be?”

“Maybe you don’t want to know the truth about him. Maybe you want to see him a certain
way.”

“It’s who he was. He has to take responsibility for it. Who knows what he was thinking.
But it doesn’t really change my opinion of him. Who knows what would’ve happened if
he had lived. He could’ve left us for this woman. Divorced Mom. And then where would
we be? Or, you know, if he stayed at the paper he might’ve gotten a big job and we
probably would’ve ended up on the North Shore or something, all messed up. Who knows
what would’ve happened. We’re sitting here now, though.”

“You think about that, too? The ‘What If’ game.”

“There’s no point in it, really. You can scream all you want about what happened in
the past, but nothing’s going to change. The past gives you no justice. Sentences
are passed. But that doesn’t mean you get justice. You can stand there forever and
rail and say, ‘Someone has to pay. I want what was taken from me.’ But you’re just
going to get silence coming back at you. The past doesn’t pay. We pay. And we’re all
free to decide when we’ve had enough. I only think about it sometimes to measure where
I am now. Especially with the kids. As a father.”

#  #  #

My mother has pizza waiting. We sit at the table, just the one light on, overhead.
She watches me eat, asks if she can have a sip of my beer.

I am still eating when she says she is going to bed. She opens the freezer, leaves
her ice in the sink.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” she asks. “Going anywhere? Out?”

“No,” I say.

She kisses me, says, “ ’Night.”

A moment later, the automated voice of the man—disembodied, tonally off—loud throughout
her house:
System armed! No delays!

I open her junk drawer, find a scratch pad from Courtyard by Marriott.
ACCOMPLISHED LIST
, it says across the top. And then,
MUCH MORE GRATIFYING THAN A TO-DO LIST, DON’T YOU THINK?

I write notes for my speech to my mother. Lines to hold on to.

#

The next morning, I lean on the bathroom sink and whisper into my mirror, try to commit
my lines to memory. Over and over I look at my Accomplished List. The sweatiness of
my palm makes it curl up like one of those red cellophane fortune-telling fish they
give you in Chinatown, the ones that reveal your fate.

#

She’s in the kitchen. Head bowed, fist to cheek, pen in hand. She hears me and turns
her head. Nothing else moves. Like the pivot of a security camera, fixed to its base.