After Visiting Friends (9 page)

#

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.

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.”

“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.