Closing Time (52 page)

After the service and a brief farewell luncheon, my wife and I took the children back to John’s apartment. While she was chatting and the kids were admiring his baseball cards, I drifted upstairs to take one last gander at my father’s final dwelling place. One thing I found particularly admirable was the way he had prepared for death by getting rid of everything he did not need. His living quarters were spartan even by Spartan standards: a bed, a chifforobe, a folding table in the kitchen, a tape player. He had lived the last few years of his life without a television, a modus vivendi everyone should aspire to. There were plenty of paperback books scattered about: Agatha Christie, Bruce Catton, Taylor Caldwell, Erle Stanley Gardner. That was about the extent of it. This was a place of refuge, the safe house of a gypsy who could get himself packed and out the door in five minutes flat. At the end of his life, my father had turned his apartment into a monk’s cell. After all these years, he had finally turned himself into the Trappist he had always dreamed of becoming.

When I rifled through the three plastic bags that contained all his worldly possessions, I felt a burst of pity: A man ought to have more to show for his life than the contents of three Hefty bags. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to believe that this was the way all of us should go to meet our maker. Strip down to the bare essentials. Take what you need and leave the rest. Get ready for the Judgment Day.

In Mike Leigh’s film
Vera Drake,
a somewhat daft working-class woman risks everything by performing clumsy, amateur abortions on poor girls who have gotten themselves in the family way and are in no position to bring a child into the world. When the long arm of the law finally clamps down on her, the viewer expects her coarse, not especially bright son-in-law to react with horror at her crimes. Instead, he exonerates her, defending her impoverished clients as well. “If you can’t feed them, you can’t love them,” he says.

This is a lovely sentiment, and it works to perfection on-screen. But it isn’t true. By all rights, it
shouldn’t
be possible to love children if you can’t feed them. But all sorts of people do. Throughout my youth, I was surrounded by poor children whose parents adored them. They were white, black, Latino, Native American. For life’s castoffs such as them, having children they loved and who loved them back made all the deprivation and humiliation bearable. They had nothing in the world other than their children, but that was enough, for when the world turned dark, their children banished the darkness.

After my father died, I briefly enshrined him in an afterglow of myth, extolling his sparkling sense of humor, his multitudinous idiosyncrasies, his nomadic lifestyle. I applauded the fact that at the end of his life he had constructed a parallel family and had managed to die in a state of grace, a feat I had long viewed as unattainable. I was even amused when I found out that his brother Johnny had not in fact sent a memorable letter to his siblings announcing that he was going to Kentucky and not coming back, the way we had always been told, but had dragged out the remainder of his short life in the suburbs of Philadelphia, breathing his last fourteen years earlier. I was equally amused when I learned that the house on Henry Avenue where we used to shovel snow was not the house Grace Kelly had grown up in; Dad had made it all up, perhaps to impress me, perhaps because he honestly believed it. He was a rogue to the last; he certainly had his moments; he was truly the life of the party. But the afterglow of affection did not last. Three years after he died, December 19 passed without my noticing it. The nostalgic period had ended. My father was dead, and I did not miss him.

When my daughter was accepted to Harvard in 2001, the first words out of my mouth were “Well, that settles it. You’re definitely smarter than I am.” This was said in a spirit of mirth, but there was a serious undercurrent. My daughter’s acceptance was a triumph not only for her, not only for me and my wife, and by extension our parents, but most especially for my grandparents, intrepid strangers I never knew, who had gathered up their belongings in rural Ireland, booked passage to a distant land, and started a new life. They did this because they had heard that the streets were paved with gold, and were not going to be told otherwise. Bridget’s triumph was something everyone could share in, even the long dead, for their childlike theories about the paving materials used in American roadwork had now been proven correct. They, more than anyone else, were the ones responsible for my daughter’s good fortune. This was why her name was Bridget, not Britney; why my son, Gordon, was named after an RAF wing commander who killed Nazis, not somebody named Skyler, who didn’t. I wanted my kids to know where they came from; I didn’t want them to think they had dropped out of the skies.

My father never once derived this kind of joy from the achievements of his children. Not until he was at the very brink of death did he realize that children are jewels, and the only jewels worth having; that the radiance they give off reflects back on those who breathed life into them in the first place. My life has been an attempt to fit this man into some kind of context where he is not merely a villain. This has not been easy. He never gave me the opportunity to love him; the closest I ever got was pity. One of the signal events in my youth, which made me feel sorry for myself at the time, years later made me feel an eerie, gut-wrenching compassion for him instead. The event was the night my uncle Jim came over with that set of jim-dandy American Flyer trains, and my father sent me out to the store, and by the time I returned, he had destroyed the engine, rendering the train set useless. I was enraged at the time; I thought no one in the world could be less fortunate than me. But this was not true. I would grow up, I would earn scads of money, I would buy electric trains for my own son, thereby putting the past to rest forever.

But what was it like to be Joe Queenan Sr. that Sunday evening? What was it like to go through life always being the man who forgot to remove the electric trains from the soon-to-be flooded cellar, the man who, when given a chance to redeem himself with another set of trains, sent them flying off the track as well? What was it like to be the man who looks into his children’s eyes and sees fear where there should be affection, hatred where there should be love? What was it like to be the man who was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t?

My life has ceaselessly been brightened by men who were more than prepared to fill the role of surrogate father. But I never wanted a surrogate father; I wanted the real thing. I did not get my wish, nor did he, for whatever he wanted in a son, I was not it. In the end, I pity my father for all he missed out on. He never got to take his grandchildren to the zoo. He never got to buy his grandson a hot dog at a ball game. He never got to take his granddaughter to see
Cinderella
or
The Nutcracker
. He never got to have his grandchildren sit on his lap and scratch his beard and beg him to tell them a ghost story. He never got to have his own children visit his home, gather around the fireplace, seek his counsel, mourn his passing.

When a father dies, it is customary to forage through stored memories and conjure up an image that casts him in the most attractive light. If you are lucky, the memory can be so powerful that it supplants, eclipses, or eradicates all others. Here is my memory. The autumn before my father died, I took the commuter local down to Philadelphia to visit him, with my son in tow. I could not reach him by phone; I did not know his address; he had again gone walkabout. But his movements were easy to track; I knew all his old stomping grounds. We found him in a fast-food joint right down the street from his favorite flophouse, one block west of Independence Hall. The restaurant, he maintained, brewed coffee of unimaginable piquancy, though this, like so many of his assertions, had no basis in fact. He was surprised to see us, ashamed that he had again flown the coop. Just as he used to drag me along to prisons and tenebrous inner sanctums where unfulfilled old men were dying, I was dragging my son along to a council of war where I would read my father the riot act. Our sons were our confederates, our partners in crime. We shielded them from some of the unpleasant truths about life but not from all of them. We made it impossible for them to avoid growing up early.

As my son gamboled about in the park across the street from Independence Hall, I told my father, once again, that I would pay his electric bills and his gas bills and pony up for the rent he had run out on. But I insisted that he return to the apartment he had recently bolted from up in Frankford. The flophouse was a hellhole, full stop. It was no place for a sick old man. Beaten down by my hectoring, he agreed to do as I asked. He would patch things up with the landlord and the utility companies. But to do so, he would need a little cash. Once again, we would be visiting the ATM.

My son, for whom my father was more a figure of myth than a real-life creature made of flesh and blood, was ten at the time, a frisky and adventurous age, so the three of us strolled over to the Delaware River to visit a World War II-era submarine that had been turned into a museum. Gordon clambered aboard, merrily scooting through the sub’s tiny compartments; I banged my head against the ceiling several times; my father wondered how on earth it was possible for men to function in these floating tombs, indeed, to have volunteered for submarine duty at all. He served up the chilling information that 75 percent of U-boat crewmen ended up in Davy Jones’s locker. I was always amazed that he knew such things. Working-class people were supposed to be ignorant. Or hadn’t he heard?

Afterward, the three of us took a walk down South Street. My father, who knew the history of the city inside out, was enthralled by the transformation this street had undergone in recent years, when it gradually morphed from a borderline slum into a gaudy bohemian district, the Quaker City’s answer to New York’s St. Mark’s Place. The streets were filled with head shops and tattoo emporiums and Middle Eastern restaurants and used-record stores. It was not the sort of neighborhood where one would expect to find a man in his seventies, but my father had always loved the bright lights and effortlessly rubbed shoulders with the newly tattooed and the freshly pierced without feeling the least bit threatened or outclassed. He possessed that enviable obliviousness that is so common in the elderly; if the streets are crackling with a year-round Mardi Gras ambience, this is where they want to be. Old people don’t care about fashion or verifying that everything is up-to-date in Kansas City. The only thing old people want out of life is to breathe another breath and see another sunset.

My son asked if we could stop for pizza. My father, never fond of what he anachronistically referred to as “tomato pies,” ordered a meat-ball sandwich and a cup of coffee. I did the same. The spry young Mexican behind the counter explained that the establishment did not sell coffee but that he would be more than happy to run across the street and get some. We said this was not necessary, but the man insisted, so off he went. I never ceased to marvel at these occurrences, at my poorly dressed, poorly shod father’s ability to induce complete strangers to run errands for him, as if he were the last surviving member of the Fujimoro Shogunate on an overnight trip to South Philly. It was a trick I wished he had taught me.

We sat there, talking about beloved old ballplayers, about long-dead singers, about legendarily crooked local politicians. All the while, we munched on our sandwiches. My father mentioned the latest travails of a man who presently headed the City Council and would soon be mayor, whose brother owed thousands of dollars in parking tickets written up for a hot dog stand that had been illegally parked outside Temple University for decades. The scofflaw brother, to the surprise of no one in the Delaware Valley, was a state senator. It was vintage Quaker City lore; the clowns might change, but the clownishness didn’t. We were happy, I recall; we were happy like the times we would go out on his pretzel truck and range across the south Jersey countryside and he would buy me a hamburger with French fries and a vanilla milkshake and proudly introduce me to all his customers as the brightest student in my class, the apple of his eye, the well-beloved son in whom he was well pleased. Once again, we were a team, and today we had my own little boy riding shotgun.

Now that my father is gone and I think back to that afternoon, I regret that there were not more days like that, joyful interludes when a wise old grandfather shuffled around the harbor with his grandson, regaling him with improbable tales of high adventure in the South Pacific. But this was not to be. I once heard a violinist make the seemingly indefensible assertion that there were passages in Schoenberg’s music that were as beautiful as anything in Brahms or Mozart but that you had to listen carefully, because there weren’t many and they wouldn’t last. So it was here. I had taken my son to Philadelphia on a school holiday, and we had spent four hours with my father. It was the only day the three of us would ever spend in one another’s company, the only time the three generations of men would be alone together. It was a nippy afternoon, if memory serves correctly, but the sun was shining, the food was delightful, the rancor had subsided, and there was hope in the offing. I was in my forty-sixth year, my father in his seventy-first. It was the second Monday in November. It was Armistice Day.

This book owes its existence to the unceasing support of Elise Blackwell, Hella Winston, Rob McQuilkin, and Rick Kot. I am indebted to my sister Mary Ann for help in researching my family’s history, to Mike Prendergast and Chris Wogan for supplying information about Cardinal Dougherty High School, and to Mike Walsh for his generous assistance in retracing my steps at the Maryknoll Junior Seminary. Tom Donahue, Rob Weiss, Chris Taylor, and Richie Giardinelli were invaluable in resolving assorted mysteries involving the Quaker City. I am very grateful to Laura Tisdel, Francesca Belanger, Paul Buckley, Sharon Gonzalez, Ann Day, and Sonya Cheuse at Viking, and to designer Erin Schnell. A special debt of thanks is due to my son, Gordon, who fact-checked the manuscript, and to my daughter, Bridget, who acted as a sounding board throughout the four years I worked on this project.