Jericho (30 page)

For a moment I thought he was going to bring up how I’d let him down: leaving him to go back to craft jewellery, then getting mixed up with Bishop and becoming a media disgrace. But he didn’t refer to any of this except by not even hinting at it. For now, looking back, I see that this was his
way of telling me he forgave me, that he was right to welcome me back, that he thought I was growing up at last.

These days I’ve long since discovered my talent for putting people at ease and making everything go along smoothly. At the time, though, the silences between his words were getting kind of awkward. Finally he came to the point. “I’m thinking of selling to the chain.”

The chain, or Chain with a capital C, was what people in the industry called it. It was a big company, one of several of them actually, that was buying up family-run and independent funeral homes in a lot of smaller cities, but in places like Vancouver too. The Chain had them all over the country, I believe, and even some in the western States. I think I remember hearing that. They always kept the old name, because people become familiar with the names over time; when somebody passes, the survivors naturally call the funeral directors that the deceased herself probably called when she was in the same position, in an earlier generation. I always say that if we’re doing it right, people should think of us, maybe not as friends exactly, because people are still pretty uncomfortable with what it is we do for them, but at least as faces they’re relieved and comforted to see again whenever a relative is gone; someone they can trust to be respectful and professional and a source of guidance in an awful time. So the Chain knew what not to fool with. But they increased the profits in a major way, partly by being able to use their buying power to get the best deals on everything from coaches to caskets to supplies.

“They’ve made a fair offer,” he said. “We’ve been through a lot of back and forth. It’s time for me to take my trains and go someplace warm.”

I suppose I must have looked as though I was taking in all the implications of what he’d said.

“Of course you’re wondering how this affects you, and the reason I asked you down here for a chat is to assure you that you’ll still have an actual position here under the new arrangement. I’ve made certain of that. A permanent job, if you want it.”

He took off his silly play-hat that made him look like a young boy. I thought there were a few beads of sweat in the thin white hair that barely covered his head like a piece of old fishing net; they glistened in the lights for a moment.

I was touched by what he said.

The conversation made me feel better about myself than I had in a long while, and I was excited about having this news to tell Mother when I went to visit her. But when I got to her apartment after the long bus trip, she dropped a bombshell before I could get to the end of the story and tell her about the permanent job.

“I didn’t want to tell you when you were having your ordeal, because I didn’t want to see you more upset than you already were, but I had a visit from your father.”

She was trying to be matter-of-fact, but it didn’t come out right, and I thought her eyes were distressed and angry. At first I must have looked shocked, but I recovered enough to ask for the details. I said something like: I want to hear the story if you’re up to telling me.

“There’s not much to tell except to say how I feel about it, and I’m not quite sure how that is. He phoned. It was in the middle of the morning. I didn’t recognize his voice at all; that’s the first thing some people forget. Finally he had to come out and say who he was. I can’t tell you how much I
was flabbergasted. At the same time, though, I was calm inside. It’s like when you have an accident or some really other serious emergency and you can’t allow things to register right away. He said, ‘Don’t misunderstand, but I’ve been thinking about you for years. Off and on, I mean. But lately, the last few years, on. Wondering about where you are.’ I told him you were a grown young woman. ‘I figured,’ he said back. He wanted to meet you, and Annie too when he found out about her. I didn’t say what I felt: ‘Why did you run out on your daughter, you bastard, and run out on me too?’ But I was too stunned. Anyway I knew what the answer was. He didn’t need a reason: he was a man. Yet it was such a long time ago, I wasn’t sure I even hated what he’d done any more. When I was actually talking to him again, suddenly I wasn’t so sure. What he said to me was: ‘I guess we have to talk.’”

She told me they agreed to meet a couple of days later at a coffee place in a strip mall not far from here. She knew he would turn up but right to the last minute, she said, she wasn’t sure if she was going to. “But what could I do? He’d got the phone number and everything.” She didn’t tell my sister about it at first but kept everything to herself, protecting her, I guess, the way she always used to protect us. She finally decided to go, of course. “It’s not easy going back to visit the past that way when you’ve spent so many years trying not to remember,” she said. “I had to do it, though, so I could … I don’t know.” She didn’t have the right words.

“I understand,” I said. “You needed closure.”

“Is that what it is? I guess so.”

“We see that all the time in the funeral profession. It’s something we try to help people do. We know how important it is.”

“Yes, you’re right, sweetie.” She touched the top of my hand. “It’s like going backwards in time to see if something had died or not. No, not that. My anger. That’s what I mean. I guess.”

Suddenly she looked older than she did the last time I saw her and just generally not the same. But I could still see how beautiful she was when she was young, which is the way I remember her when we were little girls. The two things I remember were that she had this beautiful skin and she was brave. I didn’t know how brave. Working at different jobs, more than one at a time, in a kind of crazy quilt while trying to raise two girls without any help to speak of. My mother’s a saint.

We must have talked two or three hours. Our emotions came up pretty close to the surface. She told me about the conversation with him. It sounded like she was telling me word for word but that they didn’t have quite as much to say to one another as maybe they thought they did—not her, anyway. She said that Peter, that’s what she called him, told her the story of his life after the oil field, moving around, ups and downs, though it sounded as though he’d done all right in the end. I’m obviously not telling all this in anything like the same detail she told it to me, because she said something that I had to stop and think about, that I’m still thinking about today. She said: “He didn’t come to see
me.
He wanted to see what happened to you. Then he asked to see Annie but she refused. She said he could drop dead. That was what she meant anyway. ‘After all, dead’s what he basically left you for.’ We had an argument about it, and that’s not like me, you know.”

“You’re not taking his side?”

“No, not exactly.”

“He must be a persuasive man to get you to do that.”

“You decide for yourself. I hope you will anyway. When I told him you were going to be here in a week or so, he said he’d wait around till you came.”

And that’s where the situation stood on the morning I went to his hotel and met him—my father!—for the first time. (“Father.” How odd that sounds, even to me.)

I was of two minds and I’m sure it showed. I only wanted to stare at this man in his mid- or late seventies who’d treated a younger woman the way he had all those years ago. On the other hand, I was so curious that I couldn’t stop asking him questions; I genuinely wanted to know about his life so I could at least try to understand.

It’s funny: I picked him out the second I walked into the coffee shop. He looked absolutely nothing in the least like me. In fact, if he looked like anyone it seemed to me that it was Annie, who isn’t related to him at all: wavy hair (his was all white), big shoulders like hers, a darker complexion than mine. He had a suntan and he looked like he took care of himself for a man his age and probably had some money. (You can tell so much about the living just by looking at them.) He turned out to be shorter than I expected when he stood up as I went over to the table. Very old-fashioned of him, but I didn’t mind.

Gee it was awkward going, for the first while especially. He kept asking me about myself, but I didn’t want to say much. That’s not like me: everyone tells me I’m so open etc. I guess I was uncomfortable because I didn’t know how much he knew about the troubles I’d been in and also of course because I didn’t think I owed him any information
anyway. But I didn’t feel any permanent hatred, only anger that had come to the surface after being buried for so long. This wasn’t a position I liked finding myself in (maybe that made me angry too).

For the first hour at least, he did most of the talking. He told me that his family name wasn’t really Smith, it was Lucarelli. He had to spell it for me. His father was born in Naples, Italy, he said, and he and his brother decided to change it because there was a lot of prejudice against Italian people and other Catholics in Windsor, Ontario, where they grew up. When he said Windsor, I thought of Bishop ranting and raving about the place. I think I might have smiled a bit. I hope this strange man, this stranger across from me, didn’t misunderstand the smile. I hope he knew I wasn’t laughing at him, though I sort of have the feeling that he did but didn’t let on. He kept asking how Annie and I got along, and I said, Oh fine! Which is true.

“That’s usually the way it is with girls growing up together,” he said. “Either they’re really close or at least they always get along okay.” He obviously didn’t know a thing about it or else he was talking to cover himself until he figured out what he was going to say next.

Well I guess there must be some exceptions, I said, making my own kind of talk-talk when it came my turn.

I looked at his hands. They were huge for a man who wasn’t really that tall and had been shrinking because of age. I knew hands like that from work, people who’d passed over. They belonged to people who spent a lot of time in jobs outside. I wanted to ask him if it was true that he’d been a homeless person, but I didn’t know quite how to bring it up. Finally I decided the direct approach was best. That’s what
I’ve always found. Direct is best if you’re sincere and ask in a nice way, with the words coming out of a friendly caring face. You can’t fake things like that.

He said, “I might as well tell you the story. That’s what I’m doing here, telling you my story and hoping you’ll tell me yours.”

He said that he had an older brother who was murdered in
1939.
(That’s horrible. I started to feel really sorry for him. He’d obviously been carrying this around all those years.)

“Him and me used to be real partners at one time. I was just a kid, really a kid, and he was my big brother who looked after me. He taught me everything I knew in those days. But the other side of the coin is that the age difference between us always made him the boss. Now, I’ve been a boss, the boss of my own successful small business, and I know that after a certain point you can’t be buddies with the people that work for you. If you do, you lose your authority with them, which you need to get everyone pulling on the same end of the rope.”

I couldn’t tell if this was a speech he’d made before. It sure sounded like he’d at least said it over in his head lots of times. He looked sad all of a sudden, but I couldn’t tell if this was because of the brother or himself, or maybe age caught up with him there for a second. I guess I’m better at figuring out things like that now.

“He was teaching me the business. His business was gambling, and I wanted to learn it. But I screwed up pretty badly once, or that’s what he thought anyway, and he cut me loose, threw me over. I was really crushed bad, and I moved across town, then over to the Detroit side, got a different kind of job, started a new life. A year after that they
killed him. It was a gambling thing. Four guys, two that did the shooting—and I know their names, I made a point of finding out, which wasn’t easy—and the two that drove the car and brought in the guns. I know them too, a carpenter and a Jewish guy. I thought about tracking them down. But what would I do when I found them? Call the cops? In those days you never knew if the cops were working for you or you were working for them. Maybe I should have handled it in my own way. I’ll tell you I thought about it. But I knew I couldn’t trust myself. Besides—I can say this now, seeing you—I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it right even if I had the heart to do it. I was still mad at myself for botching things up, but I’d always managed to put being angry with myself into being angry about what happened to Cappy—that’s what people called him, because when he was a kid he always wore this cloth cap that was too big for his head. Now that he was gone, killed over a thing as stupid as a debt, I was mad that people could take away his life like that, angry in a really hard way for a couple of years at least as I followed around two or three of the guys that did it—all of them dead now, I’m pretty sure—old age mostly or cancer. So I drifted. I used to hear that I got out of town, out of Windsor and Detroit, because they were after me too, but that’s a lie and it’s not right. For one thing, I was around Detroit for about two years after it happened. The truth is: I left to get away from where I was, to go somewhere and try to forget that place—and remember it too. I had to live my way through what had happened. Time’s the only way to do it. So I moved around. I was still a young guy. This was in the fifties. There was plenty of work.”

Now math is not my best subject, but right about here I started to figure out that he was skipping over a whole lot of years between his life back east and his time with Mother. What happened to the
1940
s? What was he doing with a woman like Mother in the early sixties? I wanted desperately to ask him as soon as he stopped, but for some reason I never did—and I hate myself for it now. At least that’s what I feel most of the time. Other times I’m not sure I want to know. Must be other wives in there somewhere. That’s my guess.