My Father Before Me (5 page)

12

True love. Romance. A happy future with a loving, devoted husband and child—or a passel of children, who knows? At seventeen, Ange dared to believe these things would happen with her new husband, who, though he shared the name of her untrustworthy father, was not like him—this Ed was attentive and responsible. And funny: with his wry Irish wit, he could ease a tense moment, alluding to and defusing what was difficult and painful by making light of it.

He had been born in late summer 1929: just in time, he was fond of cracking later, for the Great Depression. Accompanying the small news of his birth, the big national news was that at midnight on the night before he entered this world, seventy-three people had died off the California coast when the steamer
San Juan
collided with an oil tanker. The
San Juan
had left San Francisco and, for five hours, groped her way southward through thick fog; the captain, who went down with his ship, seems to have steered his craft into the tanker's path willfully and blindly.

That might have been how my father's parents fell in love—or fell in—with each other. Their union did not last long. I know Bernadine Carey, his mother, only from childhood pictures that, until decades after my father's death, I did not know existed. In the photos, she is round-faced and black-haired, with an upturned nose, an unassuming,
boxy Prince Valiant haircut, and the fidgety, intrepid look of a tomboy. Bernadine was Irish through and through, her family tree blossoming with Dwyers, McLaughlins, and Murphys, mainly poor Catholic farmers.

Her family moved from rural Missouri to Seattle when she was a toddler. When she was seventeen, Bernadine married Nat Forhan, who was three years older and, like her, pure Irish. Nat gave my father little more than a name. He is the trickster in this tale, the mysterious father of my own mysterious father, the cryptic, slippery figure who turned his back on his wife, who abandoned his three sons when two of them could barely walk and the third was in the womb. He would change his name and move out of state, return suddenly, briefly, decades later, then leave again and vanish so thoroughly that even his sisters and brothers wondered what had become of him. When at last he died, Nat had lived so long under an assumed name, and he had been so long a stranger to his family, that he might as well not have been himself at all. He is the mythic father—or, for me, grandfather: the object of the unending quest. And he was a cad and a bum.

He grew up on the lakeside in the shadow of the gasworks, near the giant pump house and boiler house and coal storage bunker and the trestles that coal cars rumbled up to deliver their load. His father, as foreman of the plant, was given a modest house on the site, so Nat and his siblings grew up amid a continual stink. The air was smoke-filled, the outside walls and windows of every house in the neighborhood grimed with soot. It wasn't just the gasworks that were to blame; it was the nearby tar plant and asphalt company and garbage incinerator and Pacific Ammonia Chemical Company.

By the time he married Bernadine, Nat—known now sometimes as Fred, from his middle name—had a job at the gas plant. He was young and suddenly married, suddenly a father, suddenly a husband not just to a fun, cute girl but to a chronically sick one: Bernadine
had contracted diabetes and would suffer from it, just as my father would after her. Nat was blue-collar, black Irish, probably not ready for what marriage would mean, probably overly fond of the bottle. Maybe liquor was involved when he lost control of the wheel and smashed into another car, injuring its passengers. That was in April 1929; Bernadine was four months pregnant with her second child, my father.

A year after my father was born, Bernadine became pregnant again, but her husband soon was gone, back to living with his parents near the gasworks. I can imagine his mother, Ellen, scolding him mildly, then smiling and hugging him tightly. She was a woman simultaneously exacting and generous and extravagantly protective. She refused to spank her children. She raised them to pray: each evening, as she sat in her rocking chair, the smallest of her boys and girls knelt before her and declaimed, “God bless Mama and Papa, God bless my brothers and sisters, and God bless me and make me a good child.” When they were tucked in their beds, she sprinkled each of them with holy water. They would be model Christians, all of them, she hoped—humble and charitable. She and her husband were firm, assured, and forgiving—the kind of parents, perhaps, who could raise a half-dozen reckless, irresponsible sons, send them into the world, and then, when things went badly, smile wearily and take them back in.

Bernadine's parents took her in, too, along with her two little sons, and, in the summer of 1931, she gave birth to her third, John Francis Forhan. Even after Nat's departure, she remained true to their habit of naming their children after Nat's own brothers. Their boys, as were Nat's older siblings, were named James, Edward, and John. The baby, however, was soon given the nickname Skippy, as my father was given the nickname Buddy—or Bud. Decades later, in the 1960s, I often heard my great-grandmother refer to him by this name.

Skippy and Buddy: the names of lovable scamps, little rascals. The only Forhan child who didn't earn an adorably boyish nickname was
the oldest, Jim. Through the years, the Careys made Jim pay for his face, for his rakish and slightly cartoonish look, as if gravity were pulling all of his features downward. “He looks just like his father” was an insult, and not a veiled one. Eddie was lucky: he inherited his mother's looks, one childhood photo showing him with a rounded face, a bit elfin, his expression hinting paradoxically of both ingenuousness and mischievousness. His grandparents regarded him with ungrudging love. My father was Bud: the chum, the pal, the dependable one. His grandparents told him continually that he was the good and faithful one. Or he would prove to be so. He would be the one who would make them proud.

13

Within a year of Skippy's birth, Nat had moved out of state and was neglecting to pay child support. Bernadine, only twenty-two years old, minimally educated and untrained for employment, was left, in the midst of the Depression, to do what my mother's mother, Esther, was being forced to do at the same time: raise three children by herself. Throughout the next few years, Bernadine earned some income doing housework, but she was often in the hospital for illnesses related to her diabetes, and her parents cared for the children then.

In the first decade of his life, my father—as my mother was doing simultaneously—lived in one home after another, barely long enough each time to memorize the address; he moved at least ten times, sometimes from a small, cheap apartment back to his grandparents' house and then out again, sometimes into the home of his mother's latest boyfriend. She seems to have had quite a few. Maybe she wasn't picky; maybe she couldn't afford to be. Or maybe, as her choice of husband suggests, she just had crummy taste in men.

And where was that husband? His parents and siblings might have known, but they weren't telling. Not long after Nat left, a formal photograph was taken of that family, and it includes him. Was he living in Seattle then, skulking around, keeping clear of the streets where he might meet his wife and sons? Or had he slipped into town for some party, for
the picture, before sauntering off again? In the photograph, all of the Forhans are gussied up, the men in suits and ties, the women in fancy dresses adorned with elaborate collars and flowers—except for three of the daughters, who, pious Catholics that they are, have become nuns; they sit fully habited in the front row, on either side of their parents. Five of the six sons, black hair slicked back, stand behind them, eyes fixed in straight stares, shoulders square to the camera. Only Nat gives a slightly sideways look—wide-eyed, as if stunned. He is twenty-four.

Not long afterward, he is not Nat. The person who began life as Nathaniel Frederick Forhan, who then became Nat Forhan, then Fred Forhan, has become Fred Grant. He is that intent on stepping offstage, or onto another one, vanishing into some imagined life. His father's obituary, a year later, states that Fred has moved to San Francisco. But to the law, and to his wife and children, he is in hiding, his new name nearly perfect, in its aggressive banality, for the purpose of anonymity. Shrewdly, he has not chosen the last name of Smith—too evidently counterfeit. But Grant is good: Grant is common but not overly so. Coincidentally, while Nat Forhan is melting away, farther south, in Hollywood, Archibald Leach is becoming a Grant, too: Cary. An odd and elegant touch, that: a first name that sounds like a last one—that sounds like Carey, the last name of my father's mother and, ultimately, my own middle name, which I cringe at throughout my childhood, since it is a girl's name, isn't it? Or so I am reminded by my taunting school chums. With little to cling to, I defend myself with the fact that Carey is the name of a movie star, although, okay, he spells his name differently. And, yes, it is not his real name. But it's not my name, either; it's only a middle name that my parents burdened me with before I could fight back.

Cary Grant has chosen his name: a name suggestive of an everyman except for that hint of the aristocratic in “Cary.” There may be something aristocratic about Frederick, but not Fred. Not Fred Grant: the name of an accountant, a tax lawyer, a best buddy in a middling mid-
century American play. Grant: from the Old French for “to promise” or “assure,” from the Latin for “to believe.” A name taken on by a man who wants to appear trustworthy. Grant: to cede, to yield. To agree to fulfill, to acknowledge, to bestow. In this case, the name of a man who does not intend to fulfill his obligations as a husband and father, to acknowledge his children, to write to them, to call, to pay a nickel. I searched for him decades later. Eighty years after he abandoned his family, forty years after my father killed himself, I scoured old phone directories and census records, looking for a sign. Year after year, in the Bay Area, there are no Forhans, but there are a few Fred Grants, unmarried and without a distinguishing middle initial. Or perhaps there is only one Fred Grant, continually on the move. In 1937, he's on Larkin Street, near Nob Hill. Later, he's on Hyde, then Castro, then Cayuga, then Post, then Polk. He's listed as a lodger. He lives in apartments. He's a bartender. A gardener. A printing press operator. He might be my father's father. He might not be. Nat Forhan has disappeared into Fred Grant, and Fred Grant into the vast anonymous crowd.

Wherever he is, he is not there for my father's third birthday party, or fourth or fifth. He is not there when his three young sons decide to play near the water, at the west side of Lake Union in the middle of the city. They walk down to the narrow shore from a houseboat they are living in with their mother and, probably, her new boyfriend. The gasworks, where the boys' grandfather worked as foreman for two decades, is visible a mile away, its tanks and trestles and smokestacks stark against the blue sky at the northern edge of the lake. He died a month ago, their grandfather Forhan, at only sixty-four. Have they heard about this? Had they even known him? And do Eddie and Jim, in the midst of their play, notice how long it is taking Skippy to return from the houseboat with a jar of ice? Whatever they are up to, they need that ice, but Skippy is only five, easily distracted. What's keeping him this time?

He does not come back. After collecting the ice and running down
the gangplank that connects the house to the shore, he slips. For too long, no one notices he is missing. His brothers believe he is on his way back from the house. His mother believes he has returned to his brothers. Later, when the sheriff's bloodhound, King, arrives, the dog needs little time to sniff his way to the end of the gangplank and stop there. Skippy's body, a few hours later, is hauled up from the lake bottom.

For almost forty years, until his own death, my father rarely spoke about Skippy. A couple of times when I was young, while driving past Calvary, the Catholic cemetery near our neighborhood, he'd say, “My little brother's in there.” Or maybe I have that wrong; maybe it is only my desirous memory putting those words into his mouth and placing him behind the steering wheel. Maybe it was my mother who pointed at the simple chain-link fence and said, “You know, your dad's little brother's in there.” My father certainly never told us the whole story, or even part of it—but for all of those decades he kept a newspaper clipping about the drowning. I discovered that only when I began writing this book, and my mother said, “I have a small box of some of your father's old things. There's nothing special in there, probably, but you're welcome to give it a look.” Before I held the newspaper article in my hands, I'd heard so little about Skippy, the poor drowned boy, and his name sounded so unlikely—too cute to be true—that the whole sketchy story seemed the wispiest of fairy tales. But it happened.

Skippy was buried in the graveyard where his grandfather had been laid to rest the month before. They were placed acres away from each other, with a hill between them. According to cemetery records, the address of the person paying for Skippy's burial was that of Bernadine's in-laws. Maybe Ellen Forhan, Skippy's grandmother, took it upon herself to pay. Maybe even Nat—Fred—did, if he had the money. The plot cost ten dollars and the box, made of cedar, five. A five-foot box. As Seamus Heaney says in a poem: a foot for every year.

14

Not long after Skippy's death, Bernadine and her two remaining boys moved again, this time to an apartment on the north side of the lake, in the Fremont neighborhood. The gasworks were only a few blocks south, and Nat's oldest brother, Jim, lived only a block away. If Bernadine and her young sons had strolled a few blocks toward the lake and turned left, they soon would have passed the business Jim had recently started: Forhan's Tavern, serving sandwiches and fish and chips and Schlitz and Olympia beer. It was a nondescript one-story building near the water, close enough to the shipyard to do a bustling business. Did Jim's brothers frequent the place, plunking themselves on stools at the long bar, sipping free Schlitz? I imagine four of them lined up, fists gripping glasses, complaining about some new boss or old wife, suppressing some sorrow with a long swallow or a wisecrack. Maybe Fred Grant, up from California, wandered in now and then. And what about Bernadine? Did she ever slip through the door of the tavern, let her eyes adjust to the darkness until she saw the face of a Forhan, and ask, “Where is Nat? Where is my husband?”

Maybe she didn't care to know where he was.

By the fall of 1939, Bernadine had moved with her sons out of Fremont to the northern edge of downtown. A new boyfriend was the cause, a divorced Scottish truck driver. In the spring, when the
census taker came around, Bernadine lied that she, too, was divorced. It must have been the easiest thing to say. She could not have been very healthy by then, after years of dealing with her diabetes. In the meantime, Eddie and Jim had changed schools, as they must have several times already. Perhaps they had gotten used to not getting used to anything.

Across the street from their new home stood a bronze statue: a tall, robed Chief Seattle, that noble, resourceful man who watched his ­people's ways—the hunting, canoeing, berry-gathering—­supplanted by the customs of Christian missionaries, fur traders, and hard-­drinking lumbermen; Seattle, who gave up his land and removed himself and his tribe to a reservation; Seattle, who in his youth took on the power of the Thunderbird through a vision quest and who, in his older age, was baptized Catholic; Seattle, whose entire life was given over to transformation and accommodation. Grave-faced, the chief raised his right arm to the Forhan boys in welcome.

Then their mother was gone: fallen into another diabetic coma, then gone for good. At thirty-one, Bernadine was dead.

My father was eleven. His little brother, Skippy, was four years in the grave. His father was nowhere. Now, too, was his mother.

He still had twelve-year-old Jim. The family had shrunk to the two of them. On a sunny September morning, they stood on the sidewalk outside of Sacred Heart Church, two blocks from where they had lived with their mother and her truck-driver boyfriend. They had just attended Bernadine's funeral. Now what? Mourners shuffled past them to their cars and drove off. At last, their grandparents, the Careys, appeared in the church doorway and approached them. Eddie looked up. “Where am I going to live now?” he said. “Who's going to take care of me?”

“Why, Bud,” his grandmother answered, “you're coming with us. Didn't you know that?”

No, he did not know that. Nobody had told him.

Bernadine was buried in the Catholic cemetery where Skippy lay. Would my father have doubted that the two of them were together in heaven now? Probably not. He was a good boy and did what he was told—he may very well have believed what he was told, too. He was soon to become an altar boy, solemnly pledging, as his official certificate proclaimed, “to live and die befitting one who has dedicated himself to the service of our Lord, Jesus Christ.” Almost until the end of his life, he attended Mass weekly, sidling into the pews with his grandparents and brother, then later with his wife and children, standing to sing, kneeling to pray, muttering, “Thanks be to God, thanks be to God.” He professed that the dead are not truly dead, that they will be resurrected.

As a child, if my father could depend on little else, he knew that the church, with its enduring rituals, was unchanging: the hushed gathering at the baptismal font, the splash of water and the murmured prayers; the flickering banks of white votive candles; the sticking out of your tongue at the priest as he lifts the almost weightless wafer to your mouth; the altar boys' little tinkling bells; the intermittently explicable Latin—
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus;
and always the bleeding Christ gazing forlornly and expectantly down from where he's been nailed, his mind half in this world, half in the next.

My father would have found, in the church, a version of what he heard at home: that his ceaseless mission was to prove himself worthy. Almost any impulse within him must be scrutinized as a sign of possible trespass. Even an unconsummated thought, a fancy fueled by desire, could be an offense to God, so one had to be careful to keep the mind clean. And as for the hands, any number of things they were capable of could mean damnation: stealing, masturbating, taking another's life, taking one's own.

He would have been taught the importance of honoring his mother and father. But what could that mean, exactly, with his mother dead and his father vanished?

A mile to the west of where their mother and little brother lay, Eddie and Jim moved into their grandma and grandpa Carey's house: a modest clapboard with a brick porch fronted by a tiny raised lawn. The old folks had the dust and calluses of the old country upon them still; they believed in discipline, duty, and honest labor; they had learned, I suspect, to demand little from life and to respect those whose ambitions and expectations were comparably humble.

They tried to track down Nat, the boys' father—and Bernadine's widower, though Nat might not have known that. The Careys had no interest in talking to the heel; they wanted only to know whether he was dead. His mother had died in 1942, and Nat hadn't shown for the funeral. Afterward, one of the Forhan daughters wrote to her brother, “John, do you know
anything
about Nat? Sister Dolorita told us that she knows that he is dead. She told us quite a story, but I do not know whether or not to believe it.”

So Nat's oldest sister, who had become a nun, claimed he was dead. The story apparently involved his coming to a bad end at the hands of gangsters; her own sister, also a nun, suspected she was lying. Maybe, for Sister Dolorita, loyalty to her brother trumped the commandment not to bear false witness; maybe she was covering for him so no one would worry about him any longer or come looking for him.

Or maybe the tall tale was an act of charity toward the Careys: an invented story that would allow them to keep Eddie and Jim in their home. It might be no accident that, only three weeks after Dolorita announced the death of Nat, the Careys' legal adoption of the Forhan boys was finalized, the adoption papers indicating that Nat had “deserted and abandoned” his children and had not contributed to their support.

Also, if Nat were dead, he might have left behind a pension or insurance money. Responding to the Careys' inquiry, the adjutant general's office wrote that it had no record of a Nathaniel Forhan having been enlisted or inducted into the military. Nat's life insurance company reported that if the Careys could show evidence of his death while the policy was in effect, they could make a claim for full benefits. In the meantime, the surrender value of the policy was seventy-three dollars. The Careys had no idea when or where or even if Nat had died. They took the money.

When Eddie and Jim lived with the Careys, throughout the 1940s, there was an older boy in the house, too: a teenager, Jack, whom the Careys had taken in just after he was born and whom they would adopt later. There was little money for taking care of three growing boys—John Carey earned only a couple of thousand dollars a year as maintenance foreman for the city transit system—but the money was steady, and my father and his brother learned the value of a nickel and the value of work. If they yearned for a new Stan Musial–endorsed baseball glove, there was the lawn to mow first, every Saturday for a month. When they reached driving age and wanted to borrow the family car, they knew they'd be washing it inside and out first. Every night at the same time, dinner was laid upon the table. Every Sunday morning, the family got gussied up and drove to church. In every school subject, the boys were expected to do their level best. When Bernadine died, my father was in sixth grade at Blessed Sacrament School. He earned high marks that year. Only in singing, for which he received a C, was he unable to summon sufficient zeal.