I RANG THE bell. My father opened the door.
“Good to see you! How was your trip?”
He opened his arms to hug me. The black bag slung over my shoulder excused my awkward, back-patting response. Nevertheless, my resolve began to bleed from me. What was I doing? I felt like an assassin.
“I got turned around,” I said. “I almost didn’t get here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I missed the exit for 22 and ended up over on South Mountain.”
“Oh yeah. It’s all different now. I probably should have warned you. Come in. Sit down. How are you?”
“First I’ve got to take a leak,” I said and headed for the small bathroom off the back porch.
I could feel a familiar, debilitating melancholy coming over me, related in some way to the smells of that old house, mildew and sweat and smoke and stale beer. The smells of childhood, all the way back to when this was my grandfather’s house: Pappy Hoffman sitting in his chair in the living room with his cane hooked over the arm, a dead cigar in a heavy glass ashtray, a blue coffee can—“Good to the Last Drop”—next to his chair for a spittoon, tall brown bottles of beer. Mommom in the kitchen: boiled potatoes and onions, pork roast and sauerkraut.
I was shrinking. Sitting on the toilet with the seat down, I felt a split-second shock that my feet reached the floor. After a while I stood up, turned around to flush the toilet as alibi for my privacy, decided not to, and returned to the living room.
My father was in his favorite chair. He gestured toward the sofa. “So,” he said. “Sit down. Sit down and tell me about your life.”
“Dad,” I said. I began to tremble. I hadn’t been home, to Allentown, since shortly after my mother died, more than five years earlier. My father had come to Boston a couple of times, once at Christmas, and again when my daughter, Veronica, was born, and I had called him, dutifully, every three weeks or so, “Just checking in. How are you? Good. We’re fine. Take care.” Now I was here with difficult and painful things to say to him, and he was smiling, glad to see me. The last thing I wanted was to sucker-punch him.
“Dad,” I said again. My throat closed.
He frowned. “Sit down. Sit down.”
I took a deep breath. Although I’d staged this meeting, I had also taken care not to rehearse it. That seemed pointless and one-sided and vaguely cowardly. At one point I had thought to write him a long, careful letter, like Kafka’s to his father, but I was a writer and he was uncomfortable with scribbling even a brief note, so that seemed unfair. Besides, though I told myself I had no expectations, deeper down I was hoping for something; I wanted not only to be heard, I wanted things to change between us. The telephone was out of the question. I sat on the sofa and unzipped the black bag.
I took out a picture of myself at eight and placed it on the coffee table between us. I didn’t know how to begin. I reached in the bag again and took out three bronze medallions, one for each year I’d been sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. I reached across the table and held them out to him; they clinked as he turned them over, examining them.
“Do you know what those are?” I asked him.
“No. Well. I guess I have some idea.”
“Those are the medals I won in the war, Dad.”
“What war?”
“The war, Dad. My war. Let me tell you about my war.”
I had reviewed dozens of ways to begin this conversation. Now I chose one.
On the day I graduated from college, my father took me aside and gave me an envelope with five new hundred-dollar bills in it. I began to open it, but he put his hand over mine and said, “Just put that in your pocket.” He looked around furtively as if this were a top-secret transaction. He took me by the elbow and turned me to walk a little farther away from my mother, my brother Joe, my aunt Kitty, and Mammy Etta. “I’m walking along over there, and this guy with a beard comes up to me and says, ‘You must be Mr. Hoffman. You know you should be very proud.’ And then he says, ‘I mean considering all he’s been through.’ So I thanked him. But what the hell, I’m thinking. This professor or whoever he is knows more about my kid than I do. I feel like I’ve lost track of you. We should talk. Sometime.”
“Sure,” I said. I had half a hit of acid in me. I’d just smoked some blond hash tucked inside a Marlboro. I was stoned.
It was a good place to start. I asked if he remembered that conversation. He nodded. “Well it’s time we had that talk,” I said. “I need to get some things squared away. I need to set the record straight. I’ve fucked up a lot of things in my life and almost killed myself a couple of times. I’m trying to get myself squared away for my kids, so they won’t have to go through what I went through. I’ve kept a lot of this from you. Mostly I never told you how angry I am at you.”
The anger was kicking in as I spoke, and the anger released me from the need to protect him from the truth. His face began to redden.
“I’ve come to understand a lot about myself, Dad, the drinking, the drugs, the ways I’ve gotten twisted up. I want to talk about what it was like growing up here. The stuff that happened to me. I’m angry at you because you beat the shit out of me when I was a kid, and it hurt me, Dad, it really fucked me up. You need to know that. I need you to know that.”
It was hard to see the pain on his face. I’d been sweating and shaking; now I was crying. When I needed to, I glanced at the picture of my boyhood self on the coffee table; otherwise I cried and looked at his red and stricken face. It is inescapable: my love for my family—the real love, not the illusion I professed—is sibling to anger and grief. By displacing one and trying to elude the other, I had stayed naive and grotesquely childish.
“You can’t say I didn’t love you,” he said.
“I didn’t. I didn’t say you didn’t love me. I said you beat the shit out of me.”
“I spanked you; yes, of course I did. That’s what we did in those days.”
“No.” I refused to argue the point.
“No what?”
In my black bag I’d brought a slotted spatula like the one he used to use on my bare behind. From time to time when I’d been tempted to make excuses for him, I would look at it, hold it in my hand, wonder what could possess a man to hit a child with this thing. The “potato-turner” is what he called it. I took it out and held it up between us. “You never hit me with one of these things, right? You never hit me with one of these?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I believe I probably threatened you with it once or twice.”
“You hit me with it, Dad. And more than once or twice, god damn it. I used to have raw welts on my ass from it. What were you thinking? What the fuck were you thinking? I mean I try to imagine it, Dad, but I could no more pull down Robert’s pants and hit his soft little ass with a thing like this than I could fly to the fuckin’ moon. What was going on in your head?”
He was looking away, his mouth hanging open, tears rolling down his face.
“I have more to say, Dad. I didn’t come here to hurt you. Thirty years ago I stopped telling you the truth. I couldn’t. Now I have to, and it hurts like hell, but I have to tell it and you have to listen, Because you were right: you did lose track of me, only it was a lot earlier than you thought.” I felt like I was going too fast. I didn’t want to tell him about Tom yet. “I have to tell you because I don’t want to be afraid of you anymore.”
“Afraid?” He looked astonished. “What did I do to you? Why would you be afraid of me? I’m your father.”
I stood up, unbuckled my belt, drew it through my belt loops, and doubled it. I lay it on the table next to the picture, the medallions, and the spatula. I sat down quietly and stared at the table. Tears came. I took a deep breath. I was still afraid of him. I wanted to drop the whole thing. I wished I’d never come. I needed to settle down. I didn’t want my voice to quake or squeak.
“What?”
That single syllable enraged me. Once again I felt my life diminished by his unwillingness to remember, his passivity, his defeat. I had a dream once in which my father was having surgery. When the surgeon opened his massive belly with a long incision from groin to chin, my mother, my brother Mike, and my brother Bob stepped out.
I shook the belt at him. “You terrorized us,” I said. “There’s no other word for it. You used to come home from work, from the fuckin’ brewery, drunk, I guess, and beat the shit out of me and Bob. I remember screaming and running to get away from you, the two of us on our hands and knees while you swung your belt at us. So don’t give me any of this shit about ‘spankings.’ I was scared to death of you.”
“How can that be? I remember playing catch with you in the yard when I came home from work. Of course Bob was too sick. But you and I. When I coached the American Legion team, you went along to every game. You were the batboy! How come you don’t remember that?”
“Who says I don’t remember that?”
“Well you talk as if…never mind.”
“No, go ahead, say it. There were good times too. But I’m not talking about good times versus bad times, Dad. I’m talking about assault and battery on a child. What if I knew a kid in my classroom was getting whipped with a belt or a metal spatula? I’d have to file a child-abuse report. You must know that, after all the years you worked with kids. I loved being batboy on that team! That’s just not what I came to talk about. What about you? Do you remember only the good times? Do you remember any of this stuff I’m talking about?”
“What about Bob?” He was wiping away tears when his face contorted and a stuck cry squeaked in his throat. “Was he afraid of me too? He must have been afraid of me too.”
“I’m not here to speak for Bob. Sometime I want to talk about him though. In this house people die and—poof!—they’re gone. We have a funeral, then no one ever mentions them again. We don’t tell stories about them. We don’t laugh about funny things they once did. We don’t remember things they used to say. We just forget them. They vanish.”
“Your mother was the one.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your mother was the one who remembered everything.” He put his head down and shielded his eyes with his hand. His body quaked as he wept, quietly. After a while, he took his hand from his brow, looked at me for a second, and turned away. “I know you think I don’t still grieve for those two boys.” He touched the lampshade next to him with his fingertips. “Your brother Joe is pissed off at me for that too. I want you to know I try sometimes, but I can’t help it, Dick, I hardly remember either of those two boys. Sometimes I lie awake at night and try, and all I can remember is burying them. It hurts like hell. It’s what? Five years now your mother’s gone? She was the one who was able to remember.
“I try. A few weeks after your mother died, I got out our wedding pictures and I stood one up on the mantle over there. And a couple of pictures of your brothers. I even put some flowers around. Then one day somebody walks in and says, ‘Christ, it looks like a god-damned mortuary in here.’ So I threw out the flowers, put the pictures back in the drawer upstairs. Look at this place!” He gestured with his hand. “It looks like a fuckin’ motel, like nobody ever lived here.”
“Who?” I asked him. “Who said such a stupid thing?”
He waved his hand in front of his face, brushing away the question. I wondered how we had digressed so far. I was wary of him. His grief was real, but so was mine, and my anger, and my outrage. Was he hiding, depending on the pity I felt for him? I felt invited to lay aside my wrath and embrace him and cry with him.
I looked at the photograph of the boy whose story I had come here to tell, and I knew, in that moment, that all unspoken truths do not comprise one silence, all losses do not merge into a single grief, all injuries do not add up to one great wound. I was not willing to settle for a mass grave with a single marker. Besides, one of those buried in the rubble was still alive.
“What about this boy?” I said quietly, taking the picture from the table and holding it out to him. “Do you remember him?”
He took the photograph and looked at it for a long moment and with such a growing tenderness on his face that I looked away, feeling like an intruder. He placed the picture facedown on his chest, resting the frame on the sill of his big round belly. “Seems like we remember him different,” he said. “Seems like we remember a lot of things different.”
IT WAS 1983. My son had just been born. My mother was dying. I was determined to write my novel and quit drinking. It had been two days since my last drink, and I was pretty shaky.
Once when I was batboy on my father’s baseball team, I wandered too near a player swinging a weighted bat in the on-deck circle; I heard my father shout, “Look out!” and when the bat hit the back of my skull there was a flash of white light as I lost consciousness. I saw or felt—or was—that flash of light for an instant some thirty years later while I was writing. The next thing I remember I was on the floor, coming to, my wife asking me if I was all right.
I had been writing a series of sketches I hoped would serve as fodder for a novel about a working-class Catholic boy from Cooperstown, New York, who dreamed of being the first American Pope to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. It was to be, by turns, lyrical, satirical, and elegiac. So I went foraging among my memories for incidents, places, people to shape to the story’s purposes.
Later that evening, after dinner, still feeling weak and shaky, I sat down at my typewriter and rolled up the page to see what I’d written. I’d been making a list. The last item read: “Baseball coaches: Dad, Tom Feifel.”
The popular view of withdrawal is that all sorts of phantoms, monsters, spacemen, and surreal distortions assault the alcoholic and that they are mere chimeras to be withstood until the detox is complete. For me, however, the demons were real. It was as if alcoholism were fighting back, and the Marquis of Queensberry be damned. The booze seemed to say, “Oh yeah? You don’t need me anymore? Fine. Then let’s see you handle this. Remember?” Wham! White light.
I drank all night. I remember lying on the floor, stoned, looking up at scene after scene of my life on the ceiling, a Sistine arrangement of panels my attention brought to cinematic life. And in the central panel an impostor father, mounted on a young boy, thrusts and moans, while off to the side a figure I recognize, my father, stands like a Picasso harlequin, unmoving, his countenance blank.
It wasn’t as if I had ever completely forgotten Tom. I’d never denied the events; instead, I’d insisted on their unimportance. It was one bad year, I told myself. I’d shaken it off like a batter hit by a pitch who grits his teeth and trots to first base to applause.
I drank for three more years, sick drinking, around the clock, sneaking, hiding, ashamed, seeking an oblivion just short of suicide.
RECENTLY I WAS at a Little League game with my son, Robert, when I saw him staring at a boy who had been horribly burned, his face a mass of scar. I touched Robert on the shoulder to break the spell. He whispered, “Dad, what’s the matter with that kid?” I explained that he was in a fire, that he’d been burned. My eyes welled and I trembled. It wasn’t so much pity for the boy that moved me, although I pitied him, but my identification with him. And what if that disfiguring blaze burned all the pictures too? Who can describe that boy? Whose memory can be trusted now except my own, slow as it is to recall, reluctant as it is to reveal its tracings?
“MEMORY IS TRICKY, Dad. Sometimes you have to forget. To go on. I know that. But other times, to go on, you have to remember.”
“You lost me,” he said.
I was going too fast. He’d been lost in thought and hadn’t heard what I said. He held the picture at arm’s length, put on his glasses, and looked at it for a moment.
“I have some very good memories of this boy,” he said.
“I do too,” I said, and held out my hand for the picture. He gave it to me with one hand, took off his glasses with the other. “I do too,” I said again. I lay the photograph flat on the table next to the belt, the medallions, and the spatula. “And I have some memories that damn near killed me.”
It was time to tell him about Tom, but I didn’t know how to begin. Several years before, during one of my mother’s hospitalizations, I’d gotten drunk and told my brother Joe what had happened. At the time, I believed that if I could prevent Tom from molesting another kid, I would be able to finish with it and, my adult duty discharged, get on with my life. I went to see a detective in the police department, someone my brother knew, and told her the story. I also wrote an anonymous letter to the director of the Downtown Youth Center, telling what had happened.
“There are things that happened to me when I was a kid that you don’t know about,” I said to my father. “At least I don’t think you do. Things I blame you for, that I’m angry about to this day. Tell me: what does the name Tom Feifel mean to you?”
His face reddened; he frowned, lowered his head, brought his fingertips to the bridge of his nose. “He used to run the North End, no, the Downtown Youth Center. That’s it. He coached you when you played on that football team—what was it? The Bears. And you played baseball for him too, at Jordan Park.” He looked up as if to ask “Right?,” as if he’d performed an extraordinary feat.
I was suddenly too angry to speak. The last time I’d been here, I’d asked about Tom during a commercial while we were watching a ball game. “What do you hear about Tom Feifel? Remember him? Is he still coaching?” I wanted to know if the interview and my letter had made any difference.
“Oh, he’s still coaching, I guess,” my father had answered. “Still coaching and fuckin’ around with little boys.”
I watched the rest of the ball game in silence, staggered by his reply. Was he telling me he knew? Or that he knew about Tom but assumed I was never involved? Did that mean he didn’t care if someone else’s kid was molested? Did he think it was no big deal? Did he condone it? I remember feeling as incorporeal and abstracted as I’d ever been when Tom was violating me, and struggling to control my quivering insides. Now, five years later, he seemed to remember nothing more than the fact that Tom had been my coach.
I asked him if he remembered making the remark. “I believe you,” he said. “I don’t remember saying that, but I believe you.”
“I don’t remember. I don’t remember. What the hell did you mean, ‘still fuckin’ around with little boys’? Do you have any idea?” I was on my feet now, fists clenched at my sides, leaning over him, roaring. “DO YOU HAVE ANY FUCKING IDEA WHAT HAPPENS TO A LITTLE BOY’S SOUL WHEN YOU SHOVE A COCK UP HIS ASS? DO YOU?”
His face contorted with understanding as I stood over him, teeth gritted, crying hard, and I resisted the impulse to look away from the horror on his face. He gasped, sobbed, covered his face with his hands. I turned and reached in the black bag for an account I’d written of Tom’s abuse. “Read this,” I said, and put it in his hand.
I walked to the front window and looked out at the street. The window was covered with my mother’s plants: dieffenbachia, philodendron, aloe, wandering Jew, begonia, crown of thorns. It struck me that my father had been caring for her plants for these past years, that the coleus and saxifrage on saucers on the air conditioner were the only shrine to her memory he allowed himself, and I suddenly felt I had made a terrible mistake. I wanted to yell “Wait!,” run across the room, and snatch the pages from his hands.
I looked up at the leaded stained glass at the top of the window. I was shaking as if I were freezing or detoxifying, but I needed to hold my ground until my father finished reading. As I stared at the frosted panels that looked like ice holding thousands of tiny bubbles, I thought of my mother. Her belief that we would all be reunited must have been impressed on me more deeply than I’d ever known, or maybe what I felt then had to do with a boyhood need for her comfort; anyway, I knew she was witnessing this day. As I stood there, on the exact spot where she died, I envisioned my father joining her some day in the future, and I heard her tell him, “Of course I was there. You did just fine.” And she assured him, as she had assured me countless times, “He loves you, you know. You did just fine. You both did just fine.” This weird daydream assured me that my father and I would come through this ordeal together, which was in fact the very guarantee I’d needed as a child: that no matter how shamed and filthy I believed I was, despite what Tom had taught me, my parents would never abandon me. My rage, devoid of that old fear, contracted to a mix of anger and resolve. A grown man now, what I needed was clarity. I needed some answers. Behind me my father moaned.
I returned to the sofa and waited. He sat with his head down and his arms crossed on top of his big belly, the pages I’d given him rolled in one hand, quaking now and again with a stifled sob. It was a long time before he spoke.
“We’ll find him, the cocksucker, and make him pay,” he said. “I wish I’d known about this back then. But now that you finally told me, I’ll get him, the son of a bitch. I know a few guys who can find him. Don’t worry, we’ll get him.” He wiped tears from the corners of his eyes.
I wanted to throw myself on him then and cry, as I wish I could have long ago, but I still held him responsible for Tom’s abuse in ways I needed to talk about.
“No. It’s not your battle anymore, Dad; it’s mine now.”
“It’s not just yours. You’re not the only one with a score to settle with him now. Since your mother died, since I retired, I’ve been trying to make my peace with the man upstairs.” He jabbed the rolled pages upward. “And I thought I had accounts pretty well squared away.” He sighed. “This changes everything.”
“Hold it,” I said.
“Well what did you think? You were going to tell me about this and I was going to just sit here? I’m going to do now what I would have done back then if you had told me. I mean it. We’re going to get the son of a bitch.”
“Dad.”
“There’s ways of dealing with cocksuckers like that. There’s a couple of guys in my poker game who’ll know where to find him.”
“Dad. Dad hold it. Please, god damn it!”
“What?”
I was crying, but I felt no connection to it; it was like cutting onions. I was intent on the questions I needed to ask him.
“What about you?”
“What about me? What do you mean, what about me?”
“What did you mean when you said that about Tom, that he was still fucking around with little boys?”
“That he was, you know”—he sneered—“queer. A faggot.”
“There. Ah, there it is. That sneer of yours. That fucking sneer was why I couldn’t tell you. Don’t you see? That sneer locked me in Tom’s bedroom like you nailed the fucking door shut!”
He shook his head as if he were about to speak.
“No, Dad, you listen now. I want to set a few things straight.” I was pointing at him. “First of all, whether Tom was gay or not has nothing to do with it. He was a child molester, a rapist.” My father shifted in his chair as if it was hard for him not to argue. “What if I’d been your daughter? Not your son, your daughter. Would that have been okay?
“But just for the record, I don’t think that Tom was gay. His whole pornography collection—and I saw enough of it to know—was straight.” I stopped so he would look at me. “It was just like yours, Dad. That’s another thing I want to know about sometime. The bathroom closet. Did you think I wouldn’t find that shit? Did you want me to?
“And now you want to go after Tom. But what are you so angry about? That he fucked me? That he made me suck his cock? What if he’d only beat me like you did?”
He was staring straight ahead, unblinking, tears streaming from his eyes, rolling the pages into a tight scroll. “I always knew I was fucked up,” he said, “but I never knew I was this fucked up.” He put the rolled pages on the coffee table, where they loosened and swelled, and he wiped his cheeks dry with his palms. “If this could happen to you and you were too afraid of your dad to come to him and ask for help,”—and here he cried out—“then my whole fuckin’ life has been a waste!”
“Don’t!” I said. I’d been afraid of this. For a long time I’d convinced myself that telling him the truth would kill him or that he would take his own life. Although I’d come to recognize this as an excuse for my own frightened silence, I also knew that his capacity for self-hatred was real.
“Don’t trash it all. Do you hear me? I’ve been careful not to do that. Damn it, you be careful too. You want white hats on the good guys and black hats on the bad guys, go to the movies. You took care of two sick kids for years in this house. You worked like a horse. You stuck it out, and you did a lot of things right. Don’t think for a minute I’ve forgotten any of that. This bullshit—‘my whole fuckin’ life has been a waste’—is a cop-out, Dad. I didn’t come here for that.”
“What did you come here for?” he roared at me. “Tell me! What the hell did you come here for? You’re telling me stuff that happened thirty years ago.”
“No!” I bellowed back at him. “I’m telling you what’s been happening to me for thirty years. I’m trying to stop it, the rage and the shame and the hating myself.”
“But what the hell do you want from me now? I’m angry enough to kill this bastard and you tell me it’s none of my god-damned business, that I can’t do nothing about it anymore, and when I agree with you, and when I tell you how I feel, you get pissed off at me and tell me it’s a cop-out. Tell me what you want from me!”
His question overwhelmed me. Suddenly, I wanted everything I had ever wanted from him and all at once. I wanted him to hold and comfort me. I wanted him to tell me he was proud of me. I wanted him to undo everything that was wrong, fix everything that was broken, explain everything that was unclear. I glanced at the picture of my boyhood self, with his clip-on bow tie and suspenders, and I spilled forward, my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands, and wept furiously.
When I straightened and looked at my father, I saw an old man with his eyes red from crying, at a loss, unsure what to do, and I recognized him, not “Dad,” but the man himself, as I had on only a few occasions before, always between a death and a burial.
“This is what I wanted,” I said, “to tell the truth for a change. To talk to you.”
FOR THE NEXT three days we talked. Sometimes we walked the dog or watched a ball game on TV or drove somewhere in the car, but all the time we talked. It was hard work, and there was a rhythm to it. Like building something—or dismantling something, for that matter—the work defined the pace, the balance between activity and rest, progress and repose. I first noticed this soon after I’d decided to stay, although at first I misunderstood it.
“I’d better get my stuff from the car,” I said.
“When do you have to head back?”
He asked the question in what I took to be the language of obligation.
“I should leave Sunday morning.” I sighed, thinking I was matching my idiom to his. “I don’t need to be back at work until Tuesday, but I should probably get back a day early and give Kathi a break. Spend some time with the kids.” I heaved myself up from the sofa, sighed, and looked at the clock. I’d been there forty minutes.
I stepped out into the glare of the afternoon. Trees used to line our street until the Power & Light Company cut them all down. Now the porches of all the houses on the block are useless for most of the day. Taking my suitcase from the trunk of the hot car, I remembered my mother’s story about the man with the clipboard who came to the door one day, dressed in gray Dickies and wearing a cap with a lightning bolt on it. He told her he was almost through gathering signatures from the neighbors to allow PP&L to remove any obstructions to the new power lines they planned to put up. He went on to explain that with upgraded electrical service the homes would retain their value no matter what unforeseen trends threatened to devalue properties in the surrounding neighborhoods. Having played on her fears that black or foreign-born people were about to weaken the only investment my parents had, he handed her the pen and she signed. Later that same week, when they came to cut down the maple that shaded the front of the house, my mother asked them what they thought they were doing and they showed her her signature on the paper. “I’m such a moron,” she said.
When I lugged my suitcase into the house, my father was watching a ball game on TV. I was stunned. Did he think that we’d had our catharsis, that now we’d sit around and watch the Phillies or the Yankees or the Sox for the next three days? I made a big deal of putting down my bag, squatting with my back to him and to a beer commercial, as if I was looking for something. While I tore through socks, underwear, pajamas, slacks, I tried to understand what was going on. I felt insulted, dismissed. I stole a look at him, and in just that instant he blinked, a tear rolled down his cheek, and he flicked it away quickly the way you would shoo a fly. And I understood. I remembered.
Television sports had been the hearth my family gathered around for almost as long as I could remember. Before the days of cable TV and remote control, we had three televisions stacked in a pyramid in the corner, with three ball games going on at once. I remembered Bob hunched over his score book, sometimes with a radio earphone on, watching his game with the sound turned off, while we watched two other games, with me sitting close to turn the sound up on one set and down on the other. I remember Mel Allen’s voice, broadcasting for the Yankees. “So look for the three-ring sign,” I could still hear him say, “and remember: nothing goes together like baseball and Ballantine.” And the jingle for Gillette Blue Blades: “LOOK sharp—ta da da da da, and BE sharp, ta da da da da!” To so totally immerse ourselves in the games, the lore, the statistics, the particulars and personalities had been, for all those frightening years, our common comfort. My father was asking for a time-out.
I closed the suitcase and put it by the coat closet near his chair. The game had resumed, and I stood behind him pretending to watch it. When I rested my hand on his shoulder, he reached up, eyes still on the television, and covered it with his. “We’ll talk some more,” he said.
“When do you have to head back?” he had asked, and I had only partly understood the question. What he wanted to know was, How long do we have to do this job?
“You find what you were looking for?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said, and bent and kissed him on the top of his head.
THE LIES THAT had estranged us from each other were not conscious ones; they were made of shame and silence and fear, and blame was irrelevant. Our tasks were different. Mine was to shed the props and poses I’d found necessary to come this far, not only the black bag of talismans that insisted I’d been wronged, but the handful of postures—the good son, the college-educated-but-never-forgot-his-roots son, the always-there-in-a-pinch son, the father-of-the-grandchildren son, the healthy you-don’t-need-to-worry-about-me son, and others—that had defined me to him for so many years. His task, I imagine, was to muster the courage to face who he’d sometimes been as a young father, without going on to condemn himself on the one hand nor rationalize his behavior on the other. What we were building together as we walked his dog through Jordan Park, as we visited the family plot at the cemetery, as we sat in our stocking feet and watched a ball game on TV, was trust.
On one of our walks I asked him about the other men I remembered from boyhood. They were peripheral but vaguely exemplary: the men at the barbershop, the old prizefighter who ran the newsstand, the white-haired Irishman, sober by then, who ran the youth center and who had drunk himself out of professional baseball. As we talked I could see their faces: the boxer with his flattened nose, one eye half-shut and wandering; the ruddy-faced, bald, mustached man who I remembered sometimes helped my father lift my brothers in or out of the car.
“That would have been Johnny Kovach,” he said. “Nice guy, he was. He died, hell, I guess it was back when you were a kid.” He stopped walking; at first I thought he was looking at something. The dog nuzzled his leg, whimpering, and whacked my knee with his tail. My father pursed his lips and frowned and shook his head slightly. I wanted to pick up a stick and throw it to be rid of the dog, but I thought my father was about to say something. He was still for a long time, looking down, and then he squeezed my shoulder once and we continued walking, resuming our game of fetch with the dog.
And I remembered a wet night sitting alone in my father’s car outside a funeral parlor when I was twelve or thirteen. I was lost in a dream of romance, as I was much of the time then, thinking of a girl named Carol. I loved her chastely and desperately. I wanted to be a priest, but I’d been taught that only those whom God had chosen were so honored. Those who were chosen somehow knew beyond all doubt, and I was still uncertain, waiting for a sign. During those years, instead of biting my arm, I hid in an altar boy’s feeling of holiness: the vestments, incense, candles, Latin, taken all together, were sometimes enough to suppress the lurid imagery that continued to intrude on my awareness. My fixation on Carol was self-defense. If God didn’t choose me, there was still Carol, whom the nuns had chosen Queen of the May to represent the Virgin Mary. If Carol would have me, I might yet be saved. I sat in the dark car chewing my nails and thinking of how I would brush Carol’s bangs aside and kiss her forehead, and show her how chaste I was and different from other boys.
The door opened and my father got behind the wheel. The light had come on for a moment when he opened the door, and I saw that in addition to being drenched, he was shaken. He put both his hands together on the steering wheel and rested his head on them. After a moment I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder, but he straightened up then, started the car, and we drove off without talking. I don’t remember where we were going.
We seemed to spend a lot of time in our separate pasts, with our separate griefs, as we walked side by side taking turns throwing sticks to the dog. The baseball field where I’d been shamed and humiliated was flooded and entirely under water, and I felt some delight at this without giving it much thought. When my father spoke again, I was surprised that he was still thinking of his friend.
“You were probably too young to remember him,” he said, heaving a good-sized stick into the water. The creek was high; the weeping willows trailed downstream in the clay-colored current. The dog plunged in without hesitating and, swimming with the current, gained on his prize.
“He was the kind of friend…You always want to have a friend like that. I remember his burial. Did I ever tell you about this? It was a shock if you weren’t expecting it. The coffin’s sitting there over the hole on those canvas straps, you know. Then the priest walks around sprinkling the whole thing with holy water. So far so good. But all of a sudden he throws a shovelful of dirt on the casket. Dirt! Rocks! Boom, just like that. It shook me up. He was Hungarian, Johnny, and that’s what they do, I guess. But up to then it was nothing out of the ordinary. None of the Hunkies thought nothing of it, but now I’m worried we’re going to have to stay and watch them lower the box and fill up the hole and I couldn’t take that. I never seen anything like it really. It seems like a horrible custom. Maybe if I was expecting it. It don’t give much comfort to the people who are left behind.”
We watched the dog take the stick in his teeth and turn, or try to; it was all he could do to keep his head above the water.
I was thinking of what my father said, especially the word dirt. Earth, I thought, not dirt. I was struck by how strange and right it seemed that we use the same word for a trowel of it or the whole of it.
The dog paddled harder and harder, swept downstream, until my father and I seemed to become alarmed at the same moment.
“Damn stupid dog!” my father muttered. “Look at him.”
I began to make my way along the soggy bank as best I could.
“Let go of the god-damned stick, you dumb dog!” my father shouted. “Let go of the stick!”
I was trying to run now, slipping and sliding in the wet, spongy grass. Just as the creek began to bend, and he would have disappeared from view, he let go of the stick and struggled across the current until, after two or three tired attempts, he managed to climb onto the bank.
When I got to him, he was retching and coughing, and as I squatted down to pet him, my father called, “Come here, boy. Come on, boy. Come on.” The dog straightened, shook himself all over, sneezed, and trotted off to its master.
When I rejoined them, my father was on his knees with his arms around the panting wet animal. “If I lost this dog, I don’t know what I’d do,” he said, while the dog nuzzled and licked him and he thumped its side. “I don’t know what I’d do.” He attached the leash to the dog’s collar.
And then he stood up, his face streaked with mud, and stared into the distance as if he were listening for something. After a long moment’s reverie he turned to me and said, “What do you say we head up to the cemetery for a while?”
THE DOG TURNED around and around in the back seat, smearing the windows with its wet tail, considering how to make itself comfortable. My father started the car, released the brake, and stepped on the gas before I’d even shut my door. The dog lurched, regained its footing, then curled itself on the folded blanket and snorted. My father drove as if his fresh tears were something he’d just remembered to tell my mother or one of my brothers and he was worried he might forget. He gunned the engine, ran the yellow lights, peeled rubber on turns. We rode with our elbows out the windows, and neither of us spoke until we turned at the break in the stone wall onto the gravel cemetery road.
“Let’s head up this way first,” he said, turning sharply to the right. We were going too fast and fishtailed a little on the gravel.
“Your grandparents are buried up here, near your uncle Francis’s first wife, Flo.” I knew this of course. We skidded and stopped.
“Roll up your window partway so the dog don’t get out and shit all over the place,” he said, rolling his halfway as example. Then he slammed the door and walked quickly down the row of headstones to his parents’ graves as if he were late for an appointment.
Although he hadn’t said so, I knew he wanted to be alone. I leaned against the car, surprised we had stopped here first; usually we paid a brief visit to this part of the cemetery just before we left to go home.
EARLIER, OVER MORNING coffee, we’d talked about my grandparents. I remembered that when Bob and I were little we asked Dad about the brown necklace of scar around Mommom’s throat.
“I guess they just opened her up like this,” Dad told us gesturing with his finger from ear to ear. “And they tipped back her head, took the bad thing out, and sewed her back up again.”
“What was in her throat?” Bob asked. “Did she get a frog in her throat?”
“She had a goiter in her throat.”
“Stupid,” I said to Bob. We had already discussed this. A goiter, I had informed him, was a kind of cross between a worm and a snake.
When we visited we seldom got farther than the vestibule before Mommom would give us each an apple. I remember Bob biting his while Dad was still tugging off his other coat sleeve. My grandmother believed in apples. Apples on arriving, and one piece of hard candy each when our coats were back on to go home.
And, according to my father, she also believed in whippings, with belts, hairbrushes, coat hangers, and spatulas.
“But I always knew she loved me,” he said. “I always deserved it. Pappy couldn’t whip me after his accident, so it was up to my mother to keep me out of trouble.”
“He fell from a ladder?”
“From a scaffold. It damn near killed him. Killed his partner. Pappy landed on his feet and shattered them and drove his leg bones right up through his hips. His partner landed on his back on the brick pile. Pappy was in the hospital for a long time before we were even sure he’d live.”
“Was he compensated? Did they give him some kind of disability pension or something? He worked over at Mack, right?”
“That’s right. Well, they ended up taking care of him pretty good. After he got out of the hospital, he had to show up for work at eight o’clock every morning to blow the whistle. That became his job. He blew the whistle in the morning, and then at lunchtime, and again at quitting. It may have been Pappy’s fault, or his partner’s. I don’t know. I think my mother blamed it on the dead guy. Nobody will ever know for sure. The scaffold was one of those you hook over the top of the wall and they didn’t secure it right, and the damn thing just dumped them. They must have been about three stories off the ground. He was never the same after that. Well, you remember he always walked with a cane. Mostly after that he sat around and drank beer, I guess.”
“And chewed tobacco I remember. He used to have his Maxwell House can right next to his chair.”
“That’s right.”
“Bob and I used to make up stories about how he lost his finger. Was it his left hand or his right? His index finger was just a little stump.”
“His left. He had an accident with a saw.”
“One of us—I don’t remember if it was me or Bob—came up with the idea that the Communists had chopped it off. I don’t know why except that the nuns told us that’s what the Indians did to Isaac Jogues and we just always made the Communists the bad guys. I remember it was blue.”
“Oh, he had lousy circulation. He used to stick it in his coffee to warm it up. He had lousy circulation period; he smashed so many blood vessels in his legs and feet.”
“I remember he always wore those high black shoes.”
“And heavy socks. He could never keep his feet warm. He usually kept a little whiskey close by to warm him up. Of course he always liked his whiskey anyway. I never saw him drunk or anything like that, but I remember even back when he was still working, my mother would mix a raw egg in a double shot of brandy for him every morning for his breakfast.”
“Hangover medicine.”
“I don’t know. My mother just said it was to get him going in the morning.”
I kept quiet. The morning eye-opener and the severed finger and the deadly scaffold blunder were adding up in my mind. But the word “alcoholic” meant different things to each of us. To me it meant one who had become addicted to alcohol and whose life was skewed and distorted by that thirst and the need to hide it from others and oneself. I suspected that, to my father, even coming on the heels of my disclosure, it would ring with accusation and condemnation, and I had no such intention.
My father sighed. “When you were little, he used to slip me a few extra bucks once in a while to help out, but he didn’t seem to want to have much to do with you kids. I don’t know. I guess I never really had anything with my dad.” He slowly shook his head and his eyes welled with tears. “No, I don’t believe there was really anything between us. Like I said, it was really my mother who raised me. And my sister, Kitty.”
THE DOG MANAGED to get its head through the narrow opening on the driver’s side. It barked once, then panted with its tongue hanging out. I scratched the top of its head and watched my father until he moved his body a certain way, shifted his weight slightly, and I knew it was okay to join him.
The ground was wet and spongy. My father turned as I came up to him, and with his face flushed and his cheeks wet, he smiled. “I was remembering the bread store my mom and dad ran during the Depression.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why. Boy, I tell you I could almost smell that bread.”
There was a pot of hyacinths, ragged from the storm, at the foot of the gravestone.
“Somebody’s been here,” I said.
“Kitty. She comes up here pretty regular. She always leaves some flowers and takes the dead ones away.”
“Do Francie and Willy still have the greenhouse?”
“Well, Francie has it. Willy’s dead. He died—it must be three, four years now. I didn’t tell you that story? Come on, let’s walk.”
We picked our way over the soggy ground gingerly, a hand on each other’s shoulder, at arm’s length, steadying ourselves.
“I don’t know what you remember about Willy. I think he was basically the guy that made the deliveries and Francie was the gardener, or florist, or whatever you want to call it. He always tried to be the tough guy, skinny little pisser that he was. So one day he’s delivering some flowers to a house, or a potted plant or whatever the hell it was—it doesn’t matter—and there’s a carpenter or a painter or something, a colored guy, working in the doorway. So Willy tells the guy to move, and the guy says just a minute while I finish this, or something like that. And Willy—I guess you would call him a racist; he was always prejudiced—says something—I don’t know—calls the guy a nigger, like ‘Get out of my way, nigger,’ and the guy gives him a push and Willy goes backward down the front steps and, boom, he has a heart attack, just like that.”
We walked toward my mother and brothers’ graves, away from the car, and the dog barked on and on.
“What happened to the other guy?”
“He went to jail. Manslaughter, I guess. Oh, Francie was going to kill him. Saying she was going to hire somebody to kill him. You couldn’t talk sense to either of them, her nor Kitty. Nobody even knows what happened for sure. The other guy, the colored guy, was sorry. He was the one who called for the ambulance. It don’t seem fair, but I guess a life was lost and they couldn’t just let him go. Willy always was a big mouth. You talk like that to people long enough, eventually you get what you deserve.”
We stopped beneath the great crucifix that rises from a rocky mound, planted with flowers, in the middle of the place.
“Will you listen to that god-damned dog,” my father said.
“Should we go back and get him?”
“Argh! What for? He don’t like being in the car, that’s all. Come on; we’re over here somewhere.”
I hesitated.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” I was afraid. And surprised by my fear. What would happen when we stood by those graves together? What if he went to pieces now—could I care for him? And what if I broke down and fell apart in front of him—would I feel ashamed again? I didn’t know whether I was more afraid of my father’s grief or my own. I wished we hadn’t stopped, because now I couldn’t move my feet. My father was waiting. The dog was barking on and on.
“Here, give me your hand.”
I did.
“Here. Over here it’s not too wet. Step there. You see that spot? There. There you go. Now jump this swampy spot. Okay?”
I didn’t believe for a moment that he thought I was worried about getting my feet wet. I jumped to the gravel road, and he let go of my hand.
“Thanks.”
WE ALWAYS STAND beside the graves, or at the foot, and we walk around them as if the mounded earth had never settled or the torn sod healed. So I stood at the foot of the graves, and my father stood beside them with his head bowed. He appeared to be praying.
I was trying to feel my mother’s presence. I figured that here at her grave I should be able to talk to her. From time to time since her death I had spoken to her, bringing her up to date about my life. It was more rhetoric than necromancy, like writing a letter to someone who you know will never read it. On occasion I had found myself talking to my brothers in the same way. I always spoke to Mike as if he were thirteen, his age when he died. When I spoke to Bob, he was in his late teens, the age I left him for New York, for college, and I always spoke of the places I’d been and things I’d seen just as I had during those years when, visiting home, I tried to bring back some of the world for him. Now I couldn’t address them, and I felt empty.
“Room for one more here,” my father said.
I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure what he meant. There is space on the headstone for a fourth name, I thought; that must be it.
“That’s my spot, right there,” he said. “That’s where you’re to plant me, you hear? Right there. It’s already paid for. I’ll show you when we get home. The papers are in a special place, in a steel box, with the insurance stuff and my will and other things you’ll need to take care of. I’ll show you where it is when we get home. It’s important you remember where it is. It’s all taken care of ahead of time, so you shouldn’t have any trouble when the time comes.”
I felt annoyed. I had thought we’d come here to grieve together, and here he was, juggling self-pity with fatherly instructions. I knew the gray steel box he meant.
But I had also heard the sardonic note of the verb “plant,” and, looking at his face, I suddenly heard, loud and clear, his desperate wish to be the next to die. It frightened me.
“What do you mean, ‘when the time comes’?”
“Just what I said. Oh. No, no, no, relax. I’m feeling good. Oh, hell, I plan to be around another twenty-five or thirty years. No. Don’t you worry. You and your brother will be cursing the old bastard for being such a stubborn son of a bitch.” He took out a handkerchief, blew his nose, and smiled.
And I heard what he said, all of it, as if it were a prayer: that he should be buried here, that he should not die soon, and that Joe and I should survive him—that above all: that he should not have to bury another of his children.
“Nah,” I said. “We’ll give you another thirty years or so, but you stick around for too much longer after that and we might start cursing you.”
He grinned. “Let me go get the dog before he pisses all over the car. I’ll be back.”
I watched him walk up the gravel road. It occurred to me that for years I had been talking to him the way I talk to the dead, conjuring an image of him that was both simple and paradoxical. It was as if he had died when I was ten, when I found myself unable to tell him about Tom, and how ashamed and frightened I was, and I survived to piece together what would always remain, mostly, a ten-year-old’s impressions. “I guess I never really had anything with my dad.” He walked over the crest of the hill and after a few more moments the dog stopped barking.
IF I COULDN’T SPEAK to my mother, or to either of my brothers, even for my own sake, and if I didn’t believe that they could answer me, what was I doing here? What does this mean? I asked myself. What does it mean that they have perished and I am standing here, their bodies under this ground? I had no idea.
Suddenly I had a memory, almost a sensation, of the feel of my brother Bob’s shoulders, his arms and neck, when we were little, wrestling on our bedroom floor. For one split second I could feel the texture of his skin, the hair on the nape of his neck, and I cried out. In an instant all the perplexity that death had interposed between our bodies vanished, and I knew again that grief is desire. I squatted on my heels, leaning against the smooth back of a stranger’s gravestone, and I let my body heave and sob and moan until it was done.
AT ONE POINT I went upstairs and found myself wandering from room to room, touching the walls and smelling the various familiar scents of the house as it came alive for me again. There was nothing very conscious about it, and I don’t remember feeling good or bad or even nostalgic, but I had the sense that I was reacquainting myself with the place in an animal way.
I walked into the front bedroom. The dresser and the tall bureau were familiar, along with the matching night table next to my parents’ bed. Above the bed the plaster was still chipped white where I’d removed the crucifix from the wall when my mother was dying; the crucifix itself lay flat on top of the bureau now, next to an upright photo sculpture of my father, eighteen or nineteen years old, in boots and combat fatigues, his parachutes on, front and back, smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign. He had sent the picture home before his unit went into combat. My grandmother had it fashioned into this two-dimensional copper-backed statue that she kept on a shelf in her dining room, the middle room downstairs, where I’d first seen it when I was a boy. Whenever we came here to visit, Bob and I asked to see it up close, and usually Mommom would take it down for us and let us handle it, always reminding us to be careful.
I was interested in the equipment. At the Army & Navy store Dad bought me a pair of combat boots to go along with the woven belt and the canteen that hooked in the brass eyelets of the belt so it would ride your hip the way the real G.I.s wore them, and the helmet liner with the leather chin strap I liked to suck on, but the boots were the wrong kind. Paratroopers couldn’t wear such clunky brown boots, because you could foul your parachute on the buckles; instead, they wore high black boots that laced all the way to the top, and shined them daily “until you could see your face in them,” my father said. I looked at the large pack on his back that contained the main parachute, and the smaller rolled emergency chute across his belly. I used to stare at this image and marvel at his courage. He was about to get on a plane that would drop him from the sky over enemies that would try to kill him even before he reached the ground, and he was grinning and giving the thumbs-up sign to the camera like a ballplayer stepping up to the plate.
Like other boys, I suspect, I thought of growing up only as getting bigger and stronger; I had no notion of myself as changing or developing. So my question was not whether one day I would have the courage to do something as heroic as my father had done during the war, but could I do it at all, or was I a coward? When I set my imagination to work on that question, all I could manage to feel, closing my eyes and falling through the sky, was terror. If my father had this courage, then maybe he could give it to me. So I asked him questions.
He had a yearbook, like a college yearbook, from the Army jump school, with his unit’s insigne on the cover: Airborne Infantry, it said, above a maroon shield with a gold winged unicorn on it. The inside cover was a color picture of a bright blue sky filled with hundreds of white parachutes, brilliant in the sun. Like the shoulder patches, ribbons, paratrooper wings and other regalia he let me handle, the yearbook stirred me. I saw my father as a member of an elite. A lot of my questions, about equipment, procedures, situations, were really ways of trying to discover why he was so powerful and I was not.
“How come these guys have sneakers on?”
“You don’t get your jump boots till after your first jump—that’s your graduation; you get your wings and your boots.”
“What if they give you a parachute that doesn’t work?”
“If it doesn’t work, it’s your own damn fault. You pack your own chute. That’s what those long tables are for.” I was looking at a picture of an instructor showing his students how to fold the silk chutes, and tuck them into the pack. “The first jump, your jumpmaster packs your chute for you. After that you’re on your own.”
I figured I could never do that. Dad had made me a parachute for one of my green rubber infantrymen with a handkerchief and some string, and no matter how carefully I folded it, when I threw it up in the air, the soldier tangled in the string or the chute didn’t open at all. I would probably ball it all up and kill myself.
“You’re about as useful as a left-handed pisspot,” he said to me sometimes when I was supposed to be helping him but didn’t know what to do. I didn’t understand the expression. On another occasion he asked me to steady a plank he was sawing, but I was too light to keep it from moving. He barked, “For Christ’s sake, you’re about as useful as a prick on a priest!” and by then I understood him only too well.
I had also seen paratroopers jumping from planes in the documentaries of World War II on television. Secretly I watched closely to see if Dad was in the movie. My imagination always seized on that moment when each successive paratrooper poised in the doorway until the jumpmaster slapped him on the shoulder.
“What if you got to the doorway and you were too scared to jump?”
“Then you got the jumpmaster’s boot in your ass before you had a chance to shit your pants. That happened to a lot of guys.”
I never asked him if it happened to him, although I must have wanted to.
“Did you really yell ‘Geronimo!’ when you jumped?”
“It don’t make no difference what you yell; nobody can hear you anyway.”
A KID WHO loved baseball, my father was taught to black his face and kill with his bare hands. He was thrown from a plane with a rifle, a bayonet strapped to his leg, and grenades on his chest. His eyes and ears alert with mortal terror, he hit, crumpled, rolled.
For all my questions, I never learned what happened to him. Once when I asked him if he had ever killed anyone, he said, “That’s nothing to be proud of.” During the war in Vietnam, while I was in college, he laughed at any talk of heroism. “You do what you need to survive and get home. All these fuckin’ star-spangled assholes watched it through binoculars. They make me sick.”
I imagined my father, schooled in fierceness, home from the war, marching under ticker tape and a blizzard of confetti, as I’d seen it on television over and over when I was a boy. I thought of him marching away from the slaughter with the others, in formation, empty rifles on their shoulders, just the way they’d hoped it would be, but hollow and hungover and mistaking, like all survivors, relief for pleasure, the absence of horror for peace, conventionality for safety. His dreams were gone, his memories buried. He raised his glass to the future. He married my mother. He went to work in the brewery.
Ashes. Amnesia. Anesthesia.
And rage.
NOW, FORTY-ONE YEARS OLD, I looked at the cutout photo of a grinning nineteen-year-old paratrooper, and I noticed that he wore no helmet and carried no weapons. He was not on his way to battle. He was having his picture taken. He was a son, not yet a soldier. And he was nobody’s father. I looked a long time at his face, his eyes. This is the way he wanted his parents to see him and the way he wanted to be remembered if he didn’t return.
It is the only picture of him in the house, propped up here on his bureau, in his bedroom’s privacy. I wondered if he sat sometimes, right where I was sitting, and stared at it blankly, confounded as I am by the picture of myself at eight years old.
When my father was my age, forty-one, I was twenty, already a year older than he is in the picture, and only one year younger than he was when I was born. I thought of myself as a young man, tearing my knuckles punching trees and parking meters, drunk and enraged, and always with an audience.
“Stay clear of him. He’s fucking crazy.”
“No, no. He’s a poet. He feels things deeply.”
Those were the responses I counted on. The men and most of the women turned away. Almost always some young woman pitied me and took me to her bed.
What kind of father would I have been?
I went downstairs. It was quiet, the television off. My father was just taking off his glasses and putting aside my picture.