After Visiting Friends (13 page)

We’re into it now. Lunch on the table. Three drinks in each of us. I tell him that
one thing I still can’t get a handle on is what happened to my father the night he
died. Who are these friends? Did you hear of anyone who was with him that night?

“What are you saying?” he asks me.

“I’m saying that it doesn’t add up. What’s in the obits and all.”

“Look, I never had any clue as to what the guy’s interests were. Fishing? Hunting?
Ball games? No. I think he was one of those guys who lived for the paper. It was his
whole life.”

“But from the perspective of a newspaperman, doesn’t it seem like the story doesn’t
square?”

“What are you saying?”

“He was with someone that night.”

Stormy waves his hand in front of his face. Takes a slurp of his J&B.

“Look, the guy was no Paul Newman.”

“But—”

“But what? Here’s one for you: Maybe he was with a gay that night.”

“Was he?”

“No! But it’s just as crazy an idea as him being with a woman!”

“I never said he was with a woman. I just said he was with someone. The obits said
he had been visiting friends.”

Stormy nods to the waiter in a red jacket and holds up his glass, then knocks back
the last of the Scotch. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“What does it matter? He’s dead.”

Stormy looks around the room for his drink. Head tilted up, like a man searching for
his driver at airport arrivals. He’s silent. When his drink appears at last, he gulps
it in. Again with the hand wipe.

“Didja know Fire Commissioner Quinn went to your dad’s wake? Mayor Daley couldn’t
go, so he sent Quinn.”

“Why would Daley have gone?”

“He always went to newspapermen’s funerals. It was good for business.”

Stormy refuses to let me pay. On our way out, more hugs, more backslapping. Then we
open the door, stand blinking in the harsh white late-afternoon sunlight.

Stormy puts his hand on my shoulder.

“Know where we gotta go? Billy Goat. We should do one there. See some of the old gang.”

#

Billy Goat is pretty much empty. A couple of wiry old guys sit at the bar, beers in
front of them. We find a table in the back. The walls are crammed with grainy, faded
photographs of newspapermen and athletes like Stan Mikita, Bobby Hull. We order more
drinks, and Stormy grabs his and wanders about the room, looking at the photographs
and framed old clippings, pointing at each of them as he moves down the wall.

“Harry Romanoff. Dead. Tom Fitzpatrick. Dead. Jack Griffin. Dead. Dave Condon. Dead.
Kup. Dead. Royko. Jesus. Look at ’em all, will ya?”

He raises his J&B to the wall and takes a swig, then drops his head and stares at
his feet. He’s quiet. Then—his head pops up.

“Hey, what time is it?”

“Just about four,” I tell him.

“Jesus, I gotta catch a train.”

Outside, Stormy shakes my hand. His eyes look like bloodshot oysters.

“This was a good day,” he says. “Your old man was a good man. Remember that.”

Then he turns. I watch him walk down Hubbard Street, across Rush Street, westward.
The sun is low and sharp. All I can see is the backlit outline of him as he ambles
toward the train. I wonder how my father would be now, if he were alive. And maybe,
I think, maybe it’s better not to know.

I climb out from lower Hubbard Street, take the stairs up to Michigan Avenue. There’s
a spot near Michigan Avenue and Chicago Avenue where, if one stands just so, the old
Water Tower appears in the foreground and the Hancock Building looms high behind it.
The Water Tower—storied survivor of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The Hancock—symbol
of the new Chicago—built one hundred years later.

I stand there for a moment, my package still strong, trying to take stock of what
I learned today. I’m only two friends in, but these guys stick together. I’m convinced
they know more than they are telling me.

#

October 1971. Second grade. We celebrate the centennial of the Great Chicago Fire.
For a whole week, our teacher makes us examine the legend of Mrs. O’Leary. Filmstrips
every day. The lesson: Here is the city this woman begat. All because she had to have
some milk in the night.

The cow kicked the lantern and the city kicked the bucket. A city built of nothing
but wood.

“Can you understand that, children? How careless our forefathers were? Wood! Not like
today. See our walls? Cinder block. Stone. No conflagration will touch us.”

I look at the map projected on the screen. “The Swath of Destruction,” it says. From
one woman, all of this blooms. The blackness bleeding out from one home. In one night,
a city destroyed.

More images unspool. People huddle in the lake, desperate to escape the flames. Embers
of pine, red-orange remains of someone’s home, fall all about them,
ssss
-ing into the water.

Ding!

The filmstrip demands our attention. Our teacher moves it forward.

#  #  #

The next night, after my session with Stormy, my friend John comes to my mother’s.
We’ve been best friends since we were fourteen. He’s looking at snapshots my mother
has on her refrigerator—the grandkids, my brother, me. He taps a photo of me at my
desk in New York. My mother took it last time she came to see me. She almost never
takes photos of me.

“I want to take your picture,” she said, waving her disposable.

“Okay,” I say.

“Good,” my mother says, looking through her lens. “I needed to kill this.”

John taps the photo. “Is this your dad?”

“That’s me.”

“I could’ve sworn it’s him. It looks like a picture I feel I’ve seen of him.”

#

My mother goes to bed. John and I sit at the kitchen table. I tell him what I’m working
on. All these years, and I’ve never told him of the mystery. We decide to drive to
the 3900 block of North Pine Grove. I need to see it. Walk it.

It’s a T intersection with Irving Park Road. Two enormous high-rises hulk on the southwest
and southeast corners. Honey locust trees that were no more than saplings when my
father died on the street. Are these the only remaining witnesses?

I was hoping for something big. Something hiding in plain view. Part of me was even
believing that we’d turn the corner and see him crumpled in the street. I know that
I can’t save him. But I want to see it. It is our human need—to circle back to the
stations of our sorrow.

#

I understand you now, those of you who build your roadside shrines.

Your frail white cross, lashed to the guardrail. Two wooden garden stakes bound with
rusted wire. Your son’s name, stenciled. Or your wife’s. A plastic bouquet. Faded
flag. We see your shrine as we speed by, rounding our curve. A glint of color catches
our eye. Maybe remnants of that weathered teddy bear. All of it marking that place
where someone loved left the road.

The sod black and torn. The gap in the guardrail. The tree trunk, shorn.

It is our need to mark. To witness. Our need to create sacred ground.

“History happened here,” guidebooks like to say.

No, we say—personal history ended here.

#

I think about a show I saw on TV. Scientists looking for an “impact crater” from what
they believed killed off the dinosaurs. Without a crater, no one believes them. So
the men spend their lives searching the earth for a depression that’s big enough.
The place where they can stand and say, “This is what remains.”

#

And standing there with John, my lifelong friend, I wonder what kind of friends would
watch my father die. And then never speak of it again?

I think of what Wiley said: You know how guys are.

Is this what unknowability is?

#

John and I head back to my mother’s, up Lake Shore Drive—the lake black and empty,
wind blowing off of it, filling our car. John playing Johnny Cash. The album he did
before he died. We drive through the summer streets. Not talking. Because we don’t
have to talk.

We stop at Superdawg. The lady comes to our car and takes our order. Like it’s still
1961. We order Whoopercheesies, fries. The works. Sit there, eating, watching the
traffic lights and cars coming and going on Milwaukee Avenue. Across the way, the
forest preserve is quiet, dark. As a boy, I sledded there on the ancient toboggan
runs. No one able to steer.

A car drives by, no headlights.

“Lights!” John yells. “Hey, lights! Lights!”

I yell, too.

No use. The driver drives on, into the night. Ghost-riding, we called that when I
was growing up.

“Guy’s gonna kill someone,” John says.

#

The next morning, I eat breakfast with Detective Clemens, a Chicago Police Department
cold-case investigator I’ve made contact with, thinking that I need to check off with
him.

We meet at a diner near my mother’s house. I ask if he can pull the records of that
night.

“Was your old man murdered?”

“Not that I know.”

“Then there’s nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a burn. Standard procedure—if it ain’t a homicide, the file is burned after
a couple of years. I mean, unless there’s something special about your old man. Is
there?”

“Special?”

“Yeah.” He stabs his spoon in and out of his oatmeal.

“No.”

#

Later that morning I get an e-mail from Stormy:

Thanks for my enjoyable, if prolonged, lunch. Hope you were in better shape than James
B., my twin brother reportedly at Gene & Georgetti’s. Keep in touch, your friend James
B. a.k.a. Stormy.

It’s an e-mail from a man who is comfortable in dualities. In wanting to be able to
pass off out-of-the-norm behavior on his “twin brother.” Maybe I’m a fool to believe
I can go back into the past and men will tell me the truth simply because I ask them
to. Maybe I’m as naive now as I was at six.

#  #  #

I leave Chicago.

At O’Hare, sitting at the gate, waiting for the others to board, I look out my window.
A dog jumps out of its cage, runs across the
tarmac, toward a fence. Two burly men—their orange mesh vests flapping in the wind—chase
after it. All too soon, they’re out of view.

On the flight, I drink bad wine and take stock. I keep thinking, Why didn’t you do
any of this when Uncle Dick and Aunt Helen were alive?

My uncle had a son. My cousin Mark. He was a junior in college, living at home, that
spring my father died. Our families grew apart, so I never really knew Mark. I probably
haven’t spoken to him in more than thirty years. But I also know that I have to report
all the angles.

A few years earlier, I received a Christmas card from him. He was living near Des
Moines. He’d moved there to work on the
Register
. I remember the Christmas letter had his e-mail address. I dig out the card. Send
him an e-mail.

Mark,

I know it’s been a long time. I have a favor to ask. I’m working on a story about
Bob. Would you have time in the next week or so to talk?

Best,

Mike

A day later:

Mike,

Sundays are best.

Mark

Crisp blue autumn Sunday in New York. The kind of day that can break your heart, it’s
so perfect. The kind of sky and sun you imagine when you imagine moving here.

I call my cousin. For the next hour, Mark tells me stories about
our family. He tells me how our grandfather, C.P., went to McCook in the early days
of the twentieth century. Orphaned, he always claimed. Tells me how he worked on the
railroad, hustled stray jobs here and there.

“On weekends, C.P. booked bands for dances in McCook. He bragged about how he managed
Lawrence Welk and his Hotsy Totsy Boys when Welk was just some hick out of North Dakota.
I have no idea if it’s true. He also told me stories about how he worked in the circus,
pitching tents and carnival barking.”

He tells me how my father was, in the words of Dick, “the best newspaperman of his
generation, head and shoulders above everyone else.” Then he asks me, “You know C.P.
was a drinker, right?”

“Yeah, I’d heard that.”

“Did you ever hear this story?”

He tells me how C.P. got drunk one night after work and wandered to the switching
yard, then crawled into a boxcar and passed out.

“When he comes to, it’s morning. He stumbles out of the boxcar. Figures he needs to
be getting home. Figures he can be home in time for breakfast. But as he starts up
the street, he can’t get his bearings. So he says to someone, ‘Hey—which way is Norris
Avenue?’ The guy says, ‘Norris Avenue? There’s no Norris Avenue in Denver.’ C.P. stands
there blinking and says, ‘What? Where am I?’ The guy says, ‘I told you—Denver.’ C.P.
got so loaded he didn’t notice when they hooked up the boxcar and hauled him to Denver.”

After an hour or so along these lines I say, “My father’s obituaries say he died after
visiting friends or after leaving the home of a friend. But I’ve never heard anyone
talk about that night. It seems odd that in all these years I’ve never met anyone
who was there that night. Or even heard a name. I mean, something doesn’t add up.”

There’s silence.

Then: “I always knew this day was going to come, and I always knew it was going to
be you. That you were going to figure it out. Even when you were a kid, I could see
it in you. When I got your
e-mail, after not hearing from you for years, I knew. I debated what I’d say. And
I decided that if you asked me, I’d tell you.”

“Why?”

“It’s your right to know the truth. Don’t you think?”

“Absolutely.”

“Here’s all I can tell you. I’m home that night. In my room. Upstairs. It’s late.
Two thirty, maybe. The phone outside my door rings. My folks didn’t have one in their
bedroom. Different times, you know? Anyway, my dad answers. And I can hear him giving
instructions. Invoking
Chicago Today
and his title. After maybe fifteen minutes, he hangs up. I open my door. He’s standing
there, my mother next to him. He looks at me and says, ‘Bob’s dead.’ Next thing I
know he’s left the house.”