After Visiting Friends (19 page)

The woman just looks at me and she says, “What you need to do is tell that story.
God wants you to tell that story.”

She smiles. She’s soothing. Middle-aged. She has a tight Afro with wet curls and wears
large-framed purple glasses. The kind where the temples are on the down side of the
frame.

“My name’s Jan Scott,” she says. And she puts two fingers through the hole.

I tell her my name and I touch her two fingers.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Michael.”

I look at her desk. She has two books open, side by side.

“You read two books at a time?”

“No, honey child. This is one book in two pieces. Old Testament here”—she pats the
book on the left—“New Testament here”—she pats the book on her right. “
Only
way to read God’s word. Side by side. We must understand what the Lord foretold and
we must remember what the Lord delivered unto us. We must know the past, but we must
also be prepared for the afterlife.” She smiles. “Do you pray, Michael?”

“I don’t.”

She reaches out. Puts her fingers through the hole. This time, all of them.

“Take my hand.”

I knit my fingers to her fingers, hook them up against the Plexiglas. I look at her
and her head is lowered. I do the same.

“Lord, watch over your servant as he goes forward on the quest
you have foreordained. Give him strength. Protect him from doubt and fear. The path
to truth can be dark at times. But let him know you are with him. Show him the way.
Amen.”

I raise my head. She’s smiling.

“Just remember, Michael. Wherever you go—life . . . life is all.”

As she tells me this I have but one feeling: shame. That shame that engulfs me in
the presence of a true believer. That shame at my inability to match her faith. The
shame of my fallen-ness.

She squeezes my hand.

“Life, Michael. It’s everything.”

Just as we’re letting go, the metal door next to her box opens. A man walks out. He’s
thick, balding. Looks like he could be a construction foreman or a high school football
coach. No-nonsense is the M.O. He’s got a short-sleeve yellow shirt and a moss-green
tie.

“You here for Miss Crenshaw?”

“I am.”

“Floyd Gartman. Supervisor. Come with me.”

He leads me through the door and tells me to sit at a table.

I say, “So, is this the morgue for the whole city?”

Mr. Gartman peers over his glasses, says, “Yes. Where the dead come to live.”

I have the feeling he’s said it before. And he goes on to tell me Miss Crenshaw is
running late. Then he walks away.

#

Ten thirty, a woman walks in. She’s young. Maybe late twenties. Tight jeans, Timberlands,
a tight pink velour sweater. She’s straightened her Afro into a Dorothy Hamill–style
bob.

“How y’all doing? I’m Miss Crenshaw.”

And she smiles this big smile.

“I’m sorry I’m late, but my car broke down.” Which means, she says, that we can’t
get to the Records Building to get my father’s files.

“You mean you haven’t already pulled them?”

“I’m sorry!” she says. And then she covers her mouth and giggles. It’s totally fetching.

I tell her I have a car. She says first we have to find my father’s case number. She
reaches toward a slag pile of ledgers behind me. Each the size of a world atlas. All
bound in faded blue bindings. Each bearing a year, written in ink, from 1880 forward.
She drops 1970 between us. And she tells me that anyone who dies under suspicious
circumstances in Cook County, that death results in an automatic inquest.

“Was your father murdered?”

“The story is he was found dead on the street by two cops and brought to a hospital.”

“That means he was D.O.A. Now, any D.O.A., they has to be inquested because the police
has found the body. So, till the coroner knows how the person died, it’s considered
suspicious and criminal.”

She turns 1970’s faded pages and finds April 24. Name after name, all entered in neat,
perfect Palmer script.

“Now, we need his case number if we want to find his file in the warehouse.”

I look along the page, next to his name: 249.

#

We get in my rented Century. The Records Building is ten minutes away. It looks like
it could’ve been a factory. Something repurposed. At the end of the street, a freight
train rumbles north, a long row of cars in tow.

“If anyone gives you grief,” Miss Crenshaw says as she leaves me waiting in the parking
lot, “just tell them, ‘I’m morgue.’ ”

If the morgue is where, as Mr. Gartman says, the dead go to live, the Records Building
is where they go to be inventoried. Call it the Final Accounting. Floors of files.
Row after row of files, one for every person who has died in Cook County.

Inside, my father’s life, reduced to weights and measures: Coroner’s report #249 of
April 1970.

Seven things I learn about my father while reading his Pathological Report and Protocol:

1. He was 5’10”. I always thought he was close to my height—6’3”.

2. He deserved his high school nickname (Bones): He weighed 145 pounds.

3. His eyes were hazel. I always thought they were like mine: brown.

4. “No external marks of violence” were found on his body.

5. His brain weighed 1,575 grams—slightly heavier than the average brain, which is
1,300–1,400 grams.

6. His heart was normal: 350 grams.

7. A “gaping defect” measuring 0.2 cm in his anterior communicating artery killed
him when it tore open, letting blood flood his brain: “spontaneous rupture of congenital
cerebral aneurysm, anterior communicating artery”—what doctors call the Thunderclap
stroke. One minute you’re alive, the next you’ve dropped dead.

Three things I learn while reading the Toxicologist’s Report on my father:

8. He had no barbiturates in his blood.

9. No opiates in his bile.

10. His blood alcohol level was .16—twice the legal limit for today.

I see how he died. And why. I see my mother signing her name.

But nowhere here does it say where he died. Nowhere here does it record any witnesses.
Any friends. And once again, his name is
misspelled. Robert Haney. And there, too, on the Toxicologist’s Report: Robert Hanley.

There’s still part of me that thinks this means he is not really dead.

#

Outside my Century, the sky is low, nothing but one giant gray cloud. Battered as
an old aluminum canoe.

I drive us back.

When we get to the morgue, Miss Crenshaw says, “Can you come in for a moment? I have
a favor.”

We walk inside, through the back door.

“Wait here,” and she points at the hallway outside her office.

A minute later she returns holding a pair of rose-tinted wraparound sunglasses. The
frame has a big rhinestone “G.”

“Maybe you know someone at Gucci?”

She holds up one of the temples. It is unattached.

“I love me my Gucci’s. I wear ’em when I’m out dancing. See the color of the lenses?
That pink? The boys go crazy for it.”

I hold out my hand. “I think I can do something,” I say.

“I told my girlfriend I was gonna ask you, but she didn’t believe I knew me a
GQ
man. She’s gonna die.”

“Well, you’re the best, Miss Crenshaw. Thank you for helping me today.”

I lean down and kiss her cheek.

“Don’t be doing that here! Mr. Gartman will be writing me up.”

#

I walk into the waiting room. Jan waves me over, wants to know what I found. I tell
her I didn’t get a name or address, that I’m dead-ended.

“Have you tried the police?”

“The only files going back that far are murders. Everything else is what they call
a ‘burn.’ They destroy it.”

“You have to go to the hospital where he was D.O.A.’d. Hospitals are like hornets—they
live on paper. Go to their records department. Believe me.”

She sticks her fingers through the hole.

I touch her hand once more and she takes hold of mine and says, “Jesus, protect Michael
on his journey. Keep him strong of heart as he does your work.”

#  #  #

I leave the morgue behind, head east to Lake Shore Drive, then north, to the hospital.
Beside me, Lake Michigan is purple-black. The way it gets this time of year. A cold
cauldron of winter storms waiting to be. November.

I love this drive. The city on my left, the lake on my right. This is the route he
would’ve taken that night. I see him in his LeSabre. Window down. Cool air streams
in. The air that night rich with the first whiffs of spring. Maybe the radio’s on.
The dashboard, big and wide. His face, illuminated from below. No seat belt. A time
before restraints.

His exit comes up—my exit, too: Irving Park Road.

Is this how it went?

A throbbing in his head. Everything blurry. He pulls over.

I need some air.

He opens the door, takes a step or two, and then—drops.

Is that it?

#

Until a few years ago, Thorek Memorial Hospital was called American Hospital. Max
Thorek, a surgeon from Budapest, opened it in 1911. A hospital for actors making movies.
Before Hollywood, there was Chicago. Hundreds of movies were shot near Pine Grove.
Selig Polyscope, started by a magician, was close by. Chaplin made some of his early
films at Essanay Studios on Argyle Street. In the hospital’s early days, Max and his
wife treated everyone from Mae West to Harry Houdini to Buffalo Bill. By the time
my father’s body was taken here, all the stars were gone. The neighborhood, redrawn.
After World War II, landlords chopped up apartments to take advantage of the housing
shortage created by returning GIs. Most places devolved into SROs, filled with Appalachians
who came looking for work. In the ’60s, developers built high-rises here for the young
urbans starting to push in. Still, in 1970, Thorek was more likely to be treating
stabbing victims and OD’s, not movie stars.

#

The records department is in the basement. When I walk in, all I see are wall-to-wall
workstations. One false wall linked to another. I feel people are here, but I can’t
see them. I hit the bell on the countertop. A woman’s head pops up from behind one
of the low walls.

“Whatchoo want?”

I tell her.

“Mister, we don’t have records that far back.”

Her head disappears.

I’m left talking to the wall. I say, “But can you check?”

The woman comes out. She’s large. A badge on her chest says Lynne. She walks slowly.
Like a linebacker after an overtime loss. When she gets to the countertop, she drops
her forearm on it and leans in on me and says, “Now, just whatchoo looking for?
Exactly.
”

I tell her. Again.

She cocks her head and yells, “Gail! We got records to 1970?”

#

When I started as a reporter, my first boss taught me a trick of the trade: I look
at my watch and say, “Where do you all get your coffee around here?”

“Coffee?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s almost three o’clock. I’m just going to run out for some. I figure
it must be time for your break. What can I bring back for you?”

“Mister, I
don’t
drink coffee. However, I do enjoy me some sweet tea.”

“What about your friend Gail?”

Lynne doesn’t even turn to the room. Just yells out, “Y’all want coffee? This man
here—what’s your name?”

“Michael.”

“Mr. Mike is buying coffees!”

Five heads pop up. All women. “Large coffee!” “Iced tea!” “Raisin scone.” “Cappuccino.”
A small white plastic fan is clamped to the wall, whirring away. Lynne says to one
woman, “I know, right? The boy crazy.”

And I say, “Maybe while I am getting coffee, you can check on those records?”

“You got a Social Security number for your father?”

“Right here.”

“Okay, Mr. Mike. I’ll see what I can do.”

#

“Coffee Man’s here,” I say half an hour later.

Women scurry to the counter. I feel like I’m handing out CARE packages. Lynne stirs
three packets of sugar into her sweet tea and takes a long sip before she says, “You’re
very nice, Mr. Mike. But I didn’t find anything.”

“Nothing?”

“No.”

“Is there a place where you store records? Somewhere else?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “We don’t go back that far.”

#  #  #

Thanksgiving—the day after the morgue. My brother’s house. My grandmother and my mother,
my brother and my brother’s wife and children sit at the kitchen table. The same one
that was in our kitchen when we were boys—and the same one that was in my mother’s
kitchen when she was a girl: My grandmother and grandfather bought it at Goldblatt’s
for twenty-five dollars when they got married. Hanging on the wall, a battered zither.
My father’s grandparents played it to entertain themselves in their sod house.

My brother and I sit on a bench on one side of the table, my nephew, Glenn, between
us. My mother and niece face us. At some point, my nephew reaches up and hooks one
hand on my shoulder, one on my brother’s. I put an arm around him and my brother does,
too. My nephew looks up at me, beaming. He looks at his father and beams at him. Pure
bliss on his face. And then he looks at the others. Looking to be witnessed. I can
feel—my palm flat against his boy-size back, a back still soft and in the process
of becoming—I feel him vibrating with pride. It dawns on me—he has reached territory
my brother and I never got to explore: He is a boy of eight, able to sit at Thanksgiving
and embrace his father and uncle at the same time. I envy him.

#

The next day, I visit my grandmother. She asks if I want some coffee cake. Apple with
streusel frosting that she keeps in a plastic bag with a green wire twist tie.

“I’ve been having dreams of Grampa,” she tells me. “It’s always the same. I’m cooking.
Chicken or a roast. Maybe a stick of sausage. And he’s at the table, waiting. But
he never says anything. And every time, the same thing happens. I’m missing one ingredient.
And right at the moment when I figure out I’m missing something, he disappears. Crazy,
isn’t it?”