After Visiting Friends (7 page)

My grandfather holds my hand. Somewhere at the bottom, in the darkness, I can see
myself. I let go of my grandfather’s hand, kneel down on the edge of the grate. I
find pebbles on the pavement. I drop one into the dark hole, then another, and a third.
My reflection, shattered. Ripples on the black water.

My grandfather presses more stones into my palm, says to me, “Maybe your father will
catch one.”

#  #  #

In junior high, I see a story in
Newsweek
about the USSR. This is around the time Brezhnev is fading. 1979. The story has two
photos: One shows a wall of grim, stiff men standing shoulder to shoulder on a reviewing
stand. It’s a May Day parade in Red Square. They are cloaked in heavy woolen coats
and homburgs. Some dress like military men. On the far end of the stage, a man salutes
an unseen crowd.

Next to this photo is its duplicate, except: The Saluting Man is gone. Where he was,
now there is nothing. A red circle around the spot where he stood: placed by the magazine—a
red circle to highlight his void. The caption informs readers that party officials
have removed him. “Purged,” they call it. The man never lived.

Everyone in the USSR knows his nonexistence is a lie, but no one will say anything.

What is a purge but a collective agreement not to speak of the dead? Complicit silence.
The mind, however, still remembers.

I marvel at the brazenness of Brezhnev: Did he believe he could force an entire people
to agree that this person didn’t exist? Surely everyone knows that the photograph
has been doctored. That a man with a name and a past and a family is now deleted.

And yet it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what the Soviet people thought, it didn’t
matter what the world thought, and it certainly didn’t matter what a boy in Chicago
thought. Life, I learned then, belongs not to the just but to those who do whatever
they must do in order to maintain their vision of reality. I had more in common with
those Soviet citizens than I knew. I learned never to mention the name of the nonperson.
I worked to crush my desire to know him and smother my instinct to keep him alive.

#

In the end, he lived on in scrapbooks. Six of them. Brittle, faded pages bound with
string. Out of these fragments, over the years, I created his narrative. And my narrative.

I discover the scrapbooks when I’m eight, wedged in a cabinet beneath the bookshelf.
They are my father’s life, created by his
mother. The books stop when he marries my mother. From boyhood to newspaperman, his
mother kept the evidence of a life lived. First-grade report card. Cub Scout awards.
Elementary-school class photos. Ticket stubs for football games (the scores noted
on them). Birthday cards. Mother’s Day cards he made for her. High school prom photographs.
The first stories he wrote for the
Tribune
. Stories about him from the
Omaha-World Herald
—such as the one from 1947 detailing how, as a boy of twelve, he delivered an award-winning
essay (“What New Horizons I See”) at the dedication of a Reclamation Bureau dam in
the Republican Valley. There is a photograph of him and his mother, the caption saying,
“Bob, a seventh-grader, says he hopes to be a newspaperman.”

I live in fear my mother will catch me. I have this idea that she will take my reading
of his scraps as a sign of disloyalty. I go to him in secret and in silence, and in
my time with him I try to make him whole again. Reconstruct him. The books are my
talismans, my way to conjure him. Maybe I could not raise him from the dead. But with
these scrapbooks, I could bring him to life.

#

What will be left of us when we are gone? My father? Bits of faded newsprint amid
sheaves of crumbling construction paper. Serrated-edged black-and-white photographs
shot by Kodak Brownies. A boy of six, on his back porch, hugging his black dog, squinting
into the great American Dust Bowl sun of 1939. A book of scraps. Brittle pages. It
was left to me to reassemble him. I learned to make sense of the remnants, to find
meaning in the missing pieces. A man of paper.

The more I touch it, the more it crumbles.

#  #  #

That fall, she signs up for figure-skating classes at the park district field house.

I ask why.

My mother tells me that if she could live her life over, she’d want to come back as
an Olympic figure skater. She says, “I just think it would be the best life ever.”

All through that fall she learns to skate.

“I’m learning the ice,” she tells me one morning. “Getting familiar with it. That’s
what we call it.”

I come home from school and she’s in her solitaire chair. But there are no cards on
the table. She’s just sitting there, her right arm before her, motionless and bright
white.

“I fell.”

She tells me she made a bad turn. Something in the ice. One of those things, she says.

“I tried to catch myself.”

She moves her arm. There’s a slight grinding sound, plaster on wood.

I ask her if I can sign it. She tells me no. She wants to keep the break clean.

#

Sometime after that, I’m reading the paper and I say to her, “What’s a mia?”

“MIA,” she says. “Missing in action. It’s a soldier who is not dead but not found.”

“So where are they?”

“Missing.”

“Are they ever coming home?”

“No. But no one will tell the family the truth. This way, the family can believe they
are still out there, somewhere.”

#  #  #

It’s Christmas that year. We’re at the mall. My mother goes her own way. My brother
and I head for the toy department. On the way there, I see a woman, dark-haired, in
front of a glass case. In it, she has metal bracelets. I pause.

“C’mon,” my brother says, and he keeps going.

The woman says, “Would you like one?” and hands a bracelet to me. A man’s name is
engraved on it.

“That’s the name of a man,” she says. “He might have a boy at home, just like you.”

She tells me that the bracelets are for men who are missing in Vietnam.

“Wouldn’t you like to keep a man’s memory alive? Maybe you can get your mother to
buy you one for Christmas.”

“My mother says these men are never coming back.”

The woman yanks the bracelet off my wrist and says, “If you don’t leave right now,
I’ll report you.”

#

When I got older, nine or so, I began to ride my bike to his cemetery.

Three and a third miles, door to gates.

The first time, I wandered, searching stone-to-stone. A man cutting grass tells me
to go to the office.

A woman there asks if I am lost.

“Just looking.”

“No one just looks here,” she says.

I tell her I am looking for my father.

She points to a big book on the table near the door.

“Get that,” and she pulls her black-framed glasses to her face, from the silver chain
around her neck.

It’s a heavy ledger. So big I can’t get my arms around it. I end up dragging it across
the floor. Dead weight. The lady sits behind the counter, watching me, smoking a thin
brown cigarette. When I get close to the counter, after what seems like a forever
haul, she reaches down. Ashes fall in my eyes.

She turns page after page and then takes out a map of the cemetery. She makes a blue
X
and then a dotted line from the office to the
X.
“There you go, Captain Kidd,” she says. “A treasure map.”

#

I’ve always wished my faith were stronger. Like the four men who punched a hole in
the roof of the house, tied a rope around their crippled friend, then lowered him
in where Jesus sits, preaching. Imagine—Jesus, cross-legged on the floor, and descending
from above comes a man, twisted, trussed up, broken. Jesus considers the cripple and
then looks toward the hole where his friends peer down. They tell Jesus that men blocked
them from entering the house but they were determined to place their withered friend
in His healing presence.

I have often prayed for such faith.

Our Father, who art in heaven . . .

Aren’t in heaven?

How many times did I puzzle over that?

And if my father aren’t in heaven, where are he?

As a boy I longed to be a prophet. Saturday Vigil Masses, I knelt beside my mother,
my mouth musty with His body melting to paste on my tongue. Watched the purpled incense
smoke rise into the unseen reaches of the dim and darkened dome. The bishops’ hats
high in the rafters, fading. Changing to dust in the spaces above us. The threads
that bind brim to crown failing. And me, kneeling, still. Praying for alms and supplication.
Sureness of mission.

#

My mother. She left the Church when I was still a boy. Something, she said, about
the Parable of the Prodigal Son. “It’s just not fair,” she said. “Stories like that.”

#  #  #

Not to say I have not had my doubts. Consider the story of Matthias. Christ, crucified.
Judas, suicided. And Peter gathers the remaining apostles.

“Men,” he says, “Judas now dwells in the Field of Blood, flat on his face, his bowels
spilt out of him. Rejoice. Yet, it is written—to witness Resurrection, we must make
our body whole again.”

In other words, they are only eleven. But they must be twelve.

Peter points to two men he has found—Matthias and Barsabbas. Tells them to kneel before
them. Lots are cast. Matthias in. Barsabbas out. Just like that.

And since the whole story is taken on faith, what do you believe? Does Barsabbas get
off his knees, humbled? Stand in the dirt as they link arms around Matthias? Or does
he walk away filled with rage, spitting at dogs? Cursing what could have been, if
only the Lord had willed it?

#

What signs have you pretended you did not see? Looked askance, away? Given in to that
voice inside: “Stay on the main road. There’s nothing that way!”

And yet—we wonder.

What if how we are told it happened is not how it happened? What if the story we have
been told is just that? A story. Not the truth.

Each of us has a creation tale—how we came into the world. And I’ll add this: Each
of us has an uncreation tale—how our lives come apart. That which undoes us. Sooner
or later, it will claim you. Mark you. More than your creation.

All my life, I’ve felt the story I was told about how my father died did not add up.

Here’s the story I was told by my mother. And it’s not like we sat around and recited
this story. I had to pry this out of her. I was ten and I could no longer stop the
questions in my head. I defied
omertá
. I asked her to tell me the story of how he died. We were in the kitchen. It was
January and it was growing dark, even though it was only three.

“He was working late, and on the way to his car, he had a heart attack.”

“And then what happened?”

“Some police officers found him.”

“Was he dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did they take him to the hospital?”

“I think so.”

“Why didn’t the police come and tell us? How come Uncle Dick came and told us?”

“Because the police found his press pass and called the paper and someone there called
Dick.”

“But why didn’t the police come and tell us he was dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s what they do on TV. They always do.”

“I told you: The police found his press pass, so they called the paper. Then, because
the guys at the paper knew Dick, they probably thought it would be best if they called
him first.”

#

The story never makes sense to me. Not that I say that to her. But there are holes.

#

Careful where you step.

#

So I do what I know best: I keep quiet. But I think about it all the time—about that
night. How many nights did I lie in bed, the sound of my little washing-machine heart
churning in my ear,
trying to picture him, a crumpled mass on damp asphalt. Facedown. Blood on his head
from where he hit it, going down. An arm twisted beneath him. Dead man, alone in the
night. Helpless. Abandoned.

Does he feel it coming? A dizziness? Shortness of breath? A shooting pain. Air won’t
come. He steadies himself against the hood. Touches his hand to the metal. Tries to
breathe. He drops to a knee. And the other. He presses his face to the cold metal
of the car. He’s squinting hard, trying to squeeze away the pain. . . . Black.

#  #  #

My senior year of high school, I’m eighteen, working on a term paper. I have to go
to the main library down in the city, since it has a full collection of Chicago newspapers
on microfilm. The library in my neighborhood has only the
Tribune
and the
Sun-Times,
not the
Daily News
and
Today
.

I look up my father’s obituaries. I’ve never seen them. I don’t even know if they
exist. But I figure the
Sun-Times
would have run one. Here’s what it says:

Then I look to see what Uncle Dick’s paper,
Chicago Today,
printed: