Love and Fury (7 page)

So in March, during Veronica's spring break, she and I took the baby and headed for Pennsylvania. The drive down through Connecticut is always boring and often filled with delays until you swing west to cross the Hudson. More than once I had to come to a full stop, inching ahead for maybe a half hour, and then just as suddenly finding myself accelerating to a breezy 70 or 75 mph with no evident explanation. I called my father with a report of our progress. “No hurry. No hurry. I just talked to your cousin Maryann. Looks like Aunt Kitty's girls are coming over here tomorrow to meet your grandson.”

After a few more hours, my grandson mostly asleep except when he was hungry, we crossed the Delaware River from Phillipsburg, New Jersey, to Easton, Pennsylvania. I believe that if you kidnapped and blindfolded me and left me in this part of Pennsylvania, I would know immediately on removing the blindfold where I was. The way the land rolls, folds on itself, promises the Poconos to the north, not to mention the Moravian stone barns and farmhouses, would give it away within moments. It's a landscape that continues west to the Alleghenies, and the closest thing I have to an ancestral home.

When I was a boy, our Cub Scout leader, Mrs. Steidel, took us to a vacant firehouse somewhere in town where a model train club had created a scale model of the Lehigh Valley Railroad as it had existed in its not-too-distant heyday. The men wore engineers' caps, which was one thing that struck us; another was that they did not patronize us but treated us as young people interested in learning about the geography and history of our region. Of course we were more concerned with, even awed by, the artistry of it all: the mountains, rivers, and ponds, the buildings. This was no flat platform under a Christmas tree with a train chugging round in a circle; this was a meticulous recreation of the world around us, with here and there a recognizable landmark to orient us. The scale was such that you walked through a landscape, thoroughly and minutely convincing, of rolling hills and shoulder-high mountains. Little Gullivers in Lilliput, we were larger and more suddenly aware of our increased stature than we would likely ever be again. A train whistle blew as a long freight train crossed the trestle over the Delaware near Easton bringing goods from New York; another brought coal through a tunnel in Union Gap, down from the coal regions near Wilkes-Barre. Brick factories; gray office buildings, including the PPL Building, our city's one jutting skyscraper; a train unloading cattle at the Arbogast & Bastian slaughterhouse on the Lehigh River. No acid trip I would ever take years later, no mescaline or psilocybin or peyote, ever made me feel so expansive, so able to encompass and contain and comprehend the world around me, as that art.

The overalled artists who guided us, necessarily single file, along the winding walkways of what was, for all its replicas of steel mills and slate mines and cement companies, a kind of Eden, were gardeners whose real crop was the people we blue, gold-kerchiefed, giant, and awestruck cubs would be one day. With their Casey Jones hats and red scarves, they pointed, elucidated, warned (“ah-ah, don't touch that”) from their stations high above the mountains among the painted clouds.

I rang the bell and we stood waiting on the front porch, the baby, seven months old, riding high and curious in his mother's arms. Sometimes my father didn't hear the doorbell, so I went to the picture window, cupped my hands around my eyes, and peered in. I saw him rising very slowly from his chair and before he could turn toward the window I moved back to the door. I didn't want to suggest we were impatient with his slowness. I smiled at Veronica and touched my grandson's face.

When the door opened, after I'd taken in once again how pale his illness had left him, how utterly white he had become, and saw Veronica apprehend this and then erase it from her face, it struck me that we were four generations of a family together, probably the broadest span of generational time afforded anyone, and it felt like a kind of success. My father beamed and spoke first to the baby, who turned his body away and deeper into his mother's arms, but not his face.

“And who are you? What's your name?”

“Say, ‘My name's Damion!'” said Veronica. “Hi, Poppop,” and she kissed his cheek.

“Come in. Come in.”

Inside the door my father clapped his hands softly twice and opened them to the baby who leaned from his mother's arms, happy to be held by this smiling man whom he'd not looked away from for a moment. Veronica touched my shoulder as if to acknowledge what we'd just seen.

My father handed the baby back to Veronica. “Just hold him for a minute, will you, honey?” He walked over to his chair, reached behind him for the arm of the latest incarnation of big recliner that has occupied the spot by the window since my grandfather's time, then pivoted and settled himself into the chair. I noted that beads of sweat had broken out on his impossibly white forehead. “Okay, now,” he said. “Let me see that boy.”

After a while we spread a blanket on the carpet with some of D's toys, his teething ring, a couple of rattles. My father got down on the floor to play with him. I wondered if that was a good idea, with his arthritic knees, his bad back, his sudden bouts of fatigue, but there was no stopping him. My brother Joe came home from work. He fetched a stuffed Penn State Nittany Lion from another room; battery-operated, it did a little dance and played the Penn State fight song. To my father's delight, the baby couldn't get enough of it.

It was hard to imagine where my father was getting his energy. For months, even before his diagnosis, his fatigue was the main symptom of his illness. I'm tempted to credit my grandson—
babies bring their own joy
—but it is more that D awakened a joy in my father that had lain dormant for a long time. I remember his delight with my own children when they were young. And before that, the way he delighted in my cousins' children. He was never entirely comfortable with infants, as if he were afraid to handle them too roughly, but once he could play with them, once they could respond to the faces he made, the tickling, the goofball sounds, the mock surprises, he would happily play the clown.

As my father hoisted himself up from the floor he looked at me and said, “That boy is all right.” It took me several minutes to realize that what he meant was that he'd been examining him and there was nothing wrong with him, no muscular dystrophy.

The next day my cousins Elizabeth, Maryann, and Margaret arrived with what seemed like a truckload of gifts for the baby. They ringed Veronica and D, effusing and assuring her that they were there for her come what may. They passed the baby, who seemed to be enjoying his celebrity, from one to the other.

The entire time of our visit was passed in this positive, uncomplicated way, my father's numbered days notwithstanding. The baby seemed to nap when he did, as if they'd fallen into a shared rhythm.

And where was the baby's father? The official story was that he was working, was sorry he couldn't join us, would definitely come next time. A lie. Call it a white lie.

Of all my memories of that weekend, the one that will stay with me longest is the moment I turned round to see my father, sitting in his chair, planting a loud belly-kiss on my grandson's stomach, smiling from ear to ear, the tickled baby squealing with delight: my father with his black great-grandson held above his head, the two of them laughing, there by the window in my grandfather's chair.

An undertaker met me just inside the door and led me to a room where I could have some “private time with the deceased.” Before she opened the door, she wanted to be sure that I knew that this private time was out of the ordinary but that they were glad to do it. “Yes, yes. Thank you.” She opened the door.

One side of the door, the side toward me, was the rich paneled mahogany of the walls of the place, but when the undertaker closed the door, I saw the illusion: the door was metal-painted to look like wood; on this side it was painted a flat institutional olive like the rest of the store room. Gray steel shelves floor to ceiling were stacked with paper goods, supplies, cleaning products. Here and there on the floor were steel drums of something labeled with skull and crossbones POISON warnings. Daylight was filtered through frosted-glass windows and further baffled by the many tiers of shelved goods. Unlike the rest of the place, the room was not air-conditioned.

I stopped just inside the door. My father's body lay on a rusty metal gurney in the middle of the room, in the aisle between the shelves, covered to his throat with a stained yellow blanket. I was wearing a sport coat; leaving the house I thought I should wear a sport coat at least, even though it was what my father would have called a “stinkin' hot” day. Now the jacket added to the scene's absurdity. Why had I come here? I was losing my bearings. The room vibrated a bit and darkened from a truck going by in the narrow alley and I caught a little bit of salsa on the radio as it passed. There were sounds from within the building, too, on the other side of the door at the far end of the room, water running and, faintly, the sound of something like a dentist's drill. I looked at my feet, at my new black shoes. My father, it seemed to me, was waiting for me.

Earlier my brother and I had met with the funeral director, providing her with information for the obituary, picking the design for a funeral card. From the laminated pages of a three-ring binder, over and over, grisly images of the Crucifixion or the gates of heaven framed by billowing clouds. I chose the only one neither saccharine nor grotesque, a stand of trees with sunlight streaming down; on the reverse, the prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi:

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled as to console;

To be understood, as to understand;

To be loved, as to love;

For it is in giving

That we receive;

It is in pardoning

That we are pardoned;

It is in dying we are reborn

To eternal life.

“It's about the only prayer I can abide,” I said. My brother nodded.

“Have you thought about a casket? I'll take you to our showroom when you're ready.”

Whether I was stalling or needed to insist that I had at least some kind of spiritual life, or just needed to hear myself talk, I went on. “That's the prayer that was on the stained-glass window at St. Francis. I came on it years later in a different context and it made sense to me. I used to sit in church and look at that window. You know the one, Joe. St. Francis has his hands up—like this—and the sun is in the upper corner with the rays coming down and there are birds flying around and a little deer by his feet. I never understood why he had holes in his hands and feet until one of the nuns explained about the stigmata, how it was a miracle, that Francis was so Christ-like that he carried the bloody wounds of the Crucifixion. I used to wonder about that. It seemed so painful. Like if he was such a saint, why was his reward to be wounded like that? Later on, when I came across the prayer again, I saw it as a kind of step-by-step way to slip out of your ego. I don't think there's anything Catholic about it. Hell, the Church couldn't stand the guy while he was alive. They thought he was a pain in the ass.” I thought I saw a look pass between my brother and the funeral director:
Uh-oh.
I could be wrong; in any case, I knew I was stuck in this monologue and had to finish it. I imagined the funeral director was used to people behaving weirdly in this situation, and my brother seemed similarly forbearing, so I went on.

“That's the thing all the mystics, the prophets, the saints, whatever you want to call them, all agree on, no matter what religion they come out of: you have to get past your ego, past what you want. It's a
technos
, a set of instructions. If you don't just say it, the prayer, if you stop at each separate point and really take it in, it's like reversing the poles of the usual, like an electric current or something. It's like life has us all turned inside out like a sock back from the wash, and the prayer is a set of instructions for turning yourself right side out again.” Now they both looked concerned. I was concerned myself; I felt a little light-headed. And then a terrible self-consciousness gripped me. “Anyway,” I said, and moved my hand dismissively in a way I instantly recognized was my father's.

“Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Water?”

“Not for me,” Joe said. I shook my head.

The funeral director rose. “Shall we go then? To choose a casket?”

Some were closed, some open. Some were wood. Some aluminum, some steel. Some were fine furniture: walnut, maple, cherry. Silks and satins inside: white, powder blue, silver, or rose. In only a moment I was overwhelmed. Joe asked, without quoting a figure, what she had in “a kind of midrange one.” She showed us a deep-plum-colored steel casket with a buttery satin lining. And a muted silver model, blue inside. And a coppery one. I wasn't especially decisive, I just wanted this over with. “I think this one. What do you say, Joe?”