The Removers: A Memoir (4 page)

The morning after Orville, I went into the kitchen while Dad, in a T-shirt, sweatpants, and moccasins, stood over a frying pan.

“You want scrapple, buddy?” he said.

Wondrous earthy perfume, frying scrapple. To eat it—a pressed loaf of cornmeal and the slaughterhouse oddments of pig: tail, skin, stomach, snout—is to want not.

“A guy moaned at me last night,” I said. I pulled the ketchup from the fridge and put it on the table. I sat down.

“What do you mean?”

“The body I picked up. It was talking. Like, ‘Aaaaaaaaah.’”

“Ooh, boy.” He set in front of me a plate of scrambled eggs bordered by four piping brown slices of the stuff, each a third of an inch thick and as wide and long as a playing card.

“Yeah, I’ve had that happen to me once,” he said.

“Really?”

He sat down and doused the contents of his plate with the ketchup. He slid the bottle to me, and I did the same. Forking into a properly prepared slice of scrapple is like cracking into crème brûlée: a thin, brittle, slightly scorched shell gives way to custard.

“You think he was totally dead, right?” I said. Never more than when I ate scrapple in these early days of removals did it occur to me that I was becoming the creature I feared most: the possum. I left the house at night, skulking around in shadow to clear away a dead thing. Now here I was eating the swept-up scraps off the abattoir floor, the breakfast equivalent of roadkill, feeling more myself with every bite.

“Yeah, it’s just gas leaving the body,” he said. “Passes over the vocal cords.” These had become the kinds of things we talked about, now that we were coworkers, over breakfast.

An October Monday, 1990. I was fourteen, a sophomore at Northeast Catholic High School. My sister was in the seventh
grade at St. Joachim’s. We got home around the same time that day and noticed that Dad was already home. This was strange, him home before five. I thought he must’ve had a class canceled. We didn’t see him, but his school bag was where he always put it when he got in, on the dining room chair at the end of the buffet, and we saw the cellar light on, so assumed he was down there working in his office. “Dad?” I called down the stairs. “I’ll be up,” he said.

I poured the first of several bowls of Acme-brand Cheerios and took my spot at the kitchen table, my head in the
Inquirer
sports page as usual, reading the bits I hadn’t gotten to before school, items like golf, boxing, high school soccer capsules. Eventually Mom came home from work. “Dad’s home,” I said to her and kept reading. She went down the cellar steps, and neither of them surfaced for a long time. Mom came up first. I was reading and the cellar door was behind my seat, so I didn’t see her before she disappeared upstairs to their bedroom. Dad came up a few minutes later, and I turned to look at him when he did. His eyes were red. He wiped his nose with his handkerchief. He was out of his work clothes—usually a suit—and had changed into a green sweatshirt and jeans. Weird to see him dressed casually on a weekday afternoon. He said, “Hi, buddy,” to me in a whisper. He didn’t linger. He went right upstairs, too, and I could hear him close the bedroom door.

The closing of the door resonated in me as powerfully as, was as rare as, somehow more unusual than, my father emerging from the cellar on a Monday afternoon crying. My parents’
bedroom door was never closed. They changed with it open, my mother using the angle of wall and in-let door like a dressing screen. They slept with it open. They wanted to hear what was going on in the house. They eschewed a window air conditioner even on the hottest summer night; the room’s closed windows and door and the noise from the machine would prevent them hearing the street and the house. They were always monitoring. Always looking out for us.

Theresa came into the kitchen and said, “What do you think’s wrong with Dad?”

“Someone died,” I said. “Or Dad has cancer.”

She nodded. I hadn’t formulated some great insight. Our neighbor, Mrs. Hollins, was our parents’ age, and the mother of a girl, Katie, and boy, Richie, whose ages matched my sister’s and mine. Katie was my sister’s best friend. Richie and I were different—I played sports as a little kid, he played G.I. Joe—but we were close, like family. We didn’t have to hang out every day; we had shared bathwater. Mrs. Hollins had what looked like a summer buzz cut, and in the last weeks before she died of cancer her cheeks sunk in. That was 1986. My mother’s mother had been sick in the late seventies with colon cancer and had spent June 1990 in the hospital having her bladder removed. Cancer wasn’t new to us. It was something that happened.

Our parents stayed in their bedroom for a long time. Mom came down a while after our regular dinnertime and asked me to heat up leftovers for Theresa and me. She went back to their room. We didn’t see Dad again that night. He was in bed Tuesday when we went to school. When we got home, he was
in the cellar again. He ate dinner with us Tuesday. His eyes were still red. Wednesday was the same. Neither Theresa nor I asked any questions. I was afraid of what the answers would be. He was in bed again when we left for school Thursday. When we got home, he was sitting at the kitchen table. He looked sick. He was pale. I think I would rather have gone on having whatever was wrong be kept secret than have to sit at the kitchen table and talk to our suffering father. No member or element of the family’s dynamic was equipped for communicating emotion. Dad put his in poems we rarely saw. Mom put hers into moods that rose and fell like the barometer. She was our atmosphere. She regulated pressure. A thunderstorm was a surly housecleaning with our unhung coats hurled down the cellar steps. A sunny day was brownies. Theresa and I weren’t yet required to process emotions of much weight. For physical pain, we were both still young enough for tears to be okay. We had gone through the death of both of Dad’s parents, of Mrs. Hollins, and of our next-door neighbor Miss Hippel. We had cried. But we were young enough to run around and play with cousins and friends at the funeral luncheons. Neither of us had ever felt anything that lingered, never felt anything strong enough to survive an ice cream cone or a night’s sleep.

Mrs. Browning was sitting up in bed, like she’d been reading. She wore a wig that re-created the sandy brown bob I’d known her to favor. Her face was drawn. She weighed less
than a hundred pounds, which was maybe forty lighter than she had in the eighties, but she was perfectly recognizable. Every week of first, second, and third grade, our class would visit Mrs. Browning for an hour in the school library. We’d sit at her feet on a sand-colored utility carpet, and she’d read to us from books like
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
and
Babar Saves the Day
. When she finished we were allowed to spend the remaining time reading anything we liked. I would always pull out old sports encyclopedias, their spines held together by electrical tape. Over and over I read the entries for people like Jim Thorpe, Bronko Nagurski, Gertrude Ederle. I remember a black-and-white photo of Ederle standing on a beach, smeared in Vaseline, ready to cross the English Channel. One of my favorite entries belonged to the Galloping Ghost, Red Grange. When he was playing college ball at Illinois, before he was the Ghost, he was called the Wheaton Ice Man for his summer job hauling blocks of ice. I gravitated to athletes with day jobs. I grew up knowing that Johnny Callison, a star Phillies right fielder of the 1960s, had spent his winters tending bar in Philadelphia. In high school I read everything I could about Wallace Stevens after I found out he’d worked as an insurance executive. People like him made me think of my dad, who worked as a teacher but whose true calling was poetry.

Driving Mrs. Browning back to the funeral home, I started to think, What if I stay in this job long enough that eventually I pick up all my old teachers, all our old neighbors, all the priests whose masses I’d served, all my baseball and soc
cer coaches, my mother’s parents, my aunts and uncles, and then, of course, my mother and my father? What if I collect the adults of my childhood like I’m curating a museum of my own history? What if I have them stuffed and cast in representative settings? Look, there’s my grandmother scratching a lottery ticket. There are my uncles with their heads thrown back at the punch line of a Jew joke. There’s my mother on a kneeler begging for our souls. There’s my father in the backyard with his shirt off reading Whitman. There’s my father standing in the living room—he’s thirty-five, with black hair and a black mustache—on a summer afternoon watching the Phillies play on TV while he teaches himself the banjo. There’s my father carrying a corpse down a flight of stairs. There’s my father—he’s older now, forty-five, graying, paunchy—in front of the television making a lupine call at the sight of a starlet on
Entertainment Tonight
.

And then that day comes for my sister and me, the day that fixes our befores and afters. A Thursday afternoon, three days after Dad has emerged from the basement red-eyed. Now he sits at the kitchen table. He’s been waiting for us to get home.

I have spent two months of the previous spring and summer immobilized by a leg broken playing softball in my school shoes with other members of the concert band. (My fourteen-year-old clarinetist self would want you to know that I stayed in the game after the injury, thinking it was just a bruise, lined a double to left, and scored a run before my knee blew up.)
Since I wasn’t walking, I had spent most of the summer before sophomore year inside watching television and reading newspapers. And eating like a just-released POW. I wasn’t seeing friends, except the few that came by to sign my cast. I wasn’t meeting girls. I didn’t have chronically bad skin, but I was prone to that one red, shiny, almost-glowing pimple on the tip of my growing nose. In that one summer my hair had gone from chestnut and wavy, the kind that aunts and grandmothers coo over and stroke, to a coarse, tightly curled, whopping bush of pubic-grade steel wool that in my fourteen-year-old wisdom I wore grown out long enough to hang in front of one eye. I was sullen. Aggressively, infectiously sullen. Despite a placid home, where I had never seen my parents fight. Despite Mass every Sunday.

Dad was in his normal dinner seat at the drop-leaf maple table. Theresa’s usual spot was lost during the day—her leaf was dropped, the table pushed against the wall, out of the way of kitchen traffic—so she sat at Mom’s place. I sat in my usual chair, across the table from Dad. I don’t think any of the three of us breathed much. I can’t remember being that uneasy again in my life. Finally he started.

“Something happened at school,” he said.

It wasn’t cancer. I jumped to: “laid off.” I had heard of lots of friends’ dads being laid off. I ran through the names of all the local colleges I knew from the sports pages. There must be a hundred colleges around Philadelphia. He could find work quick.

“A few women students . . . ,” he said.

Such a lovely sunny day. Mom had wallpapered the room yellow and made curtains, yellow with white vertical stripes. She’d covered the seat cushions for the kitchen chairs with the same material. The kitchen’s two windows looked onto the narrow alley we shared with Betty Lou, our next-door neighbor, so even at midday the room was never filled with sunlight. But that day the room radiated.

“Said that I touched their knees or put my hands on their shoulders.” He blew his nose. He always carried one of his handkerchiefs in his back pocket. I took pride in folding them the way he liked: in half; in half sideways; in thirds sideways; clap it tight.

“La Salle is firing me for sexual harassment.”

Stained-glass pieces Mom had made hung in most rooms of the house: a dolphin suncatcher in my bedroom window; a transom light over the porch door that read “Meredith”; and, at my father’s back as we sat at the table, in the door between the kitchen and the back shed, a panel depicting two tulips in bloom.

He took a deep breath. “I want you both to know I love you very much.”

My eyebrows lifted as high as shock could take them. Theresa stood up. Dad stood up. They went into a strong, sniffling embrace. I knew my place was to latch myself on to their hug. I couldn’t stand up. I thought instead. I didn’t feel capable of any unconditional feelings. Already I was replaying the words: “touched their knees.” Even at fourteen I sensed a false note. If I’d lost my job of sixteen years
over something as stupid as touching someone’s knee, I’d be throwing lamps against the wall. Maybe I’d cry like he was, but more than anything there’d be rage at the unfairness, and I wouldn’t need three days of hiding before I told my kids. And those words—“I love you”—had never been said to me before that moment. I had never heard my mother say it. I had heard my father say it once or twice to my sister when she was a toddler, but only when she had said it first, she calling it down the hallway after he’d tucked her in. They didn’t feel important, those words, at least not as an indicator of how much our parents loved us, which always felt too big for words. It felt as if Dad was using them now to mean, “Please help me.” I’m sure he needed on a molecular level to have those words in the air in the house. I told myself to stand up. I stood up. I could sense that Dad was waiting for me to join the hug. Theresa’s head was lost against his chest. He watched me. I was fourteen; I didn’t like hugs on a normal day. I made my way glacially around the small table. The door to the dishwasher was open. Dad must have been unloading it when we came in. I stepped around the door. I stood behind my sister and opened my arms wide enough to clear her body and touch Dad’s. My eyes were the only part of me that wanted to be open; every other muscle felt tight and stiff and closing down. I thought. Mom knows, right? Of course she knows. How will she be? What will her family say? The people we know who go to La Salle—my cousin, our neighbor, my friend’s sister—what will they say? Everybody we know will know because of them. Because I
knew how the last three days had been: secrecy, silence, evasion, sugarcoating; because I had never seen my parents fight or discuss anything of consequence; because they had never given me a talk—no primers on sex, dating, kissing, drugs, booze; there was an instinct in me that knew, even as we were hugging, that this was it, that the family as it had been was over. No getting past this trauma. None of us were equipped. The hug broke up. Dad stayed in the kitchen. He’d finish unloading the dishwasher. Theresa would go upstairs to her room. I would go to mine. I would lie on my bed waiting for the sound of Mom coming home.