After Visiting Friends (11 page)

When the show is over, I go backstage to find my mother and brother. My mother is
preoccupied with the other boys, trying to gather up their costumes and props and
make sure they do not wander off. I see my brother in a far corner. He sits alone,
holding a Styrofoam ball, yellow as French’s mustard. He does not see me, and for
a moment I watch him turn his sun over and over in his small hands.

Years later, I ask my mother where she got her idea.

“What are you talking about?” she asks me.

“You know,” I say. “For the show you did when you were a den mother.”

“I was never a den mother. Was I?”

“Yes. I remember.”

“I don’t.”

#  #  #

I call my grandmother. Tell her I want to take her to a birthday breakfast. When I
pull up, she’s at the front door, waiting, dressed in pale purple pants and a white
sweater. The sweater, white as her hair. Before I even get the car into park, she
comes down the path, pushing her walker with the sliced green tennis balls jammed
onto the bottom of the rear legs.

I lean down to kiss her, and she feels my lapel between her thumb and index finger.

“Seersucker? Sharp, kiddo. But you always were.”

We start driving to Mac’s, this local diner where I always take her. Where she likes
to go. Where, every time, she says to Barbara the waitress, “This is my other grandson.
From New York. He’s not married.”

At a red light, she says, “Hey, where’s your honey?”

I tell her that Brooke, the woman I’ve begun to date, is traveling for work.

My grandmother reaches over and touches my right hand.

“What do they say?” she asks. “ ‘Absence makes the heart wonder’?”

“No, Gram. They say, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ ”

She rubs her thumb along the back of my hand. My grandmother’s hands have always been—back
to when I was a boy and she’d squeeze my hand two times under the dinner table to
signal me that she was going to sneak my vegetables off my plate and eat them for
me when my mother was not looking—the softest hands I’ve known. Softer, even, than
my niece’s delicate hands with their tiny, deft fingers that pluck stunned cicadas
from ancient trees.

I look at my grandmother studying my hand. All I see is the top of her head, a white
crown.

The guy behind me honks. The light is green. My grandmother looks up at me.

“That’s what I said, Mike. Absence makes the heart wonder.”

#

Later that day, I start in on the old gang. I call Roy Wiley, one of the guys my mother
gave me. He’s not a newspaperman anymore. He tells me that he and my father had fallen
out of touch by the time he died.

“We were at a party and he said something about Bobby Kennedy. I took a swing at him.
That put us on ice for some time. But I’ll tell you this—your dad was the best newspaperman
I ever knew. He was a stand-up guy and I’ve always regretted our feud.”

“What do you know about the night he died? The obits say he was on North Pine Grove.
Did you know anyone up there?”

“I don’t know anything about that night.”

“You didn’t hear anything in the newsroom?”

“No.”

“You guys are newspapermen, the nosiest group in the world. You live to know the story.”

Silence.

“No one who was with him that night ever said anything to you?”

He says, “Imagine if you are the guy who dragged him out that night.”

And he switches voices, like he’s living that moment.

Bob, let’s get a drink.

Nah, I gotta get home.

Whaddya mean? C’mon.

All right.

“Imagine you’re that guy. Are you really going to go up to your mother at the wake
and say,
Hey, I’m sorry. I was the guy who kept
him out
. When you’re the guy who had him in a bar or wherever, and he should have been home?
You know how guys are.”

“So you don’t know anything?”

“Like I say, I’d drifted.”

“Drifted?”

“You know how guys are.”

#  #  #

I create stories of that night. I fill in the holes. I create scenarios.

Here he is. Off work. Two a.m. Wife and children at home. In bed. His boys, six and
eight. His wife, thirty-three. Him, thirty-five. But tonight he is ageless. Tonight,
he doesn’t think about them or himself or tomorrow. Tonight, he is free.

He walks out of the office building. Late April. Chill in the air slaps his face.
He can feel the dampness off the lake
—
big and dark and voidy. Out there, where the horizon turns black. In the east.

He flips the collar of his tan raincoat against his neck as he pulls his shoulders
high. This is what Murrow did in London. This is what we do, he thinks. Journalists.
Newspapermen. We are men alone.

He pauses. Looks at the IBM Building rising across the street. Miesian monolith. He
thinks, This is not a building. Buildings are made of stone cut out of the ground.
Buildings have windows that a man can open at lunch, windows that require him to have
paperweights on his desk on the piles of papers that he needs to get rid of.

He turns. He knows where he is going. The route. The loop. The
circuit. Every man has one. Point A to Point B to Off the Map. The places a man goes
to forget and perhaps find himself.

The man walks down Wabash. Makes a right onto Kinzie, then a left on Rush. The first
stop of the night, Radio Grill.

Hands reach out. Pats on the back. Nods. Shot of J&B and a Schlitz. On the bar. Waiting.

It’s good to be a regular. This is what it means to be a man.

Drink up! Join the party! Here’s to ya! What’s the good word?

He knocks them back with his pals. Carps about the bosses. Cracks wise about the day,
what has gone down. Cigarette smoke in the air. Jukebox. Bullshitting. It goes on
this way for an hour. Maybe two. Three drinks. Maybe four.

More of the same. More drinks. More gossip. More drinks. More laughs. Blow off steam.
This is what they do. Newspapermen, after their shift.

#

Going on 4 a.m. Someone says, “Hey, let’s go up to so-and-so’s place. Keep the party
going there.”

Next thing, they’re heading north along an empty Lake Shore Drive. They turn off at
Irving Park Road. Stop at the corner store. Grab beer. Grab bourbon. Grab Pall Malls.

Eight, ten, a dozen of them all at so-and-so’s place. Drop the needle on the record.
Turn the music up. Open the bottle. Let’s get it going. Let’s forget about it all.

It’s a small place. Nothing fancy. There’s a couch in the living room, the arms stained
from hair tonic and sweat. A couple of chairs. A black-and-white TV pushed up against
one wall. Couple of tin TV trays holding magazines
—Look. Life. Time.
And ashtrays. There’s a coffee table, someone says. Let’s get those goodies out here.
From the kitchen come glasses. Ice, in a soup pot. Booze.

My father grabs a seat on the couch, presses a cold beer can against his forehead.

Damn headache, he thinks. Maybe I’m more looped than I thought.

Someone slaps him on the back.

“Bobby, you gotta keep up.”

“My head’s killing me.”

“Have another drink. It’s good for what ails ya.”

My father tilts his head back. He’s having trouble seeing. It’s like someone is making
him stare at a white-bright spotlight. He’s getting hot. Clammy. Nauseated. He touches
the shoulder of the man beside him on the couch.

“Something is wrong with me.”

“Nothing a drink won’t fix, Bob.”

“No. Really.”

A couple of people wander over.

“Overserved,” someone says.

My father can’t hear them now. Doesn’t have the strength to hear them now.

They turn back to their drinks, to the party.

A little later, his head is slumped onto his chest. A man shakes him, but he doesn’t
respond. The man raises my father’s head. That’s when he feels it is cold. “Something’s
wrong with Hainey,” the man says to no one.

He says it again. This time, louder.

The guys close in around him.

“Someone call an ambulance!”

“No,” someone says. “No, wait. Call his brother.”

#  #  #

I always knew where my mother had been by the matches she brought home. She doesn’t
smoke. She just likes having matchbooks in the house. I always find them in the kitchen
the morning after. They’re Checkpoint Charlies on her dates with men. Like passport
stamps of her voyages through Chicago at night.

My brother starts to collect them. Every other kid in the neighborhood is collecting
beer cans. That’s the big thing. I spend stretches of a Saturday walking in the weedy
woods lining the Kennedy Expressway, looking for the cans hurled out of cars speeding
back from Wisconsin. Point. Blatz. Leinenkugel’s. Trash that I can make something
of. It’s a strange time. Kids going nuts, telling you how their uncle just came back
from Pittsburgh with something called Iron City beer and there’s a picture of the
Steelers on it.

My brother keeps the matchbooks in Folgers coffee cans in his bedroom. Red can after
red can rings the baseboard. His collection, an exhibition of her life outside the
house. Sometimes, when he is not home, I go to his room and study them. Cricket’s.
Le Perroquet. La Strada. The list goes on.

I start my own collection: miniature bottles of booze. The kind you get in first class,
or that drunks on skid row buy with fistfuls of sweaty coins. Change they’ve begged
for. Men my mother dates bring me empties from their business trips. Sometimes I find
one flipped in the forsythia bushes in our alley. I line them up on my bookshelf,
sort them from clear to dark.

#

My mother remarries. A man named Paul. This is 1988. When my father was alive, Paul
lived across the way with his wife and two girls. The girls are older, and sometimes
when my mother and father have a date, the girls babysit my brother and me. When I
am four, his daughter Cathy plays “Up, Up and Away” by the 5th Dimension on our hi-fi
and teaches me how to dance.

Then they move away.

In 1977, my mother runs in to Paul. He’s divorced by now.

With Paul she gets the life she never got with my father. They travel. Fly to Europe
on the Concorde. Eat at swank places like Chez Paul.

From the time my brother and I are maybe thirteen and fifteen, my mother spends every
weekend with Paul. He lives in a tall black tower on the shore of Lake Michigan. She
leaves us on Friday afternoon and returns Sunday night around the time
McMillan & Wife
is coming on, or
The ABC Sunday Night Movie.

I get home Friday after school. She’s gone. Always the same note on the kitchen counter:

Pizza tonight. Money on the counter.

Saturday, steak in fridge. Pre-heat to 350. 5
–
7 mins per side.

Problems, call.

Number you know.

Love,

Mom

Paul once said to me, “Your mother is the classiest woman ever.”

He died, too. January 1994. In the depths of a brutal cold spell. Us, one long row
of mourners’ cars, winding our way through the cemetery. From the backseat I watch
a solitary deer shin-deep in the snow slowly chew evergreen boughs—a dead man’s grave
blanket.

#

Paul’s death was different. He lingered.

How we sat at his bed in the midst of too much medical. Watched his face fade to a
skull. Waited for him to cease his heaving. The patient drip of a morphine bag.

Paul dies. Pre-dawn.

As a boy I heard a story about Jackie Kennedy returning from Dallas, her dress still
bloody, wandering the stacks of the Library of Congress, flashlight in hand, looking
for books about Abraham Lincoln’s funeral. She wanted to know how to do This Thing.
She wanted to do it right.

Some women just have it. That coolness in the moment.

That morning, when my mother and I return to her house, she walks straight from the
garage to the kitchen and, not even bothering to remove her coat, digs a paper grocery
bag out from under the sink, then continues on to the bedroom.

She opens a closet.

“What do you think?” she asks.

In one hand she holds a navy suit; in the other, a gray pinstripe.

I point to the navy.

She drops it on the bed and pulls a blue shirt and dark red tie from a drawer, then
gathers up socks, underwear.

“Find some shoes,” she tells me.

I marvel at her ability in that moment to compartmentalize. She remembers the drill:
a trip to the funeral home to select the casket and the Mass cards. Name the hours
of visitation. All the minutiae of tying up a life. And they’ll ask for clothes to
dress him in. Yes, she will be way ahead of them. She will come prepared.

#

Their wedding was a small thing—just family. His daughters. My grandparents. Paul’s
three brothers, one of whom works for the State Department, one of whom is a Catholic
priest, and one who lives in the house they grew up in, near the steel mills outside
the city. Also my mother’s brother and his family. And then there’s my godmother,
Lorraine, and her husband, Clarence.

I’ve always loved Clarence. He died maybe ten years ago. Big bear of a Polack. Clarence
Rychlewski. Six-four, maybe 250. Just enormous. From the North Side. When he was in
high school he was in a gang of Polack kids called the Addison Bears. Graduated high
school. Got a job selling aluminum for Alcoa. The kind of job for a kid with not much
behind him, but the kind of job that let him put his hand on the throat of the American
Dream and squeeze all that is good out of it.