After Visiting Friends (2 page)

“Michael . . . ”

#

We walk the long hallway to her room. She leans on her walker, plows ahead, slowly.
I walk beside her, my hand on the small of her curved back. She’s like an old car—she
drifts left—so I have to ease her away from the wall.

“Look at me,” she says. “I’m just a skeleton. I should go trick-or-treating. I’d scare
’em all good, I would.”

Her room has two single beds, hospital types, made to be raised up, angled. The bed
near the door is unmade, waiting. On it, the Sunday
Tribune
sits unread. The bed beneath the window is my grandmother’s. On the nightstand are
two photo albums my brother’s son made for her. “Moments of her life,” he told me
they were, “to help her remember.” My nephew is eight.

To the right of the bed, there’s an armoire. On it, someone has taped a piece of paper,
computer-printed:

ESTELLE HUDAK

FAMILY DOES OWN LAUNDRY

She maneuvers to the bed. There’s a wheelchair in the corner and I pull it up, sit
toe-to-toe with her.

“I brought you a trick-or-treat,” I say, and I place the box on her lap.

For a minute, she holds the box and gazes at it, then hands it back to me.

“Can I have one?” she asks.

I give her a chocolate cream. She raises it to her mouth. A tongue emerges, takes
the candy. Like a tortoise I saw at the zoo. She bites, almost in slow motion, chews
so slowly I swear I can feel her tasting it.

She asks, “Why’d you bring me candy?”

“I told you,” I say. “Halloween.”

She says, “Is it Halloween? I can’t remember.”

As I put the candy on the nightstand, I notice a piece of paper. “That’s my bedtime
reading,” she says to me.

It’s a pamphlet from Resurrection Cemetery. Inside, there is a form filled out. My
grandfather’s burial record:

NAME: FRANK HUDAK

GRAVE: 3

LOT: 13

BLOCK: 21

SECTION: 59

“That’s going to be my address soon,” my grandmother says. “I read that every night
before I go to bed so that if I don’t wake up, I know where to go. I don’t want Saint
Peter putting me on the wrong bus. Grave four. Right next to my little Franta. Sixty-seven
years we were married, Mike.”

Her head droops down, chin against her chest. I reach out, my hand under her chin.
Raise her head. Tears are in her eyes, and I wipe them with my fingers.

“I wish it were over, Mike. People weren’t meant to live this long.”

“Did you take your pills today?” I say to her.

“Yes.”

Ninety-five years old, and she’s on antidepressants. What’s the world come to? I think.

Truth is, she never got over my grandfather’s dying. That whole year after, she’d
sit at the kitchen table and cry, stare out the shutters.

She reaches out, takes my hands in hers.

“Warm my hands,” she says. “They’re cold.”

She slips her hands inside my cupped hands. Her hands like two small mammals burrowing
inside a hollow, hunkering down against each other, against the coming freeze.

“I used to worry about you,” she says, “but I don’t anymore. You’re over the wall.”

“What’s the wall?”

“Fear.”

THE SHADE, RAISED

April 24, 1970. Friday morning. The sun, searing the shade, my brother’s and mine.
We share a room. Twin beds above the kitchen, side by side. Headboards against the
wall beneath the window that looks down on a tiny cement patio. A small house next
to an alley next to a grocery-store parking lot. Kroger.

Scraggly forsythias divide our alley from the parking lot. Fragile yellow flowers
the color of Peeps pop on the thin branches. Mostly the branches catch the trash that
forever swirls in our lot. Flyers and circulars. Papers.

This is on the Far Northwest Side, a block from the Kennedy Expressway, in the shadow
of O’Hare.

#  #  #

My mother’s hand on my shoulder. “Time for school,” she says.

She wears a blue robe and pale blue slippers that look like sandals. She is thirty-three,
thin with frosted brunette hair and deep, heavy-lidded almond-shaped brown eyes and
a tight mouth. She
looks like Queen Elizabeth. It’s like they’re twins in time. Pick a photo of Elizabeth
from any year and lay a photo of my mother next to it. Sisters, you’d say. Especially
in the mouth and eyes. Same hair, too. My mother has always wished her hair were curlier,
that it had more body. For years, my grandmother gave her a perm every few months,
my mother hanging her head in our cold gray washtub.

The doorbell rings. My mother says, “Who could that be?”

She walks to the window and raises the shade.

“What the hell are they doing here?” she says.

Below, my grandfather and grandmother, my uncle Dick and aunt Helen, are standing
on the porch in the shadow of our honey locust tree, its tiny leaves fluttering in
the breeze.

My mother walks out.

From the air vents along the floorboards my brother and I can hear the adults in the
kitchen below. No words. Just sounds.

I remember exactly what happens when I get into that kitchen—and every moment afterward.
But sitting with my brother on the edge of our beds in our pajamas, that bright morning
in April, him eight and me six—even now I feel like I’m imagining it.

My brother and I pause at the top of the stairs. Then there we are, on the edge of
the living room.

“The boys are here,” Uncle Dick says.

He pushes us forward, into the kitchen. The sun is bright. The linoleum white and
cold on my bare feet. My mother sits at the kitchen table, in the chair she will sit
in the rest of her life. Her chair to solve the Jumble. Her crosswords chair. Her
chair for solitaire. My grandmother stands behind her, a handkerchief’d fist to her
mouth.

My mother reaches out. “Come over here.”

She sets us on her chair, my brother and me, side by side. We’re still that small.

“Your dad is dead.”

Her eyes are red but she is not crying. “It’s going to be okay,” she says. “We’ll
be fine.”

She hugs us. And as I sit there, crushed against my brother, held tight by my mother’s
arm, I can feel, against my chest, my brother’s chest, quivering. I struggle to pull
back from my mother’s embrace.

He’s crying.

In that moment I think only one thing: how excited I am. Because my whole life up
until then, my brother has never cried. Whenever I have cried, he’s always teased
me, told me I was a baby. I point at him and start to laugh and I say, “Crybaby! Crybaby!”

THE NIGHT SLOT

My father was the night slot man. That’s a newspaper term. From the time he is a young
boy of six or seven in Dust Bowl Nebraska, back in the Depression, all he wants is
to work in newspapers. All he wants is to escape, to get to Chicago and be a newspaperman,
just like his brother.

My dad’s name is Bob. He idolizes his brother, who is twelve years older. His brother’s
name is Dick.

Their father was many things, but mostly he was a switchman and, when called upon,
a griever. Those are railroad terms. Their father passes most of his life in the windblown
rail yard of McCook, a town barely bigger than an afterthought. Day after day, he
couples and uncouples strings of boxcars and then waits for the engines that will
come to pull them apart or carry them away.

At eight, my father gets a job as a paperboy, delivering the
Omaha World-Herald
. In high school, he edits
The Bison,
the school paper. Come graduation in 1952, the
Omaha World-Herald
declares him “one of Nebraska’s brightest newsboys”—who has
worked his route “with diligence and dedication.” They give him a “Carrier’s Scholarship”—$150.
He also earns a $450 scholarship from Northwestern University and uses it to attend
the Medill School of Journalism, just like Dick, who is by now an editor at the
Tribune
. Dick delivers the address at my father’s commencement. The
Omaha World-Herald
runs a story headlined
TWO BROTHERS GET ATTENTION AT MCCOOK HIGH GRADUATION
. The editors print head shots of Dick and my father. Beneath them, a caption:
Richard, Robert . . . Speaker, Listener
.

Five years later, in May 1957, my father graduates with a master’s degree in journalism.
A few days after commencement, he packs up his room in a boardinghouse run by an Armenian
woman on Foster Street. A Sigma Nu fraternity brother drives him and his suitcases
down to Chicago’s Union Station, where he boards the Burlington Zephyr, bound to McCook.

He doesn’t want to go back to Nebraska, but Dick, who is the chief of the local copy
desk at the
Chicago Tribune,
tells him that it is all but impossible to get hired at the
Tribune
straight out of college. “Most of the reporters didn’t even graduate from high school.
You need experience. That’s the only way they’ll respect you.”

The McCook Daily Gazette
is in search of a managing editor for a special project, and my father takes the
job. The town is getting ready to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of its founding.
In 1882, the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad needs a way station between Denver
and Omaha where it can switch out crews and add a more powerful locomotive for the
climb through the Rockies. They name the nothingness after General Alexander McDowell
McCook, a Union soldier in the Civil War who spends his prewar years wandering the
frontier, putting down Indian uprisings.

The
Gazette
is a small paper, but my father consoles himself with the fact that it’s a daily
and it covers all of southwest Nebraska. Just as the Great Depression hits, the
Gazette
buys a propeller plane, christens it the
Newsboy,
and claims to make journalism history by becoming “the first paper in the world to
be regularly delivered
by airplane.” Every day, the
Newsboy
takes flight from an airstrip notched into a cornfield on the outskirts of town and
zigzags through the skies of southwestern Nebraska and northwestern Kansas. Through
a hole in the plane’s thin floorboard, the pilot of the
Newsboy
drops bundles of papers down onto towns even smaller than McCook. It’s all very successful
until a windstorm sweeps into town and hurls the plane end over end, splintering it.
So dies the
Newsboy.

The paper is published in a limestone building on Norris Avenue where, above the front
door, someone has chiseled:
SERVICE IS THE RENT WE PAY FOR THE SPACE WE OCCUPY IN THIS WORLD
. My father dedicates himself to his work, creating the
Gazette
’s seventy-fifth-anniversary issue. He spends that summer interviewing old-timers
and digging through records at City Hall and the town library. He edits stories for
the paper, as well as reports and writes.

One night, so the story goes, he and a high school buddy, Bob Morris, drive out of
town and spend the night drinking beer. On the way back, they come across a road-construction
site. My father climbs onto the earthmover and drives it toward the darkened river.

“What are you doing?” his buddy yells, laughing on the bank.

“Getting some experience,” my father says.

The following morning the Red Willow County sheriff calls the
Gazette
—he asks for a reporter to drive out to the river. My father arrives at the scene
of the crime. Once there, he interviews the officers as well as the construction foreman
and then publishes a story in the next day’s paper:
MYSTERY VANDAL HITS CONSTRUCTION SITE
. The sheriff thanks him for helping to draw attention to the crime.

He publishes the
Gazette
’s commemorative edition, says his good-byes, walks to the redbrick train station
at the bottom of Norris Avenue, and buys a ticket for Chicago. His brother has gotten
him a job as a copy editor on the Neighborhood News desk at the
Chicago Tribune
.