After Visiting Friends (21 page)

I ask about the night my father died. He says, “You should beware of the past. Sometimes
people looking back can’t see what messes they were.”

“What does that mean?”

“People don’t always remember what they think they do. One night, about four in the
morning, I went to Andy’s to meet people from the paper. It was a bad scene. A real
wake-up for me.”

“Did my father drink too much?”

“There was a time when I thought so, but he straightened up.”

“What do you know about the night he died? His obit says he was with friends. Were
you with him?”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

#

He leaves me at the restaurant. All this way. And nothing. I go back to my hotel room
and flop on the bed and think, There has to be more.

I pick up the phone. “Craig, I’ve come all this way. How about dinner?”

He tells me to meet him at an Italian place in a strip mall. Enough time for me to
have a drink by myself. Settle my nerves. He shows up with his wife. She tells me
that she knew my father and mother, that she and Klugman met during the ’68 convention.
She was a student volunteer and he was driving a bus for Eugene McCarthy supporters
to and from the International Amphitheater, down near the stockyards.

Dinner comes and I’m waiting for a moment. I switch tactics. I do the reporter’s trick
where I tell him that I already know the true story. I tell him Dick told me that
there was a cover-up. “My father was with someone,” I say. “Some friends.”

Klugman and his wife look at each other. He says, “I don’t know anything about that.”

“But see,” I say, “that just seems strange to me. Newspapermen are the nosiest guys
in the world. And here, your best friend at the paper dies, and you have no curiosity
to know the details of the story?”

“I knew the details. He died on the street.”

“And?”

“And that’s all I know.”

“The obits said he died on the 3900 block of North Pine Grove?”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“So you never heard any different story about how he died?”

“No.”

“Let me ask you this: Would you not tell me the truth?”

“I don’t think you have the right to know the truth.”

“Why?”

“If you had a son and thirty years from now he went to one of your friends and wanted
to know details about your life, would you want your friend to tell him?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so. Guys stick together.”

“You don’t know anything?”

“No.”

We settle up in silence, walk to the parking lot, and say so long.

#  #  #

When I return to New York, I look up Jim Hoge. In 1970, he was the editor of the
Sun-Times
. He was thirty-four years old to my father’s thirty-five, but a world removed. East
Coast–born. Schooled at Yale. He came to Chicago in the late ’50s and had stints as
the paper’s financial writer and its Washington correspondent.

He built the
Sun-Times
into a brash, bold paper. He started an ad campaign called “The Bright One”—a clear
put-down of the
Tribune,
which was seen as the reactionary, dull one. The slogan could just as easily have
been Hoge’s nickname. Gleaming teeth. Blond hair. Intense blue eyes. He saw that papers
needed to speak to the under-thirty-five demographic. Where the
Tribune
was still on guard against the Commie threat, Hoge made the
Sun-Times
young, urban, and professional. He stocked it with columnists who knew the readership.
Roger Ebert, John Schulian, Bob Greene, Roger Simon, Ron Powers, and Mike Royko. And
then he balanced
it with vets like Bill Mauldin, Sydney J. Harris, Novak and Evans.

He took the paper back to the roots of great Chicago newspaper muckraking. Probably
the best story he assigned was his Mirage idea. The paper bought a tavern, called
it the Mirage, and then documented the endless bribes that city workers, from fire-department
inspectors to building inspectors, demanded in order to approve the licenses. A Chicago
story. A story about deceit. About men putting in The Fix.

In Chicago in the 1970s, Hoge was a minor god. That he looked like Robert Redford
didn’t hurt. The picture of him I always carry in my head was one that ran in the
Sun-Times
in 1983. He stands atop a desk in the newsroom. Jacket off, tie askew. Sleeves rolled
up. Reporters and editors crowd around, faces raised to his. He is breaking the news
that his bid to buy the paper from Marshall Field V has failed—that Field has sold
the paper to Rupert Murdoch.

Hoge went on to become the editor of
Foreign Affairs
. That’s where I leave a message. His secretary calls and says he’ll meet me for drinks
at the Metropolitan Club. But that afternoon, she calls to say that he has to work
late, I should come by the office.

The offices of
Foreign Affairs
are on East Sixty-eighth Street. It’s all very
Three Days of the Condor
. Hoge meets me in a hallway cramped with cartons of papers. His hair is more gray
than golden, but his eyes are still blue and the jaw still cut and jutting. He takes
me to his office, a smallish place made even smaller by all the books piled around
him on tables and the floor.

“What can I help you with?”

By now I have my strategy down: Start general and build, try to drop the question
in as innocuously as possible.

“I’m writing about my father and—well, you knew my dad and I’m wondering if you could
tell me a bit of what the paper was like back then.”

He leans back in his chair, a man ready to hold forth. His eyes look to the ceiling
and stay there as he speaks, as if the ceiling is
some sort of portal into the past, a screen, maybe, which I can’t see, and he’s simply
channeling, narrating to me, what he sees as it passes by.

He tells me about the lobster shift—6 p.m. to 2 a.m. He tells me how back then editors
still needed to be able to read metal type upside down, since the type was set that
way. He tells me how the Linotype machines below the newsroom vibrated so strongly
that you could feel the floor rattle.

“The night shift was a separate world,” he says. “One for night owls. The guys had
dark senses of humor. When your father and I came up, there were still guys on the
paper who had covered Capone and the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. They’d covered
Dillinger. The year your dad died—it was a moment between two eras. Between
The Front Page
and the Information Age. These were guys who saw journalism not as a profession that
you needed a college degree for. For them it was a job. And most of all, it was a
kind of game. It was all about the scoop. About getting the story first. These guys
taught us how to do second-story work.”

“What’s that?”

“You know those stories in the paper about a guy who kills his wife or his girlfriend?
And with those stories, there’s always a family photo of the dead woman, one that
looks like it sat on her mother’s nightstand? There’s an art to getting those photos.
You and another reporter go to the house of the dead woman, and when someone answers,
you flash your press passes fast, all official-like, and tell them you’re detectives
and you have a few questions. Then, while your partner asks her questions, you sneak
upstairs to the second floor and steal photos. That’s second-story work.”

He smiles.

“Of course, you can’t do that anymore,” he says.

“Definitely a different time,” I say. “And in talking to you and other guys from back
then, it seems like there was a real code among newspapermen.”

“It went like this: You could and would compete like hell during
the day, but if something happened to you, I’d protect you. We watched out for each
other. And at night, we’d all drink together. Because at night, everyone is on the
same team.”

“And my dad—tell me about him.”

“You have to understand, not many men could do your father’s job. You had to be almost
a machine. Every story in the paper goes through his team and him. He was the fulcrum.
I think part of the cost of that was you had to bury your emotions. You couldn’t lose
your cool. And when you got off work, you had to blow off steam. Instead of one drink,
maybe you have four.”

“Did he do that a lot?”

“We all did.”

He starts to pick his words and slows down. He stares even harder at the ceiling,
like he’s unsure of the script that is unrolling.

“You knew you could not push your old man. He could really verbally abuse someone.
You had to watch out for the trigger.”

I thank him for his honesty. Tell him that not many guys I’ve talked to have given
me the full picture of his personality.

Hoge nods.

“One last thing,” I say. “I’m trying to figure out what happened that night he died.
His buddies all say they can’t remember. If a buddy of mine died, I’m sure I’d know
the details. Especially if I’m a newspaperman. I find it strange that none of you
guys can remember what happened to a friend who worked with you.”

He says, “What’s in it for any of these guys if they tell you the truth?”

“What’s to hide?”

“What is it you want to know?”

“I’m just looking for the facts about that night. As his boss, you must know something.
Look,” I say, and I unfold a copy of the obituary. “Here’s the obit from the
Today
and the
Daily News,
both talking about ‘friends’ he was with.”

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

He gets up from behind his desk. His hand, big like a steam shovel, reaches out toward
me.

“I wish we had more time. I need to get back to work.”

#  #  #

We all say we want The Truth, but we all want our secrets kept. Look at me. I know
what I know and yet I will not tell my mother. And it’s not just guilt I feel about
keeping it from her. It’s also the guilt I feel in betraying him. All my life, it’s
been this struggle to leave his death—to leave him—behind. And all my life, it’s been
the same: Just when I think I’m breaking free, I feel it—his cold hand around my ankle,
grasping me from the grave, pulling me back.

I never dream. Or I rarely remember my dreams. Except for this: Just after my nephew
was born, I went to Chicago to meet him. I remember sitting in my mother’s kitchen—my
mother, my brother, me, and Glenn: son, grandson, nephew. The three of us are cooing
over this newborn and it hits me—for the first time in forty years, this family is
defined no longer by His Death. For the first time, there is a future. A fresh heir.

That night, the dream: The three of us are in the home I grew up in, sitting in the
living room, holding my newborn nephew. And suddenly, descending from the staircase:
a man-sized white cat. A cat that’s walking upright, like a man. It has my father’s
face, even his glasses. When he gets to the landing, his eyes lock on us. And in that
split second, I know exactly what I have to do. He springs toward us, his fangs bared
and his claws unsheathed, aiming directly at my newborn nephew. I launch myself into
the air and knock him off target. My brother and mother grab the baby and cower in
the corner while I grapple with this big white cat, punching and rolling and kicking.
Finally, I wrestle him out of the house. I slam the door and through the little window
at the top see him on the sidewalk, jumping up and down, railing and waving his fists.
Hate in his eyes. The look of a man who seeks revenge.

#

Whenever I’m getting close to the truth, a voice in my head—my father’s voice—yells
at me: “
Who
do you think you are? I
made
you. Who do you think you are, trying to destroy me? I can destroy
you
.”

There have been many times when that voice kept me from pressing ahead, made me feel
that to discover his truth would be a betrayal. He really did a number on me. Made
me wonder if I would be hurting my mother, if my quest for my answers and my story
is selfish or hurtful to others.

I used to have this fantasy, too, that I could stop him. I’d be on North Pine Grove
and I’d see him getting out of his Buick, parked under a streetlight, a breeze pulling
on the hem of his raincoat. I’d see him walking quickly down the middle of the empty
street, sodium vapor casting its strange glow. And I’d see me, catching him. If somehow
I could stop him from going wherever he is headed, I could save him and it’s all different.

I touch him on the shoulder.

Hey.

He spins on his heel, fist cocked, ready to hit me.

That look in his eye. I know that look.

That look of a man who will not be stopped or separated from what he desires.

#  #  #

June. My mother’s birthday. I go to Chicago. I tell her to name what she wants to
do. The day is on me.

“Would you take me downtown? We never get to do that together,” she says. “It’s a
nice day. We could see the park and have some lunch.”

I’m relieved she has a vision. She usually leaves it all to me.

We start in Millennium Park. Grant Park, the name it used to carry. That was before
Mayor Daley had enough of the past and decided to remake it. Mayor Daley—son of the
Mayor Daley I grew up with. The one we called Da Mare. The one who died in his doctor’s
office, Christmas of ’76. Then his son follows him to the job. Sons following fathers—that’s
the Chicago way.

The first time I went into the city alone was 1976. I was twelve. I had a map that
I stole from my mother. I found it in a drawer in the kitchen and hid it in my bedroom.

Look how it unfolds. Chicago. A neat grid. Color-coded. Red, yellow, green. Businesses.
Houses. Parks. Every night, I begin at the same place: 401 North Wabash. The
Sun-Times
building, snug along a gentle bend in the Chicago River. My hand moves over the city.
Measures the distance from where he was to our house. And when I’m finished, the same
struggle to refold the map, so she can’t tell. But once it unfolds, it’s never the
same.