After Visiting Friends (32 page)

“I can make eggs,” she says.

I pour coffee. Her old percolator.

“Don’t get mad,” she says, “but I had an idea.”

“What’s that?”

“I still haven’t seen Gramma’s plot. I haven’t been to Resurrection since her funeral.
It’s a long way to go. I mean. But. Well. Maybe you’d want to take a drive?”

“I would do that.”

“Only if you want.”

“Mom, yes. It’s Gramma.”

And then the air chop with her hand. Her seeing conflict to cut off where none exists.

#

She makes my eggs “Polish-style”: cuts bacon into half-inch pieces, fries it, then
mixes it in with scrambled eggs. It’s been one of my favorites, ever since I was a
boy.

We eat while she stares at her Jumble and I pretend to read the op-ed. The sun pushes
through her shade. The edges, illuminated.

“Are you finished?” and she’s out of her chair, my plate to the sink in one motion.

“What else?” she says.

She’s standing beside my chair, a hand on my shoulder.

“Mom?” I say.

And I start to cry.

She taps me twice. Like I’m a staticky radio she’s trying to lock in to a signal.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just want to tell you—I know it was not easy raising Chris and me, alone. And you
were not just the best mother I could have, you were a great father, too.”

Her chin is trembling like my grandmother’s always did.

She says, “Sometimes it’s hard being alone. I’m okay a lot of the time. But there
are times when I’m not. You know, you and Chris and the kids are all I have. You’re
everything.”

She pulls me in to her. I feel her cheek against my skull, her chest against my arm,
her breath on my neck.

Never in my life have I felt these things.

I say, “Mom, you are my hero. You need to know that.”

“I need to get some Kleenex,” she says, and disappears into her bedroom.

#

We miss the signs for Resurrection. We’re supposed to be watching for Justice, the
town where the cemetery is, but we get impatient with the road and exit too soon.
The area is a hodgepodge of interchanges and switching yards, concrete-mixing plants
and freight depots, one big manufacturing zone.

For a half hour, my mother and I go on like this, lost in a widening circle, trying
to find Archer Avenue. I say to my mother, “Gramma better appreciate this.”

My mother laughs.

Then she says, “Keep an eye out for Resurrection Mary. We can always pick her up and
she’ll get us there.”

That’s another thing about my mother—she loves ghost stories, crime stories, ideally
stories that combine the two elements, like Resurrection Mary.

When my brother and I were boys, whenever we were driving down to our grandparents’
house, our mother would tell us the story about how, every so often, a solitary driver
on Archer Avenue comes across a beautiful young woman in a white ball gown hitchhiking
on the side of the road. After people pick her up, they recount their tale to the
newspapers, always telling the reporter that the woman was young and beautiful. “A
real looker,” I remember a man said in a newspaper story I read as a boy. Blond hair.
Blue eyes. And she always asks the driver to take her to O’Henry Ballroom, near Resurrection
Cemetery. But when the driver passes by Resurrection Cemetery, the woman vanishes
from the car. A ghost.

The legend is she’s the ghost of a young Polish girl from the
neighborhood. This is back in the 1930s. She and her boyfriend spend the night dancing
at the O’Henry. At some point, there’s a fight and Mary—who knows how she got that
name—stalks out into the night. Walking up Archer Avenue, looking to hitchhike, she’s
hit by a car, killed. Her parents bury her at Resurrection, in her white dress and
dancing shoes. Ever since, my mother tells us, her ghost wanders Archer Avenue.

#

We find my grandmother’s grave. My mother kneels and presses her palms to her mother’s
gravestone, feels the smoothness, the warmth of the sun in the stone. Then the same
with my grandfather.

“They did a nice job,” my mother says, rising. “The headstone. Don’t you think?”

We pick our way back to her Buick, stepping between the graves.

My mother says, “I could show you the graves of my grandparents. But we’d have to
look them up.”

#

When we get to the administration building, it’s locked. Sunday hours. Faces pressed
to cupped hands, we look in. Near the entrance, I notice a small computer kiosk, like
the kind that dispenses boarding passes at the airport. This one has a sign above
it,
FIND YOUR GRAVE
. We touch the screen. Nothing. Dead.

“I always loved coming to this building as a kid,” my mother says as I labor to revive
the machine. “Every spring, Easter time, we’d have to make the pilgrimage. Two streetcars,
plus a bus. And we’d be hauling everything, even the sprinkling can so we could water
the graves of Gramma and Grampa. That was always my job. It’d be hotter than hell,
and all I looked forward to was the chance to come into this building. It was dark
and cool, like a cave. I loved it.”

She looks at me, raises her hand to her brow, shielding the sun.

“Things were different then, Mike. Gramma would pack lunch
and we’d have a picnic. Spread the blanket on their graves. Sandwiches. Cold fried
chicken.
Kapusta.
It was good.”

We walk to her Buick.

“I have an idea,” she says.

And then I’m driving us to the old neighborhood where she grew up. Fifty-fifth and
Pulaski.

“Long as we’re down here, we might as well go, right?”

#

We pull up in front of the old house. I click off all the things that are still the
same. The sidewalk, pebbled. The silver maple, broad. The stoop before the front door
where my father and grandfather sat drinking High Lifes on summer evenings, watching
my brother and me ride our tricycles. The iron railing with the twisted, wrought
H
in it. The slim gangway and the narrow sidewalk that leads to the alley where my
grandmother buried my father’s slippers in the trash can.

I turn a corner and slow the Buick, a view over the fence of their backyard. The silver
maple that grew here—gone. A stump now. All that remains of the broad canopy that
softly rained green propeller seeds on my brother and me.

I feel time ticking.

Should I tell her now? Here? In the alley?

“Let’s circle back,” she says. “Do you think we can go inside?”

“All they can do is say no.”

A boy answers the bell. He’s Mexican-American, maybe thirteen. He cracks the storm
door.

“Hi,” my mother says. “Are your parents home?”

“No.”

“They’re Jorge and Mary? Right?”

The boy nods, his hand on the door, cracked still.

“You were just a baby when they bought our house—my parents sold it to them in 1988.
I grew up here.”

The boy nods.

I feel the need to jump in. “Would you mind if we came inside for a minute? My mother”—and
I lead him with my eyes toward my mother—“she really needs to see it.”

“My parents aren’t home.”

“It would mean the world to us if we could see it.”

#

It’s tiny. Back then, my grandmother’s house seemed like a Wonderland.

I hit my head on the hallway arch.

Everything here is still the same. The doors, maple, varnished the color of syrup
by my grandfather, solid as rock. My mother and I move from living room to bedroom
to kitchen to dining room, tiny dioramas, all of them.

My mother says, “She’d still recognize it.”

We stand in the snug kitchen, the two of us.

“My parents will be home soon,” the boy says. “You’ll have to go.”

#

We pass Saint Turibius Church. On the sidewalk, Mexican men stand with their wobbly
pushcarts painted bright, selling shaved ice, waiting for Mass to let out. Bottles
with neon liquids are lined up beside the ice, ready to transfigure.

I see the church steps she descended with my father. Husband and wife.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

“Maybe we should eat?” my mother says. “Something before your flight?”

#

It’s after three by the time we get to Agostino’s, an Italian place we’ve been going
to forever, over near Melrose Park. It’s in a little strip mall, but the waiters wear
black vests, white shirts, and black
bow ties. No one else is in the place. Why would they be? People in Chicago do the
Sunday dinner early—but not this early.

At best, I’ve got maybe two hours to talk to her. And what if she loses it and there’s
me, walking from the wreckage, heading down the jet ramp, getting on my plane. Her,
behind me, trying to pick up the pieces. Cursing me.

I go to the men’s room, murmur aloud from my Accomplished List. Like a man saying
a Rosary. I wash my hands and go back to the table.

My mother, alone, eating a piece of bread. Behind her, an Alitalia poster. R
OME
, it says. And there’s a photograph of the Colosseum at night.

“Mom,” I say, and I look down at my empty plate, because if I look at her, I will
lose my words. “Mom, while we’re on the subject of family today, I’ve been thinking
that I need to talk to you about my father. About what I’ve learned about him. Stories
about him that we’ve held to be the truth, they’re not. Beginning with how he died.
And where he was the night he died.”

She looks at me, all quizzical, holding her bread, half-bitten, in her hand.

I say, “The night he died? The story about him, on the street, dead? The cops finding
him? That never happened. That’s not the real story.”

“Did I tell you that story?”

I think, What do you mean? Yes, you did. For decades it lived in my head.

But all I can manage is “Yes.”

“I told you that?”

“Don’t you remember? We talked about the obits? And how I told you the story had holes
in it? The stuff about Pine Grove? About the friends?”

She puts what’s left of her bread on her bread plate.

“Maybe . . . ,” she says, “maybe I should have delved into all of this more at the
time. But all I could think about that day and all
the days after that day was you and Chris. That I needed to take care of you two guys.
That I had a job to do. Because we had nothing, Michael. Nothing. Your father was
dead and nothing was going to change that. I remember, that night, sitting there at
the kitchen table all alone and telling myself that I had to focus on today. Not on
what was.”

“I always had these questions,” I say. “The obits. My whole life I couldn’t get them
out of my head. The details in them about ‘the friends.’ Friends we never knew, friends
we never heard from.”

“All I know, Michael, is that he ended up in that hospital. Then Dick came over that
morning and told us. I always thought it was odd that he was involved. Then Gramma
and Grampa showed up later.”

“No, they came together. With Dick and Helen. Don’t you remember? Because Dick coordinated
it all.”

“He did?”

“Once you told me, ‘Dick took care of everything.’ And he really did. I know how he
got involved.”

“How?”

“Dad didn’t die on the street outside the
Sun-Times
. He died in the apartment of a co-worker.”

“Is this the moving-furniture part of the story?”

“That part is not true.”

“But someone at the wake or maybe later that first day at the house, when everyone
came over, someone told me that after he got off that night he went to the apartment
of someone he worked with, to help move furniture, and he had a heart attack there.”

“Well, it’s true that he died in a co-worker’s apartment. And that person knew Dick
and called him. Dick went to her house and he fixed it with the cops and the papers.”

“Fixed what?”

“To say that Dad died on the street. On North Pine Grove. Not in this person’s apartment.”

She catches the waiter with her eyes. “Can we order?”

Then, she says, “Did you ever talk to Dick about this?”

“I talked to Mark.”

I tell her the whole story Mark told me. I tell her how he told me, “I always knew
this day would come.” I tell her, too, about how Dick covered it up because he wanted
to protect our family from the truth, but that the one thing he could not control
was the obits. I tell her, “Dad died in this woman’s apartment. I don’t know what
precisely their relationship was. I’ve heard a lot of ideas. But the woman, she’s
dead, too.”

“Who was the woman?”

“Her name was Roberta Hess.”

“I don’t know her. Did she work at the
Trib
?”

“
Sun-Times
. Bobbie, they called her. He was her boss. She worked the rim when he was in the
slot.”

She says nothing.

“What if it is true that my father had a relationship with this woman?”

My words, carefully chosen, theoretical.

Her words, chosen just as carefully: “I would have to think about that.”

The storm I feared I would unleash? Her face is without emotion.

“Whatever our relationship was, Michael, wherever your father and I were in our relationship,
you need to know that he loved you and your brother more than anything. He lived for
you two.”

“I know,” I say, realizing that I didn’t really know, until now.

“But what about you and him?”

“I’m not sure your father was a happy man. He had his demons.”

“Demons?”

“He could get violent.”

“What do you mean? Did he hit you?”

“Never that. But a couple of times he pushed me around. You know . . . hard. Everything
was fine, and then I’d say something that triggered something.”

“Did you have to go to the hospital?”

“No. Once, I had a bruise and I couldn’t go out of the house. I never told Gramma
about that.” She pauses. “I don’t know what triggered him, if it was something in
his family, or how he grew up, or what.”

“Do you think that he didn’t want to be in the family, in our home?”