After Visiting Friends (4 page)

Sometimes, if the night is right and late enough and Foy is there, drinking, Frank
and Foy will climb atop the bar and then, like two kids getting ready to run the three-legged
race at a Fourth of July picnic, belt their peg legs together. The whole bar, rapt.

And then, softly . . . softly . . . the two men begin to sing,
Way . . . down . . . upon . . . the Swa-nee Ri-ver . . . far . . . far . . . a-way . . .
Their two soles, keeping time.

#

In the fall of 1959, my father leaves Chicago. A six-week trip through Europe, his
first. It’s been a dream forever, and he’s saved
his money. He goes with a buddy. Maybe the biggest moment comes when he somehow ends
up on the British version of
What’s My Line?
He wins when he stumps the panel with his secret (“I’ve interviewed the queen”).

He airmails my mother letters from Berlin, Zurich, London. He sends her a postcard
from Windsor Castle, a photo of the Waterloo Chamber and its enormous wooden table.
“Take a look at this table,” he writes. “Looks like they haven’t made up their mind
who is going to be slot man. Had lobster last night and saw
My Fair Lady
. Both great. Be good. Bob.”

He returns. She’s waited for him. They go to bars, restaurants. The Driftwood Cocktail
Lounge, the Ivy Lounge, the Clover Club, the Town and Country, the Baby Doll Polka
Club, Talbott’s, Elliott’s Pine Log, William Tell Lounge, Café Bohemia.

South Pacific
is the first movie they see together.
Porgy and Bess, North by Northwest, The Five Pennies, Anatomy of a Murder, The 400
Blows, The Seventh Seal, Ben-Hur, The Apartment, Smiles of a Summer Night.
My mother falls in love with the theme from
A Summer Place
. Whenever they go to Talbott’s, she plays it on the jukebox, over and over.

They go to Second City. They go to music clubs. Cloister Inn, Gitano’s, the Gate of
Horn, where, a few years later, they see Peter, Paul, and Mary.

#

June 25, 1960.

They have been dating for a year. My mother’s leaving for Europe the next day with
her friend Diane Lenzi—the same woman who encouraged her to attend the Derby Day party
at my father’s apartment.

My mother’s never been to Europe. She’s saved her money. It’s her dream, too.

The night before she leaves, my father tells her he wants to marry her. She says yes.

Two facts: (1) He cannot afford a ring. She tells him she doesn’t need one. Instead,
he gives her a watch for Christmas. (2) Not until she returns from Europe six weeks
later does my mother tell anyone that she is engaged.

#

In the newsroom, they send each other notes and cards, in the
Tribune
’s house mail—manila envelopes shuttled by copy boys from desk to desk, from chicken-wire
out-basket to chicken-wire in-basket. My mother saves them all. Years later, down
in her basement, I find the box. A short time before they are married, she sends him
a card via interoffice mail.

The cover says,
YOU’VE MADE ME THE HAPPIEST

Inside she writes:

But you will make me happier if you will meet me at the end of the aisle in St. Turibius
Church at 12 noon exactly three months from today on May 6. I look forward with anxious
heart to be your wife
—
and love you, take care of you, make sandwiches for you, and even sew your buttons.

I love you very much.

Barb

Two years after they meet, they are married. It is Derby Day of May 1961. A few months
later, my mother leaves the
Tribune
. She’s a housewife now. They get a one-bedroom apartment on Ridge Avenue. Nine months
after they’re married, my brother is born. A short time later, they buy their house
near O’Hare. My mother is happy—“I had my own washer and dryer. For once, I could
do the laundry whenever I wanted.”

March 1964, I am born.

SLIPPERS

And then, just like that, he is gone. Thirty-five and dead.

And just like that, we go on. Or, try to. Three of us stumbling through that first
year. My mother, thirty-three, a widow now. My brother and I, eight and six, 1970.

A death, quick. Abrupt. Unwitnessed. Mysterious.

#

The parking lot. That morning. I am on my bike, my new two-wheeler, riding in circles
in the parking lot of the Kroger grocery store. My mother has sent me out. Or have
I chosen to leave?

Here they come. People I know. People who know me. Blood, they say. Relatives, all.
In big, wide American cars, they drive into my faded-asphalt lot. There’s my uncle
Paul, my aunt Nancy; my godmother, Lorraine and her husband, Clarence. There’s Uncle
Harry, there’s Aunt Sue. They are waving to me. I am one boy on two wheels, going
in circles, not stopping. And there they go, one after another, to do what you do
when a life stops. Coming to close the circle.

#  #  #

“What do you remember about that day?” I ask my grandmother as we sit toe-to-toe,
her in her wheelchair.

She tells me that after they broke it to my brother and me, she went upstairs to the
bathroom.

“I needed a place to cry,” she says. “That’s when I saw them, right there in front
of the radiator—your father’s slippers.”

My grandmother stares at the slippers for a minute, hesitates, and then—she stuffs
them into her purse.

All that long day, she carries my father’s slippers with her. When she goes back into
the kitchen to comfort my mother, his slippers are in her purse. When she is waiting
at home with my brother and me while my grandfather takes my mother to buy the coffin.
While she is helping to serve us dinner. My father’s slippers stay in her purse until
late that night when she and my grandfather return to their silent house on Kenneth
Avenue. Slowly, my grandfather will back his red Impala into the garage and then,
when he turns the engine off, they will both get out of the car and, together, pull
the heavy door down.

They walk with no words between them.

My grandfather pushes open the cyclone gate to their yard and stalks toward the house.
In the darkness, behind him, my grandmother considers the battered fifty-five-gallon
oil drum that has been their garbage can for as long as they have lived here. She
unlatches her purse, clutches his slippers, slides them into the dark can, hides them
between bags of trash.

“All I could think was your momma was never gonna see him in those slippers again.
I couldn’t bear for her to see them.”

#  #  #

I went to school that day. Kindergarten. My mother asks me if I want to go or stay
home.

“Your brother is staying home,” she says.

“I’ll go,” I say.

Not go on a day like this? More than ever, I want to be present.

Thomas Alva Edison Grammar School.

I walk to school alone.

And then there I am, cross-legged, Injun-style, on the floor. It is my favorite time:
story time. Miss Nome reads to us. And in my wandering mind I become aware of someone
at the classroom door: the principal and my brother’s second-grade teacher. The principal
says something. I see her lips move but hear no words. They stare at me, point. They
shake their heads and then they are gone.

#

At the end of the day, my brother’s teacher reappears at the door, and then all of
my brother’s classmates file in, bearing gifts for me. Well, sort of. There are no
trinkets. No furs. No wampum. Instead, each has made a card for my brother. All of
them big, multicolored, construction-papered, glue-and-Crayola’d sympathy cards. I
hold out my arms, receive them all. When it comes time for me to go home, Miss Nome
has to help me carry them toward the curb outside, where Uncle Dick waits. I get in
the car, and she piles the sympathies onto my lap. I have never felt more alive.

#  #  #

My mother used to be afraid that people would know anything about our family—to know
our weaknesses. Like the fact that my father was dead, or that she was a widow at
thirty-three. A fear we’d be seen as strange. Or not right. As I got older, I had
to keep telling her, Every family has skeletons. The family that you think is perfect,
the one sitting front and center at church every Sunday, the kids all smiles and well
scrubbed? They’re probably the most in need of sympathy. At our church—Mary, Seat
of Wisdom—it was the _________. How many times did I sit at Saturday Vigil Mass when
I was a kid, wishing that I were in their family, not mine? They’d stride the aisle
to take a pew, the mother beautiful as Mary Tyler Moore, the father all JFK. And their
kids? I envied them. I’d imagine how nice it would be to go home after Mass with that
family. Only years later did I learn the truth: one daughter estranged; one of their
sons living a life they didn’t understand; the parents with heavy hearts.

It was my mother who told me about them.

“Family secrets,” she said when she finished telling me the story, waving her hand
across her face.

“Family?” I said. “Secrets? Sometimes I think they are the same thing.”

#  #  #

I come home from school bearing all those cards and find our house crammed with people.
In walks a neighbor, Phil James, carrying a giant ham in a roasting pan. If you asked
me what I remember
about that day, one of the first things I’d say is “ham.” He’s weaving his way through
the crowded room, holding the thing above his head like some priest raising high his
sacrifice, and it’s hot out of the oven all sizzling and smelling good and everyone
smiles and laughs.

#  #  #

We waked him on Sunday. Ryan-Parke Funeral Home.

“Visitation,” they called it.

In my high school class was a girl named Cristen Ryan. I never knew her. There’s no
way I would have—she was a cheerleader. Dark hair and dark eyes and thighs soft and
smooth and olive-skinned. She was like a Gauguin painting on Game Day in her pleated
wool cheerleader skirt, the one that was white but had black and red panels hidden
underneath that I would get glimpses of as she passed me by in the hall: black, red.
Profit, loss. And that thick turtleneck sweater, the big block
MS
stitched onto her chest. Pointy Keds white as her teeth. She was always smiling.
Walking the hallway, hugging her binder and her books to her chest, laughing at whatever
it was the person walking with her was whispering.

I wish she would’ve noticed me, talked to me. I believed she didn’t because she knew
my father had been inside her father’s funeral home. I was sure that she didn’t talk
to boys with dead fathers. I was positive her father told her who we were. It all
made me feel ashamed. Weak. A failure. Why do I have to drag this dead man with me,
wherever I go?

Still, she was lovely. A vision.

Sometimes, at Thompson’s Finer Foods—where I started working
at fifteen, selling fruits and vegetables—she’d come in with her mother. Her mother,
perfectly tan, even in December, always wearing a black fur coat that didn’t stop
until her ankles. In the winter, the pelt rubbing against the wet wheel of the shopping
cart. Their cart, piled high with provisions for what I was sure was a never-ending
party that I’d never be invited to. I imagined their house, aglow, bursting with laughter,
with life and beauty.

And me, standing there, rotating my stock, uncrating another rickety crate of peppers
or beets, scraping off the caked, crushed ice. Stacking sack upon sack of potatoes.
My hands, soiled from my 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. shift. “Secondhand dirt,” my boss called
it—the grime of the earth that would work its way into the grooves of my fingerprints.
My hands, blackened, cracked. Transformed into dirty relief maps. And my mother, always
after me to scrub my hands when I returned home. “Go into the basement,” she’d say.
“And don’t touch my walls.”

#

At the wake, I’m on one of my mother’s hands. My brother, the other. She leads us
down the aisle, past the rows of gray metal folding chairs, toward his waiting coffin.

“Kneel,” she says.

I’m next to his face. It is as though he’s asleep on the couch. He even has his glasses
on. Brown frames, thick.

I look to my mother, but I can’t see her face. A mantilla? Behind the coffin is a
curtain. Like the kind through which a host would make his appearance on a television
talk show. Floor to ceiling. Shimmering. Suspended in the midst of it, a crucifix.

I touch the wood of my father’s coffin. It’s smooth and shiny, deep and brown. Like
his Buick. He always drove a Buick. That’s what he was driving the night he died.
Beer-bottle brown with a black hardtop.

The rest of the day, I sit in the back of the parlor and people walk in and point
to me and say, “He’s one of the boys.”

#  #  #

We buried him at Maryhill Cemetery. A town away. Us, one long row of dark black cars.
But we didn’t really bury him. It was that Catholic thing, where you have the funeral
Mass and then the procession to the cemetery and then the final prayers in the cemetery
chapel. The body left behind.