After Visiting Friends (6 page)

#  #  #

Halloween night, the rain always came. Winter’s advance troops.

Chicago in winter? Not for the faint of heart. Even now, I go back for Christmas and
I can’t take it. “Your blood has thinned,” my mother always tells me. “That’s what
happens when you leave.”

I step beyond the terminal, into the air outside O’Hare, and it’s like inhaling shards
of glass. And then there’s the snow. Endless shoveling. People get nutty about it.
After a storm, people emerge blinking but single-minded, their only thought to dig
out their cars, buried in drifts before their homes. And then, when they finally free
their cars, they drag old kitchen chairs out to mark their places. Stake their claim.
Drive down a Chicago side street in January. Amid the snowbanks, chair after battered
chair. Like so many thrones for Old Man Winter.

Chicago. I am of that place. Spires loom. The sky, a soiled shroud. Even as a kid,
I knew it was my Old Country. Where leaves get trapped and battered in dark gangways.
Where cabbages boil in every kitchen and bitter steam stains dim windows. Where old
Polacks nurse Old Styles in taverns on Ashland Avenue and, outside, women wait huddled
for buses grinding streets that stretch to the horizon. From my grandmother’s attic,
I could see the garbage dumps beyond the railroad tracks. They had been filled years
before I was born. Covered with new soil. Sodded with fresh grass. New land. And pipes
were stuck here and there, spewing fire. Burning off the methane. At night, I’d stare
out the window, watching pale blue flames flicker like hopeful campfires of settlers
on the prairie.

#

Winter, my mother always kept the house as cold as possible. “Put on a sweater,” she’d
say whenever I tell her I am cold.

I am cold every day. Some days, I wear three sweaters and two pairs of socks, sitting
there in the basement with my brother, the afghan pulled over us, watching
Hogan’s Heroes
. Imprisoned men having fun.

At night, my mother would drop the thermostat to fifty-nine. I’d sleep in a knit hat
and socks.

In the depth of winter, mornings still black as sin and the wind blowing jagged crystals
of ice-snow against the bedroom window, I’d go downstairs for breakfast and my mother
still would not raise the thermostat. What she’d do instead: Turn on the oven and
open it. I’d pull my chair in front of it. Eat my breakfast and stare at the flames.

One night I couldn’t stand it anymore, and on my way to bed I turned the thermostat
up. To sixty-two.

The next morning I come into the kitchen, and as I sit down she plants herself before
the oven and blocks my warmth.

“Did you touch the thermostat?”

“No.”

“Don’t gaslight me,” she says.

I look at her.

“Do you know what gaslighting is?”

“No.” (I’m ten. What does she want?)

“It’s a movie,” she says. “It’s all about this man who tries to drive his wife crazy
by dimming the lights in their house, and whenever she asks, ‘Is it getting darker
in here?’ he says, ‘No.’ And she starts to lose her mind. But this detective, Joseph
Cotten—oh, you know I’ve always had the biggest crush on him—saves her from her cruel
husband. Turns out not only is he trying to drive her mad, he’s also leading a whole
double life outside the home.”

She looks at me.

“That’s gaslighting,” she says.

“I didn’t do anything,” I say.

I went out into the frozen morning. School. The only sound the crunch of my boots
on iced-snow and the scream of another Final Approach.

#

Final Approach.

Over and over, that’s all we heard.

Life in the shadow of O’Hare. ORD—what this land was before
the airport was: orchards. Men took it for the airport’s original name: Orchard Field.
The origin of ORD. Acres and acres of apple trees. As a boy, I rode my bike to O’Hare,
circumnavigated its fenced-in perimeter. That’s how I found the forgotten orchards.
A patch of the past. In the fall, their apples rot unwanted. All that remains. That
and the cemetery. Graves at the far edge of a runway. Chain-link fence. Weathered,
worn stones. The remains of settlers. Germans. Some Swedes. Their church was here.
After the war, men came with money, bought out the flock, tore down the church, built
our runways. Yet the dead remain. Unless you know where to look, you can’t see them.

Today, still, when I fly to Chicago, I search out the gravestones during my descent.
Final Approach. A game I play. My landmarks, the graves. Then I know I am home. ORD.

#

Jets rattle our kitchen window. In the wake of each departure, the disturbance so
strong we cease speaking.

“Hold that thought,” it seems my mother always says whenever I try to speak.

One day, while I’m waiting for her to cook my lunch, my neat round spaghetti you can
eat with a spoon, another jet rumbles overhead. My mother slams her wooden spoon against
the counter.

“This home is a flight path,” she says, and walks out of the room, the stove untended.

Eventually, she is drawn to it, to the world of airport jobs.

O’Hare. A world of transit. Of long-term lots and frontage roads, of courtesy shuttles,
of men in flight.

When I am ten, she takes a job as a cashier in the gift shop at the O’Hare Marriott.
Walking distance from our house. When I miss her, I go to see her. But she is unaware.
I stand in the lobby, hide behind a column or a wingback chair. Somewhere I can watch
her ring up people, make change.

Hertz came later. Her job is to hand out agreements to
businessmen. Circle the relevants, ask the men if they want additional coverage, highlight
their penalties for late returns. I become drawn to O’Hare. The Marriott has a shuttle,
and in the winter, as a young boy, I hitch rides. I make friends with the driver,
cut a deal to be a porter. Men appear and I carry their baggage. Sometimes they tip
me. I buy a bad-tasting hot dog and roam the airport for hours, watch jets ascend
and descend. I come to love the terminal. It feels better than home.

#

In the weeks after he is dead, I sit on my mother’s bed and watch as she and her brother
work their way through my father’s closet. Whatever suits my uncle wants, he hands
to my mother and she stuffs them in her Glad bag. Black. Huge. The kind you use to
get rid of the dead leaves. The clothes my uncle rejects, my mother tosses into a
cardboard box, and a few days later she tells me to carry it out to the front stoop.

“What are we doing?” I say.

“Goodwill is coming.”

“What’s that?”

“You can wait if you want, but it never comes when it says it will.”

I sit on the front stoop, my father’s box next to me. Finally a man appears.

“Are you Good Will?” I say.

“I am.”

#  #  #

Mail continues to come for him.

ROBERT CHARLES HAINEY

915 C PETERSON AVE

PARK RIDGE, ILLINOIS 60068

I ask why.

“Junk mail,” my mother says. “Computers,” she says. “They don’t care.”

For years after, whenever I can get home before my mother, I pluck out the pieces
sent to him. Bills, newsletters, solicitations. Envelopes with little plastic windows,
his name framed, on display. I hide them in a blue Keds shoe box beneath my bed. Nights
when she is not home, I carry the shoe box out to the back porch, bury the letters
in the bottom of our family’s trash.

#

It’s the fall after my father has died. I’m in first grade, September. The air still
warm with summer’s afterburn. I come home from school. My grandmother is working the
stove. In the months after my father’s death, she and my grandfather stay with us.
They want to keep an eye on my mother.

I hold a picture that I drew that day: two large white candles, one on either side
of the paper, each attached to a large yellow candleholder. Small orange flames burn
steady from their wicks. Between the candles there is a coffin, propped atop two black
wheels.

My grandmother asks, “What is this?”

I tell her we were told to draw a picture of our father.

My grandmother crumples up my portrait and stuffs it deep into the trash. She squeezes
my arm, kneels down in front of me on the linoleum.

“Don’t ever tell anyone about this. Don’t ever tell your mother what you made. Or
what I did.”

#

How his death hung over that house.

It’s part of what I know to be true—your absence is greater than your presence.

#  #  #

1970. The first Christmas without him.

Father Clark sets up a Christmas tree next to the altar, blocking out Saint Joseph’s
shrine. There are no ornaments on the tree, only pieces of white paper, paper-clipped
to the branches. Like paper snowflakes, waiting to become. After Mass, my mother plucks
one off. “What’s that?” I ask, and she tells my brother and me that we’re going to
make a care package for a bum. We all said
bum
back then. Back then, any man without a home was a bum.

Father Clark has started a neediest fund and our church has adopted Pacific Garden
Mission, deep in the city. We sit at the kitchen table as my mother unfolds the piece
of paper that still smells of mimeograph. She reads the name of the man to herself,
and then she hands the paper to my brother, who hands it to me. In black ink, a man’s
name is written. Below are mimeographed purple instructions saying that the best gifts
to include are toothbrushes, toothpaste, disposable razors, warm socks, knit hats,
long underwear.
NO AFTERSHAVE
.

My brother and I watch our mother pack our gifts into a box. Her fists crumple old
newspaper into loose balls. Something to prevent
breakage. Then she slides toward my brother and me a Christmas card and a pen.

“Write something,” she says.

For a long time, I stare at the card, unsure of what to write to this man I do not
know. I’m mystified at how to begin. “Dear sir”? “Dear Mr. Bum”? I write simply, “Merry
Christmas.” As I’m about to sign my name, something else trips me: Do I sign “Love,
Mike”? If I write “Love,” am I betraying my father? Will I anger my mother?

I scribble my name and poke the card back to my mother. She seals it and says nothing,
just drops it into the box.

“Why can’t bums have aftershave?”

“They’ll drink it. That’s what they do on skid row. Hold this down.”

I put my hand on the lid as she cuts the tape. I say, “Where’s skid row?”

“Where bums live.”

“Why there?”

“Because they’re lost men.” She pushes our box to the center of the table. “There,”
she says. “That looks like it will stay closed.”

For years afterward, whenever my mother drives us into the city and we pass by the
giant red neon cross-shaped sign for Pacific Garden Mission, I stare at the men standing
in line, the men waiting to be fed. Their eyes never meet mine. I look at them all.
I think about what they were. Whom they left behind. I scan their faces, thinking
that someday I will see my own. That I will see his.

#  #  #

Maybe my father knew he would never return. Never walk through the kitchen door again,
hang his suit coat over a kitchen chair, make a pot, listen to the percolation, watch
the sun rise, wait for us to wake to find him.

At some point, doesn’t every man think of not returning?

The pack of smokes? The carton of milk? The errant errand?

And if he did return, what would be the same?

Summer of ’72, an F2 tornado hits in the night, tears a hole in our roof. Rain pours
in. A deluge. Water runs down the walls, seeps into the floors. We spend the next
two days, the three of us, ripping up gray, soggy carpeting and the padding underneath,
dumping it in the alley.

“We have to get to the floorboards,” my mother tells us.

A day or two later, men come in. They break holes in the walls. They’re looking for
rot, they say. “Before you can go on,” one of the men tells me, “you gotta make sure
your walls are strong.”

Come the fall, the house is different. Each room, remade. Fresh paint and carpeting
everywhere. Wall-to-wall is my mother’s mantra. And the shades of the ’70s, shades
of earth and canned vegetables, now rule. The thin gray carpet in the living room
is replaced by thick pile, the color of an Idaho potato. If my father were to enter
their bedroom, only the bed remains unchanged. Cherry. Four-poster. The carpeting
shag now, pistachio green. If he walks in the back door, into the kitchen, slipping
in like he always did—the walls, once white, now papered over in a print of avocado
and lemon. Carpet—something my mother tells me is “indoor-outdoor”—covers the linoleum.
Everything reskinned. Only the clock, built in to the wall above the sink, goes untouched.
Slim black hands circling a tin face.

After the repairs are made, I cannot sleep. I ask my mother to put the kitchen back
the way it was. I am convinced he will return and, opening a door on a home he no
longer recognizes, he will believe he is in the wrong house and he will leave us,
to go on searching for his home.

#  #  #

I walk with my grandfather on a summer night, the summer my father is dead. We walk
through the alley of the Kroger grocery store. In the setting sun, the bricks turn
a deep, warm orange, like the color of that powder you mix with milk to make the “cheese”
of macaroni and cheese.

My grandfather is a quiet man. He holds my hand. We walk in silence. It will be this
way, always.

For the rest of my childhood, I want from him what I want from any man in my life.
A voice. Someone to talk to. Someone who will tell me the knowledge I should know,
tell me of the ways of the world, guide me. An arm around my shoulder.

At the end of the alley, I stop at a manhole. Years to come, this will be home plate
for baseball games back here with boys.

The manhole cover is not solid but a grate, metal bars maybe an inch apart. I am on
the edge, not wanting to stand on it, afraid I will fall through the spaces.