My Father Before Me (20 page)

44

We kept the car
. The white Dodge stayed in the carport, where our father had parked it, where he'd lain down and died in it. We kids took turns driving the Dart—first Peggy; then Kevin; then, when I turned sixteen, me; then Dana. Each of us got behind the wheel, sat where our father had last sat, started it up, just as he had, and drove to work or to a friend's house or—

We kept the car
. How were we able to do this? And why? Did anybody suggest we might sell it, even give it away? But it was useful, it ran well, and it was paid for. It was only a car. It didn't have to be a symbol or even a reminder. After enough time, a year or two, I came to think of it as just the Dart, not the place where he'd
done it
.

Still, something was wrong with it: the shelf between the backseat and rear window, constructed of stiff red cardboard, began to blister. It bubbled, blackened, peeled. Was this normal—just the consequence of years of exposure to sunlight—or was it a late and continuing effect of the fumes with which our father had filled the car?

What were we thinking?
We kept the car
.

We kept it until we could keep it no longer, until keeping it was a burden, until years later, when I was hundreds of miles away at
college, and it had taken on the habit of sputtering suddenly to a stop, and then something essential within it broke for the last time, and it would not budge, and Kevin threw up his hands and took twenty dollars from the driver of a tow truck, and the guy hauled the damned thing away for good.

45

A month after the funeral, my mother received a letter from a man whose name she did not recognize. He enclosed a check for a hundred and fifty dollars, explaining that he owed the money to her husband. It was a gambling debt.

The letter was one small clue, a reminder, of the life my father inhabited outside of the family. He had a life at work, a life in Alaska, where he traveled continually throughout his career, a life with people we did not know. What was that life like? And what was he like when he was in it, when he was far from us?

Almost forty years after my father's death, hunting for answers, I tracked down a former professional colleague of his—maybe the last one still living. Kirk, also an accountant, traveled with my father several times a year to the pulp mill in Alaska to audit the Alaska Lumber and Pulp Company's financial reports.

He remembered my father well. Kirk had been impressed by his amiability and intelligence and professional integrity. Beyond that, he wasn't sure he had any information that could help me. “Well,” I said, “tell me about those trips to Alaska. What were they like?”

Kirk and my father would fly to Sitka, the remote town along the water, and check in to a hotel. In the morning, they would drive to the company's offices at the pulp mill, ten miles out of town, and go
over the books. My father, being in charge of the Japanese company's financial activities in the U.S., had a difficult job, Kirk said. AL&P was continually in financial trouble. The pulp industry was unstable, the cost of doing business in Alaska was steep, and the company “played games with where the money went.

“Your father's main job,” Kirk said, “was to prevent the company from foreclosing.” But he did his work well: “The records were always clean.”

After a day's work at the office, Kirk and my father would head back into town for dinner—a big one. “We'd be gobbling up twenty-ounce steaks.” Who knows what my mother, who weighed my diabetic father's portions by the gram, would have thought of those meals. During one dinner, my dad excused himself to go to the bathroom. Kirk waited for him to return. Then he started worrying and went to check on him. In the bathroom, he found my father, confused, “out of it”: having a diabetic reaction. Later, Kirk asked him, “What should I do if that happens again?”

“Feed me chocolate,” my father told him.

After dinner, Kirk would return to the hotel, but, for my father, the evening was just beginning: he went to the Elks lodge to meet with his regular poker group. One of the members was a priest. According to Kirk, my father would stay up all night—he might go two or three days without sleeping. “He was not disciplined about his health.” Sometimes, when the two of them had to travel two hundred miles to the lumber mill in Wrangell, they played cards with the company's Japanese employees.

Even in Seattle, Kirk told me, my dad was in the habit of playing cards for an hour or two after work. I thought about all those evenings, through all those years, when our mother had set a place at the table for him and he arrived late—an hour or two, sometimes, after he had promised to.

“Why wasn't he going home to his family instead?”

“Well,” Kirk answered, “he was a gambling addict. You know that, of course.”

A gambling addict. No. I didn't know that.

“Oh, he was a dedicated gambler—but he didn't win much. He owed a lot of money. I had assumed the gambling contributed to his death.”

My dad might have killed himself to escape his debts?

What about drinking?

“He wasn't much of a drinker. I don't recall ever seeing him drink, really.” If he was up till all hours playing cards, Kirk said, he would likely “have a beer or two,” but that didn't mean he had a drinking problem.

So maybe that explains it: all those late arrivals home, all those long nights away. Early in their marriage, hadn't he sat my mother down and tried to teach her how to play poker, tried to excite in her an interest that matched his? Maybe he hadn't been vanishing into some dim bar; maybe he hadn't been escaping into some stranger's bed. Even during his last months, when he had put on a suit and pretended to be heading to a job interview, maybe he'd been heading for the gambling table, where he would lay his money down—lay our money down. What was the seduction? I imagine him trying one more hand, then another, getting swept up in the thrill of it, the drama, the chase, taking solace in the safety of it: at this table, in this circle of poker buddies, he could feel neither depressed nor helpless; it was only numbers he was dealing with, and he knew about numbers—they were his trade. His job was to make numbers balance, make them come out even, be unassailable, while he remained invisible; but here, with luck, with patience, with skill, he might make numbers work for him. He might win just by sitting and thinking, counting, calculating his chances, saying little, revealing nothing with his eyes, making not a single gesture to give himself away. And if he lost? No harm: it was only play, and there was the next hand with which to win it all back, or the hand after that. There was always time—or, rather, time was not a condition of this realm. While he sat studying his cards, he was happily alone in his life, in this floating, enclosed fragment of it; there was only this silence to inhabit, this silence of numbers
and chance doing their work, this abstracted, projected space, this closed circle, this knowable world of controlled risk.

My mother knew that he gambled in the last year or two of his life—the check from the stranger after my father's death confirmed that. But she had had no idea of what Kirk told me: that he had gambled for at least a decade before that, and all the time. How much did he lose? Only he could know: he controlled the books. Beyond the monthly allowance he issued my mother for household expenses, the money, however much it was, was his. He always paid the bills on time—the mortgage, the utilities, the insurance—but he must have been setting aside money for gambling. Kirk said the stakes were low in those poker games, but one of my sisters remembers a day when Dad reassured Mom, “Well, I didn't lose the house.” Had he really gambled the mortgage, or was he being teasingly, or cruelly, hyperbolic? And wouldn't that conversation mean our mother knew about his poker playing? But she says she didn't realize what he'd been doing until after his death. Still, one of us children remembers our parents arguing about his gambling. One of us remembers, fuzzily, a story being told long ago—by whom?—about Dad getting lucky and winning a color television and then, maybe, a car. Wasn't there a time when we had one too many cars? Who knows? Where do such stories come from, and how can we know if they're true? Each of us recalls only fragments, and what we knew was too little to begin with.

Before I ended my conversation with Kirk, I had one last question for him. I wondered what my father felt about us: his wife and children. Through all of those business trips the two of them took, during their long plane flights, their full days working together, and those daily dinners, what did my father say about his family? Nothing, Kirk said. He never said a word about such things.

46

Days after my father died, I rejoined my church basketball team. After practice one afternoon, the twilight descending, I lingered outside the gym to wait for my ride home. One of my teammates, Perry, a lumbering, quiet, kind boy, walked past me, then turned around. “Chris, I should tell you something.”

“What?”

“That last night, the night before your dad died, my dad was with him. They had a drink together at the Wedgwood Tavern.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I thought you'd appreciate knowing.”

I did appreciate it. It was information. But what could I do with it? What might it explain? Did my father spend the evening in the tavern because he needed to eat up time while waiting for us all to go to sleep? Was he steeling his nerves with drink? What did he talk about with Perry's father? What does a person talk about over a drink when he intends, the next morning, to be dead?

I had told my best friend, Al, about my father. Otherwise, as I returned to school after the Christmas break, I intended to tell no one. The city had two daily newspapers, and the
Times
had not reported the suicide. The
Post-Intelligencer
, though, had published a small paragraph about it. I could take comfort, at least, in the thought that most
junior high students didn't read the paper, let alone the tiny items in the back pages.

On my first day back in school, at the end of science class, I was gathering my books. Nanette, who I had heard might have a crush on me, slipped me a folded note and, without a word, walked out of the room. I opened it: “Chris, is it true that your father committed suide?”

Suide
. No, my father did not commit that.

I did not respond to Nanette. But word had gotten out. It was junior high: the manner of my father's death was a weapon that could be used against me. For days, in civics class, Tony, sitting in the back of the room, whispered, “Forhan. Hey, Forhan.” When I turned, he began miming, patiently, the act of getting into a car and turning the ignition key. Grinning, he pretended to inhale deeply the fumes coming through the open car window. Then he slumped in his seat, eyes closed, tongue hanging slack from his mouth. Other students giggled or covered their eyes with their hands. I did nothing. Preferring not to be there, I acted as though I weren't.

I might as well not have been there—in that school, in my own life: I felt blurry and indeterminate, or I was sensing more intensely the blur that I had always been. For a couple of months, I had exulted in being a basketball player on the JV team: our coach, a parish dad, was relaxed and rumpled and funny, and I was a star. Even with my limited shooting repertoire—I depended almost wholly on a quick burst to the hoop from the right and a layup—I was the leading scorer, at fourteen points a game. I was flashy enough to draw the attention of the varsity coach, a square-jawed marine with a blond buzz cut. He needed me on his squad, he told me. His boys were creating something special in the top league—with my help, they might have that perfect season they were dreaming of. I made the switch. At the first team meeting I attended, the coach introduced me by saying, “Is everyone getting a good look at Forhan's hair? Kind of long, don't you think? I guess the new guy doesn't care
about rules.” It was then that I learned about a team rule the coach had established before the season started: no hair so long that it went past the top of the ear or reached the collar. “Well,” the coach announced, “he's a late addition to the family. I suppose we have to let it slide.” Whether it was my aversion to barbers or my one-dimensional game or my inability to meld with a group that had forged its own identity months earlier, I found myself transformed from a high-scoring court wizard into a grumpy longhair riding the pine. In practices and games, the coach rarely looked at me. Only late in a blowout win would he wave me in. I finished my truncated varsity season with a scoring average of one fifth of a point per game. Maybe I wasn't who I thought I was.

And my dad was dead. My dad was dead. And the geography unit I had begun to study when he was alive I was still being tested on, and the sun still rose, and people stood in winter jackets on sidewalks waiting for buses, their breath a cloud in the air before them, and Karen Carpenter sang gleefully about being on top of the world, and I tied my shoes every morning and ate and drank, and my skin sometimes itched, my body still existed, and it was important to trim my nails and comb my hair and get to sleep on time so I would have enough energy for the next day, and it was important to wear my retainer faithfully so my teeth would stay straight, and it was important to be confirmed, it was the next thing to do—it was important to be initiated as a full-fledged, willing member of the Catholic Church. I was fourteen: old enough, I was told, to make my own choice about whether to accept Christ as my Lord, as my father had done thirty years before, and as his parents had done and their parents before them. I had, indeed, made my choice: I had rejected Christ—at least the story I had been told about him, the one in which he was the one and only god who had died for my sins and been resurrected, the one who promised he would return for me one day, who promised there was, without question, a world for us beyond this one. My father was in the ground in the Catholic cemetery, and he
was floating in the murk of my memory, in fragments, but he was, most important, elsewhere, basking in the glow of God's love—at least if he had been forgiven his final crime. Everyone around me seemed to take such ideas seriously, but they struck me as being, at best, unsubstantiated. Still, I did the safe thing: I prepared to confirm my faith publicly. This involved joining dozens of other eighth-graders in the school gym for a series of meetings during which we nibbled on cookies and listened to songs from the cast album of
Jesus Christ Superstar
and then discussed them in small groups.

To celebrate the end of our formal preparation for confirmation, we organized a big potluck spaghetti dinner. Each boy or girl would bring from home a contribution to the meal, something we could share as we partook in the elation of claiming a personal stake in the Catholic faith. I had not chosen this faith; it had been sprinkled upon my forehead when I was an infant, and I had been asked week by week, year by year, before I had developed my reasoning abilities, to recite the prayers and participate in the rituals taught to me. I was old enough to feel whether I was a true believer, but I was not old enough to have the nerve to profess what I really thought. I held my tongue. I was beginning to sense that existence is terrifyingly and beautifully bewildering, but, instead of being encouraged to experience that bewilderment on my own and pursue my hunches about it, I was expected to accept someone else's metaphysical construct. About that which is the most essential thing in life—the ultimate mysterious ground of existence, the inexplicableness of our simply being here, of our being alive on this particular planet in the first place—I was being asked to adopt the beliefs of others. Could I, for a lifetime, perceive every moment through the filter of that fixed idea, merely because it was the local custom? And would this not, I was already beginning to feel, be the worst kind of lie because it was a lie I would have to tell myself?

To the celebratory dinner, I brought garlic bread and paper napkins.