My Father Before Me (27 page)

58

Like my parents, Rebecca and I were married in Seattle. Unlike them, we asked a judge, not a priest, to preside. Like my parents, we had a two-day honeymoon in Victoria. Unlike my father, I was awake for most of it.

Back in Great Falls, we packed up a U-Haul, then drove across the country to the University of New Hampshire, where I would study with Charles Simic. I had seen his poems in anthologies, and they seemed wholly unlike any others: they were deeply strange, imaginatively free. He wrote about going inside a stone, about building a “strange church” with his shoes as the altar, about looking at a fork as if for the first time and imagining that it “must have crept / Right out of hell.” His were the kind of poems one might write in a dream or scrawl on a cave wall to be discovered by happenstance centuries later and understood.

I assumed that I knew nothing about poetry and gladly gave myself over to Charlie's influence. When he helped me improve my poems, he didn't do so by telling me that he could not understand them; he did so by telling me that they were not interesting enough. He taught me to put pressure on my language, to ask of every line, of every image, that it delight or enchant or meaningfully mystify. The first week of class, he put it this way: “You want to write poems that will break people's hearts, make them jump off roofs, join monastic orders.”

I had come to the right place.

One of the first poems I wrote in New Hampshire was an account of a dream I'd had in which my father returned from the grave and, to my frustration, avoided speaking about the fact of his death. Instead, he told me that he had witnessed an interesting incident—the demise of someone else: a little boy who plunged off an overlook into a deep canyon. The child had walked too close to the edge. In the poem, as in the dream, I was befuddled and angry. Why could my father not speak to me for once, directly, candidly, and emotionally, about himself? Was I merely a stranger to him, someone who might only accidentally catch his eye, as if I were the poor nameless boy who had tumbled to his death? I accused my father of making superficial pronouncements, of not taking his own suicide as seriously as I did—“as if you thought / you could / still change your mind,” I told him, “as if you'd the right / to talk to me / about dying.”

Too late, I was pleading with him to speak with honesty and fullness, pleading with him to reveal what he truly felt, to admit that his death was real. And his life.

EPILOGUE

Silence is the sound of inwardness, of a solitude essential for the making of the self, or the discovery of it. Silence is a cave, a comfort: it is safe. And it is dangerous: the sound of he who would make himself known by speaking, and create himself in the world by doing so, but who hasn't the courage—or, not having been instructed in candor, hasn't the skill. His silence is a white screen onto which others project their shadows. Silence signals unspoken questioning or signals unquestioning assent—a surrendering to notions of who to be, and how to be, that are aswirl in the culture's chatter or inherited from long-dead faceless ancestors tilling some hillock in the old country. Silence is the sound of someone preparing to speak in his own time, when he is ready, or it is the sound of he who, whatever he has of import to reveal, has long since forgotten what it is.

* * *

I choose not to be silent. This book is the consequence of that. I have learned—I am still learning—how easy it is, out of fear or out of habit, not to speak directly and honestly, how easy it is to evade conflict by addressing it sideways or not at all, to slide by on bleak and easy humor, as my father did. In poetry, especially, I have found a way to let what would otherwise remain hidden speak. Decades after his death, long
after my few graduate school efforts to write about him, my father would not leave me alone; he began again to appear in my poems. I worried about how my mother would react to these excavations of my memories of him and of my childhood home. Would she think of the poems as indiscretions, a reckless publicizing of the family's sadness? Would she think of them as needlessly reopening a wound? I was concerned about a poem that referred directly to the morning of my father's suicide—but my mother wrote to me that I need not worry: “It is all true and I recall those feelings myself.”

When the poems weren't enough—when I knew that my investigation into my father would deepen and expand, taking the form of this book—I went to my mother for help. I wanted to know everything. Would she tell me her story? Would she trust me with it? A writer's selecting and shaping of memory, his searching for something true in it, is a dangerous, maybe partially futile business, particularly when the memory is someone else's. He risks glibness, a cheapening of feeling: the simplifying, and thus falsifying, of a life because that life's evanescence and intricacy cannot be rendered adequately on the page. But my mother agreed to speak with me. She sat for hours, answering candidly and thoughtfully every question I put to her, even if the answers brought her to tears, even if she knew her words could end up in a book.

Once, when I was sharing with her an early draft of this manuscript, the whole project suddenly struck me as outlandish and impudent. She had wondered whether I might delete from the book a certain questionable theory about her father, and she had quibbled about the exact phrasing of something she'd said in a quarrel with my father over forty years before. “I can imagine,” I wrote to her, “most people by this point saying, ‘Can't you just take me entirely out of your silly book? That was my dad, my marriage, my argument. I'd like to keep them to myself.' ”

My mother is not wholly pleased with the contents of these pages;
she regrets that I do not remember my childhood with more pleasure. But she does not regret her gift to me: she talked to me; she told me the truth. She, too, has had her fill of silence.

* * *

I still dream about my father, although the dreams come less frequently than they once did. Almost always he is, astonishingly, alive—and ready, at last, to talk. He has returned, sheepish, apologetic, from the realm of the dead, or he never died in the first place. It was a horrible misunderstanding, he explains: he was kidnapped and kept under guard in a small room for years, away from any phone. Or he was an undercover government agent obliged to fake his own death; he might have revealed this to us from the start, but the mission would have been compromised.

In one dream, he is a dapper, tuxedoed figure who appears at a table next to mine in an outdoor café. “Dad,” I say, “you're dead. What are you doing here?”

He looks at me, nearly expressionless, only halfway back in the world. “Woman,” he replies. “I never said thank you.” I understand: he is referring to my mother—the girl he married when she was only seventeen, the girl who could not nudge him awake on their honeymoon, the woman who bore him eight children, who remained loyal to him, entwined with him in marriage, even while he was slowly, silently unraveling. It pains him that he left so abruptly without telling her what she deserved to hear.

In another dream, almost forty years after his death, I receive a letter from him. It is signed “Dad” in his familiar, elegant script and is written in a breezy, informal way, as if the letter is just the latest installment in a continuing conversation
.
He tells me that he hasn't been traveling around the country in search of a new house after all, so he won't be making plans to see me. Sorry: he knows it has been a long time.

Is this letter really from my father? Is it possible? I think back to him lying outside his car; I remember his body in the casket; I remember the funeral and the subsequent decades of silence. In the letter, he makes no mention of the death I have lived with for forty years—as if it never happened, as if he merely still exists, as any number of fathers do, and he is sorry that we have not been in touch for so long and sorry we won't be seeing each other again soon. How can I confirm that the message is truly from him? I need to be sure. If I can do that, I will respond to him. I will write, “I'll come meet you anywhere. Just tell me where you are.”

* * *

Fifteen years after my father's death, I was living in a little town amid the North Carolina tobacco fields. Only an hour's drive away, in Jacksonville, lived the uncle I had never met: Jim, my father's older brother. He was a retired marine, living with his second wife. Of my father's family, he was all that was left—save perhaps Nat, his father, who had disappeared decades before, and who knew if he was dead or alive? When my mother and Russ, her new husband, visited me from Seattle, my sister Dana drove down from Virginia, and we all decided to pay Jim a visit. My mother had not seen him since the earliest years of her first marriage, four decades before. As far as she could recall, that was the last time my father, too, had seen or spoken to his brother. There had been no bitter estrangement; they just lived different lives, in different states, maybe different worlds. Jim, though only sixty, had suffered a debilitating stroke. We sat for an hour in his living room, and he hardly spoke; his wife did most of the talking. She was pleasant and engaging, chatting easily and exhaustively about their children and their life in Jacksonville, but, the entire time, I was thinking about my father. I was looking for him. I wanted something of him back—whatever my sitting in the same room with his brother might
offer. Did we ask Jim about his past, about my father's past? Whatever we asked, he stuttered and mumbled incomprehensibly in reply, and his wife swiftly interrupted, steering the talk toward another topic. I stared at Jim's face. I stared into his eyes. I was searching for my father, searching for something that wasn't there.

* * *

Skippy, my father's drowned brother, lies in a cemetery a little over two miles from the house where I grew up. When we were young, we Forhan children drove by it hundreds of times, glancing at the passing headstones through the chain-link fence. We never entered the gates. Seventy-five years after Skippy's death, Dana, Erica, and I decided to visit him. Knowing his plot number, we walked across the grass toward the corner section called Guardian Angel, the one reserved for children. Where was he? We paced methodically, peering at the ground, searching foot by foot, in widening circles, for his stone. At last we sought help in the cemetery office. The director opened his big book. “Your uncle's there, trust me. It says here, though, that he was never given a stone.” My father's mother, Bernadine, is buried in the same cemetery. We decided to search for her. We found her plot, but, again, there was only grass upon it, no stone. These people—our grandmother, our uncle—whom my father kept buried in his memory and would not speak of, were conspiring with him in death, lying hidden, unremarkable, unmarked, as if they had never been.

* * *

And Nat Forhan, Fred Forhan, Fred Grant—my father's father? He died in 1994. Maybe. Probably. After not hearing from him in years, one of his sisters, Pauline, received a call from a nursing home in Portland, Oregon: someone had died there, and he was probably her brother. His name was Fred Grant, but in his papers were refer
ences to Nat and to her—and his birthday was listed as December 29, Nat's birthday. True, the dead man had identified his year of birth as 1917, eleven years later than Nat's, but that didn't surprise Pauline: her brother was vain enough to be capable of lying about his age.

However, there is this one problem, this mystery: there was an actual person, an actual Fred Grant, born in Oregon on December 29, 1917. He and his family—the Grants—are in the federal census records for decades. And this man is the only Fred Grant identified in Oregon death records for the 1990s. Is it possible that Nat stole, or borrowed, the identity of this real Fred Grant? Yes, except what are the odds of Nat—who, because of his middle name, Frederick, had long referred to himself as Fred—stealing the identity of someone else with that name? More confounding than that, what are the odds that the real Fred Grant shared his birthday?

Beyond the intriguing puzzle of it, maybe it does not matter. Nat is the grandfather who was never my grandfather, the man who was never my father's father, except biologically. He is the father my father was content to see once, then never again, whatever name or city he might vanish into. He is the man who remains what he seems to have devoted his life to becoming: a nothing, a name in the air.

* * *

Forty years after the death of our father, my youngest sister, Erica, like him, is a certified public accountant, a highly accomplished one. She was only five when he killed himself and is therefore haunted by him in a way different from that of her siblings. To her, as his own father must have been to him, he is not the parent who left her so much as he is the parent who never existed; he has always been wholly a ghost—an absence, an idea: the idea of absence. As he did, Erica dons a business suit each morning and drives to downtown Seattle to her office—for a time, it was in the same soaring black box of a building
that housed our father's office. And the plaque he received around the time of her birth, the one honoring his work as president of the local chapter of accountants? It hangs in Erica's office in her home.

* * *

For two decades before she died, my sister Patty worked in a small factory in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, stopping off after work at her favorite local haunt: the Dock Bar and Grill, a modest one-story building at the northern lip of Lake Union, a block from the water. Years after Patty passed away, beginning to piece together the family history, I searched in an old phone directory, hoping to find a listing for Forhan's Tavern, the establishment begun by my father's uncle in the 1930s. Yes: there it was. I jotted down the address and got into the car. I would drive to take a look—maybe the building was still there. It was. And it was unchanged, except for one thing: the tavern was now called the Dock Bar and Grill. On all of those evenings after work, when Patty slid onto a stool at the bar and ordered a beer, she was sitting where, fifty years earlier, her drink would have been poured by her great-uncle, a man she'd never heard of. On all of those evenings, she was surrounded by her own ghosts and did not know it.

* * *

Seattle is a palimpsest. Over the years, my siblings and I have made summer-evening visits to Gas Works Park, climbing its big hill to talk and gaze at the lake and the skyline. This is the park built on the grounds of the old gasworks where my great-grandfather worked as foreman; to our left, beyond the rusty generator towers that still stand, was once the small company house where he and his wife raised their eleven children. Behind us are the streets where my father walked with his mother when he was a small boy and where his uncles and aunts and grandparents, the people I never heard about growing up, lived and worked.

How odd, I mention to Kevin one day. For years, my brother has been a brewer, working among the small and fervent group of beer aficionados plying their trade in Seattle. I am visiting him, sitting atop the small boat he calls home, docked at a marina along the Fremont Cut, not far from the old neighborhood where our ancestors lived. He has poured me a beer. How peculiar, I tell him, to learn for the first time about those relatives who preceded us, to think about those people who seem so different from us, who are such strangers, yet who not long ago walked the very sidewalks we do now. My brother the poet, he of the ruminative, mordant wit, replies, “Let's see. I'm an emotionally wounded, metaphysically bewildered man with a vaguely literary bent who is lounging on a boat drinking a beer. I'm not sure I've fallen very far from the tree.”

* * *

Ten years older now than my father ever was, I am married again, contentedly, permanently, to another poet, a woman of great beauty and vigorous intelligence, wit, and feeling. In Alessandra, I do not see my father, and, with her, I try not to act like him. Sometimes I catch myself, in moments of conflict, in moments of frustrating misunderstanding, protecting myself by going quiet or by relieving the tension with a feeble joke, some easy irony upon which I can safely float. Then I stop myself. What am I feeling? Why? I try to talk about it—and Alessandra listens, with gratitude, with love.

* * *

We have two young sons, Milo and Oliver. I have not spoken often with them about my father—their grandfather. One day, though, I find myself chatting about my childhood. “Our daddy,” I say, “used to string Christmas lights along the edge of our roof.”