My Father Before Me (6 page)

15

Eddie was not his mother's boy any longer, nor had he ever been his father's. He couldn't have known what it felt like to have a father, except an absent one, a parent who existed only as a vilified name. What did it feel like for him to be a son? What could
son
mean to him? No matter how welcoming and accepting his grandparents were, he might always have felt like an accidental resident of their house, a guest, an interloper. Whether the Careys made him feel this way or whether he brought it on himself, he continually needed to prove to them that he was worthy of having been taken in. Every day, by being good, by doing what was expected of him, and doing so uncomplainingly, he was earning all over again the right to be there. Perhaps this meant not revealing entirely what was on his mind for fear of disappointing someone. Perhaps it meant training himself to say the proper thing, the safe thing, but no more than that. Perhaps, in wanting not to be a problem for his grandparents, he determined that he would keep his problems to himself. He would work hard, be a joiner, be a good sport, a chum. He would help set the table, make his bed, yank weeds from the garden. He would earn an A-plus for conduct and application. He would ace the final, cook with gas, not get his kicks with knuckleheads. He would have the clean kind of fun, be a good hoofer, charm the prettiest girl, glide her across the gleaming gym floor to the
year's top hit, about how it's better to have a paper doll than a real girl you can't trust. He might get a smooch or two.

Maybe from Jean, whoever she was. When my mother showed me the box of things my father had saved for decades, among them was a letter he'd received from Jean when he was fourteen. There were no letters from my mother, but there was this one, sent two years before my parents met, handwritten in pen on small stationery, folded twice. Jean begins by asking, “Is your nickname ‘Bud'? I got a letter from Ruth today and she was telling me about a parish dance. She said, ‘Bud Forhan took a look in the doorway and evidently he thought that it was a flop, too,' or something like that.” Jean also notes that she's been to the pictures, seeing an American submarine sneak into Tokyo Bay in
Destination, Tokyo
. She “was nuts about” the flick—“Wasn't it super? Just think, Cary Grant and John Garfield in the same show, together! Wow!”

It sounds like what a ninth-grade girl would write in 1944. Who was she? My mother has no idea—and my father couldn't have known her very well, since Jean was unaware of his nickname. Why did my father save this letter, filled only with amiable teenage small talk and gossip?

Who was this guy?

Was there something about being fourteen and fifteen that he wanted always to remember? Is it possible, poor man, that these were the happiest years of his life? In a high school yearbook photo taken when he was fifteen, my father looks boyish and handsome, with full dark hair and a broad, open smile. The war is on, but its incomprehensible horrors are far away—they appear only as headlines or are contorted for the big screen into tales of providentially ordained acts of heroism, amply rewarded. The rightness of the American cause is unquestioned; Eddie and his classmates are roused by a cheery patriotism and a desire to prove themselves the youthful face of freedom and its necessary sacrifices.

There is much for Roosevelt High School students to do on the home front: train in a drill organization, scour their neighborhood for
old garden hoses and fan belts to contribute to the school rubber drive, add brushstrokes of crimson paint to the giant paper thermometer measuring the school's purchases of war stamps and bonds. Girls might join the Junior Red Cross, filling Christmas stockings to send to the brave boys overseas. Boys might join the ROTC—or the swim team; after all, as the yearbook reminded them, “Swimming is one of the first vital requirements requested by our armed forces. Many of our former swimming team members are now instructors of swimming for Uncle Sam.”

Eddie decides Hall Patrol is to his liking. He is one of four dozen boys whose duty is to keep order in the halls between classes and during fire drills. Eddie is nothing if not orderly; his grandparents demand it of him, and he demands it of himself. It probably comes naturally to him. Raised amid chaos and loss, he feels safe within systems of rules that can be followed and expectations that can be met.

With the war effort reminding him that there are concerns larger than any one person's private woes; with geometry, Latin, and world history homework keeping him occupied; and with the Careys requiring that he do his part at home, he might feel that life makes a kind of sense, that everything is in its place, that everything has a place, and that he does, too.

And pretty, convivial girls are a pleasant consequence of living in such a world. In a photo from this time, one that he kept in the box that he saved for decades, my father, in swim trunks, is standing on a beach, his hair long on top so it swoops down the side of his head in a thick wave. He is tussling with a girl who wears a backless one-piece striped bathing suit. This is play, but there's a fierceness in it: they are facing each other, but she is bent at the waist, head down, curly brown hair falling forward, and he grips the back of her neck with both hands, feet planted, as if preparing to toss her to the ground. She is reaching up, grabbing his hands, trying to pull them away. Her face cannot be seen, although I know she is not my mother. But I recognize the boy: he is my father, smiling grimly.

16

My parents were trained, mainly through circumstance, to depend on themselves, not on others—certainly not on their fathers. A father was a person who deserted his children, and happily. Home was a borrowed room and a shared bed, then a trunk full of clothes lugged to another address, then another.

Growing up, my parents knew as the primary determining forces in the world only depression, then war; they understood that, as a matter of survival and of honor, a person was expected to labor and to sacrifice. They were also not many generations removed from their Irish and Scandinavian forebears—close enough to the old country to be steeped in the immigrant ethos of toil, perseverance, and the modest ambition to make a steady living. They came from people for whom family and religion were the central social structures, even if those structures were sometimes maintained so heedlessly and mechanically that they existed more as pretense than as reality. A family ostensibly meant love, self-sacrifice, and a bulwark against outside forces that might harm it, yet family often meant dissembling, bitterness, and division. Religion ostensibly meant humility, rigorous self-scrutiny, and awe before wondrous and indecipherable mysteries, yet religion often involved an unthinking practicing of rituals out of mere habit or fear of disapproval. Maybe that is why the cultures that produced
my parents, cultures that valued family and church—the cultures that produced me—also bred silence and shame.

Those forces might have been at work within my father when he chose not to speak to his new bride about his mother. Maybe he was embarrassed about the series of apparently shiftless, shady men she lived with after her husband disappeared. Or maybe his memories of her were so few and confused that he felt it was hardly worth bothering to share them.

After Nat left her, Bernadine did not marry again. She didn't even seek a divorce. My mother wondered about that after marrying my father. Why didn't Bernadine break all ties with Nat finally? It was the 1930s, and Bernadine was neither highly educated nor highly skilled, so she couldn't be expected to find a way to support herself and three small boys. Her plight was remarkably similar to that of Ange's mother, Esther, who found security in a new marriage. Why didn't Bernadine at least consider remarrying and giving her children the stability that might have come from a permanent stepfather? When my mother asked, my father snapped, “She would never get a divorce.” He would speak no more on the subject. Bernadine was Catholic. Bernadine was his mother. No more was necessary to know.

But how much more about her did he know? He must have recalled, as a blur, those early years with her: the series of homes, the parade of men who stepped tentatively and temporarily into his father's shoes, some of them with articulate fists as well as mouths. Maybe he remembered lying in the dark and hearing, from the next room, stern, reproachful words, a chair scraping on linoleum, a slap, a slammed door. Maybe he remembered being held gently by Bernadine, sung to by her in some dim evening light. Maybe he remembered her being sick again, hospitalized, and he and his brothers tangling as they tried to sleep together in an unfamiliar bed at their grandparents' house.

Bernadine, it seems, was reckless in her romantic life, heedless in
her choice of men, and careless with her health: she was less than diligent in monitoring and treating her diabetes. Nonetheless, in death, she became the poor, sainted Bernadine. In the home of the grandparents who adopted my father and his brother, she and the scoundrel Nat lived on invisibly, as names spoken with a quick glance upward and a hasty prayer that their souls receive the justice due to them. In this home, Eddie at last was part of a permanent, stable family, one in which he was raised, in the immigrant way, the American way, to grin and bear it, to tough it out, to leave his worries on the doorstep, forget his troubles, come on, get happy.

That's what he would do now, with his young wife and the baby who would be born to them soon. His old life, the only one he'd known, the life of loss and uncertainty, was over. Who his father was, who his mother was, did not matter. Even his older brother was fading to a mere idea—an ill-defined thought, perhaps, that might waft occasionally through my father's mind. Jim, having shared with my father the same series of losses, might have been the person best able to understand him, the person he most needed as he began to navigate adulthood. But Jim had married, moved to California, and started a lifetime career in the marines; in the next few years, my father would see him once or twice, but then Jim would go silent, as their own father, Nat, had. He would become another absence, another shadow. When my father began his new life as husband and father, the journey he had taken to arrive at this moment—through a childhood of poverty and abandonment and displacement, through an adolescence of cautious, self-conscious deference to the grandparents who had taken him in—did not matter. It was this new life he cared about, one solely of his own making, like a robe of silk he might sew and slip into, concealing the self that had suffered and didn't care to talk about it.

17

Ed and Ange moved into student housing, and my father became a college man, unlike any of the Forhan men before him. Many of his uncles—his father's brothers—had not even finished high school; they had honored the family tradition of turning to common labor: they were mechanics and truck drivers and filling station attendants. My father would not be a Forhan in that way, nor in his behavior as a husband and father. He would do his duty. He would be responsible. His life was his own, to make as he desired. He just needed to set himself to the task.

And he did, taking a job in the student union cafeteria and studying hard. He wanted that business degree, that sharp suit and tie, that briefcase, that desk, that secretary, that steady, respectable, growing salary.

Halfway through Ed's first university term, the baby was born: a girl, my oldest sister. They named her Theresa Lee, after two saints, the first one sanctified by Rome, the second one—the baby's kind and gentle stepgrandfather—by my mother.

Although Ed was distracted by his studies and Ange by motherhood, and although their first winter together was Seattle's worst on record—repeated harsh arctic blasts and snowfall that shut down the city—they were happy, mainly, according to my mother. They were making something: a family, a future. Both knew their roles and flourished in them. Ange's was to keep the household running smoothly. On her first Moth
er's Day, she received from Ed a mass-manufactured greeting card, on the front of which was a drawing of a harried housewife wearing a pink knee-length dress, a blue frilly apron, and black pumps. She was removing a hot pie from the oven with her right hand and gripping the handle of a pot of steaming vegetables with her left. The printed message:

Though you keep busy 'round the house

And take things as they come,

Please take time out on Mother's Day

To love your old man some!

On the inside of the card, the wife had her hands full still, holding a broom and a mop and her husband's shoulder. The gift for her on this special day: a plea that, in the midst of her interminable, mindless labor, she devote some attention to her needy husband.

The same quaint and frightening pre–Betty Friedan world of gender expectations gave birth to this store-bought Valentine's message my mother gave to my father:

Some husbands ask for homemade pies

And then refuse to eat 'em—

Some husbands boss their wives around . . .

And now and then they beat 'em . . .

But mine is such an angel,

So different from the rest . . .

That I'm gonna buy a pair o' wings

And sew them to his vest!

Being neither a cloddish ingrate nor a bully and abuser, Ed must have been heaven-sent. Of course, to buy those wings, Ange might have had to ask him for a temporary increase in her household allowance.

Before Theresa—Terry, as she was called—was a year old, Ange was pregnant again. She herself was still a kid, only eighteen, and not long before had been living cheerlessly in the house of her mother, a woman whom she had come to understand existed in a kind of permanent Norwegian bleakness and rigidity. In leaving that home, Ange had entered a taxing life of her own, but, still, it was her life, and it had some fun in it. She had no desire to return to that house in Wedgwood, but, in this summer of her second pregnancy, this summer of 1950, she began to fear that possibility. In late June, North Korean forces invaded South Korea. Ed, a member of the marine reserve, was called up to active duty. He would be going overseas, almost certainly.

My father was not stupid; he had known that joining the marines meant possibly getting shot at. Still, he had enlisted in peacetime, and he had done it not out of a blundering or starry-eyed patriotism, not out of a desire to sacrifice himself for his country—or for another country, across the ocean, that he likely could not identify on a map. He had enlisted out of shrewdness and necessity, as a means of putting himself through school. Now he had a wife and child and another baby on the way. To the military, that did not matter: he was a soldier; if called upon, he would go. As for Ange, she was not eager to see Ed leave her yet again, especially when this time there was a chance that it would not be him, but his boxed body, returning to her on a troop transport. Also, with Ed gone, she would not be allowed to live in student housing, and she didn't know how she could face returning to the home she had escaped from.

In the midst of their worry, with my mother four months pregnant, my parents decided to be kids again, without plans or obligations, if only for an afternoon. They rarely visited the Careys, Ed's grandparents; they entered that house only when formally invited for dinner, and they weren't invited often. But on an August day, the sun dazzling and the sky a boundless blue, they pulled their bicycles out onto the
sidewalk and, one of them carrying Terry, wheeled their bikes a mile and a half to the Careys' house. They were not expected. When they arrived, Ange handed the baby to Ed's grandmother. Would she watch Terry for a while? They were riding their bikes to the lake. Grandma Carey said yes—she must have understood that there could be no other answer.

This little outing was important enough that my parents brought their camera along. They were already remembering the day in advance. Ange took a photo of Ed standing on the wooden porch steps of his old home, posing between his grandparents. Ed is goofily attired, as if he has woken abruptly from a deep sleep and found himself unexpectedly on an island vacation but without the full wardrobe. He sports wrinkled bathing trunks, a light short-sleeved shirt, dark dress socks, and street shoes. At his side, his grandfather wears the grim, contrived smile of the imposed upon.

Then my parents were gone, flying off on their bikes, as if in a last burst of youthful abandon, down the gradually declining hill to Green Lake. They took photos of each other there, future proof, as they posed on their bicycles on the dirt track that edged the lake. Four years earlier, they had come to this lake in their white clothes, looking giddy and innocent and filled with the promise of teenage love. The Ange of this photograph, in her one-piece strapless bathing suit, white ankle socks, and saddle shoes, seems little changed. She looks like the fresh-faced college girl who, in a different life, she might have been—a young woman with her whole enticingly undefined life ahead of her, although she is already vaguely plump around the middle, someone else's life, again, growing within her.