After Visiting Friends Read online

  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.

  4

  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.

  No ropes. No lowering of the box bumping against the grave wall. No fistfuls of dirt tossed on top.

  A few years later, we are at the kitchen table, the three of us, and my brother says out of nowhere, “How come we didn’t get to throw dirt on Dad’s coffin?”

  My mother says, “What did you say?”

  He says, “Like they do on TV.”

  “Because we didn’t,” she says. “That’s why.”

  And then she walks out, her food sitting there, going cold.

  # # #

  A few weeks after he was dead, a man in a white shirt, white pants, and a white cap comes to our house and starts working on our doors, front and back.

  “What are you doing?” I say.

  “Deadbolts,” he says.

  Not until I was in my thirties did my mother let slip that for months after he died, phone calls came for her in the middle of the night. Obscene phone calls. She tells me she has a theory: There are men who read the obits in the paper, looking for what she calls “fresh widows” to prey upon. “It’s easy,” she says. “Everything is right there in the obit. Everything you need to know to hurt someone. It’s like a burglar driving through a neighborhood and looking for a dark house. A vulnerable target.”

  My mother calls the police. They come to our kitchen and take her statement. In the end, they do nothing, just tell her to take the receiver off the cradle at night.

  One of the cops tells her, “You don’t want to be inviting any of this.”

  I can only imagine her terror. Alone in that house with her two children, aware that somewhere out there is someone who knows where you live. Someone who is watching you. Someone who has your number.

  Dead bolts.

  # # #

  I asked her about her friends. Who was there for you after he died? Who was there for us? Who stepped up?

  “For a month or two, I got invited to dinners or to parties. The things we always went to as a couple. But then that stopped. Just like that. I’d hear talk about the parties the morning after, when I was in town running errands. I think it was the women who cut me out. They all thought I was out to steal their men.”

  She is playing solitaire at the kitchen table.

  The shuffle. The cut. The deal to herself.

  “Married women don’t like single women,” she says. “If one appears in the group, they cast her out. That’s when I saw that I was alone.”

  She looks back at her cards.

  1, 2, 3. No match.

  1, 2, 3. No match.

  1, 2, 3. No match.

  “I’ll never forget the women who cut me loose,” she says, not lifting her eyes from her cards.

  # # #

  You are being raised by a single mother. You are growing up in a house where silence is the rule. Still, you can’t help yourself. There are times you forget the rule, times when you want to ask a question. About him. About life. About her. And your mother always answers your questions with the same question: “Michael,” she’d say, “remember the last scene?”

  From the time you are a small boy, she has drilled this scene into you. Some kids, their parents make them study the Bible, learn piano. Speak a foreign language. You—you’re taught The Godfather.

  Even before you ever saw the movie, she tells you about the last scene, acting it out for you and your brother as you sit at the dinner table, your Green Giant niblets simmering yellow and brig
ht in the CorningWare, next to your tuna casserole and perfectly browned Pillsbury crescent roll.

  She tells you how Michael, the not-firstborn son, becomes, upon the death of his father, what he never wanted to be—his father.

  She tells you how Michael, so seemingly gentle at first appearance, so seemingly immune to the rage that burns in the blood of the family, slowly and surely becomes the complete embodiment of this rage. Rage drives Michael to settle family business. But Michael is blind to the truth that he can never settle the score. He wants revenge for what has been taken from him. Yet he cannot see that revenge will not bring back to him what is lost.

  Your mother tells you then about the last scene—her favorite scene, she says. Your mother says it is her favorite scene because in it, Michael has finally become wholly his father, and as he stands there in his father’s study, being attended by his dead father’s lieutenants, his wife, driven to doubts about her husband, confronts him.

  Your mother says this is her favorite scene because it contains her favorite line of dialogue.

  “And then,” your mother says, “Kay asks Michael, ‘Is it true?’ Is it true that he ordered the murder of his sister’s husband? And Michael looks at her and says, ‘Don’t ask me about my business, Kay.’ ”

  Your mother smiles and says, “I love that line.”

  All through your childhood, whenever you ask her a question about her life or what she is doing or where she is going, she will fix you in her gaze and say to you, her son: “Don’t ask me about my business.”

  Omertá.

  # # #

  My mother often has more interest in the lives of TV characters than those of real people. It’s easier for her to talk about their problems, their story lines. We talk about their lives more than we talk about our own lives.