My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  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 Mother’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.

  18

  Ed had one chance to stay in Seattle and avoid Korea: he could apply to the air force ROTC program at the university, but he would be accepted only if he excelled in the required exam. If taken, he would avoid active duty as long as he was enrolled in school.

  About two hundred men passed the exam. Ed was in the top thirty of them. He had dodged a bullet. Maybe more than one.

  That winter, instead of being hunched in a ditch in the snow near Toktong Pass, he was home for the birth of his second daughter, Patty. And he was home for the phone call—the one from his father.

  Nat Forhan—Fred Grant—was alive after all. A decade before, his sibling, Sister Dolorita, had stretched the truth about his being in the grave; he had only acted as though he were. Now Nat had tracked down his son. For what reason? Purposefully or not, he had waited, conveniently, until my father was of age—that is, no longer a legal dependent of Nat’s—to inform him that he was still among the living.

  Ed agreed to meet him, and he would do it alone. If my father felt any particular emotion about the prospect of seeing him—anxiety, anguish, irritation, curiosity, anger—he did not show it to my mother. He just went, taking the short walk north to the Duchess Tavern, a popular haunt for university students, where father and son had arranged to reunite. At home, Ange waited for his return.

  Only recently, I have unearthed photos of Nat from around the time he reunited with my father. He is in his forties but looks sixty. In one, he stands in a front yard with a few of his siblings. His brothers are dressed informally, in white T-shirts and narrow suspenders, while Nat, hair graying, wears a dark double-breasted suit and tie. He stands with arms folded across his chest, squinting into the brilliant sunlight. He might be the relative just in from out of town, the one who long ago hopped a train, made his fortune, and knows not to talk too much about it.

  In another picture, posing again with siblings and their spouses, he stands slightly stooped and stiff-legged, as if favoring an old battle injury. In a suit coat and tie, he stands to one side, slightly apart from the others, his hands behind his back. He looks almost not there, ready to be cropped out.

  For almost the entirety of my father’s life, Nat had been a phantom, one whom it was bad luck to mention. Ed had seen him in his mind’s eye only. Now he would see him in the flesh. What had he come to ask, or to offer? An explanation, perhaps. But what explanation would satisfy? What would a man say who had forsaken his son?

  Maybe he’d had no choice. Renowned detective that he was, he had been called in to lead the search for Lindberg’s baby. He had fought with the Spanish loyalists; had served as a leader in the French Resistance; had, with a cocked revolver, gotten within six feet of Hitler, but the trigger had jammed; had helped plan the landing at Normandy; had toiled shoulder to shoulder with Gandhi; had piloted a cargo plane during the Berlin airlift.

  Or no. Intensely desiring a life for his children more prosperous than his, he had shipped off to Sierra Leone for some secret dealings, none of them shady, had traveled to Singapore, to Shanghai, to Santiago, for years and years, keeping only pocket money for himself, slipping all other profits into a suitcase—this one. Open it, son, plunge your hands in, those are gold coins, all of them, and all for you.

  Or he’d been imprisoned on a bum rap. It wasn’t his knife. He hardly knew the man. Dodging the searchlights, he’d clambered over the prison wall, slicing his palms and shins on the barbed wire, spent twenty years undercover, seeking the real killer. I’ve found him, it’s settled now, I’m a free man, free at last to be the father I couldn’t have been to you before.

  Or he was sorry, so sorry he could hardly speak of it. No man had been as selfish as he, as thoughtless, as heartless. But he had changed. He understood. He wanted to speak now of the past, of Bernadine, of his fierce, undying love for Ed and for his two other sons (Skippy! Poor boy!). He could not make it up to them, he knew—oh, how he knew—but son, please, son, I am on my knees, hands clasped before me. Let us begin again, take me back, take me back, though I am an unworthy thing deserving only of your contempt.

  Or Nat had no time to explain himself. Ed entered the tavern, looked once into his father’s conniving eyes, and socked him in the jaw. Decked him, stalked off.

  Or Nat volunteered no meaningful explanation, and he and my father engaged in awkward small talk. That is what really happened. That, at least, is what my father reported to my mother when he returned home that night. He had sat for two hours with his father, and they had spoken superficially. Ed had talked about his wife, his two girls, and his college courses, Nat reacting courteously but not appearing especially curious about his son’s life. He expressed no interest in talking about the past, although he did point out that if Ed had been trying to find him, any difficulty would have been the result of him living in San Francisco under an assumed name.

  Ed had not been trying to find him.

  When my father returned from his reunion with Nat, my mother asked if he would like her to meet his father, too. Would they be seeing each other again? No. No such plan had been made. Ed was content with that; he was finished with his father. He would not see him again, and, for the rest of his life, he would hardly mention him. During that second half of his life, how much did he think of Nat? Did he ruminate over the things his father had said to him in their one brief meeting? Perhaps not—the topics of conversation had been safe and forgettable ones. What else does one talk about with a stranger?

  19

  A year after Patty, their second child, was born, my parents had a third daughter, Peggy. Terry Patty Peggy: my three older sisters arrived within two and a half years of each other. My father was twenty-two, still an undergraduate, and my mother was twenty. Ed was continually distracted by schoolwork—perhaps contentedly so, considering the bustle of diapering and feeding and squealing and rocking and cooing that he otherwise would have been in the midst of. They lived in student housing, and any ex
tra income they could scrounge up was welcome. Amid the cooking and cleaning Ange was doing for her own family, she began taking in the laundry of university medical students, washing, starching, and ironing for a quarter a shirt, more than enough for a loaf of bread. They nonetheless had time for fun: parties and barbecues with other young couples, with Ed often at the center of the action, cigarette or beer in hand, holding forth, gregarious and quick-witted.

  Nineteen fifty-three, when my father was preparing to graduate, was not a bad year to look for a job. America was working; the middle class was expanding. Families found themselves able to buy a house, a car, a television, a washing machine, and my parents were riding that wave of increased prosperity. Before Ed had even earned his degree, he was hired as an accountant by Price Waterhouse and inaugurated into the life he would lead for twenty years—the life of business: the closetful of conventional suits in blue and gray and charcoal; the starched white collars and slim ties; the hurried breakfast and quick peck on the wife’s cheek; the fedora, the briefcase; the sun-splashed hood of the sedan on the drive downtown; the swift, purposeful stride down the sidewalk and through the building’s glass doors; the glance at the Timex on the wrist before the elevator doors slide open; the loyal and indefatigable secretary—Three messages for you, sir, and don’t forget lunch with Mr. Ramsbottom; the leather chair and ledger; the calculator; the cabinet; the smile; the firm handshake; the ride home, in thick traffic, in time for dinner, or maybe not.

  A life of work. A life elsewhere, away from home. For my father, that often meant not just in his own office downtown but in other companies’ offices out of state. In his early years of work, he would typically spend three weeks out of the month traveling, doing field audits. He would fly out on a Sunday, return home on Friday, then fly out again two days later.