My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  Once, when he is on the couch, my mother enters the room, sits in a chair near him, and, as he is waking up, begins to speak to him. Maybe she is asking him about his progress in the job search. He looks at her and says, “Everything always comes up roses for you, doesn’t it?”

  A few times, Kevin arrives home from school in the afternoon, walks down the hall to his bedroom, and finds our father there, lying in Kevin’s bed or, in haste, rising and pushing his way out the door past my brother, mumbling something like, “How’re you doing, son?” On other days, Kevin doesn’t see our father but notices signs that he’s been there: rumpled sheets, with the scent of aftershave in them; some well-thumbed supermarket paperback, filled with steamy erotic passages, on the floor near the bed. If our father is lounging in the house all day, why doesn’t he do it in his own bedroom? Maybe he needs a safe place to hide: from our mother or from the fact that he has nowhere to go, no purpose that might inspire him to rise from his own bed instead of staying there all day, maybe staying there forever.

  He is getting through the day, whatever day it is—he sometimes forgets—then getting through the next one, then the next, doing so by avoiding us, avoiding his wife, avoiding real talk. Talk: maybe that will help him. He should see a psychiatrist. But it’s 1973, and he’s my dad. A door with a loose hinge, a faucet with a leak, he can fix. But problems within himself he solves by ignoring or hoping they go away, or he never fully grasps them in the first place. He’s only three generations removed from old world Ireland, from the tradition of a man working hard and, if he has troubles, drinking or singing or wisecracking them away. He’s only one generation removed from his own father, who dealt with his problems, whatever they were, by walking out the door and disappearing for good. Unlike his father, my dad hasn’t left the house, but he is abandoning his family—abandoning himself, too.

  Once or twice during this time, he visits Terry at her apartment on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. When a friend of his gives him a present of Alaskan moose meat, he passes the gift on to her. She cooks it and makes coffee, and they talk, but the conversation feels strained to her, slightly unreal. There is no room for honest discussion about the family or about his condition. Sometimes Terry returns home to visit him—she understands that he is sick, and she wants to check on him—and the conversations then are even more difficult for her. He is morose, complaining about the hard life he has had, the hard life he is having: too many people are dependent upon him. In some moments, as he tells a story that has no clear context, Terry wonders if he is hallucinating. Is he describing something he has experienced recently? Or is he musing about something he plans to do?

  One day it occurs to my father that the problem is his wife: she’s not on his side—she’s keeping secrets from him. In a rage, with my terrified mother watching, he stalks through the house, yanking closets open, pulling boxes and blankets down onto the floor, shouting, “Where did you hide my gun? Where is it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Ed,” my mother says. “What gun? I don’t have your gun.”

  “You’re lying to me. I gave you a gun.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I sent it from Hawaii. Where are you hiding it?” My father storms out of the house.

  He does not own a gun, as far as my mother knows. Why is he so desperate to lay his hands on one? Does he have it in his mind to shoot himself? Or to shoot her and their children? Both possibilities occur to her.

  I do not know of this rampage; I hear about it only years later. Perhaps too much like my father, I can sense trouble but cannot confront it squarely. I certainly do not talk about it. I do not ask my mother, “What’s wrong with Dad? Do you think he needs help?” Instead, I keep my head down. As my father avoids the rest of us, I avoid him. But I cannot fend off the images that flash unbidden into my mind: visions of corpses or, more often, of living people who look as though they belong in the grave. For weeks, through November and December, I look at someone—a smiling grocery store cashier, a baby in a stroller, my science teacher at the blackboard, lifting before us a beaker of blue liquid—and see that person’s skin as ash-gray, falling off in flakes and chunks. I do not intend this; the vision simply appears to me, unanticipated, unasked for.

  I understand what it means: soon either I or my father will die.

  I do not tell anyone—what would I say? I am sensing a truth that is to be accepted, not acted upon; it is a shadow cast back upon me from a fixed future. I do not know how I know it or why the knowledge has come to me in the way it has. I just understand that it is true.

  The fact is in the house already.

  Friday, December 21. Nixon has a plan to present his side of the Watergate story to Congress, but his aides announce that “Operation Candor” will be delayed. The reclusive Howard Hughes has checked into a hotel in the Bahamas under the name of Mr. Ludwig. Bobby Darin, the man at the top of the charts when I was born, has died young of an “imperfect heart.” In the Skylab space station, astronauts create, out of food cans, a makeshift Christmas tree. On this date thirteen years ago my father signed the mortgage for our home. In ten days, his severance package will expire; he will no longer be on salary. He will need to find a job soon. He will need to find one now. In three days, our extended family will gather for its traditional Christmas Eve celebration. I have bought a gift for everyone except my father. What might I purchase for a few dollars that he would value? What do dads want? Socks? Shaving cream? I’ll figure it out this weekend. It is the winter solstice—Robert Frost’s “darkest evening of the year.” I mark the occasion in the way I mark every Friday, sitting in the rec room all night, staring at the television. Even after the late news, I am not tired enough to go to bed—or, rather, I am tired but want to stay up past midnight to see all of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. Argent plays “Hold Your Head Up” and “I Don’t Believe in Miracles,” and then, through the silent house, bleary-eyed, I trudge off to bed. In the morning, I will think about my father’s gift.

  41

  I’m surfacing from sleep. Voices—far-off bursts of talk—are drawing me out. A bustling. Fast footsteps. I’m curled on my right side; now I give in, roll onto my back, open my eyes. Eight-twelve. Saturday morning. A dead time, usually. My brother speaks frantically; my sister responds. They’re upstairs, Kevin and Dana.

  Something is happening. Something has happened.

  I slide from bed, stand up, open the door, and walk upstairs.

  “It’s Dad.” Kevin and Dana, standing in the dining room, have seen me. Nearby, in the living room, the front door is open. The house inhales cold air. He’s outside, they say, down in the carport, and Mom is with him.

  “He might be dead, he might be dead. We called 911. We don’t know.”

  A heart attack? Dads have heart attacks.

  At some point later, after the EMTs have arrived and then stayed too long, lingering in the carport, standing and muttering, their ambulance idling purposelessly in the driveway, and after Kim and Erica have stood puzzled in their pajamas, staring through the front door, then been hurried off along with a distracting toy or two to the ­neighbors’ house, Kevin, Dana, and I understand. Our dad is dead.

  We are not a family given to hugging, but we stand by the dining room table in a little circle of three and hold one another. It is over. For six months, our father has lived with us as a ghost, an awkward, furtive presence. Perhaps without knowing it, we have been waiting for something to happen. A question has been stifling the household for months—for years, really—making breathing difficult, and at last the question has been answered. Grief will come, but first we feel something surprising: relief.

  We let go of each other. I walk into the living room, where the big tinseled Christmas tree glitters, wrapped presents beneath it, carefully arranged there by our mother. To the left of the tree is the open door. I know that my father is out there, lying on the concrete at the bott
om of the steps. I know that I can look at him if I choose to and that, if I do, whatever my eyes take in I will never forget. Do I want to see what has become of him? I must make this decision.

  I turn toward my father.

  He is lying on his back in the carport. From where I stand, I can see only his head and torso; his gray hair is swept wildly back from his face, which is bright red.

  It was our mother who discovered him. Waking and finding herself alone in bed, she rose, as she often has done, to look through the second-floor window and see whether his Dodge was in the carport. It was there, running. Wherever he had gone the night before, he had come home. Was he in the car? Wrapped in her robe, she walked outside into the December chill. She peered in: he was lying on the front seat. She turned back, ran to Kevin’s ground-floor bedroom window, and knocked hard. “Call 911!” she yelled. “Call 911!” In the next room, Dana, already awake, was sitting on her bed, playing with her Spirograph, fitting one plastic gear within another and drawing perfect circles. She heard the scampering in the gravel outside her window and then our mother’s frantic voice.

  She and Kevin hurried upstairs, and my brother made the call, Dana looking through the front door and down to the carport, relaying information to him. She saw our mother pull our father from the car, then lean with him against a wooden post and cradle his head. Later, our mother would remember that she was saying to him, “You didn’t have to do this. You didn’t have to do this.” What he had done was run a garden hose from the exhaust pipe to the driver’s window, turn the ignition, and lie on the seat.

  There is no reason for Kevin and Dana and me to stay in this house. We leave through the back door and join our little sisters at our neighbors’. We sit in their upstairs living room, looking through the picture window down toward our carport. The ambulance is there still, idling. The EMTs are speaking with my mother. They are standing near our father’s body. They are pulling a sheet over his face.

  Across the street, a few doors down, in a neighboring family’s upstairs window, two faces appear. A mother and her teenage daughter have pulled aside the curtain and are peering toward our house. The mother raises binoculars to her eyes; then she passes them to her daughter.

  We are outraged. We are being invaded—our experience, in the midst of our having it, is being gawked at. We are an interesting thing that is happening on the block.

  “We ought to call them,” Dana says.

  “You think so?” Kevin says. “Should I do it?”

  “Do it.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “make the call.”

  Kevin thumbs through the phone directory, then picks up the receiver. He dials. We wait. “Mind your own business,” he says bluntly, then hangs up. In the window down the street, the curtain closes.

  A couple of hours later, back in our house, my mother is sitting on the living room couch, near the tree and presents, surrounded by friends and family who have come bearing sandwiches and casseroles. The room, I understand, is for her alone. I linger nearby in the dining room and hear Grandma Esther saying to her, “That poor tortured man.” Is this true? Yes, it is: my father was tortured. He must have suffered much. But it has not crossed my mind that my grandmother has known this. Has everyone known? Have my father’s troubles been common knowledge?

  Father Lane, the pastor of our church, appears in black shirt and white collar. He stands, of all places, in the narrow downstairs hallway, near the doorways to three bedrooms: Kevin’s, Dana’s, and mine. He looks preposterous there, like a character from a storybook who has come to life and stepped off the page. He is the man who, in our sudden drama, will be playing the role of the priest. Briefly, gently, he tells me something comforting that I will not remember; instead, I will remember his sour breath—I will remember thinking that he is a person, a normal person, just a man who hasn’t had time to brush his teeth.

  One of my mother’s twin sisters has arrived. She crooks her finger, motioning me over. “Chris,” she says, “I have a job for you. It is possible that your father wrote a note. He could have mailed it to your mother. For the next few days, I want you to be the first to the mailbox. Don’t let your mother get the mail. If you find an envelope that looks as though it’s from your father, bring it to me.” That day, and the next few days, I do as she asks. I find no message from my father. I am relieved. And disappointed.

  Sunday, the day after my father’s death, the viewing is scheduled at the funeral home. The viewing: we are going to look at him. He wanted out, but we won’t let him go so quickly, not before we take a last look.

  He lies in the casket, his face no longer red. But his hair is wrong: it is combed straight back from his face, without a part, in a way he never wore it. Maybe it’s not even my dad in the casket. Is it too late for this whole thing to have been a mistake, a misunderstanding? No, it’s him: a bountiful amount of makeup has been slathered onto the bridge of his nose, where his wound still is.

  Sitting in a row with my family, the casket before us, I am silent. We are all silent. I look at the room: the muted wallpaper, the dim lights. I look at the casket, then at my shoes, and feel my breath catch. I sob, my shoulders slumped, my chest trembling. Grandpa Lee, sitting beside me, hooks his arm around my shoulders, squeezes, and keeps his arm there. I think: That’s right—until now, I haven’t cried. I think: This is me feeling the reality of it. He is really dead: that must be what the tears mean.

  The funeral is at noon the next day, Christmas Eve. Terry has given me a Bible and marked a few New Testament chapters. “Choose a passage from these—a short passage, anything,” she says. I will read it at the funeral. I select a few verses that most closely reflect my own feelings; their tone seems entirely bitter, discouraged, and without hope. I don’t know the context of the verses or their ultimate significance to the chapter. I just pick the language that sounds the most bereft. I also must choose clothes to wear, and I realize, to my embarrassment, that I own nothing appropriate: no black slacks, no simple black shoes, no white shirt. I am unprepared for a funeral. I do what I can with what I have: I wear my moss-green corduroys and, lacking any other shoes but sneakers, my glam rock–inspired two-tone platform shoes, gold and brown. In the church, reciting my sad verses at the lectern where my father stood a few months before, I feel miserable and clownish. In the far back row, I see the members of my basketball team, the entire eighth-grade junior varsity squad, sitting with the coach. He has required them to attend. Although it’s Christmas Eve and drizzly, and notice has been short, turnout is good. My dad had friends. Neighbors are there, and fellow parishioners, old colleagues from the company that cut him loose, and even some Forhans: aunts and uncles and cousins. No Nat, of course. My father’s father long ago disappeared for good. And no Jim: my father’s brother, trained by fate—as my father was—to rely on himself, has long since drifted off into his own life and hasn’t spoken to my father in twenty years. In the funeral memory book, set out for mourners to sign, dozens and dozens of people inscribe their names. Erica, my five-year-old sister, has been practicing writing her name, so she signs three times, inserting herself even among the list of pallbearers.

  On the front of the funeral card, presented to each mourner, is a quote from Saint Augustine: “In thee is rest, which forgetteth all toil.”

  After the funeral, it is still Christmas Eve. The whole family—grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins—gathers at our house, and we engage in the standard rituals: the praying, the feasting, the nibbling on nuts and gingerbread, the unwrapping of gifts. I get what I’ve asked for: Ringo’s new album. (Now you’re expecting me to live without you . . .) For all of us Forhan children: a Ping-Pong table set up in the rec room. Afterward, when the table is not in use, Kim and Erica will drape it with blankets, transforming it into a fort that, side by side, they can hide in. Otherwise, for weeks of round-robin tournaments, we fix ourselves at either end of it, in a single place of mindless distraction
, our eyes focused only on what is before us, only on the ricocheting ball, the wooden paddle sweaty in our grip. Serve. Return. Serve. Return. Return. Return. Return. Return.

  – Part IV –

  A Voice in the Air

  42

  Kevin

  In those last weeks, I was the first to return home in the afternoon, and he would leave the house then. The last time I saw him, I had come home and poured myself a big bowl of cereal. He comes out, and I say, “Hi, Dad.” We’re having a light conversation, and he says, “Son?”

  I say, “Yeah?”

  He says, “I’m scared.”

  “Well, good luck,” I say, and he goes downstairs and leaves. And I never see him again.

  After all this time? You completely failed to prepare me to be any use to you, and now you’re telling me you’re scared? You’ve never told me anything like that in your life. It came out of the blue. Nothing led up to it. It was basically throwing out one last line, and I did him no good. It’s not something I blame myself for. It wasn’t my job. It would have been easy just to say, “What are you scared of?” That would have been a good answer, but I was essentially trained to avoid meaningful conversation with my parents.

  Dana

  On a night not long before Dad died, he and Kim and Erica and I were playing Life, the board game. I remember, with Life, you spin a wheel and move your piece—a little plastic car—along a road a certain number of spaces, and along the way you get married or have children or become a doctor or buy life insurance, whatever. I spun and landed on the green Revenge Square, which gave me the power to pick any player and take money from him or move his piece backward. I picked up Dad’s car and moved it back ten spaces. He said, “Why would you do that?” I said, “Because I hate you.”