I was here, at last.
A working-class neighborhood. Blue-collar. Neat, clean. Real estate had a name for homes like these: starter home, empty-nester.
It was the middle of the afternoon. I parked down the block, pulled on my ivy cap and sunglasses, got out, wandered up the street. Opposite the house was a park set up for kids, backing onto a complex that included a Montessori School, Baptist Center, Ballet School.
I found a bench in the park, behind a swing set and sandbox, sat down, stretched my arms along its back, pulled the cap down low over my eyes, let the sun beat down.
I sat there for an hour, staring at the house, then I left.
On 675 North, I drove until the usual signs appeared, near Fairborn: Holiday Inn, Fairfield Inn, Homewood Suites, Hampton Inn. Bob Evans, McDonald's, Arby's, Wendy's.
I ate dinner at Chi-Chi's. I had the chimichangas and a beer. It had been good in Bowling Green, it was still good here.
The Hampton Inn that I checked into was on Presidential Avenue, off John Glenn Parkway, right opposite Wright State University. Standing in my room, looking out the window, I pictured Adam going there, carrying his books across the broad campus, living in Dayton, with his father.
TEN
I
I dreamed that night of my father flying in on a plane to meet me. At the airport, I told him that I didn't like looking after his money, that I didn't want the responsibility. As in other dreams, he was young. His hair had blond streaks in it—which, if you'd seen my father, made no sense at all.
He told me that young people are always angry, that when I was older, more damaged, I'd understand.
The dream was already fading as I stepped out of my morning shower. Sitting on the edge of the bed, studying the map of Dayton, I realized that it had disappeared down drains, into the rivers around the city—the Greater Miami, Wolf Creek, the Stillwater. Mad River.
Mad River.
During the last six months of his life, Dad suffered from dementia. It was triggered by the first of the two bouts of pneumonia that finished him. It was explained to me that pneumonia in the elderly can act like a stroke, cutting off necessary oxygen to the brain.
There were moments of lucidity, mingled with the madness. One day, sitting in the green, cloth-covered chair in his room, five days before he died, he talked.
"I'm near the end. I know that." Pause. "If you move over to the other side of the plane, there are better seats. I was in Hamilton yesterday. Today I was in Kingston." The eyes, watery. "I slept with a woman last night. She was a big woman, bigger than that nurse who used to come to see me." Struggling. A frown. Then: "I dream a lot now. I don't know when I'm dreaming and when I'm not."
I listened.
I'd phoned Jeanne before I went to bed the previous night.
"Tonight?"
"Hampton Inn."
"Big spender. What's Dayton like?"
"Don't know yet."
"You must have some impression."
I thought about it, about the Convention Center, Otis Elevator, the Greyhound Bus Station, the building near Arby's, boarded up, ready for demolition. I thought about Oakwood, the gazebo, hills, trees, the Peasant Stock Restaurant in the mall. "You can't pigeonhole it. I saw a business section, some inner-city stuff. Then you drive farther, there's a beautiful suburb, big houses. It's like you. Too complex."
We sipped our beers, four hundred miles apart.
"So I'm complex, huh?"
"Isn't complex good?"
"How am I complex?"
"You're always planning ahead. You're smarter than me."
"How could anyone be smarter than you?"
"Touché."
"One example. Just one."
"You taught me how to shop, how to plan. Buy bulk. Like the running shoes on sale, you bought two pairs, put one in the closet. I only bought the one pair. Two years later, you whip out your second pair, toss the old away. Me, I had to go shopping again. Like a dumbhead."
"I got 'em on right now."
"I know you do."
"How do you know?"
"You wear them when you're cleaning. You're cleaning, aren't you? Like a wild woman?"
"Maybe you're wrong. Maybe I'm stark naked."
"Maybe you are."
"Think about it."
"I am." And I did. But not for long. I knew I'd never sleep.
We listened to each other breathe over the phone. It was comforting. She never asked the questions she wanted to ask, and I was grateful, because I didn't know any of the answers.
Da, my father's maternal grandfather, my great-grandfather—whose name was Thomas Samuel Sutton—was an imposing figure. On a wall in his room my father kept a black-and-white photograph in a twelve-by-fourteen-inch frame of my brother Ron, circa 1934, at about two years of age, sitting on Da's knee. It's a handsome photo—done in a studio. If I were guessing, I'd say Da paid for it. He looks pretty proud.
Ron is wearing a sailor suit. Da has on a three-piece suit and a bow tie. My father has Da's ears, the long lobes. He has his mouth.
If Nanny was the matriarch of my memory, Da was the patriarch of the previous generation. My father must have lived in his shadow. Certainly Bampi—Dad's father—did. There are some good stories of Da still circulating through the family. I've heard them. Jacquie has told me most of them.
Da couldn't read or write. He used to get one of the kids around the house to read the newspaper to him. He spent time in the backyard, the garden, the garage of the house on Maxwell Avenue. When I was a kid we could still see some of the harps that he had carved into the side of the garage. He was born in Toronto in 1862. His father, Sam Sutton, was born in Dublin in 1842. Once, in the early 1930s, he raised the Irish flag on a pole from that garage. Someone complained. The police came and made him take it down.
Among my father's things I also found a receipt, dated October 21, 1899: Received from Mr. Thomas Sutton, the sum of $951.46, payment in full for 81 Duke Street, Toronto . . . signed, Annie Russell, Executrix. Duke Street no longer exists. It's been blended into Adelaide Street. The house is long gone too.
Da, son of Sam Sutton of Dublin, both illiterate laborers, had managed to accumulate enough cash to buy a house, something even I couldn't do. He gave us all a leg up, a small start. It was a beginning. We stood on his shoulders.
In the photo, my brother Ron's hands are resting on his great-grandfather's. Ron told me once that Da used to take him out on Sunday afternoons for a walk, a ride on the streetcar, then to a playground. This would have been around 1937. Ron would have been about five years old. Inevitably, they would visit a bootlegger and Da would have a drink. When they got home, Nanny would be suspicious and grill Ron with questions. He'd always answer that he didn't know where they went. Sitting in the corner of the kitchen, Da would beam, a twinkle in his eye, say That's my boy, That's my boy. We'll go for walks and rides to the playground every Sunday.
Da, Thomas Sutton, was a widower from 1930 until he died in 1944. He lived at Maxwell Avenue for those fourteen years. I think he needed that drink on Sunday afternoons.
Ron died May 23, 1993, age sixty.
It was 5 a.m. I had no idea what Bobby Swiss did for a living, what time he got up, where he went, if he even went anywhere. I wanted to be sure that I didn't miss him.
Coffee, orange juice, muffin, and strawberry yogurt in the Hampton Inn lobby, another coffee to go, then back onto 675 South. Within twenty minutes, I was in my car, parked on Galewood, watching the house where he lived. The steam from my coffee made a crescent on the windshield. The paper cup warmed my hands. I squinted into the summer sun, rising in the east, behind the house.
At six-thirty, he came out. I knew it was him. He wore jeans, a white T-shirt, had a cigarette in his mouth. Tall, strong, his hair shoulder-length, brown, combed back behind his ears. He hadn't shaved. The rhythm of his body, the way he walked: I realized who I was seeing. I was seeing Adam.
He got into the '87 Olds parked in the driveway
. When it pulled out, I saw the license plate: jesusrox. I started up my car, followed the early morning exhaust cloud north on Galewood.
Galewood curved west, became Bingham. At Woodman Drive—Wright Brothers Parkway—he turned left, driving along the perimeter of a classic factory, the Delco Plant: acres of parking behind wire fencing, thousands of cars. Smokestacks, gray vats, electrical transformers.
He turned right, into the entrance driveway—a long, wide road leading into the grounds—stopped at the gatehouse, said something, then was gone. I pulled over at the foot of the entranceway, sat for a minute more, then drove away.
II
Dad attended grade school at St. Paul's Catholic Elementary School on Sackville, near Parliament and Queen. Born in 1904, he was there from 1910 to 1918—eight years that were the extent of his formal education. At age fourteen, he went to work.
He told me the Christian Brothers taught him. The boys and girls were in separate classes, played on separate sides of the school grounds at recess. He said Brother Jerome, his eighth-grade teacher, could plunk an eraser off a kid's head from thirty feet, a trick that was held in high esteem by his students. No one complained to their parents. If they did, they got whapped again. You must have deserved it, they were told.
He was an altar boy, serving Sunday Mass at St. Paul's Church, across from the school. The image of my father as a kid in grade school is hard enough for me to conjure up. The thought of him as an altar boy is almost incomprehensible.
The whole area was called Cabbagetown. Irish Cabbagetown. Up until the 1950s it was pretty much a slum. Today, it's quite gentrified, diverse, interesting, downtown, central—trendiness mingled with vestigial traces of the old, the seedy. Corktown was a part of it—the part south of Queen, where St. Paul's was. Quite appropriate, since Dad's paternal grandfather, a shoemaker by trade, one of my great-grandfathers—who had the same name as Dad's father, Matthew Nolan—was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1842.
It was in the newspaper just recently: six coffins discovered during playground construction at St. Paul's School, which was built upon a nineteenth-century cemetery. Burial records show that nearly three thousand Catholics were interred there between 1847 and 1857. No one knows how many bodies were buried between 1822, when it opened, and 1847, when records began. Thousands more, presumably. Also in the area is a mass trench, containing more than eight hundred Catholics who died of typhus in 1847—emigrants who had escaped the Irish famine only to perish thousands of miles away, be buried in that strange, hard soil. The cemetery was closed in 1857 because it was full; grave markers—not the bodies—were removed in 1870.
As a child, my father played atop their bodies. Brother Jerome wielded his eraser there. They are still there, an entire community, founders, shoring us up, unsung.
My father and Brother Jerome are still there too.
Jeanne: He told her he was working in a factory in Dayton. That's how I know what I know.
Delco. It fit. Owned by General Motors. Jesus. I even had a Delco battery keeping the electrics in my '93 Honda Civic humming. I saw the irony: maybe Bobby Swiss had made the unit that helped power me here, to Dayton, across Mad River, to this low floodplain of the Great Miami, seat of Montgomery County.
Down a funnel. Inevitable.
My map told me I was actually in Kettering. From what I could determine, Dayton was a metropolitan area that included the cities of Kettering, Miamisburg, Xenia, Fairborn, Oakwood, and Vandalia. Population of Dayton was around two hundred thousand. If you included the greater metropolitan area, it went up around a million.
I stopped at a 7-Eleven, looked up Delco in the phone book, and called. I told the woman who answered that I was a journalist doing an article on factory shift work, and asked them how long a typical shift would be at their plant. The one that starts at 7 a.m., for instance.
"It finishes at five. Shifts are eight hours, with an hour for lunch or dinner, and two half-hour breaks."
I hung up. I had a whole day ahead of me. I bought a pocket guide to Dayton.
I'd seen Wright State University from my window at the Hampton Inn. Like Bowling Green, I wanted to see more of it.
It was enormous, a huge campus. And beautiful: trees, ravines. I parked the car, got out, walked for a bit.
My guide told me that its charter was less than thirty years old, that there were sixteen thousand students here, more than ninety percent of them Ohioans, that there were seven hundred thousand volumes in the libraries. As a state university, its tuition was around four thousand dollars—double that if you were from out of state—staggering sums to me, especially when you factored in living expenses as well.
In the bookstore, Dayton's aviation pioneers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, were represented by a silhouetted logo of their famous biplane. A metaphor for discovery, change, literally throwing off earthly shackles, defying gravity, they had taken flight, freed themselves.
As at Bowling Green, and as I had the previous evening from the window of my room at the Hampton Inn, I pictured Adam sitting in libraries here, surrounded by seven hundred thousand books, studying in the state where he was born.
Research, books, community service, the arts and sciences—opportunities engulfing these people in their green and gold sweatshirts, under the bright Ohio sun.
In my mind, Adam and I became one. I was attending classes with him. If I had gone to university, would I have been smart enough to understand what was happening to me? Was there a way to learn what I wanted to know, especially when I wasn't even certain what it was that I wanted to know?
I envied Adam his life. I envied him that he still had a father.
It was 10 a.m., was warming to a hot, clear day.
In the night all things were possible, anything could happen. The dreams had proven this to me. Things changed, ever so subtly, every time I awoke. The world shifted, in fractions, the past and the present existing together, inside me. My mind roamed free.
The sun beating down changed all that.
The booklet in my hip pocket told me that Kettering, where Bobby Swiss lived and worked, was named after Charles F. Kettering, who, along with Edward Deeds, developed the modern automotive starter and ignition systems.
I sat in my Honda, keys in hand. I looked out through the windshield into the glare of morning, tried to will the night magic to appear. I inserted the key into Kettering's ignition, turned it, heard the Delco battery fire the noisy valves of my 1960 Chev to life. I closed my eyes, saw the shaky three-speed gearshift on the steering column, felt its wide bench seat beneath me.
ELEVEN
I
West of 675, off Shakertown Road, just outside Kettering, I saw the Belmont Auto Theatre.
$6.00 A CARLOAD
OPEN WEEKENDS
THROUGHOUT THE WINTER
HEATERS WILL BE FURNISHED
FOR YOUR COMFORT
NO ALCOHOL
ON THIS
PROPERTY
I got out of the car, stood with my hands in my pockets. Then I went up to the fence and peered through.
I know a lot about drive-in theaters. I've made it a point to find out. I like them. I bought a book about them once— written by some guy who had taken a trip along Route 66, searching them out. He liked them even more than I did. I'll tell you a little bit of what I know.
By the early thirties, Detroit was rolling cars off the assembly line, Hollywood was churning out movies. The first drive-in opened in New Jersey in 1933, an unexpected offshoot of the two growing industries. Over the next decade drive-in theaters began to appear all over the States: Pennsylvania, Texas, California, Massachusetts, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Rhode Island, New York. By 1942, there were ninety-five of them, scattered across twenty-seven states.
As I recall, Ohio took the concept to its bosom: it had more than any other state. Eleven, I think. Like the one I was looking at right now. Good old Ohio.
During 1941-45, the War years, for all the obvious reasons the whole phenom
enon flattened out. But it blossomed again with a vengeance after the War. Before 1950, their number had increased from around one hundred to over eight hundred. By 1958, there were close to five thousand.
And the one near Copiague, New York, on Long Island, almost overlooking South Oyster Bay and Ocean Parkway—that was one of the largest, one I wanted to get to, but never did. It hosted twenty-five hundred cars, had an additional twelve-hundred-seat, heated and air-conditioned indoor viewing area, playground, cafeteria, and restaurant with full dinners. A shuttle train took the moviegoers from their cars to the various destinations on the twenty-eight-acre site. I also heard of one in Lufkin, Texas, and another in Troy, Michigan, both of which claimed parking space for three thousand vehicles.
Onward and upward, fun and novelty for everyone, unlimited expansion. Playgrounds might incorporate minitrains, boat and pony rides, talent and animal shows, even miniature golf. Fried chicken, burgers, pizza: fast food was a natural.
In the 1960s and seventies, the party wasn't quite over, but it was ending. The numbers leveled, the enthusiasm waned. By the end of the eighties, they were closing with regularity. Suburban ones were engulfed by housing and shopping developments, their property too valuable. Many of the rural ones just withered and died. There are close to a thousand dead drive-ins across the U.S., weeds sprouting freely—graveyards, the speaker posts like headstones.
The States has fewer than a thousand left. Canada has about seventy-five.
The drive-in theater. Although you can find one in most countries on the globe, they're a particularly American hybrid. Passion pits for teens, cheap entertainment for families. Young couples with an infant could avoid the hassle of a baby-sitter—just plunk junior in the backseat with a bottle, let him sleep.
St. Patrick's Bed (Ashland, 3) Page 7
