Love and Fury

by Richard Hoffman

  He shrugged, pursed his lips, nodded. We’d chosen the darker one. It had a little work where the railing was attached all around for the pallbearers.

  “Very well then. Now, Richard, I understand that you would like to spend some time with your father?” I nodded. Back at her office she gave me a card. “Your father’s at our other location, on Fourth Street. Do you know where that is?” I nodded again. “The address is there on the card. I’ll call to let them know you’re coming. You understand that our aesthetician hasn’t finished with him yet, hasn’t finished his work. I want to be sure you understand that.”

  It was perfectly appropriate that she was so businesslike and accommodating and I wished she was something more, although just what I couldn’t say.

  The other funeral home was across town, in a neighborhood near where I’d gone to high school. It was alive with bodegas, hoagie shops, travel agents, restaurants, fruit markets, and, at that time of day, kids coming home from school, the boys wearing ties and white shirts, the girls in their plaid Catholic jumpers. Whenever my father got on one of his rants about how the city was falling into ruin, my brother would tell him to come off it, that if he spoke Spanish, he’d think it was a great place to live.

  I had been gripping an upright of the steel shelving, hard, a red crease in my palm. I moved toward my father. I touched his face and stood looking at him.

  The expression on my father’s face was odd, a kind of self-satisfied smirk. Maybe that’s too strong a word, smirk. It’s hard to describe because although I’d seen the expression thousands of times, it was always fleeting, the prelude to a wisecrack, or laughter, or his saying, “Aw, go on!” incredulously, a slight movement of the lip—except that now it wasn’t a movement—on its way to something else. In the next instant surely he would say something.

  The day before, I had set out as soon as my brother called to say that he’d taken my father to the emergency room. Traffic was heavy on the interstate. My brother called a couple of times to let me know what the doctors were saying. The next time he called he said, “Well, you didn’t make it. And neither did he.” The hospital staff wanted to know how far away I was and if they could move the body or if I’d be there soon. I said I was far away.

  Alone in a car is a good place to get such news. I cried a good while, without restraint, before calling my wife and then my friend Will in Michigan, who loved my father like another son. He’d played baseball on one of my father’s teams and had stayed close to him and our family for more than forty years. “The world is different now,” I said to him. And then I spoke to my father, the one I’d made of him, the one in my head. Aloud. I thanked him and said good-bye.

  As if he were ever going to go away.

  I was trying to feel some of that grief now with all that was left of him in this stark room, but it was futile. A single fly, large, loud, came buzzing in a series of loops toward me, close enough that I shooed it away; it seemed to labor in the closeness and heat as it rose to a top shelf and alighted somewhere out of sight.

  I was trying to orient myself. I looked away, scanning the shelves of plastic jugs and bottles, cartons, paper towels, not seeing anything. I wasn’t feeling anything, either—no tears, no lump in the throat, no heartache.

  But I recognized my state of mind. Had I been younger, had writing not been a part of my life for more than forty years, I would have panicked at my lack of emotion. I would have levied a terrible judgment on myself. But by now I knew that I was recording all of it, not only to write about it but to keep it, as I could not if I were distracted by sentiment. I knew I would weep again for my father, for his suffering, for the injustice of his life, for his loss. In that moment I was receiving a kind of imprint, as if I were recording a period of time, and a place, that would forever exist inside of me, a camera oscura, my time with my father’s body in this room forever mine. I can return to that room now at will. I swear if I actually went back there I could tell you which cartons and containers had been moved. At any time now I can reinhabit this storeroom pieta and I can grieve all I want, all I need.

  The fly came humming toward me again and I ignored it. It alighted on my shoulder for a moment then zigzagged off toward the windows, where it bizzed along the frame and bumped along the frosted glass, looking for a way out.

  Then I did something impulsive: I pulled the blanket from my father and stared. I began with his feet and noted where he’d torn off the nail of his big toe with a pliers a couple of weeks before; he’d bloodied it on the doorjamb in his bare feet, and trying to free the nail from where it had cut into his flesh, he tore the whole thing off. I looked at his bowed, arthritic legs and bony knees, his penis and—he had a dozen names for them—“the family jewels.” He called them his privates. (Inflected with his army experience, the term became a quip, an adage: “Privates take orders; they don’t give them.” Good advice.) A hirsute man, my father’s abundant chest hair came right up to his neck, and I could see that the mortician had shaved a little there, probably when told that we wanted to bury him without a necktie. And that smirk which made me want to say “What?”

  It was not so much that I was looking at him; it was more my body, my whole body, recognizing itself in his.

  It occurred to me then that someone might come in. What would they think? What would they think I was doing? I didn’t even know what I was doing. I placed the blanket over him, kissed his forehead, patted him twice on the shoulder.

  At the door I looked back at the body on the gurney, my father’s body, the body we share. It seemed to mean, as surely as any broken bony Christ’s down from his cross, “Don’t be fooled. This is how it ends.”

  Except—suddenly I know it, wordlessly—it doesn’t end.

  Don’t be fooled.

  I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

  JAMES BALDWIN

  You arrive, take a number from a dispenser like the one at the deli counter of the supermarket, and fill out the yellow form on the counter in the back of the waiting room. Where the form asks my relation to the inmate I always write, in tiny print so it fits on the short single line, HE IS MY GRANDSON’S FATHER. I always feel a little exasperated that there isn’t room for even that. Then you wait for your number to show up on the screen. The waiting room is full of people, mostly mothers and children. We sit in rows of attached chairs as at a bus station. There’s a machine selling bottled water and sodas, another selling bags of salty snacks. I’ve been here several times before, but they’ve put up a wall since I was here last, a plywood wall with two Plexiglas windows that separates us from the main hall where the guards come and go, talking loudly, joking with each other as the shift changes. As time goes by, the children are more and more restless and their mothers, made up, with their hair done as if for a date, are becoming more and more frustrated, tugging arms, smacking bottoms: “I’m not going to tell you again!” Babies are shrieking and wailing. Every 20 minutes or so a guard calls out a handful of names of people who will be taken to the next phase of this process, allowed into “the trap” where they will take off their shoes and belts and step through a metal detector, then be asked to show there is nothing hidden under their pants or in their pockets. “Roll up your cuffs, please. Please pull down your socks. Turn around. Bend over. Stick out your tongue. Ma’am, if your child touches the bars of the gate again you won’t be allowed to visit.”

  We are les miserables. The majority of us are black. Many of us speak Spanish. A lot of the women and nearly all the children are dressed in clothing with logos: GATORADE, DORITOS, NIKE, GAP. Lined faces topped with teased and dyed and sprayed bouffants, bad teeth, smokers’ sallow complexions. Working people.

  You have to put your belongings in one of the twenty-five-cent lockers, about a foot square. When my number appears in red dots, I go into the hall to the window to present my yellow sheet and identification. “You need to fill
in your locker number.” I’ve never had to do this before. He’s going over the form, pen in hand. “Forty-one,” I say. He hands the paper back to me. “You need to fill in the locker number, sir.”

  “Okay. May I borrow your pen a moment?”

  “Pens are at the back counter. You know where they are.” He refuses to meet my gaze. So I return to the waiting room and walk to the back counter, where I wait while people who’ve just arrived are filling out their yellow forms. A little girl is twisting around her mother’s leg, bashful and curious, looking up at my exasperation, trying to puzzle out what exactly is going on here.

  When I return to the window with a bold “41” in the box, the guard says, “They won’t let you in there with that sweater on.”

  I’ve read the regulations. Several times. There’s nothing else to read, nothing else to do once you’ve emptied your pockets and locked up your things. “Why not?”

  “No vests. It’s a vest.” I’m trying to remember if there’s another quarter in my jacket in the locker. The guards don’t make change. There’s no point arguing with this guy. I walk away.

  “You’re welcome!” the guard shouts at my back. As I reenter the waiting room, a running toddler, looking back at her older sister chasing her, slams into my knees, hard. She’s crying on the floor and I reached down to pick her up, trying to soothe her. Her mother is there in an instant, snatching her away, while the older sister hangs back, twirling her hair around a finger. “Don’t you touch my child!” the mother says to me. Everywhere babies are wailing, and now because I am the only drama in the room, all eyes are on me. There’s no point in saying anything, so I mumble, “Sorry,” and go stand against the wall next to the locker. There are no empty chairs.

  An hour later, there are still many people ahead of me, and if I don’t get in by four thirty, I’ll have to wait until six. At last the guard calls Damion’s name, and I get in the short line next to the iron door.

  It took me a long time to finally visit Damion in prison. For one thing, I didn’t feel I could visit him without a certain disloyalty to my daughter. She was ambivalent, given the fraught relationship they had at the time, and she said she didn’t want to take D there because she felt that a prison was no place for a two-year-old. “But he remembers him, Dad. When we’re out someplace and he sees a black guy with dreads, he asks me, ‘Mommy? Is that my daddy?’”

  After her first visit I asked her how it went.

  “It was good. It was good. D sat on his lap and the two of them were playing around and laughing.”

  “I mean how was it for you?”

  She teared up, resisted, then let loose. “I still feel it. In my heart. I still feel it!”

  “You still love him.”

  She nodded as she blew her nose. And I knew that she knew how hard this would continue to be for a long time. After that, every Thursday evening she would take D with her and visit Damion in Concord.

  My own resistance I still don’t understand entirely. Even after my first visit, I made excuses. I made myself busy. The whole scene there is stressful for one thing, I told myself, and for another, sometimes I just don’t know what to talk about with him. I don’t really have an eventful life myself— mostly reading, writing, and teaching, none of which is of particular interest to him. It goes without saying that not too much is going on in his life. It’s a little bit like visiting someone at bedside when they’re in the hospital—it’s just awkward.

  But it is so much more complicated than that.

  Soon after Veronica became pregnant, Damion moved in with us. Robert was also home, living in his old bedroom, just beginning to sort out his problems, engage in treatment for alcoholism, and recover from several years of self-destructive behavior. We were a full and uncomfortable house, all of us trying to get along, share limited space, and keep conflict to a minimum. I used to get furious when the strong smell of microwave popcorn or some Jamaican beef patties or jerk chicken would waft up to our bedroom when I was trying to get to sleep. And groping my way half asleep to the bathroom to pee in the middle of the night, I’d sometimes find a large dreadlocked stranger sitting on the toilet. “Jesus, close the door!”

  “Sorry.”

  But I was impressed with Damion’s solicitude and concern for Veronica’s comfort during her pregnancy, his willingness to run downstairs to the kitchen or out to the store. He rubbed her back, her legs. He soothed her anxieties. They seemed to me to be making a go of it.

  Damion was looking for work. Each morning he would leave the house a young father to be, and he’d come home in the afternoon having been reminded more than once that he was a felon on parole. Not only that, but hanging over him was a three-year-old charge that, with adequate representation, not a court-appointed attorney, likely would have been dismissed. The state had decided to pull out that old file and prosecute him. Who would hire him? And how would he prove he was changed after his time in prison?

  Around that time I went looking for a room to rent so I would have a place to write. I had a contract for a short-story collection, and I wanted to finish it. I had three stories in need of revision and three new ones in the works. I found a long triangular room in an industrial building and moved my desk, library, reading chair, and lamp into the space, just across the hall from an agency serving Salvadoran immigrants. I put my desk on one wall and a table against each of the other two. I have always written in multiple genres, and with my desk chair on wheels, and fiction, nonfiction, and poetry projects on their respective tables, I was able, whenever I felt stuck, to give myself a push and wheel across the room to a different work in progress. I mostly worked on the short stories and was grateful for the chance to escape the stresses of our life then: Veronica’s pregnancy, the tensions of the household, Robert’s crisis, my father’s final illness.

  That odd space became a haven, and I began to think. I would write for an hour and then sit there staring out the window for three. There had to be a way to have the charges against Damion dismissed. It was a matter of getting the DA to see him as more than a case, to see who he had become. I wrote the DA a letter and received a call from his office saying thank you, that the prosecution was carefully considering how to proceed. Kathi, Robert, Veronica, and others wrote as well.

  For me, that time we were all together under one roof was too much like the household I had fled. We weren’t fighting, but we weren’t talking, either; we were mostly trying to stay out of one another’s way. It was tense and lonely. And although the house I’d grown up in was filled with angers more chronic, tensions more constant, the two situations made a rhyme I wished I could erase.

  For Kathi, that period reminded her of the year, early in our marriage, when we lived with her parents. We fought, I drank, both of us felt ourselves disappearing. Kathi would write until noon while I spent time with our newborn son. Then I’d hand him off to her and sit at the desk drinking and trying to write something. We were trying to bring two immense solitudes together, and we battled over temporal, parental, familial, and emotional boundaries. My mother was dying and I was flying back and forth to Allentown, leaving Kathi alone for days. Other times I played on her guilt to convince her to come with me so my mother could see her grandson. From one moment to the next Kathi was a mother, a daughter, a spouse—when and how would she also be a writer? Would she ever write again? Was she ever to have a professional life? One of her teachers, a poet, told her when she married that she was finished as a poet. Our life that year was mutual existential panic. Robert was our only joy.

  And now he was back home with us, in his old room, which had been my study while he was away. In the parable of the prodigal son, there is no mention of the weeks and months following the moving scene of reconciliation, the father keeping his distance so he doesn’t say the wrong thing, holding in check his resentment that his son is lying around the house all day, eating, sleeping, and doing not much else. The parable doesn’t include the son missing his convivial pals and their nightly
adventures from pub to bar to tavern. There is no mention of the son’s girlfriend and how badly he wants to be back in her arms, no digression to examine the enervating effects of disgrace, how at such times it seems so clearly the opposite of grace, of comfort, of any ease at all.

  We didn’t know what to say to each other. He stayed in bed most of the day, watching DVDs on his laptop, and in the evening he would move to the sofa downstairs and watch TV. After Kathi and I went to bed, Damion and Veronica would sometimes join him.

  I often wondered, boxed in my rented triangular room, if I would ever have my son back, the boy I once knew who was so buoyant and hopeful. Once, when he was ten or eleven, we were at Fenway Park and the Red Sox were down by nine runs going into the ninth inning. People were beginning to leave, had already been leaving for a while. I sighed, stretched, thought about the usual traffic jam in the sprawling parking lot across the street; maybe we could avoid it if we left now. Robert was standing in front of his seat, his fist in his mitt, ready for any foul ball that might come our way. I tapped his shoulder. “Come on, let’s go. We’ll beat the traffic.”

  “Dad, come on!” He gave me a look that accused me of treason. “Two grand slams and a homer and it’s all tied up!” Now he was disconsolate, touchy, and evasive.

  Robert is named after my brother Bobby. Kathi took my choice, my sad and sentimental attempt to thwart death, as the desire to honor my brother, but I did it more for my parents than anyone else. I wanted to assure them of the ongoingness of life. Lo! Your son who was dead is returned to you. Not only presumptuous, but useless: within eighteen months, my mother was dead, and my father devastated, isolated, depressed, and in retreat from life.

  I fantasized about all of us moving to Canada. Maybe Jamaica. I never mentioned this to anyone; I just Googled the immigration requirements of countries where I thought we might all get a fresh start. I asked a writer I knew in Denmark, an American expat, how far we would get on the proceeds from the sale of our house. “You wouldn’t make it out of the airport,” he said. Kathi and I were too old; we’d be a drain on the system. “Maybe if you had a job you were coming for, or a corporate sponsorship of some kind.” All I knew was that our daughter was starting a family with a man who was facing jail time for an old and victimless crime. The two of them appeared committed to each other, come what may. I had feelings too complicated to fully understand, but there were many things larger than my understanding in those stressful days, and fantasies and daydreams helped as a way to shepherd my thoughts away from the anger and confusion I felt.