A Pub in Ireland. I know it is Dublin. I’m drinking Guinness. The street signs visible through the windows are in Irish and English. The man across from me is a young man, in his twenties, regaling a group of us with stories. He is familiar, but I can’t place him. Then I see the red garnet ring on his right hand and know that it is my father, and he says, “Without any pressure, there is nothing at stake,” but I do not understand.
Suddenly I am outside, in the mist and the rain. There are birds. Starlings, everywhere. The Irish has disappeared from the street signs. It is not Dublin, but an American city. There is a different feel, a texture, the rain is not as soft. And in the pub window, no longer Guinness, Kilkenny, but Budweiser, Miller signs, orange and blue neon. Neon like Vegas. I clutch American dollar bills in my hand.
But I am not in Vegas. I know where I am. I see a sign on a building, carved in stone: “Greyhound Bus Station, Dayton.” I am in Dayton, Ohio.
When I awoke, Jeanne was there, wiping the mist and rain from my head, my shoulders. “You’re having one of your night sweats. You haven’t had them since you were sick.”
Since I was sick. A flood of images rose up out of the
darkness, out of the shadows and memories of our trips together and why we took them.
Her hand was cool on my brow.
Even though I was awake, the dream was still there. I was half in, half out, swimming up out of that place where dreams swirl like whirlpools, drawing us down.
And that’s most of what I remember.
They say that the Sumerians, more than five thousand years ago, chiseled their dreams onto clay tablets. And I read once that archaeologists discovered a two-thousand-year-old Egyptian book on dream interpretation.
In the clear light of the morning, I looked up Dayton in my road atlas, traced my finger along I-75, the blue line through Ohio. Bowling Green, Cygnet, Findlay. Bluffton, Lima, McCartyville. Pigua, Troyj, Tipp City. Beads on a string. Like beads on the rosary I held as a child, seated on a cool wooden pew at the back of St. Monica’s Church, my mother and father on either side of me. Each town a prayer, a reflection, a step toward the past that must become the present.
III
Dad never knew what to make of nachos. What is this? he’d say.
Nachos. Corn chips, cheese, green onion, jalapeno peppers. You dip it in the salsa. You want a beer?
What’re we having for dinner?
This. This is dinner. We’ll have some green pea soup too.
How can this be dinner?
I laughed. It just is.
This is something you eat while you watch a hockey game. If you don’t have any popcorn. Or ice cream, he added. But not dinner.
Eat it. You’ll enjoy it. It’s not like we have it every night. It’s a change of pace. A treat. Fun.
Fun, he repeated.
I laughed again.
He ate it. He ate all of it. But he knew it wasn’t dinner. The soup came the closest.
We developed routines that worked. Because we had strict time lines, Jeanne and I and Adam would get up in sequence in the morning, use the bathroom, shower, eat whatever breakfast we could force-feed ourselves, then off to work and school. After we had gone, after the house was empty and no one was around to pressure him, Dad would get up and dress and use the bathroom at his own pace, running that crazy electric razor all over his face forever. We’d find various pills on the bathroom floor on a daily basis. He had them for everything. He actually liked taking them. He’d line the little bottles up like soldiers. His devotion to doctors and pills was a religious faith— unshakable.
Then it was downstairs for cereal, juice, coffee. The coffee was from the pot I made every night and timed to start perking at six-thirty in the morning. Even with his bad eyes, there was nothing he couldn’t handle in that routine, and he’d leave the dishes in the sink for me. Dishes were my domain. Jeanne would claim at parties that her hands never touched dishwater, and I took foolish pride in my work.
I made him a lunch every night, along with lunches for Adam, Jeanne, and myself. All he had to do was fish it out of the refrigerator when he wanted it. Dinners he ate with us. Jeanne handled them. That was her domain. She liked cooking and she was good at it—said that having a glass of red wine while making dinner was like therapy, as good as yoga.
And he always knew when she was working late or had gone out for the evening. Nachos. Or take-out chicken. It wasn’t the same.
But he’d eat whatever you gave him. He was grateful.
I learned that from him too.
“What happened to your father?” I asked him once. He never spoke of his father. It was always Da he mentioned, his grandfather, Nanny’s father.
He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “He went senile.”
I listened.
“I remember one time he came downstairs at two o’clock in the morning. He was carrying a candle and had his feet wrapped up in rags. I had just come in. I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was going to work.” He paused. “He hadn’t worked in years.”
I didn’t know him. He died in 1942, before I was born. Even Da outlived him, dying in ’44. “What did he used to work at?”
“He was a shipper, then a driver, at Doyle Fish Company, down in the St. Lawrence Market. When he got older, he worked for the city. Department of Streets and Cleaning.” He paused. “He had a twin brother that died at birth. It was a big family. He was one of ten.”
I waited. He didn’t offer any more. “Why was he called Bampi?”
“Your sister Anne started that. When she was little she couldn’t say Grampa. It came out Bampi. The name stuck. We all liked it.”
“Did he have Alzheimer’s?”
He looked at me. “I don’t know. I never thought of it.”
“It sounds like Alzheimer’s.”
He was thinking. “I never heard of Alzheimer’s until the last few years. Some people just went senile. It was the thirties. Happened in lots of families.” He looked distant. “Never thought about it before.”
“Sounds like it. It was just a thought.”
He didn’t say anything more. He was quiet for the rest of the evening.
I lived with him for seven years, from when he was eighty-three till he died at age ninety. He never mentioned Bampi again.
IV
At the Metro Reference Library I asked for the white pages of the Dayton, Ohio, phone directory. The woman at the Information desk gave me a small envelope of microfiche transparencies, showed me how to use the machine, then left me alone.
There was a “Swiss, B” on the black-and-white screen before me. Only one. I read the address, the phone number, copied them on a piece of paper, put the paper in my shirt pocket.
I sat back.
I saw my father, traveling around the city, blind, revisiting places from the past, coming home and telling me how everything had changed. I touched the piece of paper in my pocket. Another step toward becoming my father.
SEVEN
I
What else can I tell you about Jeanne? Besides everything, I mean. It sounds corny to keep mentioning how we’re crazy about each other, but it’s true. Most people don’t believe us. Everyone is sure we’re not being honest, hiding something—a discordant note that would make our relationship more akin to their own experience.
I don’t know. I’ve had lots of relationships that didn’t work—most of them, for God’s sake. A failed marriage even. But this one works, and it probably shouldn’t. And maybe I shouldn’t be so smug. After all, no one gets married thinking it isn’t going to work, do they? I didn’t that first time. Yet half of them don’t make it—and of those that do, I don’t know how many of them I’d say were real good.
High maintenance, low maintenance. This is Jeanne’s theory.
“Most of the women I know treat their pets better than they do their man,” Jeanne told me one day. “They got a dog, they’ll get up early to walk it, scoop behind it, clean, feed, groom, o
oh and aah, pick fleas off it, you name it. Yet they ignore their man. Like they’d be happier if he was gelded. Like their dog.”
“Who are you thinking of?”
“Nearly everybody. They like them to bring home a lot of money, wear knee socks and shorts in the summer and mow the lawn, shovel the snow in the winter, and by and large leave them alone. Only a few exceptions.” She thought for a moment. “Jenny and Walt. Jenny understands her man.” Pause. “Christine and Fred. They’re both happy as clams.” Longer pause. Shrug. “That’s about it. Jenny and Christine get it. Rest of them don’t.”
“Get what?”
“Lust makes the world go round.” Her eyes twinkled.
I nodded sagely. “You’ll get no argument from me.”
“Course I won’t. It’s true.”
“What about Ted and Irma?”
“What about them?”
“Aren’t they exceptions? They seem pretty happy.”
More thought. Then: “Nah. She’s a little bit nuts.”
“Why?”
“She actually does have a dog. She thinks he needs braces.”
I laughed.
“Says he has an overbite. God knows what she thinks about Ted.”
“Scratch behind my ears?”
A smile.
“Straighten my tail?”
She crooked her finger, twice, beckoning. “You come over here and I’ll rub your belly.”
It was my turn to smile.
“Women are high maintenance. Men are low maintenance.”
It was true. It was profound. She was a genius.
Her finger called me twice more, like underwater sea grass, undulating.
I think I salivated and panted. In fact, I’m sure I did.
Then there was the time—earlier that summer—that she told me that she was a logistical genius—as well as a sexual one, of course.
“I didn’t know you knew the word ‘logistical,’” I said.
“I know a lot of words, smart guy.”
I nodded. “If I turn off the lights, will you whisper some of them in my ear?”
“That’s part of my sexual genius. This is different.”
I waited. “You have my full attention.”
“Adam’s car ran out of gas this morning on his way to work.”
Adam had a 1990 Toyota Tercel. It functioned for him much the way my 1960 Chev Impala had for me at his age.
“He had to leave it on Logan, near Gerrard. He phoned and told me about it after he finally got to work— late—said he couldn’t get away from the store. Asked me if I’d do him a favor—take my car and get some gas, put it in his car, because he didn’t have a gas can and it was too far to carry it even if he did have one.”
I was trying hard to follow.
“So I did. Got his spare keys from his room, got a can of gas from the corner. They made me leave a twenty-dollar deposit on the damn thing. Poured the gas into his car, then got to thinking.”
I frowned.
She smiled slyly.
“This is where the genius part comes in.” I folded my hands.
“Pure genius,” she said.
“I’m hanging on your every word.”
“So I started thinking,” she said, “about how pleased and surprised he’d be if I could get his car to him so that he’d have it right after work. Have it sitting there in the parking lot behind the store.”
“The perfect mother.”
“And wife.”
“And wife. Of course.”
“But I had my own car with me.”
I listened. Smiled. Patient. No idea where this was going.
“I couldn’t drive two cars at the same time.”
“Can’t see how,” I said.
“And I didn’t want to leave my own car there.”
I sat back then, bemused, crossed my arms.
“So I drove my car for two blocks, got out, locked it, went back to Adam’s, drove it two blocks ahead of mine, got out, locked it, walked back to my car, drove it two blocks ahead of Adam’s …”
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
I laughed.
She beamed. “Took me half an hour.”
“All the way to The Book Cellar.”
“That’s right. Put it in the lot behind the store. Went in and told Adam. He told everyone in the store that his mother was a logistical genius.”
“That’s where you heard it.”
“From my very own son. One genius begets another.”
“I’m the luckiest guy in town. Surrounded by geniuses.” I raised my arms expansively.
“I know another big word too.” She leaned over me, whispered it in my ear.
She had my full attention again. I was indeed low maintenance. She was incredible.
The leapfrogging car story was a good example of how she’d do anything for her son.
He was my son too.
The Bobby Swiss thing was something we were having trouble with, though. Lots of trouble. Jeanne was like I had been originally—hoping it would all go away by itself, afraid to mention it.
And although we didn’t talk about it much, we thought about it a lot. I could see it in her eyes—something new, mixed with something old. There were moments of silence when I’d glance at her. We both knew.
The more I thought about it—doing dishes in the evening, in the shower in the morning—a strange plan was beginning to form in my head. And unlike Jeanne, I was no genius, so maybe my idea was crazy.
Images and people collided: my father. Jeanne. Adam. Bobby Swiss.
Dayton, Ohio.
II
TV families can confuse us. They show kids talking with their parents candidly, discussing problems, relationships, everyone learning valuable life lessons.
It wasn’t like that with my parents. My brother and I told them only what they wanted to hear. It took a monumental incident to break down those barriers, to open up with honesty, seek true advice, to pay attention.
In reverse, Mom was better at it than Dad. She liked to talk, to tell us stories of the past. I learned things from her that he would never even allude to. She’d tell us about her mother, her father, her brother, Jack, who disappeared down into the States back in the thirties, the places they lived, family secrets. Details. It was wonderful. Always stories. I couldn’t get enough.
“You’re special,” she’d tell me.
I wanted to be special. I wanted her to tell me why. Often, in the kitchen at Maxwell Avenue, barely old enough to tie my own shoes, I’d coax the same story out of her.
“You’ve got the Radey blood flowing in your veins. My father told me how the Radeys see things others don’t, how they’re special.”
“Are you special?” I’d ask.
“I must be,” she’d say. “I’m a Radey.”
“Is Dennis special?”
“Yes.”
“Is everyone in the family special?”
“Absolutely.”
“Why are we special?”
The pause. The dreamy look. “My father told me that Great-Grampa Radey, who came over from Ireland, had the gift. He said that he could see the past and the future together sometimes.”
I loved the dreamy look. It made me feel warm, safe. “Did he see me then?”
She’d meet my eye. “Yes,” she’d say. “He saw you. It made him happy.”
“Do you see the past and the future together?”
“Not yet,” she’d say. “But I will, someday.”
I’d wait. I could feel her trying to see it.
“We all will. Someday.”
It was in ways like this that her life became an open book, and as I got older, when I became an adult, I saw many of her tales differently, saw how much more she deserved out of life than she ever got.
Dad was a different case. He was tougher. The armor slipped occasionally—like that day his mother was buried. I remember another rare glimpse. I’d seen a name and dates on one of
the two family tombstones in Mount Hope—one of many carved there. But this one I didn’t recognize.
ANNIE BERTHA NOLAN
BORN JULY 11,1909—DIED NOVEMBER 29,1909
I had taken him to the cemetery for a visit. He had asked me to drive him—the kind of day that I usually put off until I ran out of excuses. Standing beside him, I read the inscription. “Who is that?”
“My baby sister.”
I knew nothing of this.
“She died when she was four months old.” A beat. Another. “It was three days before my fifth birthday.”
I turned, watched him stare at the marble monument, his gaze fixed.
“I remember going into my mother’s bedroom, seeing her sitting in a chair with the baby in a blanket on her lap. ‘She’s dead, Tommy,’ she said to me.”
He stopped suddenly. Neither of us said anything. A few seconds later, we shuffled our feet in the grass, dug our hands deeper into our pockets.
The moment passed. It was like our brief talk about Bampi. He never spoke of it again. And I never asked. I never heard the story from anyone else in the family.
My cousin, Jacquie, though, did tell me a similar story. It came from her mother, Berna—my father’s sister. Jacquie said that her mother told her about a stillborn baby in 1917—eight years after Annie Bertha—whom they kept in a shoebox on the mantle until it was time for burial. This was in the old family house at 222 Berkeley Street, before everyone moved to Maxwell Avenue.
Both these stories came to me after Dad’s mother— my grandmother—Nanny, had died. They were details that made me revise how I saw her. Everything we learn helps us revise how we see people.
Fathers and sons.
Like my father and me, Adam and I were mostly quiet around each other too.
When I drove him to the Bloor subway line in the morning during school term, we’d talk. A bit. Pretty superficial stuff. Morning’s tough to get conversation rolling at the best of times.
He was twenty-one. Just as I had been with my father, there wasn’t much he was going to tell me. But it was more complicated than that.
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