Songs Only You Know

by Sean Madigan Hoen

  On the living room floor sat a keyboard, a disposable, toylike contrivance.

  “Your mom said you want to learn piano.” The excitement in Dad’s eyes hit me like a slug to the kidneys. What on earth might he have built me by hand? He’d patronized the local instrument shop instead. “Tickle some ivories?”

  More and more, it was jazz I was listening to. The atonal, mind-bending variety that did away with melody. The pianists—McCoy Tyner, Cecil Taylor—were my favorite. Their pounding, backward-sounding chords. I’d hardly touched an actual piano but must have mentioned wanting to.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “It’ll work?”

  The plastic instrument was dreadful to look at it, far from being anything usable to conduct the furious sounds I was after. The keys might shatter the moment I pounded. “It’s great,” I said, squinting to read the short catalog of electronic tones the thingamajig might produce: Organs. Bassoons.

  Mom served waffles and fruit, and we sat in the living room holding our plates. She asked Dad if he’d like his coffee warmed, the kind of gesture I’d seen a thousand times, but watching Mom repeat them now, caution in her tone, seemed to actualize all that had changed.

  “Thanks, Cyn,” he said. “Cyn” instead of “Cindy”—which he alone called her on family road trips, as she sat beside him with an atlas; on a summer walk, asking for a napkin to wipe ice cream from his fingers.

  Dad dug into the pocket of his jacket, which he’d yet to remove, and passed a card to my mom. Sipping coffee, I pretended not to notice as her nail pried open the envelope and she began to read. It appeared to contain a lengthy message, causing her to nod slowly as she read. Dressed in sweatpants and an oversize T-shirt, Caitlin sat unmoving, her eyes ticking back and forth from the television to my parents.

  “Well, you always wrote nice cards.” Mom perched the card atop the coffee table, and I had to wonder if it would wind up with the others arrayed on the mantel. “I guess it’s time for your stockings,” she said.

  Then I noticed them, across the room on a chair, so overfilled they couldn’t be hung from the mantel. Mom rose and carried them over, mine and Caitlin’s and my father’s. Stuffed inside were odds and ends. Breath mints and Chapstick. Lotions and soaps for Caitlin. Razors for me and my father, and aftershave, the brand he’d always worn. We regarded the items duly, Dad unable to get to all of them without closing his eyes, breathing fast and hard. He nodded toward my mom. When he reached out his hand, she took it.

  I was content to carry on business as usual, but this weirdness became too much for Caitlin. “I thought we weren’t doing presents this year,” she said.

  “Just a little something,” said Mom. “Nothing much.”

  Before Dad left for his parents’ condo, where their version of Christmas was soon to unfold, I watched through the windows as he circled the house, surveying its exterior. He poked his head through the front door. “The foundation’s low on the east side. The basement could flood. You want me to look into it?”

  Mom said, “I think we’ll live.”

  Caitlin was already deep into whatever was on the television. A pink sweater sat folded at her feet on a bed of torn wrapping paper. After Dad drove off, I plugged in the keyboard and toyed with the sounds, dialing up a synthesized flute. I performed an easy, bittersweet melody as Caitlin and Mom took their time dressing. Imagine the sounds moving through them, with them. For an instant I lost myself, changing octaves before deciding upon the violas, playing that simple phrase again and again.

  CAITLIN AND I DROVE together in her Escort, trailing Mom’s wagon and parking directly in front of Dad’s old house on Evangeline Street. The Arabs who’d moved in hadn’t hung a wreath, possibly the reason Caitlin huffed out an unenergetic, “Weird,” as she turned off the engine. Everything was changing, but there, on the other side of the road, were my grandparents, holding open their door.

  “Happy holidays.”

  Grandpa—Papa—wearing a Santa cap.

  There’d be no talk of drugs or divorce here, only the charred gingerbread men and bowl of punch, the wood-paneled television and gas fireplace. Though I caught something in their eyes—my aunts’ and uncles’—a rapid-fire sorrow transmitted through handshakes or a quick rub of the shoulder. Mom and Caitlin might have liked to talk all night with a listening ear, but I only hoped that sympathy would help them overlook my lack of plans and shabby Carhartt jacket, taken by my grandmother and hung in a closet beside the peacoats.

  Mom’s tribe was unpretentious, people of work, family, and church. Papa was a window salesman; Lady Grandma a home-maker of forty years. Mom’s brothers and their wives seemed living proof of sanity’s attainability. I liked them a great deal, as much as I felt shameful and alien among them. I avoided mention of myself, and especially of my band.

  “Music’s good,” I said, when they asked. “Pretty good.”

  “Do you play any Christmas songs?” said my grandmother.

  BEFORE WE SAT DOWN to dinner, Caitlin excused herself and left to visit my dad’s family while I stayed behind with Mom, pickled inside a sweater I’d outgrown, filling my glass with my grandpa’s Lauder’s scotch as many times as I could. My grandmother’s jellified roast beef oozed onto a platter next to a bowl of canned beans. As we ate, she asked if I’d be willing to sing for the family, once the meal was over. “I’ll bet you have a beautiful voice,” she said. “Though you wouldn’t have gotten it from this family. We sound like strangled cats when we sing. We shame the whole parish.”

  My mom gave me a pitying smile.

  “That,” I said, “is exactly how I sound.”

  Caitlin had already returned to Dearborn by the time I arrived at Lauren’s parents’ house, just a few streets over from Evangeline. “That was fast,” Mom said, seeing my sister’s Escort—to Dad’s and back in a matter of two hours—parked at the curb in a line of cars that stretched down the block. Mom braked the station wagon in the middle of the street and we both stared at the house, an industrious four-bedroom fort strung with bulbous multicolored lights. Lauren was home for the holidays and had asked Caitlin and me to come by. Only now, with a head full of scotch, had I decided I might. Mom urged me out of the car, saying, “Go ahead, don’t worry about me. I’m so tired—you guys should just enjoy yourselves.”

  When I knocked, Lauren swung open the door and pulled me inside with a hug. Caitlin stood close behind. From the look of her, shadowing Lauren and possibly smoothed over by a nip of wine, nothing awful had come of her visit with Dad’s family.

  “Hey,” Lauren said, giving vibrato to the syllable. “You’re here.”

  Her smile involved every portion of her face, such a thorough expression it appeared painful to complete. It didn’t take a holiday to put her in the mood of love, but inside the house was a nauseating cheer. Sing-alongs and gut-ache laughs, everyone red faced, happily schnookered, pecking cheeks beneath scraps of mistletoe. A feast of Polish meats in the dining room. I’d never known people so purely in touch with what it meant to celebrate their togetherness, who invited you in and offered you the best seat at their table. My arrival was a terrible mistake.

  “How’s rockin’?” someone asked, and I shrugged sophisticatedly, understanding that bands were foolish, child’s play.

  Lauren mustered joy enough for both of us. “He’s too humble,” she said. “His band has a CD.”

  Caitlin held a constant, thin-lipped smile, meaning to apologize for the fact she was too shy to speak. She followed us room to room, awed by the scene. Awed, no doubt, to experience this new “like-family” upgrade to her relationship with Lauren, the cool-but-kind role model about whom Caitlin had expressed a wish for future sister-in-law status. “Hey, hey,” Lauren sang to each passing relative. She was stoned, I could tell, in her eyes a sexy glaze. Her dad kept a sack of weed from which she and her siblings furtively pinched.

  When no one was looking, she made a grab at my butt.

  “Stay awhile,” she said.r />
  Her long brown hair was a stupendous thing, shiny against the tight redness of her cotton sweater. She was womanly, larger boned than me, and I was never more aware of this than when standing beside her, jittery and winter pale, inside her parents’ home. At first chance, I began buttoning my Carhartt, trying to slip out while the scotch was still on my side, looking forward to the mile or so trudge back to Mom’s.

  With her eyes Caitlin seemed to say, Yes, it’s good to be here.

  “I’ve gotta go,” I said.

  Lauren and I had been through this. After four years, I remained a nearly hypothetical creature to her family.

  “Fine,” Caitlin said. “I’ll drive you.”

  “Caitlin, stay,” Lauren said. “I’ll take you home.”

  There was no better place for my sister, no better company—I could see that, but not my place in any of it. Intending to communicate this, I shrugged and made no eye contact with either of them. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said, taking Caitlin’s keys and waving as I left them in the doorway.

  BY ELEVEN I’D SLUGGED down several bottles of wine Mom had bought for holiday guests who’d never arrived. She’d gone to bed, leaving our fake tree aglow, burning electricity, but Caitlin might let this one slip, let it shine. In the basement, I blared records, selecting each platter and letting it spin, cranking the volume for half a song before pulling the needle and tossing the disc to the floor. John Coltrane. Joy Division. Not even the greats were helping. When Caitlin returned, she clomped downstairs with an intensity that announced she was undeniably pissed.

  “Are you nuts? It’s too loud.”

  She’d pulled her hair into a ponytail, rolled up the sleeves of her blouse. In her hand was the cordless phone. Any clear-thinking person would have remembered that, days before, she’d sought the big sleep in an exhaust-fumed garage. At that moment, it seemed ages ago. The fibers of my personality rearranged themselves each time I drank, and like any other lush, I knew it and reveled in the spinning moment, wishing it would never end.

  “Idiot,” she said, a rare bite that raised the stakes. “Why are you boozing all the time?”

  In place of an answer I snapped off the stereo.

  “Have you heard from Dad?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Call him.”

  She dialed his number and handed me the phone. A few rings, then his answering machine, a voice approximating the tone of a happy man: Hello, I’m not home.

  “You think he’s using?” Caitlin said.

  “How was he when you saw him?”

  “It was weird over there. Why’d you make me go alone?”

  She sat beside me on my mattress as I guzzled wine, phoning my dad every few minutes. With each call, I increased the hostility of my messages. I goaded him and challenged him to a duel. I was totally cooked. I’d keep dialing until the batteries died.

  In one message, I attempted to flaunt my lyricism: “Smoking that shit like the world’s on fire. I know you. I know where you are.”

  “Dead man” was all I said after a while.

  Caitlin said, “Stop it. You’re being an ass.” She went upstairs in hopes, I was sure, that Mom might intervene.

  Dead man. Dead man.

  When Caitlin returned, she snatched the phone, hurling it at the wall. “Who are you?” she said.

  The receiver’s plastic casing had split open, its wires and nine-volt battery a mess too complex to consider. Seeing the pieces, I began putting together an idea about what I’d done.

  “I’ve gotta erase that shit.”

  I stood. By some metabolic gift of my Irish heritage, I could manage a good deal of spirits for my five-foot-eleven, one-hundred-sixty-five-pound physique, but at that moment the floor felt to be revolving beneath me. I concentrated on each step before plucking my jacket from the floor.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Caitlin said.

  I imagined my dad listening to the repeating messages, alone.

  Dead man.

  Heading upstairs, I was already feeling new wind.

  “He’s drunk,” Caitlin yelled.

  Mom appeared in the kitchen wearing her blue robe as I was tying my bootlaces. It’d been all she could do to survive this holiday, and here I was wrecking its final minutes. If she saw anything of a man in me, it was enough that she’d given up arguing with me about most things. Her eyes were puckered from sleep, the lack of it. “Why don’t you drive him?” she told my sister. “Take him over there if he wants to go.”

  WE TOOK CAITLIN’S ESCORT west on Michigan Avenue, past the Wayne Assembly Plant where the car itself had been built. After that, the road widened near the airport, and there was only the neon of topless bars and the silhouettes of farmhouses. Metro Detroit’s outskirts looked, for a short distance, nearly rural, before the sprawling shadows of the subdivisions a few miles ahead. Caitlin drove slowly and steadily, catching every green light along the way.

  “Real stupid,” she said, hands on the wheel.

  The wipers yawed, scraping the ice at the bottom of the windshield. Caitlin had scrubbed the makeup from her face. This was how she appeared most like herself, waiflike, her thick brown eyebrows making unusual sense on her round face.

  She said nothing more about her visit with Dad’s family, but I knew what I’d missed: my dad’s father in a red vest, dealing out jokes he’d pilfered from the Knights of Columbus, telling yarns that reeked of legend. My dad, too, could sell a myth: stories of the Everyman—unsung pilots and center fielders—who’d conquered fate in split-second decisions. When telling of my grandfather, it was as though he were speaking of a long-begotten hero I could hope to know only in another, more significant life I might lead. The Buffalo gangs. Grandpa’s career as a crooner and a minor-league pitcher. I’d heard it all numberless times but had begun to wonder: Where were the news clippings? The seven-inch single?

  The things Dad never told me about his father I’d learn much later, leafing through his rehab journals while attempting to glimpse the murky past from which he’d heaved me into the world. A bloodline dosed with its fair share of poison. Fathers’ fists. Whiskey stashed beneath the sink. Delirium tremens. Children abandoned in orphanages at the turn of the century by people who’d otherwise left barely a trace. All of it a curse I’d try to pin on those who came before, and before, an old pain that had yet to be healed and was now mine to behold. At the time, I barely sensed this, or sensed it only as much as I believed there was something exquisitely fucked up about me.

  The road rushed toward the windshield, and I convinced myself that my no-show had been what set my dad off on a bender. Felt at once a wish to reverse time and arrive at the garlanded door of his parents’ and also a desire to change my name and move to a distant coast, where I might write a thousand songs about it. My drunken fantasies swarmed like gnats, swept away with each saw of the wipers. Caitlin veered off Michigan Avenue. With a turn or two still to go before Dad’s condominium village, I switched on the stereo, knowing Caitlin would do what she did a moment later: slap it mute, never taking her eye off the road.

  CAITLIN HAD A KEY. As the door opened there was something—an infallible silence, total stillness—assuring us Dad wasn’t there.

  She snapped on the lights.

  He’d done some decorating. Framed pictures of Caitlin and me, our graduation headshots, propped beside his desk. The Serenity Prayer tacked on the kitchen wall. Beside the phone were NA and AA texts with bookmarks jutting from between their covers. I played his messages on the machine, all of them from me, tapping the delete button as rapidly as I could.

  Dead man. Dead—

  My recorded voice slurring into the kitchen sounded like the dirty work of some other person, a bastard who’d ceased to be once the last recording was erased.

  “So, there,” Caitlin said. She appeared frozen in place, having possibly never before seen someone so hopelessly and scarily shitfaced. “Let’s go.”

  A clock I’d fashioned in
eighth-grade woodshop hung on the kitchen wall, its hands reading that the hour was well past midnight. Stalking down the hallway and pulling on doors, I found that the last opened to the attached garage. No car in sight, but leaning against the concrete wall, next to a rake, was an aluminum hockey stick. I carried it back inside.

  “Put that down,” Caitlin said. “You always gotta get crazy.”

  In the living room, I rummaged through a desk drawer searching for evidence: Pipes. Guns. Receipts from the drug fairy. Best I could find was a note on Ford Motor stationery, a woman’s curvaceous handwriting: Let me know if you need anything. A number printed beneath—a clue, a narcotic cryptogram—which I punched into his phone with a light speed reminiscent of long-ago nights spent dialing for concert ticket giveaways—caller number 69 when the first notes of “Welcome to the Jungle” grind across the airwaves.

  After several rings, a tiny voice answered with the singsong tone of a child: Hello, we’re not home. Leave a message.

  “He’s dead,” I said, and hung up.

  By now my limbs had fully revived. I made a hearty chop with the stick, shattering the frame that held my picture. Next I went after the desk chair, cracking its legs with the aluminum shaft before stomping the collapsed seat.

  “Stop it,” Caitlin said. “Knock it off, freak.”

  She stood, arms crossed, with a frown that seemed the mask of what she thought she should be feeling. In instances like this she was not dramatic. It would be days, months, later, after she’d held the moment and squeezed it into a million shapes, that whatever she felt would appear on her face.