Songs Only You Know

by Sean Madigan Hoen

  LATE THAT JULY, ONE of Dad’s nieces was getting married near Detroit. Angela agreed to accompany me to the wedding. Two hours, one hundred and forty miles—the distance between us had no effect. We’d already begun sweetening each other through the phone. I’d driven to see her, visiting her new apartment until we began feuding over our unsolvable problems. But seeing Angela arrive in a black sleeveless dress, her hair pinned and her green eyes rife with everything she knew and wanted—I had no immunity to that. A swift maneuver into each other’s arms, and we were right back to it.

  At the reception, she and I sat in a corner as the DJ spun songs we’d heard all our lives. There was an open bar and Macarena prancing. Dad’s family passed by with the usual how do you dos, while Angela kneaded the scruff of my neck. She was aware of my every tic, had phrases to address my many modes of anxiety. “Easy, now,” she said to each whiskey I knocked back. “Slow and steady wins the race.” Red lipstick; a silver necklace lay just below her throat. With such little flourishes her beauty became dangerously obvious, and the fact I was beside her seemed satisfactory evidence that I had a life to speak of. It felt inevitable that we’d one day exchange vows, alone and in a place where there’d be no further ceremony than the two of us clasping hands.

  “It means a lot that you came,” Dad said, every time he made his way to us.

  His smile was clumsy. I worried that he’d had a few, but he looked vital as ever, filling out his suit, shuffling in his honky way to the disco pulsing the room. While Angela was using the ladies’ room, he took me aside in a corridor outside the reception. We heard the music, the clatter of glasses. The celebration was really just beginning, but Dad put a tough arm around me, nuzzling me to his chest, knowing my business was done there. A glorious thing: the strength that remained in his arms. I felt he could crush me, Paul Bunyan the whole of me above his head as he had when I was a child. Yet there was something else—as Angela appeared, striding toward us—the slightest change in his eyes that let me know that wherever I was headed, or who I’d become, was all right by him.

  I remember clearly the last thing he said to me:

  “That’s all that matters. That you were here.”

  TWO WEEKS LATER I was pacing the living room, stamping over the fake Chinese rug, tracing its patterns with my feet. I reached for Ozzy as he wended past, blindly sniffing for my mother. She’d gone out for the night to a book club or a movie—never anything more. She was soon to return, and I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing. I’d been on the phone so long its earpiece was moist with sweat.

  Angela was talking, crying.

  We were ending it again, this time through a long-distance call.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Write songs about me or whatever you’re gonna do, but don’t call when you get lonely.” The message was nothing new, but her insistence felt more permanent than ever before. “You don’t even want me at your shows.”

  “All right,” I said. “There’s no other way.”

  “Don’t talk to me like you talk to everyone else. I gave you everything I could.”

  It wasn’t a question of love. It’s that it was no way to live—spiraling through our private terror, each of us knowing what levers to pull in order to collapse the other. We’d dedicated so much to our struggle that I had no energy to face the larger problems, which might have been the reason we whipped things into a crisis every week or so. The spinning wheels, a centrifugal avoidance of the larger themes.

  “I’m serious,” Angela said. “This time.”

  And if I could just avoid her face, I’d slip beyond her weakening, spellbinding charms, and soon enough it would be over.

  We hung up. No apologies. None of the open-ended gestures we usually tossed out at the conclusion of our battles; no hesitation in our voices, no softening tone as we said, “Okay, bye.” Staring at the phone, I wanted to talk with someone who could see the future. Thoughts of a bar terrified me in moments like that, when there’d be no telling what I’d do or where I’d wind up. I knew to stay in, put on a record with the hope of slumbering through it.

  Outside the windows, the summer sun had gone under.

  Through the opened windows came the trickle of my mother’s garden pond.

  Some things—maybe they happen the way they’re meant to. Years pass, and you look back at certain instances, wondering if there’s a cosmic order to life’s whirling events. What I did next, of all things, was dial my dad’s condo. It had been years since I’d come to him for anything but the most practical advice about income taxes and torn engine belts. I doubt that I intended to tell him about Angela. I’d only wanted to hear his voice, hoping it would convince me that I’d live a long time, convey some brand of hard-earned wisdom only a father is capable of passing to his son.

  The phone rang, and what an awful feeling that brought on. Since Caitlin’s death, waiting out those chiming seconds could induce a speedy, paranoid frenzy. I’d jittered through it many times when I rang anyone dear to me and couldn’t get through. More than once I’d phoned my mom only to be terrified by her answering machine, the gentle clearing of her throat before she spoke, I’m not home. I’d call her neighbors, asking them to go, please, check on her house, her car. See if the lights are on. She’d done the same, if only to hear my voice and say, “I had the worst feeling.”

  Dad’s line rang once or twice. It was nine or ten o’clock, a weeknight.

  My uncle answered, the new husband of my dad’s youngest sister. A friendly electrician I already felt I knew better than any of Dad’s brothers. He’d lost a son to a car accident and had the wounded eyes to match.

  It was the thinness of his voice as he spoke my name.

  “Something’s wrong,” I said.

  He said, “Now, where are you? Who’s there with you?”

  And I said, “No. No, no, no.” Not because I didn’t believe it but because I wasn’t sure I had it in me to get on with whatever was about to happen.

  EXCEPT FOR THE KITCHEN, Mom’s house was dark. I sat Buddha-style on the floor with a guitar, my back to the cupboards, strumming open chords I’d pilfered from Nick Drake.

  The tones rang over the linoleum. Soon enough, turning around the notes here and there, I was onto a new tune, one of my own.

  “What is it?” Mom said, as she came through the back door.

  She could tell the instant I looked up at her that something was no damned good.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Let’s go to the living room.”

  “What?” she said. “What?”

  She took a seat on an ottoman that matched her favorite chair, leaving the chair itself for me. I leaned my guitar against it. The light from the kitchen softened the edges of the room. Mom sat upright, wearing a sundress, her purse in her lap. Her arms were freckled, sunburned, a late-summer tint. Ozzy came right to her, and she stroked his spine with the nervous momentum another woman might have used to light a smoke.

  I wanted to be a man, to say it quick, tell it like it was.

  “Dad’s dead.”

  Her eyes shifted. Then she winced so tightly it appeared as though she were grinning, this brief, puzzling instant being the last she’d ever be free of the undesirable truth I’d spoken into the room. She didn’t want to know, not just yet.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  I stood and moved toward her. I put my arms around her. There was no man, now, in our lives. Not anymore. I felt it—not the loss of him but the fact that there was no one to help us.

  She said, “What are we gonna do?” She brought her hands to her face, pulling them away to say, “How?” Saying, “No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know … Tim,” she said in a harsh voice, as if calling him from somewhere in that house in which he’d never lived.

  There was no way of imagining the flood of memories passing through her. Twenty-two years of marriage; children, homes, anniversaries. The teenage boy across
Evangeline Street, thirty years before. As she crumpled onto the ottoman, I couldn’t guess what picture of his face arose in her thoughts. It was she who’d seen him at his best. His finest day—surely he’d spent it with her, with us, in a Dearborn backyard, tossing me a baseball across our trimmed lawn, hamburgers cooking on the grill and Caitlin soaring on the swing set he’d cemented into the ground, next to a garden boxed with railroad ties he’d dug for Mother’s Day … nineteen eighty-something.

  “It’s gonna be all right,” I said.

  I’d already begun assuring myself things would go differently this time. I reckoned I understood the low-blowing shock waves that came after losing someone. The way they took years to rise and curl and break. Caitlin’s death had shaken me loose from myself, but I’d harness the coming weeks and months. I’d ride them expertly, sensing each undertow, never fooled by the numbing crests that trick you into believing you’re sailing free.

  “How?” Mom said. “Was it drugs?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Doesn’t matter anymore.”

  6

  Not just the city—half of northeastern America was blackened, if you believed the news. Early that morning, the circuits had blown. Rolling brownouts. Too many AC units, coffeemakers, and box fans sucking voltage. August 15, 2003, and as far as I could see the earth was without power. Police officers directed traffic on Michigan Avenue, waving their hands through a smear of exhaust while Howe-Peterson, the funeral parlor where Caitlin had lain three and a half years earlier, was lit by candles.

  It felt as though I’d only just left, a dark riddle I hadn’t the grace to solve. In my head I made up a song about being buried in leaves and set aflame—anywhere but here—when my time came.

  Inside was a sweatbox filled with mourners in suit coats and dresses, fanning themselves with prayer cards. Mom had pasted together a collage—snapshots of Dad with Caitlin on his shoulders, the four of us carving pumpkins—photos she’d peeled from poster boards stored in the basement after being displayed beside my sister’s coffin. Dad’s family brought their own framed pictures of him: looking stoic in his air force uniform; wearing a Halloween costume—a 1950s clown getup—grinning over six or seven birthday candles. Set on a podium next to the casket was a recent impromptu headshot, catching him with a similar boyish gleam. It was no put-on: the earnestness of his smile, his small teeth peeking between his thin lips.

  Dad’s mother came at me with a hug. Drawing me near the coffin, she pointed to the framed image, saying, “That’s your father. This is how you remember him.” She reached for the frame and held it up. “Not there,” she said, nodding to my dad’s corpse, which I’d yet to willingly observe.

  I’d insisted on an open casket, a cause for resentment among Dad’s family. His youngest sister had discovered his body inside his condo; another had been called to assist. Both women were nurses who loved him with a matronly intensity. My aunts, the nurses, said he’d had a heart attack. They were firm in their diagnosis, insisting there should be no autopsy. One told me he’d died in his favorite chair. The other said he’d passed on the living room couch and that he’d looked at peace.

  They’d known another man, one I might never understand. What he’d left them with was something cherished, much more good than bad. Their unconditional love was frozen in sad time, impervious to the many hells he’d been capable of. He was my grandmother’s favorite son, my aunts’ favorite brother, and to allow the rest of us to see him in his final state must have seemed unbearable. What he’d leave me with was another thing entirely—so many things of the kind only a son carries away from his wasted father. I needed to see him once more, to say to his face whatever might come to mind.

  Ford Motor employees and 12-step fellows drifted my way, prompted by my resemblance to someone they called “A good man. A great man.” I’d donned one of Dad’s paisley neckties. Angela was in the black dress she had worn to my cousin’s wedding. The minute she’d said, “I’m always here for you,” I gave up any idea of us being apart.

  I held her hand.

  She’d brought a Baggie of Vicodin. I’d known she had access to the pills, I had begged for them because I feared what might happen once I started drinking. I saw it in Angela’s eyes, too—her worry over how all this would play out in the coming weeks. And I couldn’t tell if it was the effect of the opiates or if the scene inside Howe-Peterson was as dreamily sepulchral as it seemed: the swell of the heat wave; musk exuding from the textiles; running makeup and perspiring scalps; the mothballed blazers. As dusk fell, people moved toward the coffin with candles in their hands, raising them over my father’s body.

  Andrew paid his respects. Will vanished no sooner than he’d arrived, dressed in a blue blazer and pleated khakis like some old-fangled Bible salesmen. His eyes told me how little he wanted to be there. He had tickets to see the Stooges that evening, their first tour since ’75.

  Mom stood in a corner as Dad’s family worked the room. Awful things were said at her expense—grief-blinded anger directed toward her for not, I suppose, having stuck beside him through another hundred nights of dread and maxed credit cards. I overheard this horseshit with an ease that made me believe I’d been meant to. By evening only the true bloods remained, mulling about the doorway. The windows had darkened and the staff gathered in the vestibule, hands clasped, insinuating in a professional way that now was about that time.

  Seeing my chance, I slurred something to a staff person about having a moment alone with my old man before the lid was closed. She seemed to understand, enough that she quickly arranged for my private viewing.

  The chapel doors closed behind me, and I approached with a flashlight, turning it on my dad’s face as I neared the casket’s edge. He looked barely like himself. His chest, as I laid my head on it, felt stuffed with tissue. When I began to cry, it was as deeply as I could. I took his thick fingers into mine and felt suddenly aware of the truest reasons that he was there, cold and lifeless beneath me. It was like a question being answered with a thousand larger questions, and I sensed his defects within myself, what it might take to overcome them: everything I had. For a moment this awareness whispered near the periphery of my blindest spots, only to vanish as soon as I raised my head from the dampened patch I’d left on my father’s starched shirt.

  I told him, in no uncertain terms, “I love you.” Then I said, “You crazy fucker,” and it felt as though I was saying it to both of us.

  When I opened the chapel doors, Dad’s family awaited in the hallway. “Now it’s the family’s turn,” my uncle Dennis said, as all eight siblings made their way into the chapel. I liked some of these relatives and felt nothing much for others. But I believed we all were deciding, then and there, that I’d never be one of them.

  ANDREW AND I MUST have been the only people in Wayne County listening to a tune that evening. He’d tapped the batteries in his garage, where he stored energy channeled from solar panels affixed to the roof. It was enough to run a lamp in the upper flat and keep a record going on the turntable. Andrew boiled noodles; the fridge was stocked with beer.

  “You gotta eat,” he said. “Slow down the thought forms.”

  Since abandoning the mind quest he’d braved three summers earlier, Andrew had evolved into a pious, selfless blue-collar guru, working as an electrician’s apprentice. The fasts and cosmic toils had led him to a sane, sturdy way of life. He’d changed for the better. He now spoke with untroubled simplicity.

  “The journey,” Andrew said. “It’s whatever you learn from it. The only choice is to make it about growth.”

  Angela had gone home exhausted with my mom, both wanting for sleep, defenseless against the heat. Dark and sweltering. Of all evenings for the Stooges to reunite—Iggy the Iguana, four years older than my dad, and still strutting the world’s stages. The power, however, had not returned to the land. Pine Knob amphitheater was an unlit chasm and Will’s whereabouts were unknown.

  “Willy,” Andrew said. “Think he’s
in trouble?”

  I didn’t care to guess.

  He switched off a lamp, lighting several candles and placing them around the flat. His solar-charged batteries might have been running low, and he knew the records were what I needed most. “It’s sorta nice,” he said, about the way the candlelight twitched in the corners. And it was, even at a time like that.

  Will was laid up at Oakwood Hospital the following day, having drank himself into a diabetic shock. I was unaware of this as I read my dad’s eulogy: a sloppy, unreligious account of family anecdotes, the pages marked by sweat as my voice hoarsened and faded. Afterward I walked outside, down the church steps, intending to embrace the heat wave, which was now being publicized as a regional crisis. The moistened asphalt smelled like chemicals. And it might have been the Vicodin I’d crushed and swallowed, because as I stood in the sweltering daylight, I was positively unafraid. If only in that sunblind moment, I could have laughed. You could have dug your thumbs into my eyes and I wouldn’t have minded.

  I was standing like that, feeling that way, when Lauren drove by, smoking a cigarette and slowing her Ford Tempo as it sputtered past. We saw each other quickly and clearly, though I knew she wasn’t coming inside.

  But seeing her pass. Knowing she would again, even if I wasn’t there—it told me more than I’d wanted to know about love. That at your worst moments you are forgiven by those who see all the way into you, clean through your fears, to the thing you truly are, what you could or couldn’t be.

  Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. Stevie Wonder’s soul-sap double album Songs in the Key of Life. Paul Simon’s Graceland. Simon and Garfunkel, pitiable old Garfunkel, whom Dad always claimed was a dead weight Simon had to leave behind. Crosby, Stills & Nash. Neil Young. The Doobies, The Stones, Led Zeppelin. Steely Dan. The White Album—Ringo Starr bemoaning the blisters on his fingers during “Helter Skelter’s” discordant anticlimax.