My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  From her weekly allowance of ten cents, Ange would use a nickel to call her mother. “Mom, why can’t we see you?” she’d say. “We miss you. Let us visit.” The situation didn’t make sense; they lived in the same city, after all. She understood that Esther was busy, working long hours at the dime store and spending any extra time searching for an apartment big enough for the four of them. Still, couldn’t she visit with her daughters for an hour or two?

  “I know, sweetheart. I miss you, too,” Esther would say. “But it’s impossible—I’ve explained that. Keep being a good girl, now.”

  Finally, a reunion was arranged for Mother’s Day. The girls saw their mother for the first time in nine months at the home of Esther’s brother and his wife, across Lake Washington from Seattle. Ange, Janet, and Janice were thrilled to see their mom again and thrilled as well to be free of their steely, autocratic father. The reunion was permanent. Esther had found, at last, a place for them to live together, although the new quarters would be like most places they had stayed in: tiny and temporary. They would move to Bremerton, across the waters of Puget Sound, and stay in the small apartment of Esther’s oldest sister and her husband.

  This story has a long-delayed coda. Six decades after that reunion of the Peterson girls with their mother, Esther had been in a long second marriage—over fifty years—and given birth to two more children, another daughter and a son. Now she lay dying in a Seattle hospital bed, and she was in distress, in despair. She would not, she lamented, be able to see her twin boys. “Twin girls,” someone corrected her. She’d had twin daughters. Weeks earlier, probably sensing that she would not be alive much longer, Esther had stammered to my mother, “I have a terrible secret, and I’m taking it to my grave.”

  And so she did.

  Not long after Esther’s death, her son received a phone call from a man he had never heard of: his older brother. That brother revealed to him that he had yet another brother: his twin. In 1941, when Esther had dropped her little daughters off at their father’s home to live, she was three months pregnant. During all of those months when her children begged to see her, she couldn’t bear the thought of exactly that: their seeing her, seeing her swelling belly. She hid it from Ed and Betty, too. The man who had impregnated her was someone Esther had known in high school in Minnesota. Tommy. My mother remembers him. Yes, Tommy came to visit once. During her pregnancy, Esther lived in a small apartment with a girlfriend and often visited one of her brothers and his wife. These three people, apparently, were the only ones in whom she confided her condition. Maybe she didn’t even tell Tommy. In March, two months before she reunited with her daughters, she did what Ange, years later, surprised by her own pregnancy, would not do: she took an eastbound bus over the Cascade Mountains to Yakima, gave birth, offered the baby boys up for adoption, took a bus back, then kept her mouth shut about it. She was thirty years old.

  Until her death at eighty-eight, she kept her silence—she did, indeed, take a terrible secret into the earth with her. But what secret, exactly, is the one that haunted her? What made her feel the deepest shame and remorse? The secret that she had gotten pregnant out of wedlock? The secret that she had given up her babies? Or the secret that for months, then years, then decades—her whole life—she had lived alone with those original secrets? She had told no one, not even her second husband. A few years before she died, Esther received a phone call from an agency that reunited adopted children with their birth parents. Her twin boys were searching for her. They didn’t know her identity, and the agency wouldn’t tell them her name if Esther preferred that it not. Would she be interested in meeting her two middle-aged sons? No, she said. No. Never. Her husband didn’t know about them. No one knew about them. “Please,” she pleaded, “don’t call me again.”

  11

  Only weeks after reuniting with her daughters, Esther found a job with Boeing, which had become central to the war effort, already rolling out sixty B-17 Flying Fortresses a month. Almost immediately, among the tens of thousands of workers in the massive plant, a lean, genial bachelor a year younger than she, a machinist named Lee, caught her eye, or she—with her big eyes, high cheekbones, and dark wavy hair—caught his. She brought Lee to Bremerton to see what her daughters thought of him.

  They loved him. Unlike most of the adults they had known, Lee had a relaxed way about him; he laughed easily and was open and unstinting in his affections. Lee was not sour on life or distrustful of it; he was an enthusiast of it, especially of the simple things that gave him pleasure: an easy-handling car, polished to a gleam; a smooth Scotch; a brisk autumn afternoon in the bleachers at a college football game; and jazz. He would spend his pocket money on evening trips downtown to the opulent Trianon Ballroom, with its vast polished floor that could hold five thousand dancers, swinging to a big band. He would stand toward the side and tap his wing tips, take a spin or three, or edge as close as he could to the bandstand, where, between numbers, he might shout out some words of admiration to the clarinetist. Lee loved the music that had first made his teenage heart leap: snappy syncopated beats, a band in the groove, and virtuoso solos that rose organically out of that sound, set your mind swirling, then settled back naturally into the arrangement. He was devoted to Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, and Pee Wee Russell. Decades later, not long before he died, he bequeathed to me one of his treasured possessions: a well-thumbed, massive encyclopedia of big bands, page after page marked with his hand-scribbled annotations. With little arrows, he had drawn attention to blurred figures in back rows of posed portraits of bands, important players he remembered—Bennie Bonacio, Doc Ryker, Miff Mole.

  One day not long after meeting Lee, Ange took a walk with a friend of hers and burst out, “I hope they get married! I hope they get married!” Marriage would mean that, overnight, everything might be fixed: Esther, no longer struggling by herself to raise three young girls, would be happier; her daughters would have a new father, a loving and kind one this time; and they all might finally have a house of their own.

  Esther and Lee did get married, and quickly: within two months of meeting each other. Esther was by natural inclination intractable, undemonstrative, and befuddled by the unfamiliar; Lee’s unforced good cheer was a tonic for her—although eventually it began to grate, if it didn’t from the start. In retrospect, my mother understands that the marriage was mainly one of convenience. What better choice did Esther have? Marriage would mean stability and security. She could stop working and devote herself to raising her children. She could stop moving from place to place, relying on the generosity of friends and family members for a bed to sleep in.

  And, for Lee, what did this marriage mean? Joy, maybe.

  In a wedding photo, he turns sideways to the camera and gazes at his new bride, embracing her waist with one arm and her shoulders with the other. He wears a barely suppressed, big-chinned grin. Esther’s smile is directed not at Lee but at the camera. She does not hug him back; her hands, lowered before her, are gripping her white dress gloves and small black purse.

  Ange was right about the house. The wedding was in August, and only weeks later Lee moved his new family into a recently built two-bedroom home, with polished wood floors, a fireplace, a driveway, and a trim front lawn, in northeast Seattle—in Wedgwood, a neighborhood that three years before had consisted only of trees and that had been christened (why not?) after the British makers of elegant bone china. For Ange, for a moment, anything might have seemed possible. You just had to name it.

  12

  True love. Romance. A happy future with a loving, devoted husband and child—or a passel of children, who knows? At seventeen, Ange dared to believe these things would happen with her new husband, who, though he shared the name of her untrustworthy father, was not like him—this Ed was attentive and responsible. And funny: with his wry Irish wit, he could ease a tense moment, alluding to and defusing what was difficult and painful by making light of
it.

  He had been born in late summer 1929: just in time, he was fond of cracking later, for the Great Depression. Accompanying the small news of his birth, the big national news was that at midnight on the night before he entered this world, seventy-three people had died off the California coast when the steamer San Juan collided with an oil tanker. The San Juan had left San Francisco and, for five hours, groped her way southward through thick fog; the captain, who went down with his ship, seems to have steered his craft into the tanker’s path willfully and blindly.

  That might have been how my father’s parents fell in love—or fell in—with each other. Their union did not last long. I know Bernadine Carey, his mother, only from childhood pictures that, until decades after my father’s death, I did not know existed. In the photos, she is round-faced and black-haired, with an upturned nose, an unassuming, boxy Prince Valiant haircut, and the fidgety, intrepid look of a tomboy. Bernadine was Irish through and through, her family tree blossoming with Dwyers, McLaughlins, and Murphys, mainly poor Catholic farmers.

  Her family moved from rural Missouri to Seattle when she was a toddler. When she was seventeen, Bernadine married Nat Forhan, who was three years older and, like her, pure Irish. Nat gave my father little more than a name. He is the trickster in this tale, the mysterious father of my own mysterious father, the cryptic, slippery figure who turned his back on his wife, who abandoned his three sons when two of them could barely walk and the third was in the womb. He would change his name and move out of state, return suddenly, briefly, decades later, then leave again and vanish so thoroughly that even his sisters and brothers wondered what had become of him. When at last he died, Nat had lived so long under an assumed name, and he had been so long a stranger to his family, that he might as well not have been himself at all. He is the mythic father—or, for me, grandfather: the object of the unending quest. And he was a cad and a bum.

  He grew up on the lakeside in the shadow of the gasworks, near the giant pump house and boiler house and coal storage bunker and the trestles that coal cars rumbled up to deliver their load. His father, as foreman of the plant, was given a modest house on the site, so Nat and his siblings grew up amid a continual stink. The air was smoke-filled, the outside walls and windows of every house in the neighborhood grimed with soot. It wasn’t just the gasworks that were to blame; it was the nearby tar plant and asphalt company and garbage incinerator and Pacific Ammonia Chemical Company.

  By the time he married Bernadine, Nat—known now sometimes as Fred, from his middle name—had a job at the gas plant. He was young and suddenly married, suddenly a father, suddenly a husband not just to a fun, cute girl but to a chronically sick one: Bernadine had contracted diabetes and would suffer from it, just as my father would after her. Nat was blue-collar, black Irish, probably not ready for what marriage would mean, probably overly fond of the bottle. Maybe liquor was involved when he lost control of the wheel and smashed into another car, injuring its passengers. That was in April 1929; Bernadine was four months pregnant with her second child, my father.

  A year after my father was born, Bernadine became pregnant again, but her husband soon was gone, back to living with his parents near the gasworks. I can imagine his mother, Ellen, scolding him mildly, then smiling and hugging him tightly. She was a woman simultaneously exacting and generous and extravagantly protective. She refused to spank her children. She raised them to pray: each evening, as she sat in her rocking chair, the smallest of her boys and girls knelt before her and declaimed, “God bless Mama and Papa, God bless my brothers and sisters, and God bless me and make me a good child.” When they were tucked in their beds, she sprinkled each of them with holy water. They would be model Christians, all of them, she hoped—humble and charitable. She and her husband were firm, assured, and forgiving—the kind of parents, perhaps, who could raise a half-dozen reckless, irresponsible sons, send them into the world, and then, when things went badly, smile wearily and take them back in.

  Bernadine’s parents took her in, too, along with her two little sons, and, in the summer of 1931, she gave birth to her third, John Francis Forhan. Even after Nat’s departure, she remained true to their habit of naming their children after Nat’s own brothers. Their boys, as were Nat’s older siblings, were named James, Edward, and John. The baby, however, was soon given the nickname Skippy, as my father was given the nickname Buddy—or Bud. Decades later, in the 1960s, I often heard my great-grandmother refer to him by this name.

  Skippy and Buddy: the names of lovable scamps, little rascals. The only Forhan child who didn’t earn an adorably boyish nickname was the oldest, Jim. Through the years, the Careys made Jim pay for his face, for his rakish and slightly cartoonish look, as if gravity were pulling all of his features downward. “He looks just like his father” was an insult, and not a veiled one. Eddie was lucky: he inherited his mother’s looks, one childhood photo showing him with a rounded face, a bit elfin, his expression hinting paradoxically of both ingenuousness and mischievousness. His grandparents regarded him with ungrudging love. My father was Bud: the chum, the pal, the dependable one. His grandparents told him continually that he was the good and faithful one. Or he would prove to be so. He would be the one who would make them proud.

  13

  Within a year of Skippy’s birth, Nat had moved out of state and was neglecting to pay child support. Bernadine, only twenty-two years old, minimally educated and untrained for employment, was left, in the midst of the Depression, to do what my mother’s mother, Esther, was being forced to do at the same time: raise three children by herself. Throughout the next few years, Bernadine earned some income doing housework, but she was often in the hospital for illnesses related to her diabetes, and her parents cared for the children then.

  In the first decade of his life, my father—as my mother was doing simultaneously—lived in one home after another, barely long enough each time to memorize the address; he moved at least ten times, sometimes from a small, cheap apartment back to his grandparents’ house and then out again, sometimes into the home of his mother’s latest boyfriend. She seems to have had quite a few. Maybe she wasn’t picky; maybe she couldn’t afford to be. Or maybe, as her choice of husband suggests, she just had crummy taste in men.

  And where was that husband? His parents and siblings might have known, but they weren’t telling. Not long after Nat left, a formal photograph was taken of that family, and it includes him. Was he living in Seattle then, skulking around, keeping clear of the streets where he might meet his wife and sons? Or had he slipped into town for some party, for the picture, before sauntering off again? In the photograph, all of the Forhans are gussied up, the men in suits and ties, the women in fancy dresses adorned with elaborate collars and flowers—except for three of the daughters, who, pious Catholics that they are, have become nuns; they sit fully habited in the front row, on either side of their parents. Five of the six sons, black hair slicked back, stand behind them, eyes fixed in straight stares, shoulders square to the camera. Only Nat gives a slightly sideways look—wide-eyed, as if stunned. He is twenty-four.

  Not long afterward, he is not Nat. The person who began life as Nathaniel Frederick Forhan, who then became Nat Forhan, then Fred Forhan, has become Fred Grant. He is that intent on stepping offstage, or onto another one, vanishing into some imagined life. His father’s obituary, a year later, states that Fred has moved to San Francisco. But to the law, and to his wife and children, he is in hiding, his new name nearly perfect, in its aggressive banality, for the purpose of anonymity. Shrewdly, he has not chosen the last name of Smith—too evidently counterfeit. But Grant is good: Grant is common but not overly so. Coincidentally, while Nat Forhan is melting away, farther south, in Hollywood, Archibald Leach is becoming a Grant, too: Cary. An odd and elegant touch, that: a first name that sounds like a last one—that sounds like Carey, the last name of my father’s mother and, ultimately, my own middle name, which I cringe at throughout my childho
od, since it is a girl’s name, isn’t it? Or so I am reminded by my taunting school chums. With little to cling to, I defend myself with the fact that Carey is the name of a movie star, although, okay, he spells his name differently. And, yes, it is not his real name. But it’s not my name, either; it’s only a middle name that my parents burdened me with before I could fight back.

  Cary Grant has chosen his name: a name suggestive of an everyman except for that hint of the aristocratic in “Cary.” There may be something aristocratic about Frederick, but not Fred. Not Fred Grant: the name of an accountant, a tax lawyer, a best buddy in a middling mid-century American play. Grant: from the Old French for “to promise” or “assure,” from the Latin for “to believe.” A name taken on by a man who wants to appear trustworthy. Grant: to cede, to yield. To agree to fulfill, to acknowledge, to bestow. In this case, the name of a man who does not intend to fulfill his obligations as a husband and father, to acknowledge his children, to write to them, to call, to pay a nickel. I searched for him decades later. Eighty years after he abandoned his family, forty years after my father killed himself, I scoured old phone directories and census records, looking for a sign. Year after year, in the Bay Area, there are no Forhans, but there are a few Fred Grants, unmarried and without a distinguishing middle initial. Or perhaps there is only one Fred Grant, continually on the move. In 1937, he’s on Larkin Street, near Nob Hill. Later, he’s on Hyde, then Castro, then Cayuga, then Post, then Polk. He’s listed as a lodger. He lives in apartments. He’s a bartender. A gardener. A printing press operator. He might be my father’s father. He might not be. Nat Forhan has disappeared into Fred Grant, and Fred Grant into the vast anonymous crowd.