My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  Wherever he is, he is not there for my father’s third birthday party, or fourth or fifth. He is not there when his three young sons decide to play near the water, at the west side of Lake Union in the middle of the city. They walk down to the narrow shore from a houseboat they are living in with their mother and, probably, her new boyfriend. The gasworks, where the boys’ grandfather worked as foreman for two decades, is visible a mile away, its tanks and trestles and smokestacks stark against the blue sky at the northern edge of the lake. He died a month ago, their grandfather Forhan, at only sixty-four. Have they heard about this? Had they even known him? And do Eddie and Jim, in the midst of their play, notice how long it is taking Skippy to return from the houseboat with a jar of ice? Whatever they are up to, they need that ice, but Skippy is only five, easily distracted. What’s keeping him this time?

  He does not come back. After collecting the ice and running down the gangplank that connects the house to the shore, he slips. For too long, no one notices he is missing. His brothers believe he is on his way back from the house. His mother believes he has returned to his brothers. Later, when the sheriff’s bloodhound, King, arrives, the dog needs little time to sniff his way to the end of the gangplank and stop there. Skippy’s body, a few hours later, is hauled up from the lake bottom.

  For almost forty years, until his own death, my father rarely spoke about Skippy. A couple of times when I was young, while driving past Calvary, the Catholic cemetery near our neighborhood, he’d say, “My little brother’s in there.” Or maybe I have that wrong; maybe it is only my desirous memory putting those words into his mouth and placing him behind the steering wheel. Maybe it was my mother who pointed at the simple chain-link fence and said, “You know, your dad’s little brother’s in there.” My father certainly never told us the whole story, or even part of it—but for all of those decades he kept a newspaper clipping about the drowning. I discovered that only when I began writing this book, and my mother said, “I have a small box of some of your father’s old things. There’s nothing special in there, probably, but you’re welcome to give it a look.” Before I held the newspaper article in my hands, I’d heard so little about Skippy, the poor drowned boy, and his name sounded so unlikely—too cute to be true—that the whole sketchy story seemed the wispiest of fairy tales. But it happened.

  Skippy was buried in the graveyard where his grandfather had been laid to rest the month before. They were placed acres away from each other, with a hill between them. According to cemetery records, the address of the person paying for Skippy’s burial was that of Bernadine’s in-laws. Maybe Ellen Forhan, Skippy’s grandmother, took it upon herself to pay. Maybe even Nat—Fred—did, if he had the money. The plot cost ten dollars and the box, made of cedar, five. A five-foot box. As Seamus Heaney says in a poem: a foot for every year.

  14

  Not long after Skippy’s death, Bernadine and her two remaining boys moved again, this time to an apartment on the north side of the lake, in the Fremont neighborhood. The gasworks were only a few blocks south, and Nat’s oldest brother, Jim, lived only a block away. If Bernadine and her young sons had strolled a few blocks toward the lake and turned left, they soon would have passed the business Jim had recently started: Forhan’s Tavern, serving sandwiches and fish and chips and Schlitz and Olympia beer. It was a nondescript one-story building near the water, close enough to the shipyard to do a bustling business. Did Jim’s brothers frequent the place, plunking themselves on stools at the long bar, sipping free Schlitz? I imagine four of them lined up, fists gripping glasses, complaining about some new boss or old wife, suppressing some sorrow with a long swallow or a wisecrack. Maybe Fred Grant, up from California, wandered in now and then. And what about Bernadine? Did she ever slip through the door of the tavern, let her eyes adjust to the darkness until she saw the face of a Forhan, and ask, “Where is Nat? Where is my husband?”

  Maybe she didn’t care to know where he was.

  By the fall of 1939, Bernadine had moved with her sons out of Fremont to the northern edge of downtown. A new boyfriend was the cause, a divorced Scottish truck driver. In the spring, when the census taker came around, Bernadine lied that she, too, was divorced. It must have been the easiest thing to say. She could not have been very healthy by then, after years of dealing with her diabetes. In the meantime, Eddie and Jim had changed schools, as they must have several times already. Perhaps they had gotten used to not getting used to anything.

  Across the street from their new home stood a bronze statue: a tall, robed Chief Seattle, that noble, resourceful man who watched his ­people’s ways—the hunting, canoeing, berry-gathering—­supplanted by the customs of Christian missionaries, fur traders, and hard-­drinking lumbermen; Seattle, who gave up his land and removed himself and his tribe to a reservation; Seattle, who in his youth took on the power of the Thunderbird through a vision quest and who, in his older age, was baptized Catholic; Seattle, whose entire life was given over to transformation and accommodation. Grave-faced, the chief raised his right arm to the Forhan boys in welcome.

  Then their mother was gone: fallen into another diabetic coma, then gone for good. At thirty-one, Bernadine was dead.

  My father was eleven. His little brother, Skippy, was four years in the grave. His father was nowhere. Now, too, was his mother.

  He still had twelve-year-old Jim. The family had shrunk to the two of them. On a sunny September morning, they stood on the sidewalk outside of Sacred Heart Church, two blocks from where they had lived with their mother and her truck-driver boyfriend. They had just attended Bernadine’s funeral. Now what? Mourners shuffled past them to their cars and drove off. At last, their grandparents, the Careys, appeared in the church doorway and approached them. Eddie looked up. “Where am I going to live now?” he said. “Who’s going to take care of me?”

  “Why, Bud,” his grandmother answered, “you’re coming with us. Didn’t you know that?”

  No, he did not know that. Nobody had told him.

  Bernadine was buried in the Catholic cemetery where Skippy lay. Would my father have doubted that the two of them were together in heaven now? Probably not. He was a good boy and did what he was told—he may very well have believed what he was told, too. He was soon to become an altar boy, solemnly pledging, as his official certificate proclaimed, “to live and die befitting one who has dedicated himself to the service of our Lord, Jesus Christ.” Almost until the end of his life, he attended Mass weekly, sidling into the pews with his grandparents and brother, then later with his wife and children, standing to sing, kneeling to pray, muttering, “Thanks be to God, thanks be to God.” He professed that the dead are not truly dead, that they will be resurrected.

  As a child, if my father could depend on little else, he knew that the church, with its enduring rituals, was unchanging: the hushed gathering at the baptismal font, the splash of water and the murmured prayers; the flickering banks of white votive candles; the sticking out of your tongue at the priest as he lifts the almost weightless wafer to your mouth; the altar boys’ little tinkling bells; the intermittently explicable Latin—Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus; and always the bleeding Christ gazing forlornly and expectantly down from where he’s been nailed, his mind half in this world, half in the next.

  My father would have found, in the church, a version of what he heard at home: that his ceaseless mission was to prove himself worthy. Almost any impulse within him must be scrutinized as a sign of possible trespass. Even an unconsummated thought, a fancy fueled by desire, could be an offense to God, so one had to be careful to keep the mind clean. And as for the hands, any number of things they were capable of could mean damnation: stealing, masturbating, taking another’s life, taking one’s own.

  He would have been taught the importance of honoring his mother and father. But what could that mean, exactly, with his mother dead and his father vanished?

  A mile to the west o
f where their mother and little brother lay, Eddie and Jim moved into their grandma and grandpa Carey’s house: a modest clapboard with a brick porch fronted by a tiny raised lawn. The old folks had the dust and calluses of the old country upon them still; they believed in discipline, duty, and honest labor; they had learned, I suspect, to demand little from life and to respect those whose ambitions and expectations were comparably humble.

  They tried to track down Nat, the boys’ father—and Bernadine’s widower, though Nat might not have known that. The Careys had no interest in talking to the heel; they wanted only to know whether he was dead. His mother had died in 1942, and Nat hadn’t shown for the funeral. Afterward, one of the Forhan daughters wrote to her brother, “John, do you know anything about Nat? Sister Dolorita told us that she knows that he is dead. She told us quite a story, but I do not know whether or not to believe it.”

  So Nat’s oldest sister, who had become a nun, claimed he was dead. The story apparently involved his coming to a bad end at the hands of gangsters; her own sister, also a nun, suspected she was lying. Maybe, for Sister Dolorita, loyalty to her brother trumped the commandment not to bear false witness; maybe she was covering for him so no one would worry about him any longer or come looking for him.

  Or maybe the tall tale was an act of charity toward the Careys: an invented story that would allow them to keep Eddie and Jim in their home. It might be no accident that, only three weeks after Dolorita announced the death of Nat, the Careys’ legal adoption of the Forhan boys was finalized, the adoption papers indicating that Nat had “deserted and abandoned” his children and had not contributed to their support.

  Also, if Nat were dead, he might have left behind a pension or insurance money. Responding to the Careys’ inquiry, the adjutant general’s office wrote that it had no record of a Nathaniel Forhan having been enlisted or inducted into the military. Nat’s life insurance company reported that if the Careys could show evidence of his death while the policy was in effect, they could make a claim for full benefits. In the meantime, the surrender value of the policy was seventy-three dollars. The Careys had no idea when or where or even if Nat had died. They took the money.

  When Eddie and Jim lived with the Careys, throughout the 1940s, there was an older boy in the house, too: a teenager, Jack, whom the Careys had taken in just after he was born and whom they would adopt later. There was little money for taking care of three growing boys—John Carey earned only a couple of thousand dollars a year as maintenance foreman for the city transit system—but the money was steady, and my father and his brother learned the value of a nickel and the value of work. If they yearned for a new Stan Musial–endorsed baseball glove, there was the lawn to mow first, every Saturday for a month. When they reached driving age and wanted to borrow the family car, they knew they’d be washing it inside and out first. Every night at the same time, dinner was laid upon the table. Every Sunday morning, the family got gussied up and drove to church. In every school subject, the boys were expected to do their level best. When Bernadine died, my father was in sixth grade at Blessed Sacrament School. He earned high marks that year. Only in singing, for which he received a C, was he unable to summon sufficient zeal.

  15

  Eddie was not his mother’s boy any longer, nor had he ever been his father’s. He couldn’t have known what it felt like to have a father, except an absent one, a parent who existed only as a vilified name. What did it feel like for him to be a son? What could son mean to him? No matter how welcoming and accepting his grandparents were, he might always have felt like an accidental resident of their house, a guest, an interloper. Whether the Careys made him feel this way or whether he brought it on himself, he continually needed to prove to them that he was worthy of having been taken in. Every day, by being good, by doing what was expected of him, and doing so uncomplainingly, he was earning all over again the right to be there. Perhaps this meant not revealing entirely what was on his mind for fear of disappointing someone. Perhaps it meant training himself to say the proper thing, the safe thing, but no more than that. Perhaps, in wanting not to be a problem for his grandparents, he determined that he would keep his problems to himself. He would work hard, be a joiner, be a good sport, a chum. He would help set the table, make his bed, yank weeds from the garden. He would earn an A-plus for conduct and application. He would ace the final, cook with gas, not get his kicks with knuckleheads. He would have the clean kind of fun, be a good hoofer, charm the prettiest girl, glide her across the gleaming gym floor to the year’s top hit, about how it’s better to have a paper doll than a real girl you can’t trust. He might get a smooch or two.

  Maybe from Jean, whoever she was. When my mother showed me the box of things my father had saved for decades, among them was a letter he’d received from Jean when he was fourteen. There were no letters from my mother, but there was this one, sent two years before my parents met, handwritten in pen on small stationery, folded twice. Jean begins by asking, “Is your nickname ‘Bud’? I got a letter from Ruth today and she was telling me about a parish dance. She said, ‘Bud Forhan took a look in the doorway and evidently he thought that it was a flop, too,’ or something like that.” Jean also notes that she’s been to the pictures, seeing an American submarine sneak into Tokyo Bay in Destination, Tokyo. She “was nuts about” the flick—“Wasn’t it super? Just think, Cary Grant and John Garfield in the same show, together! Wow!”

  It sounds like what a ninth-grade girl would write in 1944. Who was she? My mother has no idea—and my father couldn’t have known her very well, since Jean was unaware of his nickname. Why did my father save this letter, filled only with amiable teenage small talk and gossip?

  Who was this guy?

  Was there something about being fourteen and fifteen that he wanted always to remember? Is it possible, poor man, that these were the happiest years of his life? In a high school yearbook photo taken when he was fifteen, my father looks boyish and handsome, with full dark hair and a broad, open smile. The war is on, but its incomprehensible horrors are far away—they appear only as headlines or are contorted for the big screen into tales of providentially ordained acts of heroism, amply rewarded. The rightness of the American cause is unquestioned; Eddie and his classmates are roused by a cheery patriotism and a desire to prove themselves the youthful face of freedom and its necessary sacrifices.

  There is much for Roosevelt High School students to do on the home front: train in a drill organization, scour their neighborhood for old garden hoses and fan belts to contribute to the school rubber drive, add brushstrokes of crimson paint to the giant paper thermometer measuring the school’s purchases of war stamps and bonds. Girls might join the Junior Red Cross, filling Christmas stockings to send to the brave boys overseas. Boys might join the ROTC—or the swim team; after all, as the yearbook reminded them, “Swimming is one of the first vital requirements requested by our armed forces. Many of our former swimming team members are now instructors of swimming for Uncle Sam.”

  Eddie decides Hall Patrol is to his liking. He is one of four dozen boys whose duty is to keep order in the halls between classes and during fire drills. Eddie is nothing if not orderly; his grandparents demand it of him, and he demands it of himself. It probably comes naturally to him. Raised amid chaos and loss, he feels safe within systems of rules that can be followed and expectations that can be met.

  With the war effort reminding him that there are concerns larger than any one person’s private woes; with geometry, Latin, and world history homework keeping him occupied; and with the Careys requiring that he do his part at home, he might feel that life makes a kind of sense, that everything is in its place, that everything has a place, and that he does, too.

  And pretty, convivial girls are a pleasant consequence of living in such a world. In a photo from this time, one that he kept in the box that he saved for decades, my father, in swim trunks, is standing on a beach, his hair long on top so it swoops do
wn the side of his head in a thick wave. He is tussling with a girl who wears a backless one-piece striped bathing suit. This is play, but there’s a fierceness in it: they are facing each other, but she is bent at the waist, head down, curly brown hair falling forward, and he grips the back of her neck with both hands, feet planted, as if preparing to toss her to the ground. She is reaching up, grabbing his hands, trying to pull them away. Her face cannot be seen, although I know she is not my mother. But I recognize the boy: he is my father, smiling grimly.

  16

  My parents were trained, mainly through circumstance, to depend on themselves, not on others—certainly not on their fathers. A father was a person who deserted his children, and happily. Home was a borrowed room and a shared bed, then a trunk full of clothes lugged to another address, then another.

  Growing up, my parents knew as the primary determining forces in the world only depression, then war; they understood that, as a matter of survival and of honor, a person was expected to labor and to sacrifice. They were also not many generations removed from their Irish and Scandinavian forebears—close enough to the old country to be steeped in the immigrant ethos of toil, perseverance, and the modest ambition to make a steady living. They came from people for whom family and religion were the central social structures, even if those structures were sometimes maintained so heedlessly and mechanically that they existed more as pretense than as reality. A family ostensibly meant love, self-sacrifice, and a bulwark against outside forces that might harm it, yet family often meant dissembling, bitterness, and division. Religion ostensibly meant humility, rigorous self-scrutiny, and awe before wondrous and indecipherable mysteries, yet religion often involved an unthinking practicing of rituals out of mere habit or fear of disapproval. Maybe that is why the cultures that produced my parents, cultures that valued family and church—the cultures that produced me—also bred silence and shame.