My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  By the end of the year, Ed might have seemed—if you didn’t look too closely—a personification of the pride and strength and limitless potential of postwar America. He had earned his degree, passed his certified public accountant exam, been appointed a second lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve, and even, for his distinguished military service, been awarded the good conduct medal and the World War II Victory Medal. He had enlisted a year after VJ Day, and his most memorable accomplishment in the military had been to get caught sleeping on guard duty in the Hawaii sunshine, but he was nonetheless honored for his wartime service. It was a matter of happy timing: President Truman didn’t officially announce an end to the hostilities of World War II until the last day of 1946, and anyone on active duty before then received the Victory Medal. He had made it by three months.

  For my parents, I imagine the next few years were a blur—a happy blur, mainly, according to my mother’s memory—of working, of watching their daughters learn to walk and then run, of lugging their belongings into a house, a house at last, even if it’s a rented one: there’s Dad, struggling valiantly in the snow to maneuver his car backward downhill and around the corner to the new house, a trailer packed with all of their possessions hitched behind him, Ange flailing her arms in the streets to guide him. Then there’s the next home—a snug one of their own, with a mortgage, a modest front lawn, a small backyard emptying into woods. It’s a weekday morning, the bustle of getting everyone off to school; then, the sun dipping beneath the trees, Dad’s home from work, leaning back in his armchair with the newspaper, then the girls, fresh from the bath, are in their pajamas, and Dad chats with them before they’re tucked in—about Terry’s arithmetic homework, Pat’s plans for her sixth birthday party, the boo-boo on Peg’s knee. Now it’s Sunday evening, Dad’s at the airport gate, waving goodbye, now it’s the next Sunday and he’s back there waving again; he’ll be gone all week, somewhere in Alaska, in Oregon, in California, but he’ll return for the weekend, when he’ll sleep, maybe sleep all day—You kids pipe down now. Then the girls are in the backyard, ready to perform their well-rehearsed play, and the neighborhood mothers are there, and a couple of fathers, and, look, there’s Dad, he’s up and sunlit and settling into a lawn chair. Later, the kids in bed, he’s at the dining room table with a pack of cards, teaching his wife his favorite game: here’s how you shuffle, here’s how you deal, here’s how you know what you have and what you’re willing to give up, here’s how you make your face a mask—but she doesn’t get it, she’s not taking to it. Then the whole family’s at Sunday Mass, backs straight and firm as they sit in the pew, the three girls in sweet pastel dresses and lace head coverings. Now the girls are wearing buckskin and feathers or long dresses and bonnets made of gingham—it’s the neighborhood Pioneer Days celebration, it’s the kids’ parade, children pulling wagons down the blocked-off main boulevard, hula hoops taped to each wagon as a frame for a sheet; it’s a Conestoga wagon—and, as the horse to lead it, a dog. Then the girls are curled in their beds, mid-summer, their thoughts dissolving into sleep, soft music floating toward them from next door, from the tennis court the neighborhood parents are dancing across—a burst of grown-up laughter rises, then dies away. And it’s morning, and Mom’s in the kitchen, clearing the last of the breakfast dishes, while Dad’s outside—he has picked up a turtle that has emerged again from the woods, the familiar neighborhood turtle, and Dad is squatting, showing it to his daughters, saying, “Look, he won’t bite, you can touch him if you’re gentle—feel his back, his belly—now let’s set him down and give him a chance to find his way home again.”

  20

  Amid this continual activity, how much could my parents have been learning about each other? Through most of their courtship, an ocean had divided them, then they had married young and abruptly, and, from the start, their marriage had been devoted almost entirely to work, not the work of understanding each other—of sharing their fears and griefs and desires—but the work of finishing school, beginning a professional life, paying the bills, and raising children.

  Suddenly, they had another project to work on, a permanent one. When he was twenty-six, my father began, unaccountably, to lose weight. He seemed to be eating plenty, and he was always hungry, but he was getting noticeably skinny. He was always tired. Always thirsty, too. My parents decided he should see a doctor.

  Just back from his appointment, he met Ange in the kitchen. “I have diabetes,” he said. Diabetes: the disease of his father’s family and the disease that had killed his mother. He must have thought back to his boyhood then, the years of Bernadine being chronically ill, often gone from the house, lying in a hospital bed. A diabetic is unable to properly produce insulin, the hormone needed to convert sugar and maintain an appropriate level of blood glucose. Who knows how Bernadine was living in her last years, how much she knew about how to treat her illness, and how conscientious she was about doing so? Was she getting regular insulin injections? What was she eating? Was she drinking? How much? She was poor, maybe jobless, with little money for health care. If the amount of sugar in her blood rose too high, she would have become tired or restless or oddly unresponsive. To a young boy, she might have seemed as though she wasn’t his mother anymore. With too little sugar in her blood, she would have become confused, maybe drowsy, maybe irritable, strangely loud—and, if one of her sons didn’t know to plead with her to drink some apple juice or eat a handful of candy, she might have fainted, even gone into a coma. Maybe my father remembered rising in the morning, wandering into his mother’s bedroom, and being unable to shake her awake. Maybe he remembered having to call his mother’s parents or knock on a neighbor’s door for help.

  My parents understood immediately what this diagnosis meant: their lives would have to change now, and permanently. They took classes at a hospital and learned about the necessity of controlling Ed’s diet and constantly monitoring his blood sugar levels. He wasn’t supposed to drink alcohol—but if he did, each drink would have to count toward his carbohydrate intake. And he had to give himself daily insulin injections. The household of my childhood is the one in which Dad was in the bathroom jabbing himself with a needle and Mom was in the kitchen with the little scale, measuring every gram of what my father would eat.

  They were instructed on the danger of neglecting these rituals: the risk of diabetic shock and coma, heart disease, kidney disease, blindness, amputation. When my father traveled, as he often did, my mother was worried: was he controlling his diet, taking his insulin? If he had a diabetic reaction—becoming manic, confused, physically uncoordinated—who would be there to help, to peel him an orange or buy him a scoop of ice cream? Would he be able to help himself? When he was home, my father, at least for the first ten years or so after his diagnosis, was assiduous in the treatment of his illness. Also, meticulous accountant that he was, he was careful each year to deduct from his income tax the costs of this regimen: the blood glucose testing tape, the insulin, the needles, the antiseptic alcohol, even the cotton balls—up to two dollars a year by the 1960s.

  Meanwhile, his list of exemptions for dependents kept getting longer. My parents were 1950s Catholics—they weren’t thinking much about birth control. If they ever employed the rhythm method, it didn’t succeed for long. In 1957, my older brother, Kevin, was born. Over the next decade came me and Dana, then our little sisters, Kim and Erica. Terry Patty Peggy Kevin Chris Dana Kim and Erica. Eight children: a throng of an Irish Catholic family. We arrived in clusters, subcommittees of two or three born close together: Terry Patty Peggy. Kevin Chris Dana. Kim and Erica.

  We were raised by people who had seen, from the example of their own parents, that mothers and fathers were distant: absent from the family or remote emotionally. My parents were kind people, capable of gestures of tenderness. But they were also overwhelmed, and those gestures were memorable because they were infrequent. The essential tools my parents brought to the raising of a platoon of children were those that
helped them keep the house in order and the children safe: their perfectionism—their own ambition to do this thing well, to do anything well that they put their hands to; their natural intelligence; and their skill at organizing. In our house, things got done. Our mother ensured that we were on time to baseball practices, to birthday parties, to Girl Scout meetings. On school mornings, our sack lunches were prepared and sitting in a row on the counter, organized from oldest child to youngest, waiting for us to grab them and head out the door. A quick lick to her handkerchief and a scrub of our cheek guaranteed that we were unsmudged in public. We were all tasked with making our beds and keeping our rooms tidy, the cleaning of much of the rest of the house being divided formally among us: somebody vacuumed the rec room while another scrubbed the bathroom and another raked the leaves. Because she was there, my mother took on the role of disciplinarian. She spanked, a wooden spoon being her favored implement.

  Our father was not often home, and, when he was, he was typically busy with a project of his own: a gutter had come loose and needed renailing; the basement door, if planed a bit, might shut more smoothly; the Ford could use an oil change. His main jobs were to make sure our home, the physical thing itself, was in working order and to take care of us financially: he paid the bills and taught us the value of a dollar and of a nickel. In these things, he was expert. In helping us to fathom and navigate our inner lives, he was not. In this way, he was a typical father of his generation and perhaps a typical Irishman, deft at employing his charmingly wry wit to deflect attention from what unsettled him, what he could not possibly begin to talk about. But I suspect that his particular skill at silently, implicitly discouraging discussions of feelings was sharpened by his own childhood series of losses and fears that he had been expected to resolve or forget. He must have been hiding painful, disquieting feelings—from his children, more harmfully from his wife, and, most disastrously, from himself.

  He probably wasn’t revealing much to his grandmother, either, who was not, herself, inclined to speak inquisitively, with tolerant and genuine interest, about others’ feelings. My oldest sister, Terry, remembers Grandma Carey as being affectionate toward our father but exhibiting no noticeable warmth toward our mother; Ange, after all, had married her favorite grandson, taken him away, and presented him with a slew of children to be responsible for—children who were sometimes too loud and who put their fingers, slick with slobber, on things that didn’t belong to them. As a little girl, Terry once opened a drawer in a table at Grandma Carey’s house, a drawer where Grandma kept her cigarettes. For years afterward, Grandma reminded our mother that Terry ought to be watched closely. “That one—she’s always after my cigarettes.”

  By the time I knew Grandma, she was in her seventies: minked, rouged, slow-moving, and seemingly without mirth, both her daughter and her husband long dead. She persisted, until the end, in calling my father Bud. She was the only one to do so then, as if my father had never left her house, as if Roosevelt were still in his third term. Grandma Carey was another of my father’s constant obligations. He was expected to visit frequently, to fix the leaky sink and broken toilet, to drive her to the doctor, to speak to the neighbor about that yapping dog; one summer he spent days with a ladder and drop cloth and bucket, painting her house. A few years later, he sold it for her—his childhood home, if he thought of himself as having one—and helped her move into a Catholic retirement center in downtown Seattle. He paid her bills, listing her as a dependent on his tax return. He was happy to help. He did not question it. He could not forget how, years before, she and his grandfather had adopted him and his brother and given them a home, a stable life. In her last will and testament, Grandma Carey bequeathed her entire estate, such as it was, to my father. She made no mention of Jim, the Forhan boy in whom the Careys had been disappointed—he was the one who, like his father, had disappeared. Jim had divorced his wife after only a few years of marriage, and since then neither my father nor his grandmother had heard from him. Only years later, when Jim remarried, did my parents learn what had become of him. He was stationed at a marine base in North Carolina. And he still couldn’t summon an interest in talking with my father or his grandmother. For a decade thereafter, though, Ange and Violet, the two women who had married the Forhan boys, remained in contact; they shared birthday and Christmas cards, filling each other in on the respective families’ news. Apparently, that was enough for my father and Jim. They heard through their wives about how the other was doing and never bothered, themselves, to pick up the phone or put pen to paper.

  Grandma Carey never wavered in her high opinion of my father, and he never faltered in his efforts to prove her right. According to my mother, he knew—he felt—that he owed his grandparents, that he would never stop owing them. No one had given him such security before. Why should he believe that he deserved it?

  Work. Keep working. Get the next thing done, then the next. My father was good at that: earning his paycheck and earning, perhaps, a right to believe that he was worthy—of trust, of love. Still, he understood that he couldn’t continue working in the way he had been, traveling three weeks out of the month—not with his diabetes to control, not with so many children in the house, not with his aging grandmother to attend to. When he was offered a new job, he took it.

  The company, Alaska Lumber and Pulp, was a fledgling one. While at Price Waterhouse, my father had done AL&P’s audits and impressed its executives enough that they asked him to serve as their assistant treasurer. This new job might be easier, my father thought. True, he would have to learn something about Japanese etiquette—the bowing, the gift-giving, the refusing to refuse a drink: AL&P was a Japanese company, and all of its directors and officers lived in Tokyo; to rebuild after the war, Japan needed timber, and Alaska had it. Also, my father’s responsibilities would be considerable: overseeing all of the company’s financial activities in the United States, ensuring that the accounting records were accurate and acting as liaison between the company’s owners and the bankers from whom they would be seeking loans to keep them afloat. However, he would be able to stay home more. He would manage an office in downtown Seattle and travel only occasionally to the company’s main operation in Sitka, Alaska, to supervise the financial operations there.

  In the fall of 1959, a year after my father assumed his new identity as local boss, international underling, translator, and negotiator, I was born, entering a world in which, it might have seemed, truth was becoming harder and harder to discern, being gladly and easily distorted by fiction or subsumed by it. Congress was investigating the TV quiz shows, discovering how scripted was their spontaneous drama. Richard Nixon was a teen idol: in Los Angeles, a swarm of college students clamoring for his autograph had driven him to seek refuge in a women’s restroom. The top tune in the nation was an assemblage of fabrications and mutations: a song written in German and adapted from a two-hundred-year-old tale first written in English, meant to be sung by a fictional character in a musical but performed now in an English translation by an American who went by a stage name, not his given Italian one—a singer who believed, even now, the lie that his grandparents were his parents and his mother was his older sister, a singer who was a teenybopper rocker but, on this record, was reinventing himself in the image of Frank Sinatra.

  And Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife” totally, authentically swung.

  I was christened Christopher: Christ bearer. It was there in my name—I would hold Christ in my heart, as the saint I was named for had held Him on his shoulders, carrying the exalted toddler across the swollen river. By the time I was ten, though, Saint Christopher’s credentials were being formally questioned, and, when his story was judged legend, not fact, the Vatican took away his feast day. I, too, would be drained of some sacredness, my name becoming, for my schoolmates, Chriscross-Applesauce, Christopher Robin, Chris Piss. But, in my adulthood, to junk-mailers whose computer program prints only the first six letters of a long name, I sometimes am
back in church, with pride of place above the altar: Christ Forhan.

  21

  Sitka. I heard the name often in my childhood. It was the place my father flew to and then returned from, weeks later—a place I couldn’t picture, except I knew it was very far away and had a pulp mill, whatever that looked like. Sitka was on the west side of an island, looking out to the Pacific. To get there, my father had to travel on a small plane from Seattle a thousand miles north to Juneau, overshooting his ultimate destination, then board a seaplane and reverse direction, going south the last hundred miles to the coast, landing in the water, and motoring up to the dock. Sometimes he traveled to Wrangell, two hundred miles from Sitka, to the company’s lumber mill. Sitka. Wrangell. These were words my father carried back to us, as if in little leather pouches, from the edge of the world, to speak at the dinner table, words with jagged music in them, initial syllables falling swiftly like an ax—Sitka, Wrangell, consonants closing the throat: words almost absent of meaning but with mystery glittering in them, the mystery of what my father did in those places, of what the air smelled like there, of who the people were. At five, at seven, at ten, I could have only the vaguest understanding of what my father did for a living. I might not even have cared much. Fathers went to work; that’s what they did. Up and down our street, morning after morning, Jenny’s dad, William’s dad, Pete’s dad, Tommy’s dad—each gripped the top of the steering wheel with his left hand, craned his neck to look behind him, backed down the driveway, shifted gears, then drove off, turning at the corner and disappearing. They each might as well have been going to the same office. But my father sometimes was gone for days and days, leaving us for Sitka, for Wrangell, leaving us with room to imagine anything we might about those places, leaving us with time to begin feeling that he, hardly ever here, was hardly real himself.