My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  The world of children and the world of adults existed side by side, but they were separate. Taunted on the street one day, teased by three older boys who circled me, raised their clenched fists, and would not let me leave their block and walk on to my home, I watched one car after another drive slowly by, one adult after another decline to stop, step out, and save me from my tormentors, adults who saw us but did not see us. The bald old man I sat behind in church, ears sprouting gray hairs, shoulders flecked with dandruff: he might have been a thousand years old and have journeyed to Mass from his home beneath the sea.

  My parents’ bedroom, at the far end of the upstairs hall, was miles away, and what they said to each other there I could not know, although sometimes, as I sat at the dining room table or stood in the nearby kitchen, I heard raised voices, a sudden shout, an accusation, a verbal sneer, then silence—nothing for the rest of the night—or I heard the yanked-open door and saw my father walk purposefully out of the hallway, past me and down the stairs, face stricken, teeth clenched, one time weeping loudly, and then I heard the downstairs front door click open and shut and his car engine stammer to life.

  Dad would escape by driving away, out of the neighborhood, to who knows where. My older sisters had their secret teenage lives; they had the phone or friends’ homes to flee to. We younger kids—Kevin, Dana, and I—would escape with our neighborhood friends to the top of the street, to the dead end, into the woods that grew thick there, that sheltered us as we split into two platoons to play war games, as we arranged snapped branches with broad leaves into huts that we hid in to eat our wrapped sandwiches, as we squatted and slid on our dirty tennis shoes down the steep hill toward the shadowy, deep ravine.

  The summer when I was five was especially dry and hot, and we seemed to live in the woods then, the children from our own street and older ones from the next street over: the boys who were menacing and mysterious because they were twelve and thirteen and had constructed a sophisticated tree house far off the ground in which they convened and smoked cigarettes. One day in late July, it was ninety degrees; for weeks, no rain had fallen. I ambled with Dana, who was four, up the street to the woods. I was the older brother, the tacit leader on this outing. We found ourselves gazing up at the older boys’ tree house. We had no thought of climbing to it: we wouldn’t have known how to begin, and we weren’t going to try something that dangerous. I spotted, on the ground, a small piece of folded cardboard. I bent to pick it up. It was a book of matches. “Let’s light one,” I said to Dana.

  “No,” she said. “Anyway, you don’t know how to.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “No, you don’t. Let’s go.”

  I opened the matchbook. Three or four matches remained. I pulled one out. It was easy. “Let’s light it,” I said.

  “I don’t know. Can you even do it?”

  “Uh-huh.” Actually, I wasn’t sure. Dana was right: I had never lit a match. But I had seen my father do it, scraping the red end quickly across the black stripe. I tried it. Between my fingertips, the match flared.

  I dropped it. I didn’t know what else to do. I hadn’t considered that, if I succeeded at lighting the match, I would be responsible for the flame.

  Dana and I gazed at the ground where the match had landed. The flame was bigger now; a small dry bush had caught fire. Then a ragged patch of tall grass next to the bush was ablaze, too.

  We turned and raced out of the woods, looking for someone to tell, for anyone who could help. Across the street from our house, in the neighbors’ yard, our older brother, Kevin, and a couple of his friends were playing football. “There’s a fire in the woods!” we yelled.

  “Yeah, sure,” they responded, laughing. “Fire in the woods! Fire in the woods!” They resumed tossing the football to each other.

  We needed to knock on a door, to find a grown-up. We rushed to the next house up the street, the Younies’, and pounded on the door. It opened. Mr. Younie—a distant, even intimidating presence, with whom we rarely traded words—looked quizzically down at us. After a few breathless words from us, he strode swiftly toward the woods. A moment later, he returned. “You kids go home,” he barked.

  Once I was home, where could I hide? Where could I make myself invisible, pretend that what had happened had not happened?

  I don’t know where Dana went—maybe immediately to our mother. I fled to the smallest room in the house, the one least likely for anyone to look in: my father’s bathroom, the one that adjoined my parents’ bedroom. Only he went into that room, and he wasn’t home. It was cool and shadowy and smelled of soap and aftershave. On the counter near the sink were his shaving brush and razor. On the back of the toilet was his beige leather pouch in which he kept his insulin, syringe, alcohol, and cotton balls. To my left was the shower; I thought to click its glass door open and hide inside, to become a shadow behind the opaque glass, but only my father ever stood in that space. Hiding there would feel like a second transgression. I sat in the corner of the room, on the tile floor, and huddled, my back against the cabinet, arms around my knees, head down.

  How long did I wait? Ten minutes? Two hours? I wanted to be undiscovered forever. I knew that eventually someone would find me, that I would have to become a part of the family again, that I would never get my old life back, the life that had been mine that morning, the one in which I had not yet been touched by disgrace. As my father before me had, I was being raised to be a good boy: dutiful, respectful, careful, hardworking. But maybe I wasn’t good, or as good as I should have been. For a few minutes, anyway, I could be alone and apart with the fact of my sin, even while the siren outside proclaimed it.

  I do not recall who found me or how I explained myself or whether I tried to. I do not recall being scolded or lectured by my mother or father, although I probably was. What I remember is being an exile from the world of children: I remember the lesson on fire safety, presented by an actual fireman, that all of the kids of the street attended the next week in a neighbor’s basement. I remember, as soon as I entered the room, kneeling behind an armchair to hide. I remember the fireman asking the assembled children if the boy who set the fire in the woods was present. I remember being pointed at: “That’s him. Behind the chair.” I remember, on another day, standing at the big picture window of our home, watching the children of the street, in a replanting ceremony to which I had not been invited, parade solemnly in single file to the scene of the crime, each with a sprig held tenderly in his hand.

  I was no longer of their tribe. I understood what I had done. I had burned down our woods.

  Almost forty years later, I found a report of the fire that appeared the next day in the local newspaper: “4:19 p.m. 3816 N.E. 96th St. Grass fire caused by child with matches; no loss.”

  26

  It would be comforting to remember my father as a drunk, to diagnose him as an alcoholic and be done with it, to imagine him, in those hours after work when he should have been home with us, hunched at the end of some dim downtown bar, giving in to temptation. When he arrived home late, maybe whistling overzealously, tromping up the stairs to the dining room, my mother sometimes smelled alcohol on his breath. She began to think he might have a drinking problem.

  An enthusiasm for alcohol was, after all, a family tradition. On his mother’s side were Irish immigrants to Canada who had a lucrative business in home liquor, running the stuff over the border to Detroit during Prohibition. A great-uncle suffered a flurry of neighborhood attention in 1895 when he was arrested for operating a still that the local newspaper reported was “capable of producing ten gallons of spirits daily, and bearing evidence of having been used very recently.” An ancestor on his father’s side was Daniel Shawhan, a farmer and distiller in Kentucky who made a whiskey so smooth and popular that the grateful citizenry named a Bourbon County town after him. The oldest of my father’s Forhan uncles was a tavern owner, while the youngest was a loquacious,
convivial guitar-picker prone to vanishing for days at a time and being tracked down in the shadowy corner of some pub in Seattle’s skid row. His own sons, my father’s cousins, struggled with the bottle, too, one of them coming to a lurid end, strangled in a cheap motel room by a transgender ex-con whom he’d propositioned drunkenly.

  But my father—did I ever see him drunk? Not stumblingly so. I don’t recall him often with a drink in his hand—a beer at a ball game, a mixed drink at Christmas, but not much more than that. I saw him manic, charged up, speaking in a rush of uninterrupted syllables, physically reckless, insensibly knocking a water glass from the table with an elbow, becoming unbalanced while climbing a ladder in the backyard and tumbling from it. But this behavior was caused by diabetic reactions—by low blood sugar. I saw him lethargic, unable or unwilling to rise from the couch as the hours of some Saturday wore on toward dusk. But he was tired from overwork. Or maybe depressed. Or maybe, by 1967, with seven children in the house, he was incapable of facing the chaos. Maybe that’s why, when his workday was long over, he found something other to do than come home. What that something was, who knows. Was he closing down all of the bars? Was he cheating on my mother? When I was seven and eight and nine, neither of these possibilities crossed my mind; I knew nothing of the snares and lures of adult life. I just knew that my father was often gone when he wasn’t supposed to be, and this made me nervous and my mother fretful and testy.

  But she kept the household going, climbing out of bed early enough, even if she’d stayed up late wondering where my father was, to get the children fed and off to school. My three oldest sisters attended a Catholic high school, each morning donning their uniform—the plaid shirt and white blouse—and slipping their textbooks, protected by covers made from brown paper bags they had scissored, folded, and taped, into a canvas bag they cinched shut. Terry remembers leaving the house on those mornings and knowing, from the empty space in the carport, that our father had not come home. This was the space where his bright red Volkswagen Beetle should have been, his humble little rounded insect of a car. Riding in the Beetle, you felt each bump in the road and heard the wind whipping past you. “The tin can,” my father called it.

  One morning in March 1967, as we kids slid from bed and gathered upstairs for breakfast, the red car, again, was not in the carport; our mother, again, was methodical, efficient, in getting us ready for school. The five oldest of us headed out the door. Dana, a year younger than I, would not be going to her kindergarten class until the afternoon, so she was there when the tow truck pulled up to the house, the passenger door swung open, and our father stepped out. She was there to see him wearing the suit he’d gone to work in the day before, but he was disheveled now, tie undone, hair in disarray, blood streaming down his face. He was shaking, nearly weeping. Dana remembers our mother leading him to their bedroom, making him sit on the bed, and stepping into his bathroom to soak a washcloth in warm water. “Go to your dad, Dana. Talk to him,” she said.

  Dana did move toward him, reluctantly, but couldn’t murmur a word. “I didn’t want to,” she remembers. “He was not my dad.”

  He had begun driving home that morning after the sun rose. Two miles from our street, he had lost control, spun off the road, and rolled: the car was crushed—only the driver’s compartment remained intact, unmangled. Anyone sitting elsewhere might have been killed.

  The next day, cleaned up, calm, on the mend, our father explained to us children what had happened. It was an unfortunate accident. It couldn’t have been helped. A car had veered toward him, and he had swerved to avoid it.

  Later, an alternate story began circulating among us: he had driven off a freeway overpass on purpose. He had tried to kill himself. One of our older sisters must have told us that, and we believed it. We believed it: we did not doubt our father could do such a thing.

  This is what he told our mother: he had been drinking. He was drunk. In front of him, suddenly, a woman and her child were crossing the street. He nearly hit them. He could have killed them, could have killed himself. He was aghast at what he had done.

  After the accident, my mother says, he shaped up for a while. He bought another car, the last he would own: a white 1966 Dodge Dart with red interior—handsome but unassuming, used but solid. Reliable.

  Two months after he crashed the Beetle, the Seattle-Tacoma chapter of the National Association of Accountants elected him as its president. In his life away from us, our father was doing well, or at least successfully preventing his peers from thinking otherwise. And what did he think? Perhaps, when he left home in the morning, he felt relief—able, with the voices of his wife and children silenced, to sink into his own thoughts at last—and he felt dread when he returned. Or maybe the dread existed no matter which direction he drove.

  For whatever reason, he soon returned to his undependable ways, often failing to arrive home on time for dinner. We sat at the table, pushing our mashed potatoes and peas around on our plates, waiting. Kevin, ten, Opie-ish—a hint of red in his hair, freckled, gangly, getting to be all elbows and knees—and precociously witty, could ease the tension with an ironic quip and sly grin. Dana, six, a cherubically cute prankster, her dark brown hair in pigtails, preferred slapstick: the exaggeratedly twisted face and, when our mother wasn’t looking, the wide-open mouth revealing half-masticated cube steak. My habit was to gaze innocently at nothing while kicking her fiercely beneath the table. Kim, in her high chair, drooled and whacked happily with open palms at her Cheerios. We hoped to hear our father’s Dodge muttering to a stop in the carport, and then, as the minutes passed and our mother grew gloomier, we hoped not to.

  27

  A benefit of my father working for a lumber and pulp company was that he kept us supplied with free stacks of cardboard and reams of paper that he lugged home from the office. On the paper, I painted watercolors of houses, front walks curving away from them and off the page, wood smoke swirling from their chimneys. I lay them on the floor to dry, the paper puckering. I drew a crayon portrait of my new pet gerbil, LBJ, named after the most famous person I could think of. LBJ was an agreeable roommate, keeping to himself, sleeping amid his wood shavings, crouching in the corner discreetly emitting pellets, making his wheel squeak forlornly in the night. In his portrait, I drew him huddled behind the bars of his cage near his hanging water bottle—above him, on the wall, a portrait within a portrait: the Sacred Heart of a black-bearded Jesus, orange flames bursting from his chest.

  As the weeks went by, Christ and I watched over my gerbil. Then, one morning, I noticed that LBJ’s left eye was purple and swollen. Was this normal? I told myself that it was, that gerbils’ eyes are prone to bulging grotesquely and that the problem would go away. I wanted it to; the eye was not easy to look at. But what if it didn’t go away? That would be my fault, wouldn’t it? LBJ was my gerbil; he was my friend—I was responsible for him. In a perverse misapplication of that responsibility, as day gave way to day, I kept the fact of LBJ’s condition to myself. I did not tell my parents, and I did not offer aid to him. I hadn’t a clue how I might do so. Instead, I waited, I temporized, my shame and secrecy feeding each other. Like a small version of my father, perhaps, I was ignoring a warning sign because it was easier to do so: easier merely to hope for the best and say nothing than to admit that I was inadequate to solve the problem alone, or to admit that I might be the problem. LBJ’s bulge grew larger, more freakish, so I understood that he was truly suffering and that his suffering was indeed my fault, so much so that I could bear to glance at him only occasionally and then chose not to look at him at all, shielding my eyes with my hand when I fed him or changed his water. Finally, one day, no rustling noises came from his cage. LBJ lay still on his side in the corner. I prodded him with a pencil. He did not unstiffen, to my relief. With a trowel, I dug a deep gerbil-sized hole in the corner of the backyard and deposited him in it, marking the grave with an upright Popsicle stick.

  I had not
been able to reveal to my mother or father that my pet was sick, let alone that I had allowed his condition to worsen because it repelled me. I had begun to nurture a protective privacy, a silence within which I might hide and ward off censure. Instead of speaking freely and spontaneously about what I felt and thought, I preferred to show off the parts of myself that I felt safe in revealing, the unassailable parts: my artistic flair and high-mindedness. I was beginning to try my hand at verse. My earliest extant poem is an occasional one, written for my mother when I was eight:

  There are daisy’s that grow,

  and tulip’s sometimes too,

  but ofcourse they’ll never do!

  So there’s the carnatain.

  Because Mother’s day is a celebratoin.

  The poem was cunningly original, I thought: my best effort yet.

  My imagination was glutting itself not only on the poetic implications of nature, and not only on tales of superheroes and villains of the Wild West and knights and kings, but on the stories shared with me by nuns and priests. As my father had been once, and his father before him, I was a Catholic schoolboy, sitting rigidly in my seat each morning, hands folded before me, in my uniform of salt-and-pepper corduroy pants, white button-down shirt, and navy blue sweater, the school insignia sewn over the left breast. It was here—with Sister Aida, white-habited and black-shoed, looking down upon us as she patrolled the rows of desks—where I practiced my penmanship, penciling O after O after O and, when it was time to try a whole sentence in cursive, was instructed to try my hand at this: “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee.”