My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  God was watching me. Like Santa Claus, He was tough on criers and pouters. He likely didn’t approve of my wobbly penmanship. He seemed generally unpleasable—strict and particular, having concocted a dauntingly long list of sins, venial and mortal, for me to steer clear of, and those were on top of the nasty original blotch on my soul that I had earned just by being born. But God was also capable of extravagant generosity, most of all in His final gift of eternal, ecstatic life in heaven alongside Him, although I would have to earn that reward every day, every minute, throughout my entire life, and He would never apprise me of how I was doing. I would have to die and be surprised.

  I believed in heaven as an actual place, a geographical location. One day, during art hour, our teacher asked us to draw our private vision of it. On that rough grayish paper we used for everything in school, with bright-colored crayons, orange, yellow, and green, I drew something that looked suspiciously like the Emerald City: slender, tightly gathered towers soaring skyward, sparkling with stars. Beyond that, I had only the fuzziest sense of the place. Would ice cream be served? Would we be issued wings and, if so, would they be feathered? Assuming Dana would also be present—a big assumption, considering her general and intensifying brattiness—would she and I be together on the same family cloud, bound eternally, or would we be free to roam independently? Would kickball be played, or would we only lounge eternally in the glow of God’s love? And what would that feel like? I wanted specifics.

  More relevant to me and real, because I had seen them, were the remote, secret places of television: Maxwell Smart’s underground headquarters, which you got to through a phone booth concealed behind five sets of doors; the Batcave, sheltering a sleek black convertible and blinking computer consoles; and the scrubby, prehistoric world of club-wielding cavemen into which two astronauts, falling backward through time, crash-landed their capsule.

  Christ had done something like that, hadn’t he—fallen from a far star and awoken in the desert, burbling, wrapped in swaddling clothes? Christ I could understand better than his father because I could picture him—or, rather, because he was pictured for me. He was there in my slim children’s missal, the gilt edges of its pages sleek and gleaming: gazing upward, his face full of tender yearning, tawny hair falling in gentle curls upon his shoulders; standing atop a rock, palms uplifted, preaching to his kneeling, rapt apostles; or, barefoot and robed, riding up, up, and away on a shaft of golden sunlight streaming through a hole in a cloud.

  But church was filled with riddles. I was told that, as the priest mumbled, waving his hands like a wizard over the silver tray of wafers and the chalice of wine, Christ himself was present there before us. But I never saw him. I looked and looked. And what about this business of the Communion wafers being Christ’s body? Every picture of him I had seen indicated that our Lord was no giant; after all of these hundreds of years and all of these Masses in all of the churches of the world, by now he should have been entirely punched through with holes.

  Nobody told me I might think of it as a metaphor. True, at seven, eight, or nine, I had limited capacity for abstract thought. But someone could have tried. Did all of these Catholics—did my parents, my older sisters—really believe all this literally? When, on my own, through years of careful observation and deduction, I had determined that Santa was a pretty fiction, and I had begun to consider that the same might apply to the biblical miracles and the empty tomb, I did not feel free to speak my thoughts. When I was fourteen, a confirmed doubter being asked to proclaim in front of the congregation that I was a believer, I felt alone with my awkward secret; it would have been a great gift, though a highly unlikely one, for some priest to take me aside and whisper, “You know, it’s only the symbolism of the stories that matters, really.” I was years away from being able to think of the strange and glorious Christian story as a poem, a way of expressing indirectly, in images and words that humans comprehend, those things that, by definition, transcend comprehension.

  What did my father—the lifelong Catholic, the altar boy—think? I do not remember asking him. Perhaps when I was three or four I posed, as children do, rudimentary theological questions to my parents: What is God? When you die, where do you go? But what I remember of my parents’ conception of faith is just one thing: they went to church, and they required their children to do so. My mother had come to Catholicism late, at seventeen, because she married my father. But he, like generations of Forhans before him and like his children after him, was born into it. Is it possible he doubted this faith he had not chosen? He was a practical man. His job was to make things add up. Did the story of Christ and the concepts of sin and salvation in which he professed belief make sense to him? Maybe it didn’t much matter. Maybe he was a Catholic in the way he was an orphan and grandson and father: it was something that happened to him, so it was something that he was, not something to think about. And because he was Catholic, he weekly expressed, in ritual and song, his understanding of his insufficiency, his sinfulness, his duty to be humble and strive to reach the ideal of absolute love and sacrifice embodied by Christ.

  Like my father, I was told that Jesus was conceived by a ghost and that, because of him, when you’re dead, you’re not really dead. And I believed it. In second grade, wearing dark slacks, a white shirt, and a clip-on bow tie, I took First Communion, sticking my tongue out so the priest could set a thin bit of our Lord upon it. He tasted kind of good. The next year came my first confession: the ritual of opening, with quivering hand, the polished wooden door, then stepping into the small dark box of a room, lowering myself onto the creaky kneeler, waiting for the little window to shhh open before me, the dim figure of the priest leaning at his ease on the other side, his ear toward me. Regularly afterward, groups of us children were brought from the classroom into the church to do this. Peering at the blurred outline of the priest as he waited for me to speak, I had to think, and fast. Had I hit my sister? Talked back to my mother? Dillydallied and daydreamed and not made my bed? I didn’t think so, but I had to say something; I would tell the priest that I had done those things. Given a penance of two Our Fathers and five Hail Marys, I got up off my knees, then exited the confessional as if floating; it really did work—I felt absolved, scrubbed clean. At the front of the church, I knelt before the altar, bowed my head, and murmured my assigned prayers. But the relief was only temporary. I felt deflated when I thought of what I had been taught: that there would be a lifetime of this—decades of monitoring my misdeeds and loathing them, of pleading for another chance, of asking for forgiveness that, stained from the start, I might not deserve.

  Even in my twenties, long after I had left the church, Catholicism remained in my muscle memory. If I would not, as my father did, continue to practice the public rituals of the faith into adulthood, I nonetheless would find myself unable to shake it entirely: certain habits of mind and body had been shaped by it. In graduate school, I worked for a summer in a candy store in a Maine resort town. One afternoon, in a moment when I hadn’t anything else to do, I grabbed a broom and started sweeping. A customer remarked, “You’re Catholic, right?”

  I looked up from my work. The woman was smiling.

  “I was raised Catholic,” I said. “How did you know?”

  “I recognize the sign: doing more than you have to because you know you can never do enough.”

  28

  In third grade, I was a good boy. My grades in deportment and attention were exemplary. Regularly, I promised to do my best to do my duty to God and my country, to be square and obey the law of the pack: like the other boys I knew in school, and like my brother before me, I had joined the Scouts. I was a boy; it’s what a boy did. “Do you like to pretend you are someone else sometimes?,” I had read in the Wolf Cub Scout Book. “Well, Cub Scouts in their meetings pretend they are cowboys, space cadets, firemen, policemen, knights, and almost any kind of hero.” This sounded promising. And I admired the uniform: the smart blue pants and sh
irt, the gold belt buckle, the neckerchief, the cap. In it, I was unimpeachable. This is a boy, the uniform said, on the side of right, a reverent boy, a courteous boy, a boy aware already of what will make him, one day, a respectable man: a knowledge of knot-tying and pocketknife safety.

  Week by week, in my official Scout book, I checked off accomplishments that proved me a worthy member of the pack: I played catch with someone twenty feet away. I showed three ways we give respect to the flag. I wrote a fifty-word essay on what I liked about America. I practiced my religion as I was taught. I explained what to do in case there was an accident in the home and one of my parents needed help.

  I was practicing my reading, too. Sister Aida was fond of the Dictionary Game: at our desks, each of us sat before a closed dictionary. She called out a word—disciple, tabernacle, resurrection—and the first student to find it in the dictionary raised his or her hand and read aloud the definition. I often found the word first: I was becoming proficient in spelling, at least.

  Outside of school, I read everything that entered my line of sight: cereal boxes, Richie Rich comics, mattress tags. There were few books in our house; my parents had sprung for a set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias and a few Reader’s Digest condensed books, but there were no Jane Austen novels, no collections of Shakespeare, and I doubt I would have cracked their spines if I had discovered them. Instead, I let the language of advertising flow into me unimpeded. Riding in a car, I made a silent game out of trying to read every word on every billboard and business sign as it passed. Eat Energy-Packed Hansen’s Sunbeam Enriched Bread. Dag’s Beefy Boy Burgers 19 Cents. Nixon’s the One.

  When I wrote, I did so primarily to convince people that I was admirable. In a flamboyant effort to please Sister Aida, I wrote a seventy-­word illustrated novel about an insect who knows nothing but then goes to school to learn and becomes so smart and appreciative of teachers that he opens a school of his own.

  Only once that I recall did I use writing privately, as sheer self-expression, as personal catharsis. I had been bullied—as many in my third-grade class had—by a boy named Leslie. Maybe his girlish name made him surly. He was stocky and blond, his head flat as an anvil, and, when he wasn’t scowling, he smirked. As all of the students in the class paraded single-file out of the building to the playground, he was fond of stepping swiftly out of line and shouldering someone hard toward a wall, like a hockey player checking an opponent against the boards. On hot days at recess, he grabbed the sweater I’d wrapped around my waist and tossed it into the bushes. In the classroom, when I rose from my seat and walked to the pencil sharpener, he followed, then stood behind me, poking me repeatedly, rhythmically, in the lower back with his pencil tip. One morning, outside of school, when he was certain that no one was watching, he spat at me, the bubbly white stuff hitting my pant leg and dribbling down. This was too much, finally: I reported to Sister Aida what Leslie had done. I don’t recall the punishment he received, but it was not enough for me. Later that day, sitting on the asphalt playground, leaning my back against the wall of the gym building, I lifted my pencil to the red brick and wrote, slowly, deliberately, pressing down hard, “Leslie is a moron.”

  I lowered my pencil and looked up. Striding stern-jawed across the playground directly toward me was one of the older nuns. She reached down, yanked me up by the elbow, and pointed at the wall. “What’s this?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.” She spied the pencil in my fist. “Is that yours?”

  “No.”

  “You’re staying after school today, and you’re going to scrub your handiwork off this wall.”

  So I did. But writing those words—pushing my pencil lead emphatically against the brick, making palpable my unequivocal judgment of Leslie’s mental capacity—had been exhilarating. He had spat on my pants, so I had spat on his character. I had felt something real and expressed it. Still, I had hoped to do so anonymously, the vandalizing of church property being a sin and all.

  29

  “Tell us about dinosaurs and why they’re gone.”

  “Tell us about the ocean—the deepest fish, the ones we never see.”

  “How does radio work?”

  There were times when we younger children had our father completely to ourselves. He had returned home in time for dinner and was in a buoyant mood, and, after we ate, Mom was happy to finish the dishes in solitude or to grab a few private moments on the living room couch with a magazine while he gave us his attention. One of us—Kevin, Dana, or I—or maybe all of us together, conspiring, would say, “Can we have a staying-up night?” Dad would say, “Sure,” and that meant we wouldn’t be going to sleep, not yet, not when we were supposed to. Instead, we would put on our pajamas, gather downstairs on somebody’s bed, and ask our dad about anything, anything at all that came into our heads, and he would explain it to us. He seemed a bottomless repository of knowledge. I picture Dana lying on my bed on her stomach, bare feet in the air, chin on her fist, Kevin and me sitting cross-legged near her. Our father, in slippers, lies on his back along the length of the bed’s edge, hands behind his head.

  “Tell us about airplanes, about how people first learned to fly.”

  “Why are there volcanoes?”

  “What was your mother like?”

  No, we didn’t ask that. It wouldn’t have occurred to us. Our father’s past was mentioned so seldom that he might as well not have had one. We did not ask him about himself; we asked him about the world outside of himself, the one we were convinced he had become expert at navigating. In these moments, past our bedtimes, time didn’t matter; only our father did. He was ours alone, and, for the half hour or so that our talk lasted, he seemed happy to be so, looking each of us in the eye in turn, earnestly, patiently explaining to us how planets and moons orbit in interlocked patterns, grinning at the wonder of it, asking if we understood. The world we knew—our rooms, our house, our school, our street, our friends—seemed cramped and circumscribed, but it was surrounded by another world: the truer one, a world unbounded and fathomless with secrets. My father, I sensed, knew them all.

  Maybe every adult did, and growing up meant learning the secrets one by one, taking a series of hesitant, or sudden, steps into the bigger world and finding it fitting or frightening or baffling to be there. You light your first match, the flame blossoming abruptly from your fingertips. You take possession of a pet and agree to take care of it. You find yourself standing alone in public, a grown-up stranger’s eyes fixed upon you, expectantly—as I did when the family visited a California amusement park and filed into a row of seats to watch, onstage, someone we’d seen on TV: Andy Devine, a movie cowboy sidekick and kids’ entertainer. He strolled the stage with a microphone, a hitch in his stride, and, in his raspy, angular voice that suggested chronic delight, cracked jokes and recounted tales of old Hollywood. He had a big, rubbery face, bushy-browed and jowly. As I watched him, I thought about how I was watching him, how I was having an experience. This was a star—he’d been on Flipper and Batman, for Pete’s sake—and he and I were in the same room at the same time. I felt myself, in the moment, recording my memory of the moment.

  I leaned toward my father and asked if I could borrow the camera. “The camera?” he whispered. “You?” I nodded, and he handed it to me. It was heavier than I’d expected.

  I stood up and shuffled sideways past the long row of knees, then walked down the main aisle twenty rows to the lip of the stage. I lifted the lens to my eye and pointed it at Devine. He noticed me, sidled over, still talking, and posed for a good shot. I continued to hold the camera in front of my face. It occurred to me that I didn’t know what to do next. How did one work this thing? Was there something, perhaps, I was supposed to know about flashbulbs? I stood still, and Devine stood still, pointing his face at the camera that was pointing at him. Then he squinted quizzically, shrugged, pivoted, and strolled toward the ot
her end of the stage. I returned to my seat and handed the camera back to my father. He grinned and shook his head. My siblings rolled their eyes.

  It was a risk to hold in my hands any unfamiliar complicated object, or even a simple one, such as a baseball bat. I had taken the Cub Scout oath because all the boys were doing it; the same assumption—that any organized activity my peers were volunteering for must be a requirement of boyhood—compelled me to join a Pee Wee baseball team. The best part was the uniform: a bright orange T-shirt, the team name—MAPLE LEAF—inscribed in black on the front. The rest was a mix of boredom, bafflement, and ineptness. Every game, all game long, I stood in right field, inert, my hand clammy in my glove, listening to the distant, wind-muffled sounds of other boys hollering at each other. For the season, I went hitless—bat and ball never made contact—and the team went winless: 0–11.

  It was only after practice, when I trudged across the diamond and through the opening in the chain-link fence, then headed home alone, that happiness, even exhilaration, began to take hold of me. It might have been that, as with the moment after I left the confessional, I felt the joy of a dreaded thing being over. But it was more than that: it was my being alone, walking home, but having a while until I would arrive and so, for a time, being unaccounted for, accountable only to myself, living my life in secret, accompanied only by whatever dog chose to tail me for a block and by my own meandering thoughts or the scrap of a tune I’d begun humming without being aware of it. The distance from the ball field to home was only a little more than a mile, but anything might happen on that walk. One afternoon, practice ended under menacing slate-gray clouds. A block into my walk, with a thunder crack, the sky opened. Hail, swift and sharp, pelted me. It hurt. But I liked the chill of it and the feel of hailstones melting inside my shirt, trickling down my back. I liked that I was caught in something vast and wild and mindless but something natural, something that happens, something that will end eventually.