My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  On another afternoon, under a cloudless sky, I gave myself a project: I would count each step the whole way home. One, two, three . . . ten, eleven . . . one hundred and five, one hundred and six . . . one thousand and ninety-nine, ten thousand, ten thousand and one . . . ten thousand and ninety-nine, one million . . . When I arrived home, I made a proud and excited announcement to the first person I encountered: my father, leaning back in his vinyl-covered recliner in the living room, studying the newspaper.

  “Dad?” He looked up. I had his full attention. I was ready to startle him with how smart I’d become, how attuned to the workings of the world. “I just walked home from baseball, and I counted every step. Guess how many it took?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Two billion and four.”

  “You don’t say,” said my accountant father. Then he looked back down at his paper.

  30

  In 1969, after a dozen years in a difficult job, after eight children, my father must have felt overtaxed, maybe panicky, as if he had lit a match and distractedly let it burn to his fingertips. But it was not his habit to confess such a thing, maybe even to himself. Whatever pressure he was under at work was beginning to show there; he was slipping up, by his own admission to my mother. Maybe he was missing meetings, missing deadlines. At home, as my mother told me years later, he was behaving strangely, erratically, not taking care of himself. I had only a nine-year-old’s sense of this: he was Dad, and he was unpredictable, and sometimes this made me wary of him. Terry and Patty were out of the house by now, but six of us remained, including the two little girls, Kim and Erica, only three and one. We were a huge brood, and our mother, without a dependable husband to help her, was overwhelmed. But she kept our clothes clean and pressed and patched; she packed our school lunch boxes and set them on the kitchen counter each morning, ready for us to grab them as we headed out; she was always there, with a box of crayons and colored construction paper for our art projects, with bandages for our wounds

  For several evenings in a row, our father would return home from work in time for dinner; he would engage with our mother in civil, occasionally droll conversation over the lasagna or scalloped potatoes, and that meant life was good for now. That meant—who knew?—that our parents might begin to be happier with each other and then permanently so. They would make plans to go out one night, just the two of them, and then keep those plans, Dad dressing in a sharp blue suit, slapping on aftershave, and brushing his hair neatly, with a perfect part, Mom donning her best dress and a string of faux pearls. They would dance the evening away, and the sixteen-year-old boy my father had been once, the boy whose eye had been caught by my mother on a high school dance floor, would come to life again. He would glide and spin with cheer and conviction, even though—as my mother saw it—he was a much less able dancer than he thought he was, with defective rhythm. What could that matter when he had that patented move, the magic flourish at the start of each dance: he would slide his big wing-tipped foot forward in a theatrical sweep, his wife, in his arms, deciding to keep quiet about how silly it looked. Sometimes, on a weekend evening after dinner, suddenly in the mood for a show, Dad would pull down from a closet shelf the heavy slide projector, set it up in the rec room, roll down a white screen, and show old family photos. Click. “That’s the Olympic National Forest, Mom sitting pretty on a fallen tree.” Click. “That’s the big snow of—what was it, ’56? It took days to dig the car out.” Click. “Oops—a blank.” Click. Click. “Those are the girls at Yellowstone. Old Faithful’s behind them.”

  Then, one night, without having called to warn our mother, our father would arrive home from work hours late, long after the family had eaten. He would find, in the dark kitchen, in the warm oven, his dinner wrapped in foil and, in the living room, my mother sitting alone, resolving this time either to hold her tongue or to let him have it. Then the next night, and the next, he would not come home at all. After arriving the following morning, he would sleep all day. He was there but not there, a husband but not a husband, a father but not a father. If my parents both were home and both out of bed, they kept a distance from each other, speaking, if at all, with stiff courtesy or thinly veiled resentment. They must have become experts at reading each other’s tone: the accusation delivered as ironic apology, the agonized plea for empathy expressed as sarcastic gratitude. We children could read the weather of any room our parents were in. We sensed when a squall was about to erupt and retreated to the solitude and safety of our separate bedrooms.

  Typically, though, our parents did not scream at each other; they seethed and brooded. There were shouting matches and slammed doors, but more prevalent and unyielding was the simple heavy tension in the air, the tension of the unsaid, maybe of the unsayable. We all walked quietly through that house, a tightness in our chests.

  In 1967, after my father had crashed his car, my mother urged him to seek counseling. But he refused. He was a hard worker; he was disciplined. And he wasn’t the type to spill his guts to a stranger. If something needed fixing, he would fix it himself.

  But he couldn’t, or didn’t, and my mother began to realize that a time would come, maybe soon, when he would be of absolutely no help to her, when the responsibility for the children would be hers alone. She made up her mind: she would go back to school. She had always regretted not having been able to finish college, and now she felt not just a vague wistfulness about it but an urgent sense of necessity. Somehow, eventually—because of the end of her marriage or the end of her husband’s ability to function in the workplace—she would have to earn a salary. She would need a degree and marketable skills.

  My father didn’t object to her going to school; he just didn’t understand why she needed to, and he didn’t want to pay for it. As long as she could pay for the tuition out of her household allowance, he told her, she could do as she pleased. She began taking night courses at a community college. Like many other older women with families in the late 1960s, she found herself sitting with pen poised above an open notebook in freshman composition and Psych 101, among slouching, lank-haired students half her age. Before leaving home for class—before donning her long plaid coat, wrapping her hair in a sheer scarf knotted at the chin, slipping her purse over her shoulder, and grabbing her books—she would set out food for our dinner, with notes attached: instructions for when to put the dishes in the oven, at what temperature, and for how long. Peggy was fifteen, the oldest of the children still in the house, and she was happy to help, happy to babysit her five younger brothers and sisters while our mother was taking notes on Freud’s patients’ dreams.

  My mother probably didn’t see herself as being swept up in the women’s movement—she was being swept up by the exigencies of her own uncertain marriage and by her determination to make the most of the nimble mind she had been given. But it turned out that women of her age across the country were having a similar experience: they had been married for two decades, devoting their creative energies and affections to their homes—to their husbands and children; now those children were older, maybe off on their own, their husbands were inattentive, undependable, or gone, and the constrictive social world of the 1950s and early 1960s was crumbling.

  Around the time my mother began going to school, she began visiting an attorney. The two acts seem related: they were calculated steps—maybe desperate ones—designed to improve her life and the family’s life. And maybe save her marriage. Sifting through letters as I walked from our mailbox to the house, I noticed long, slim envelopes addressed to my mother, sent by a law firm. Kevin noticed the letters, too; they lay, menacingly, for days on the Formica countertop of the kitchen. It was probably Kevin who explained to me their significance: Mom and Dad might be divorcing. He deduced that before our mother told us.

  The thought of divorce terrified me: I could not bear to lose what I was used to, even if it was untenable instability and unease.

  Decades later, my m
other told me that she did file for divorce but that she had no intention of going through with it and concealed this fact from my father. She needed to file in order to be granted a legal separation; she wanted him out of the house, out into the open air, away from the family, away from her, where he could think more clearly, where he could learn what being alone, as the man he had become, felt like. Filing divorce papers must have been excruciating for her. She was no longer keeping their problems between the two of them. She had gone to an outside party for help—and her strategy was, in effect, to gain leverage over her husband by making him believe she was willing to divorce him. She had to use that lie to shock him into admitting the truth that he needed help. His wry humor, the goofy wisecracks that had served as a defense against trouble and had charmed her in their early years, wasn’t working anymore. It had become wearying: a sign of him ignoring their problems—ignoring his problems.

  When he was served the papers, according to my mother, he was stunned. He and she were Catholic; they believed that marriage is for life; they had vowed so before a priest twenty years before. His own Catholic mother, Bernadine, had not divorced Nat even after years of him being missing. From the first time, years before, that my mother had broached the topic, my father had refused to consider that Bernadine might have benefited from ending her marriage. A separation from his own wife? Maybe a divorce? The possibility apparently hadn’t crossed his mind.

  My mother told him that if he would get help, she would not proceed with the divorce. She wasn’t merely asking this time; she was giving him an ultimatum. There was something wrong in his head, something haunting him. If he wanted the marriage to survive, he needed to see a psychiatrist.

  So he did. And he left the house, moving into a small, nondescript apartment a few miles away. If someone asked where our father was, our mother instructed us, we should say he was on a business trip.

  The trip lasted almost two years. He had become such a phantom, flickering and fading at the edges of the family, that I don’t recall our home feeling much different when he was gone. It was just less tense, and instead of wondering every evening whether my father would return home in time for dinner, I sometimes wondered whether he would ever return. My mother never visited him at his apartment. Once or twice, it was arranged that we children would visit him. I recall being dropped off, with Kevin and Dana, for a weekend hour or two at his apartment. The place was impersonally furnished: off-white walls without a picture upon them; a cheap sofa upholstered in some solid color—lime green or burgundy; a spare coffee table of dark wood, nothing on it but the gifts he had bought us to mark our brief reunion: one big Time-Life illustrated nature book for each of us—The Universe, Early Man, Animal Behavior. We knelt around his coffee table, turning the pages, muttering, “Thanks, Dad.” Then Terry picked us up and drove us home.

  In that apartment that might have been anyone’s or no one’s, in that sparsely furnished new life in which his obligations had been reduced to just his job and himself, what did our father feel? Maybe overwhelming relief. He had lived with his mother and brothers, then his grandparents, then a platoon of marines in barracks, then his wife and their expanding brood. For the first time in his life, he was alone, absolutely alone. He could wake when he wanted, sleep when he wanted, gaze at the TV all night if it pleased him, eat what he cared to eat, even if it was only hot dogs, canned beans, and frozen dinners. I suspect that he didn’t—as my mother had when he was home—weigh each gram of his food with care to ensure a proper blood sugar level. He didn’t have to ensure much of anything anymore. He had no yard or house to maintain; if the bathroom faucet dripped, he could call the landlord or, hell, just let it drip. When he arrived home from work, whenever that was, he arrived not to tension and questions but to silence and solitude. He must have felt the power of that. Perhaps, with his life stripped bare, he was able to sense, with clarity and force, what he cared about most, what he needed, what made him feel alive. Without the daily requirement of playing the role of husband and father, maybe whatever was at his core, most truly and crucially, revealed itself to him. I wonder if he looked at it, if he had the courage to do so.

  Occasionally, he drove to our house, staying only a minute, long enough to pack a few of us children into the Dodge and take us away somewhere: to a movie, the ice cream parlor, a baseball game. The first summer of the separation was the summer of Woodstock, of men on the moon, of Chappaquiddick, of Manson—but, for me, it was the summer of the Pilots, Seattle’s major league team, in their first season. If we could be in the big leagues at last, playing the Yankees and Red Sox, anything was possible. “Go, go, you Pilots, you proud Seattle team,” the club’s rousing march of a theme song went. “Go go go go go go go go go!”

  And they did go: bankrupt, then east. After one year, the Pilots moved to Milwaukee and changed their name. But, for a summer, my tenth summer, even with my family changing, maybe splitting apart forever, I was young enough to have faith in what felt eternal—and still does: that shock of green, the vast sunlit field, as we stepped up the concrete stairs and into the stands; the players in their blinding white uniforms and dark blue caps; the old, stooped usher who studied our father’s ticket stub, a ball of sweat hanging from the tip of his nose, wobbling, refusing to fall; our dad with us in the bleacher seats, with a bag of peanuts in the shell and a big beer in a paper cup; and down in the bullpen, fists in their jacket pockets, the Pilots’ pitchers—among them Jim Bouton, taking mental notes on the memoir he was writing.

  This was the summer the family vacationed, fatherless, at Ocean Shores, a little Washington beach town. It was chilly and cloudy. My mother in a heavy coat and scarf and six of us children in long pants, we knelt on the beach, heads down, scooping up wet gray sand. The weather didn’t matter: we’d driven a long way, we’d come there to have fun, by God, and we were going to play in this sand. We huddled close together, each of us working on his own project, digging a trench or holding packed sand in two hands, trying to make something of it.

  This was the summer I was old enough to go to summer camp. It was a Catholic camp—there would be no avoiding Mass. But it was set on a lakeshore, so boating and canoeing were promised, and hiking, and a daily trip to the canteen for a candy bar or bottle of pop of my choosing, and campfires at night and ghost stories. For comfort, I brought along my own pillow with a tiger-print case, black and orange stripes. On the first day, I stepped from the bus with my suitcase and pillow and entered the cabin I would share with a dozen other nine-year-olds. A tall blond boy, slack-jawed and sneering, grabbed the pillow from me, scurried to the open back window, and tossed it out. “Tigermaster!” he yelled. “Tigermaster! Hey, Tigermaster!” The other boys laughed, stopped what they were doing, and gathered near him.

  What should I make of this? My cheeks warm, I walked out the front door and around to the back of the cabin. The pillow lay in the high weeds. I picked it up and brought it back inside. The boy yanked it from my hands again and, to the others’ glee, held it out the window for a moment, then dropped it, chanting, “Tigermaster! Tigermaster!” Trembling, suppressing tears, I asked him not to do that anymore and retrieved my pillow. He did it again. Then he grew weary of it, plopped onto his bunk, and stared at nothing, flicking his tongue against his top lip.

  Later that first day, my assigned counselor, a wiry, crew-cut high-schooler, observed in front of the assembled boys that my hair—which had begun to creep over my ears, Brady Bunch–style—was too long, didn’t they agree? Did they have a hippie in their midst? He promised them he would scrounge up some scissors and, that night as I slept, sneak up on me and do what the barber had neglected to do.

  I was a Forhan, mired deep in the habit, when unnerved, of retreating into rigidity and good manners; I requested that he not do that, please. Each morning after that, at the bugle’s call, I rose immediately and made my bed neatly. After each meal, I brushed my teeth with vigor. I asked the counselor if he needed as
sistance carrying those dodgeballs. On the last evening before going home, I received an official commendation: the counselor had named me honor camper, the most obedient boy in the cabin.

  I had successfully kept my head down—including literally. Throughout the week, whenever I walked toward the boat dock on the lakeshore, I avoided raising my gaze to the top window of the big main lodge. With hushed voices, shaking their heads, the counselors had warned us about a former colleague of theirs, a young man who had worked at the camp a couple of years before, someone who had been quite a jovial fellow, immensely popular, but who had gone absolutely mad. Stark raving. He’d been separated from the rest of the camp, confined to the attic of the lodge. If he got loose, he’d be dangerous. It had happened once already, and the consequences to an innocent camper who’d found himself in the madman’s path were something they didn’t care to discuss. Occasionally, throughout the week, one of us boys would glimpse, he thought, the silhouette of the insane man materialize in the window, then vanish.

  Stay where you are, I thought as I walked past the lodge. Just stay where you are.

  31

  My father was miles away, but who needed him? Who needed parents at all? Our little street was the children’s street, the children’s world. Squeezed between Puget Sound to the west and Lake Washington to the east, the city of Seattle had rapidly developed northward, and our secluded dead-end street in the far northeast corner of town was lined on both sides with houses now. At the closed-off end, where I had once dropped that lit match, there were no woods at all anymore: just a tract of upturned dirt, a vast construction site, where a final few houses were rising shoulder to shoulder around a cul-de-sac. Adults had bought these homes. Adults would live in them. But we didn’t have to think about that. Where once, stepping into the rich shade of dense trees, we imagined we were vanishing into the frontier wilderness, we now called to each other across wide concrete slabs sprouting rebar. We gaped at colossal bulldozers and backhoes, ponderous single-minded beasts, inexorably erasing the landscape we knew. And we loved them: their hugeness, their grinding and grunting, their smokestacks puffing black exhaust, their treads with thick muck stuck to them. Who needed parents? We befriended a bulldozer operator, Nels—someone who would greet us with a grin and a salute as we stood, rapt, at the edge of the work site, who would load up his arms with a pile of scrap lumber and hand it over to us, telling us we ought to build something, too. One evening, the construction crew gone, dusk settling in, my friend William and I strayed, as if pulled by some deep invisible current, up the street to the work site. Nels’ bulldozer sat empty, idle. We clambered up and in, plunking ourselves down behind the wheel. We were grown-ups. We were tough and taciturn construction workers. Then we saw what we had half hoped we would not see: the key in the ignition. What choice did we have now? William reached forward and turned the key. The engine sputtered awake. We leaped from the bulldozer, leaving it running, scampered off, and told no one.