My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  The grown-up world, inhabited by Valerie Harper’s sister and my teachers and my parents and those strangers onto whose porches I flung the afternoon paper in the dusk, remained inscrutable, although I lived within it, or alongside it. I did not fully comprehend the messages it sent. One weekend, a few of us kids tagged along as our dad drove downtown to his grandmother’s apartment. Grandma Carey, we were told, had decided to get rid of a bunch of her belongings, little things she had no use for but that children might cherish. She would like us to have them—Grandma Carey, who normally seemed indifferent to us, even silently disdainful. Who knew what treasures might soon be ours to divvy up: a conch shell with the sound of the ocean trapped inside it? Bright strands of beads? Books about adventurous orphan boys? Postcards from lands across the sea? This day was one of those unearned and sudden gifts of childhood, like the occasional day when our father thought, oh, what the heck, he’d split his big bowl of spare change among us, and we could buy whatever we wanted with the coins, a Big Hunk or candy cigarettes or a Matchbox car. As we drove home from her apartment, Grandma came with us, her big, mysterious cardboard box in the trunk. Then, while she sat in the living room with my mother, chatting, I waited quietly in the next room. I felt myself being mature, being patient and considerate. I kept waiting. I waited and waited. Finally, I could take it no longer. I entered the living room and approached my mother. “Mom,” I said, “when are we going to look at Grandma’s things and decide who gets what?”

  Grandma Carey glared at me. “What a selfish child!” she said.

  I understood immediately that I had been misled, that she had never intended to give us a thing. Had my parents misinterpreted her intentions, or had they spoken of them imprecisely enough that I happily misread them to my benefit? Regardless, I felt myself suddenly, and merely, a child: judged unfairly—and helpless to defend myself.

  At such a time, the world of grown-ups seemed to be populated by a wholly different species, one whose customs and interests were arcane. There was something important that adults knew, and they weren’t telling. At the parish picnic every summer, while the kids lurched along in the three-legged race or potato-sack race or gripped a thick rope for tug-of-war, the grown-ups were the ones on the periphery, the moms keeping watch on us with half an eye, peeling Saran wrap off big bowls of macaroni salad and melon balls, speaking mysteriously to one another, laughing and nodding. The dads were pressing burgers flat on the grill or gathering in a circle in the distance, smoking, flicking ashes, eyeing the trees, or they were slicing twine from bales, strewing hay on the ground, calling the children over to sprawl in it, then circling us, tossing coins toward the hay and laughing as we scrambled for them: dimes, nickels, quarters, sometimes whole dollars; they kept coming—here, then here—a bright coin, then another, descending upon us, spinning, glittering in the sun; we stretched our whole bodies toward them, toward our fathers’ offerings.

  Oh, to be older, to be the one with a pocket full of change, the one with a lighter in his shirt pocket and a hand on the wheel. The summer of my thirteenth year, the most I could do was be the attentive and clever older brother. Kim and Erica were six and four and bored, standing on the back lawn in pigtails and sundresses, sullenly kicking a rubber ball back and forth, or sitting cross-legged on the rec-room floor, staring at their dolls’ fixed smiles. I owned a guitar and knew six or seven chords and saw before me week upon week of nothing but free time, so I recruited my sisters into a band: the Purple People. I would be songwriter, guitarist, arranger, producer, audio technician, concert promoter, and general impresario. We gathered in my bedroom, where I presented Kim and Erica with material to learn—a ballad about a friendly leprechaun who lived beneath a sewer grate, an ode to doors and the varied sounds they make—and, when they had rehearsed sufficiently, I recorded their performance on cassette. The girls played xylophone, bicycle bell, and coffee can and did all of the singing. If Erica, distracted by sudden doubts about the value of our project, forgot the lyrics and collapsed into giggles, or if Kim, overcome by shyness, began to stammer, then whisper, then retreat into a pained silence, I could stop the tape, rewind it a few seconds, embolden the girls with some cheering words, and start again mid-song. Not once, when the tape was rolling, did I join in the singing, pubescent self-consciousness having gathered around me like a fog. Who knew how long these tapes would be around and who might hear them. I would assent to my strumming being heard, but not my voice.

  That same summer of 1972, the family spent a week at a cabin on an island in Puget Sound. We weren’t roughing it; there was a public swimming pool across the street. One afternoon, I stood in the warm chlorinated water, holding Kim in my arms. She had not yet learned to swim, and I was the strong big brother. I held her in front of me and strode around in the shallow end, my legs cutting easily through the water. “Isn’t this fun?” I announced. Then I turned and walked slowly toward the deeper water, the concrete bottom of the pool rough against my feet. The incline was steeper than I’d expected and, because I was holding Kim, hard to negotiate. I felt myself weakening, being overcome by the water. Kim and I were up to our chins. Did she know we were in danger? I hoped not. I didn’t call for help—I was too embarrassed. I gritted my teeth, took frantic deep breaths. Desperate for traction, I scratched at the bottom of the pool with my toes. Somehow I gained my footing and enough strength to move us haltingly away from the deep end. Gradually, the water lowered around us. I returned us to the shallow water, where we belonged.

  One night that same week, driving the family back to the cabin on a dark road through the woods, my father, silent at the wheel, was taking the turns too fast and hurtling over hills. It was mildly thrilling—and, I realized, possibly frightening to my little sisters. As we plunged down a hill, in order to cheer them, I squealed, “Whooo!”

  “Shhh!” my mother said. She looked at me sternly. For a moment, the curtain between the child’s world and the adult’s lifted; I glimpsed a darkness, an uncertainty I was living in and rarely sensed but that my mother was aware of constantly. Pretending to delight in my father’s reckless driving, I had risked encouraging that recklessness. My anxious mother knew better: she was maintaining her vigilant watch over him, her watch over all of us. She was trying to keep us safe.

  My mother’s every act implied a vision of the world as an orderly, dignified thing. There was a God, a merciful one, whose perfect wisdom was beyond our comprehension, and His spirit breathed perpetual life into the universe, and that life was revealed most powerfully in our capacity to love, and that love, as a daily practice, looked a lot like respect, and that respect extended beyond oneself and others and into one’s surroundings. It was my mother who promised that, if I vacuumed the rec room, I could join the family at a matinee movie and then, when I had finished the job, bent down, ran her fingertip across the floor, and said, “There’s dirt here still. You’ll have to vacuum again.” But it was also she who scolded and sent away a man who’d come to the door with a petition to keep “coloreds” out of the neighborhood; it was she who turned to me then and said, “It reminds me of that song you like—‘The child is black, the child is white, together they learn to see the light.’ ” It was she who, when I found a crumpled ten-dollar bill on the street, made me earn the right to keep the money by knocking on every door in the neighborhood and saying to everyone who answered, “I found this money in the street. Is it yours?”

  And it was she who ensured that the whole family attended Mass every Sunday. My father, when he lived in the house, came, too, although I rarely sensed that he was as enthusiastic about the ritual as my mother. He seemed to attend as a matter of course more than as a matter of faith.

  One Sunday, for some reason, our mother could not attend the same Mass as the rest of us, so Kevin, Dana, and I accompanied our father to church. We paraded silently toward the front and slid into the second pew, facing the pulpit. No one sat in front of us. A few minutes into the Mass, Dana
did what she often did, for little apparent reason: she giggled. “Quiet,” our father whispered. “May almighty God have mercy on us,” the priest pronounced. I stiffened, stared at my lap, sealed my lips shut. Then I giggled, my efforts to muffle the sounds succeeding only in making them burst out more violently. Our father leaned forward, turned his head, and shot us dark looks. “Stop it,” Kevin pleaded. “Christ have mercy,” the parishioners proclaimed in unison. Kevin erupted in laughter. Our father glowered, fixing his gaze before him. Then the priest stepped up to the pulpit. Dana snickered. Our father’s shoulders trembled. He put his hand to his mouth—and he giggled. He was overcome; he could not stop. We all were overcome, giggling uncontrollably. The priest glared at us. “Sorry, sorry,” our father muttered as he stood up, and we all stood up with him, biting our lips, staring at the floor, staring at our feet as we walked swiftly out of the pew, into the aisle, and out of the church. Once outside, in the crisp air, the sounds of birds and traffic around us, we exploded with laughter. We laughed and we laughed, and then it was out of us completely, finally, and we wiped our eyes and we drove home and we did not tell our mother.

  The energy making mischief within us that morning might have been the kind that spawned The Daily Nonsense, the household newspaper my brother published when he was fifteen. MAD magazine was a likely influence, too. Kevin was revealing himself to be fiercely smart and sensitive to the absurd and to the use of language as a means of subversion and delight. He sat at the desk in his bedroom and patiently wrote The Daily Nonsense in pencil; he had to take great care, since the paper was minuscule—its tininess a kind of apology, an admission of its undersized ambitions: it came in folio form, a single, folded two-inch-by-three-inch sheet of paper. EARTH INVADED! RAY GUNS! one headline screamed. The accompanying article read:

  Mrs. Ray Smith discovered today that the earth in her back yard garden was being invaded by a few slugs. She called her husband (Ray) on the phone.

  He was so upset he gunned his engine all the way home.

  The weather report:

  Look outside. On a 3 x 5 inch piece of paper describe the weather. Soak the paper in pig fat, stand on your head and say “rats!,” salute General Electric, hold the paper over your head and sneeze. Read it. It will describe the weather exactly.

  A political editorial:

  The only time Spiro Agnew opens his mouth is to change feet.

  While I was squinting and chortling at The Daily Nonsense and deciding I admired my brother more than I had thought, and while Kevin was sharpening his pencil and his wit, bending over another little scrap of paper that would be his next issue, our father was coming unmoored again.

  He could not be depended upon even to remember a birthday. Our mother’s came, and he ignored it or forgot it, so she gave herself a present: a day away from the house, away from him. “Pack some things. Get in the car,” she told us kids. “We don’t need your dad—we can have fun by ourselves on my birthday.” It was as if our parents were separated again; it was as if we were rehearsing for a future in which he would not exist. The day was gray and chilly—autumn, in its first week, already ferociously devoted to its business—but it was the ocean, the beach, that our mother aimed for. We drove three hours and spent all day with our jacket collars up, braving the winds whipping in from the Pacific. Who knows if our father cared that we were gone. Who knows if he noticed.

  He had slipped back into the habit of arriving home late for dinner, liquor on his breath, or not arriving at all. He was having trouble at work, although he no longer admitted that to my mother. “Fine,” he would say, “everything’s fine,” when she asked how things were at the office. But on many weekdays he would sleep in, then rush out the door late for work. His secretary would call our mother to confirm that he was coming to the office, then cover for him as best she could while she waited.

  But his bosses noticed. After fourteen years on the job, he was neglecting his work. They would not fire him, not yet. They were Japanese—above all else, they valued loyalty. They would try to help him. Was he having trouble with drink? They paid to have him tested at a local hospital that specialized in treating addictions. No, he was told, he was not an alcoholic. Well, he and his bosses decided, he would just have to try harder. He would have to be more disciplined.

  In the meantime, my mother—always disciplined, always planning ahead—had earned her degree and, in a Catholic school in a nearby town, begun working as a first-grade teacher. She wasn’t being paid much, but she was bringing in something. More important, she had begun a career. If we ever had to survive without support from our father, we could do it. It wouldn’t be easy, but we could do it.

  In a photo from this time, it is Thanksgiving. My father, at the dining room table, bends over the roasted turkey, gripping a long-bladed carving knife, scraping meat from a leg. His expression is one of absolute attention—attention to doing a dad’s work. But he is a man in danger of losing his job, of losing the salary that has allowed him to build this house and feed, clothe, and educate eight children. He is at risk of losing the trust of his wife and the confidence of his sons and daughters. At his office and in his home, he is ill at ease. Now, at the center of our celebration, as he picks up the knife again for the ritual carving, is he thinking of these things? No one would know: he is not the kind of man to speak a word of such thoughts. He is the kind of man who, at Thanksgiving, knows his responsibility is to carve the bird and does so expertly. His hair is long, swept back on the sides, and hanging down over one eye. It has gone almost entirely gray.

  36

  My junior high school was a sprawling brick prison of a building, its parking lot crammed with portable classrooms to handle the overflowing swarms of platform-soled, hormone-addled children. It was there that my seventh-grade English teacher, a strict, stout German, circled our desks, a whistle on a string around her neck so she could squeal us periodically into submission. It was there that my reward for enrolling in wood shop was to be taunted daily by a squat, muscular black kid in a knit cap who roamed the room, stalking me, whispering that if I crossed paths with him after school, I’d regret it. It was there that I met Al, a fellow twelve-year-old with a long mop of brown hair and a sly smile that veered easily into a smirk. Al was of the opinion that the old folk song “Erie Canal” would be improved if it were entitled “Anal Canal.” He explained that for a long time he had been under the misapprehension that girls, unlike boys, had multiple penises, springing from their loins like a bouquet. Immediately, Al and I became best friends, and we stayed so until I went to college.

  Al’s house, unlike mine, was a glorious confusion, stinking of cigar smoke and boiled potatoes. His dad was an electrical engineer, a tinkerer, so there were gadgets scattered about the house, boxes of plastic or wood half opened, wires and springs dangling out. My own house was tidy and silent; my friends didn’t go there. Al’s house was a place for lounging around, for clattering down the basement stairs, for blasting the stereo, while his mother smiled and foisted cookies upon us.

  As I did, Al and his older brother, Kurt, loved music—but their interest was obsessive, their knowledge exhaustive and esoteric. I liked whatever was poppy and maudlin in the Top 40—I was big into Bread and Jim Croce and Gilbert O’Sullivan; Al and Kurt had given themselves wholly over to dark, weird English bands that specialized in ten-minute organ and guitar jams and released double or triple albums with names like Lizard Tails in His Majesty’s Wardrobe and Fables from the Lunar Zoo. In the unkempt, cramped sanctuaries of their bedrooms—which they seemed not to be under any obligation to clean—were uncategorizable messes of albums and singles and cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes and speakers and turntables and tuners and coiled headphone cords. It was Al who taught me that vinyl records can be washed, carefully, with soap and water—a valuable tip if your collection, as theirs did, came mainly from flea markets. Kurt was a shy Brian Wilson type, holing up in his room all day with
his cheap electric guitar, practicing riffs from Yes and King Crimson albums and writing his own songs.

  I, too, was still writing songs, although my subject matter had changed. I was walking the school halls surrounded by girls who were different from what they’d been the year before. Suddenly they were lovely to look at and alluringly mysterious: objects of an intense, baffling desire. The girl who won my exclusive adoration was Cherie. She and I had been assigned by our homeroom teacher to take attendance each morning. At the front of the class, with the roster before us on the desk, pencils in hand, we stood side by side, bantering in our few moments together in the coded way of people who share an important and private project. She stood close enough that I took note of the way her chestnut hair curled as it fell upon her shoulder; I observed the tanned skin of her forearm. Her easy, bewitchingly crooked smile, directed toward me, seemed an emissary from some far-off golden land, its fragrant air rich with mystery. I fell for Cherie hard—fell in love, I thought. What else could it be? The passion lasted three years, unrequitedly—lasted that long, probably, because it was unrequited.

  Soon after she began haunting all of my thoughts, Cherie started going steady with Brad: handsome and unflappable, with shoulder-length wavy blond hair, a puka-shell necklace, muscles, and a pool. I didn’t stand a chance.

  Still, if Cherie declined to be the girl in my life, she could not refuse to be the girl in my songs. Her name was fortunate, since it gave me a rhyme for “marry.”

  I hadn’t a clue how to interact with girls. How this could be so with all the females in my house—my mother and six sisters—I don’t know. Maybe it was that my early model of womanhood was idealized and untouchable: the Virgin Mary—exquisitely beautiful, eyes downcast, with an air of knowing something I was yet unworthy to hear. Girls seemed to be a separate, prettier, superior species. It was almost impossible to imagine them as living in actual houses, sitting down to dinner with parents and siblings, watching TV, sleeping. To the best of my understanding, they did not shit.