My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  I had learned about love mainly from pop songs, which might be why I was under the impression that someone you desire is obligated to desire you back. When I heard that Debbie, who was Cherie’s best friend, had a crush on me, I was flattered—also disappointed, not just because the wrong girl was showing an interest in me but because now, as I understood it, I would have to be her boyfriend. For a while, I tried it. I met Debbie after school every day and held her hand as we walked the two blocks until my route home split off from hers; I bought her a cheap metal necklace with a heart pendant and paid an extra dollar to have her name and mine engraved on opposite sides; when anyone took me aside and conspiratorially asked if it was true that Debbie and I were going steady, I admitted that it was—and I was proud to do so. I had a girlfriend, an official one. I was in the game. I was not regarded entirely without interest by the opposite sex. But I couldn’t keep up the ruse for long. I would have to do the brave and honorable thing: I wrote Debbie a note explaining that it would be unfair of me to continue going steady with her, considering that it was really her best friend I was in love with. There would be no negotiation, no trial separation, no mutual effort to rekindle whatever fires might have burned in our first days. I folded the paper multiple times into a small, tight square and, during a break between classes, as Debbie passed me, smiling, in the hall, handed it to her swiftly, with an apologetic, compassionate frown.

  I was out: the breakup was clean, with no conversation—perfect.

  37

  Every waking moment, Cherie flitted at the border of my thoughts or sat smack in the center of them, but I never mentioned her to my mother or father. She seemed safer hidden. Or I was safer. If I were to talk to my parents about this puzzling, consuming desire, I might be judged. I felt pre-accused. I knew that what I felt for Cherie was essentially shameful, or my weakness in the face of it was. Maybe it was the family’s Catholicism that made me think this; maybe it was my mother’s emphasis on spotlessness, on orderliness of home and of heart; maybe it was the tension in that house, the feeling that the family was teetering at a cliff’s edge, so anything unpredictable, anything outside of our established pattern of behavior, any candid expression of raw, unresolved feeling, might upset it. Anyway, how could my mother comprehend what it felt like to be a teenager in love?

  And my father? I don’t think it crossed my mind that he might advise me in matters of the heart, or in any matter concerning my murky interior world. I remember him then not as a teacher, a guide, a disciplinarian, or a comforter. I remember him as a body—as pieces of a body. He had grown a beard, and the gray hairs in it had gone yellow from his continual exhaling of cigarette smoke. His fingernails were yellowed, too, and his thumbnails had become oddly dented and grooved: he kept picking at them nervously, unconsciously, with the nail of his ring finger.

  Although we children were unaware of this, he was continuing to fail at work; his bosses in Japan had tolerated his erratic performance and counseled and supported him as well as they could, but they were running out of patience and debating whether it was time to stop giving him another chance and then another. While trying to hang on to his job, he was also having to tend to his grandmother. A few years before, she had briefly remarried, but her second husband had died, and she was living alone in a retirement center. One spring day, walking on a downtown street, she fell—she probably fainted. Diagnosed with severe heart trouble and showing signs of dementia, she was given a pacemaker and, with my father’s consent, placed in a nursing home. My mother was bringing in a small salary to help support the family, but there were still six children in the house, and there were Grandma Carey’s medical expenses to deal with, and my father—the central breadwinner, the believer in discipline, industry, and self-­reliance—must have been growing dizzy, maybe even desperate, wondering if he was adequate to the demands his life was placing upon him.

  To me, he was still just Dad, which meant, most important, that he sometimes surprised us kids by taking us to a ball game or the lumberyard or the boat show. I had little interest in boats—and our family was surely not in the market to buy one—but my father didn’t mind wandering the big annual boat show downtown, admiring the gleaming white luxury yachts, climbing aboard them to examine their sleek decks and nifty control panels, saying, “Hmmm,” and “Interesting.” What I found interesting—my sole motivation for attending—was whatever big promotional gimmick was being sponsored by the Top 40 radio station I listened to. One year the station brought in a world-record-holding high-diver to astonish the crowds by plunging a hundred feet from a platform into a small pool. Another year it carved out a two-ton chunk of Alaskan glacier and shipped it to the boat show to be gazed upon with wonder.

  The boat show with the fish: that was the last one my father took me to. For weeks, rapt, I had been listening to excited announcements on the radio about the fish I would receive for free if I attended. This wouldn’t be just any fish: it would be a golden koi, the most valuable pet in Japan, the disc jockeys said—prizewinning koi, they announced, sold for as much as twenty thousand dollars. As soon as I arrived at the boat show, taking no chances, I slipped into the line of people awaiting their fish. When my turn came, there were still plenty of fish left—the station had secured ten thousand of them to give away. I was handed a plump, sturdy plastic bag filled with water, a little slip of a golden fish within it. For the next hour, as I walked among the boats on exhibit, I gripped the top of the bag with one hand and supported the bottom carefully with the other. On the ride home, my father behind the wheel in front of me, I sat, my priceless fish on my lap in its plastic bag, and read again the mimeographed note that had come with it:

  You now are the owner of an extremely valuable and enjoyable animal. This fish, of Oriental ancestry, will bring you years of happiness with proper care and attention. Your fish will become so tame you can feed it by hand. We sincerely hope you will build a nice pond in your yard so that you may eventually add to your collection and receive the maximum enjoyment.

  I did not imagine that I would be building a pond, but, once we arrived home, I did find, in a cabinet, a glass bowl adequate to my needs and transferred the fish and its water into it. The koi, getting used to its new home, looked listless. Throughout the evening, I checked on it, peering at this new member of the family, this delicate pet I would care for in exchange for years of happiness. The fish continued to move sluggishly. Then it didn’t move at all. It rose to the surface of the water and floated there, its belly to the ceiling.

  Mine was not the only koi that reached a swift end—almost all ten thousand of them died within a day. Their plane trip from Tokyo over the Pacific had been long and the shift in climate sudden, so they were handed to their new owners fatally dazed and frail. They didn’t stand a chance.

  My father was barely hanging on. Then he fell: in June he was told to collect his things and turn in his key. He no longer had a job.

  He had worked at Alaska Lumber and Pulp since before I was born. His severance package was generous: he would be given his full salary for another six months, until the beginning of the new year. When he told my mother the news, she put her arms around him and said, “This is a good thing. There was too much pressure in that job, too much work—it was killing you. Now you have six whole months to find a new job.”

  Our dad would be home; he would have no reason to stay away. He could begin again—we all could begin again. If the job had been the problem, there was no more problem. In the weeks following the firing, he seemed happier, and so did Mom. They even seemed to enjoy each other. Dad would start looking for work soon, but, in the meantime, this would be a summer of rest and of fun. We planned a two-week family vacation for August—we would travel in our new station wagon down the coast to Disneyland. On the Fourth of July, a few weeks after my father had lost his job, my parents wanted a quiet, leisurely celebration. We boarded a ferry and crossed Puget Sound to a little harbor town, whe
re we would stroll around, duck into a few shops, and stake out a spot on the sidewalk to watch the parade. As my father drove us through town, my mother sitting beside him, I glanced toward the front of the car and saw something I had never seen before: my parents were holding hands.

  One Sunday morning at Mass I saw another new thing: my father, robed, standing behind the lectern, the entire congregation watching as he served as that morning’s lector. He kissed the Bible, set it down gently before him, opened it to the day’s chosen verses, and recited them slowly, steadily, as if he were a man whose daily habit was to contemplate Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians. He looked like someone else’s dad. Had my mother encouraged him to do this, reminding him that it was time he offered himself in service to his church, to the faith they shared? Or was it his idea, part of his project of winning her trust or of persuading himself that he was a changed man?

  Another Sunday, the whole family sat together in a pew, as usual. A guest priest was at the altar, assisting in the celebration of the Mass—he was a visitor for the weekend and had begun work the day before, hearing parishioners’ confessions. Not long after the service began, things began to feel odd. This priest didn’t seem familiar with the liturgy; he mumbled his way through much of it and interspersed Latin into parts of the Mass that had long been spoken in English. Also, there was something wrong with his hair. Was that a wig?

  By the next day, the visiting priest was in jail, two stolen guns and blank checks with our pastor’s name on them having been found in his belongings. He was a con artist and convicted check forger who had recently robbed a gun store in Alabama. For years, in cities around the country, he had impersonated a priest. He couldn’t help himself, he said. It gave him “satisfaction as a human being.”

  The following Sunday, one of our parish’s priests, a real one, explained to the congregation what had happened. Father Englebert emphasized that, although the visitor was fake, the confessions he’d heard were real: they counted. God’s powers are strong enough, he assured us, to work even through an impostor.

  38

  Our car tilted: it was too low on the driver’s side. Otherwise, it was perfect—new and huge and lavishly appointed, a long low boat of a car, a 1973 Plymouth Fury Suburban station wagon, “honey gold,” as the manufacturer had it, with faux-wood panels on the side, luggage racks on top, a tailgate that could, as if by a bit of trickery, swing open from the bottom or from the side, and, best of all for us kids, a bench seat in the far back that faced the rear window, a prime vantage point from which to peer at places as they shrank from view and, by gleefully miming the act of yanking on a cord, to signal any trucker to blast his horn.

  In the Fury, we would travel down the coast to Disneyland—or, as the youngest of us, five-year-old Erica, put it, “Dinneyland.” I know that she said this because I have the tape that proves it. Peggy was unable to make the trip, so Kevin took it upon himself to bring the sounds of it home to her.

  On Kevin’s lap as we sat in the car, or in his grip as we strolled the aisle of some souvenir shop, was the black-and-silver Panasonic cassette tape recorder he’d received for Christmas. In pushing record and pause and stop, Kevin was packaging our travels, making a shape for them, finding a permanent narrative within the larger, fleeting one. He was sixteen and had become the kind of person so thoughtful about experience that he could not help, in some ways, living slightly to the side of it; for Kevin, to have an experience inevitably meant to observe himself having it and therefore to feel its joy or solemnity or horror but also its absurdity or strangeness or wonder. He was conscious of being conscious; he sensed how easy it is to act as though we understand what can’t be understood. This was the boy who had called his minuscule family newspaper The Daily Nonsense. He was the boy whose preferred means of terror was to stalk me silently, slowly, from room to room, wearing Buster Keaton’s deadpan expression, sitting when I sat, standing when I stood, walking when I walked. He was merely being; what was the harm in that? But I was thoroughly creeped out, while he was entertained. And then there was the dead hand. At any given moment, when I had annoyed him enough, Kevin would raise his long, pale, freckled hand and let it hang limp before my eyes. I couldn’t stand it: the raw, simple grotesqueness of it against which there was no rebuttal.

  This family vacation would be a beautiful trance, a dream: Dad wasn’t working—he was just Dad at last—and we would have him, have both of our parents side by side in the Fury’s front seat, or together at a restaurant table, or at the head of a parade of us clicking through the turnstile of some tourist trap; we would have them for as long as we wanted, for as long as it took to wend our way down the coast and back, for as long as it took to forget that things were ever otherwise. We were off to California, where gold glittered in the air and on the license plates, where the land of Mickey and Snow White lay waiting: the place where dreams became real, the place where, just by being there, you were happy.

  On the first day, we drove south through Portland, then west to the coast, to Lincoln City and the Sea Gypsy Motel, a three-story building nestled into a kind of low hillside or dune. At ten that night, leaving our father and mother and sisters in their rooms, Kevin and I ambled down to the beach, to the expanse of packed sand black beneath the night sky. Kevin clicked on the recorder; he would begin documenting our journey here. Should we say something? We should say something. With the waves roaring and the wind whipping into the microphone, we had to shout; we could hardly be heard as we narrated the facts that the waves were roaring, that the wind was whipping, that it was cold and, well, that was about it. “It’s just Chris and I. . . .” Kevin announced into the microphone.

  “And the sea,” I added mock-portentously.

  We were teenage boys with a tape recorder, a deserted beach, self-consciousness, and an arsenal of dull satirical wit. That’s what we were documenting.

  The next day, late in the afternoon, after hours of snaking down the curves of the coastline road, our father said, “Here it is!” and drove the Fury across the state line.

  “We’re in California!” my little sisters sang. “We’re in California!”

  Our father’s words are the first of his that are heard on the tape—the first of only a few. Throughout the trip, he seems to have concentrated, in silence, on driving: on gauging how far we could travel on this tank of gas, on ensuring that he was merging onto the right road, on calculating where the nearest exit was. He might have been enjoying himself, doing the private multiplying and dividing that he was so good at, letting his mind go where it would, regardless of what his children were up to behind him.

  “Poor Dad,” Erica said. “He always has to drive.”

  Our mother, in the front passenger seat, turned around regularly to check on the five of us, to ask who was hungry, who needed a potty break. She was the cheerleader, the first-grade teacher by trade, the one who knew how to lasso kids’ attention, the one who often broke into song: “California, here I come, right back where I started from!” On the third day, as we wove among the redwoods on Highway 101, she was inspired to lead the family in a rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.” Not long after hitting the highway that day, we pulled into the parking lot of Trees of Mystery, a tourist attraction that was hard to miss: its entrance was marked by giant statues, higher than a house, of Paul Bunyan and his trusty companion, Babe the Blue Ox. Paul, in rough black beard, red open-necked shirt, blue jeans, and boots, rested his ax on the ground at his left side while holding his right hand up, palm open: a friendly greeting or a warning to back off.

  We climbed out of the station wagon, paid our entrance fee, and took to the trail that wound through the woods—among trees, we’d been told, so strange, so extravagantly large and queerly shaped, that they had to be seen to be believed. We passed a tree that, if we squinted and were generous with our imaginations, could be said to look something like an octopus. We saw the upside-down tree and the ligh
tning-bolt tree. Standing before another, we listened to a recorded voice inform us of its astonishing resemblance to a kneeling elephant. “It looks like a tree with a lot of roots,” Kevin said.

  Earlier, he had stood beside the road, recorder in hand, capturing the noise of passing traffic. What we are listening to, he whispered, in the awed, excited tone of a jungle explorer who has discovered a new tribe, are the exotic “sounds of California.”

  A few hours later, our mother exclaimed, “There’s the bridge!” The Golden Gate, its orange towers glowing in the afternoon sun, had appeared over the crest of a hill. We were approaching the city that, the last time our dad heard, was where his good-for-nothing father lived. His one short encounter with Nat had happened twenty years earlier. Since that time, how often had he thought about his father? Might he be thinking about him now?

  Our dad broke his silence: “I haven’t seen as much traffic the whole trip as I have the last hour.”

  Getting closer to the bridge, he began to read aloud the highway signs, speaking deliberately and quizzically, mainly to himself, in the way that drivers sometimes do, with a mix of attentiveness and distraction: “Toll plaza. Auto toll fifty cents.” Then the bridge was under us, only air on either side of us, San Francisco gleaming to our left across the bay, its buildings shimmering white in the sun, spilling over hills and down to the dark blue water.

  For a moment, our father’s voice changed, his goofy, deadpan Irish humor rising to the surface. “Boy, that’s scary! You see that big city over there? I don’t want to go to San Francisco.” But he did go, checking us in to a motor lodge in the Tenderloin.