My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  That evening, as we drove away from her childhood home, Lauren said, “My parents think you’re polite.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “And my brother thinks you’re stupid.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t talk.”

  It’s true. I didn’t talk. My tongue was bent, debilitatingly so.

  I felt most at ease with language when the communication was one-way and scripted: when I was reading an announcement into the microphone during my morning radio shift or, in the privacy of my notebook, tinkering with syllables, with the rhythms and whispery implications of them. Only a part of me was speaking then, a part I felt comfortable with, and no one talked back.

  So timorous in conversations with strangers, so used to stewing in my private juices, I began to sense that broadcast journalism was an imperfect career choice. At the heart of reporting is a genuine curiosity about other people and a relentless desire to learn the truth about them, especially uncomfortable truths, the ones they would prefer to conceal. Me? I didn’t like to use the phone. At the grocery store, if the shortest line led to a noticeably chatty cashier, I chose the longer one. Before leaving my apartment, I peeked through the curtain to confirm that I would encounter no neighbor or postal worker with whom I might be required to converse.

  A journalist is required to converse. In my junior year, I was selected to have a very difficult conversation. Two disgruntled members of the WSU basketball team had revealed to a friend of mine, another apprentice TV reporter, that a few star players were receiving special treatment from the head coach, and that treatment might be illegal. If not, they claimed, it was at least unethical. Players’ academic transcripts might have been altered. Poor performers in the classroom were being reinstated and playing again, maybe without first meeting the university’s criteria for improving their grades.

  Four of us journalism students were put on the story. We would investigate and then, on our weekly cable TV news program, share what we had discovered. My duty was to confront the coach, a burly, gregarious, charismatic man who, I suspected, could squish me between his fingernails as if I were a flea. I would go to his office. I would ask him to respond to the charges against him.

  Our faculty adviser, wanting us to catch the coach off guard, recommended that we not call him first. Instead, with a cameraman, I walked into the basketball office in the athletic building and asked to see the coach.

  “Do you have an appointment?” asked his secretary.

  “No,” I said. “We’re with Cable 8 News—it’s a student TV program—and we have some important questions for him. He really should talk with us.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, please, if possible.”

  The secretary left her desk. A minute later, she returned. “He’ll give you five minutes. But no camera.”

  Alone, I entered the coach’s office. Surrounded by cabinets filled with golden trophies and plaques and signed basketballs, he sat, glowering, steely-eyed, behind a desk. “What’s so goddamn important?” he said. He did not ask me to sit.

  I explained the charges that his players had made against him. I told him that we planned to air a story about them. Did he have a response? For twenty minutes, glaring at me, he fumed, sputtered, and yelled, claiming that the complaining players were bush leaguers. They were crybabies, fueled by envy. In taking them seriously, I was proving myself a fool. He’d recruited them and given them a chance to succeed, but they had underperformed, and now they were inventing stories to excuse their own failings. He wouldn’t get into a “pissing match” with them. As for me, I should be ashamed of myself. Had I no self-respect? What kind of journalism were they teaching in the Communications Building, anyway?

  Pretending that I wasn’t trembling—having pretended so since I entered his office—I muttered my thanks, spun around, and left. I was Mike Wallace: I had ambushed him. But I wasn’t sure I liked it. The next day, as I was walking across campus to class, the coach crossed my path twenty steps ahead. He spied me, pivoted, and strode straight toward me. “Hey!” he screamed, jutting his arm out, pointing at me, jabbing his finger at the air repeatedly, as if shooting off rounds. “Did you ever take a course in logic? Do you know what logic is? You need to learn about it!” Then he turned and stomped off.

  I had done a journalist’s duty. I had nettled a public figure. I had asked the hard questions. I had parted a curtain in service of the truth.

  But I was beginning to feel that such curtains might be better parted by others. I wasn’t up to it. I was a coward, probably. Nonetheless, after graduation, I would seek a job in broadcasting. This, too, was an act of cowardice, though I preferred to think of it as practicality. I had made a career decision years before; why change now and watch the work I had done come to nothing? Years before, Kevin had tried college—his most gratifying moments had been in poetry courses—but he had dropped out, unable to stomach the idea of all those classes he would have to take because they were required of him, not because he had a genuine interest in them. He was working on a Seattle pier now, driving a fish delivery truck by day, writing poems by night. I, though, like my father, had stuck it out, through the physical education and geology and sociology classes, through the exams and term papers and oral presentations, and earned a degree—earned my ticket into a professional world waiting patiently with its fixed structures and meanings that I could take on as my own.

  Still, I had begun to sense that a life in television might be a kind of betrayal, a silencing of the self I had coaxed into the light and encouraged to start talking. The truths I was interested in uncovering were of a kind not heard about on TV: they were permanent and unspeakable and incompletely knowable but present in poetry, behind the words, like ghosts. When I reported the news, the words I used were just words, delivering information only, erasing themselves in the moment they were spoken. How much good could they be on mornings such as that December one when I arrived at the radio station, as usual, at five-thirty, the sun not yet up, to prepare for my shift? Dave, the news anchor, was already there, the normally jovial, nimble-witted Dave, but he looked stricken.

  “Morning?” I said.

  “They got Lennon.”

  He bit the words as he said them. He didn’t have to say more. Somehow I understood immediately what he meant.

  For the next three hours, I sat in front of the control board, microphone propped in the air before me, feeling inadequate to the task of talking. I merely played Beatles records and, when I spoke, said mainly that there was little to say. I was no broadcaster. I was someone who wished he were home, alone, who wished he hadn’t woken up yet.

  And what words did I say on the air that week in May, the one that began when I rose Sunday morning to an eerie gloom, a dimness not right for that time of day? Stepping outside, I saw, in the west, a wall of black cloud advancing steadily toward me; in the east, the sky was a lucid blue. By the time the cloud had swallowed the sun entirely and a dark snow had begun to fall, I had heard that Mount St. Helens, three hundred miles to the west, had erupted. This was not snow; it was ash—a cadaverous gray descending upon everything, an inch of fine, dead powder shrouding the town. What words I spoke on the radio afterward, who knows? I remember only that morning: sitting by my window, silent, watching ash sift from the sky and gather on the branches and roofs and cars and roads, the world becoming blank and mute as the moon, and as implausible.

  56

  The town of Great Falls, Montana, hugs a bend of the fretfully meandering Missouri River. The falls themselves are famous for stunning Lewis and Clark with their unruly beauty, then setting them back weeks in their transcontinental journey, forcing them to lift their dripping boats and supplies from the water and portage for miles through untamed terrain. When I moved to Great Falls after college, lured by an offer to be an actual professional television reporter for eight hundred dollars a month, the area seem
ed hardly less wild and remote to me. The town was at the southern edge of a glacial plain of wheat fields and ranches and archaeological digs and tiny unincorporated outposts with one blinking stoplight and two taverns. Winter began in October and ended in late spring; in the midst of it, with the town ice-bound, with mountains of plowed snow shoved to the edges of parking lots and the sides of streets, the little hairs in my nose and ears froze as soon as I stepped outdoors. I hadn’t known they could do that. Until my car’s ignition clicked and clicked and refused to turn over in the morning, I hadn’t known that I should attach a portable heater to the engine at night to keep it warm while I slept. My first apartment was across the street from an air force base, close enough to its radar system that, every twenty-three seconds, my television and stereo and clock radio beeped wanly. Other than being a home to flyboys, Great Falls was a town of cowboy painters and cattle auctions and pickups with gun racks and Reagan stickers and Patsy Cline on the radio wringing my heart and Merle Haggard singing outlandishly of the good old days “when a girl could still cook and still would,” his throaty, taut-jawed baritone making him sound almost persuasive. In the local movie theaters, the feature film was abruptly halted midway through and the lights flicked on to give moviegoers a chance to buy popcorn and Goobers. The town’s major landmark, looming darkly and conspicuously on the north side of the river, was a giant smokestack—once the world’s tallest—sticking up like an extinguished cigarette. The stack had been left there by the Anaconda Copper Company, which had closed its smelter and refinery and abandoned the town a couple of years before I arrived. One of the first stories I reported for KRTV was about the demolition of the stack, to great fanfare, before a crowd of tens of thousands.

  Shortly after I arrived in Montana, my mother wrote to me. She was thriving, having settled into a career as an elementary school principal and gotten married again—to Russ, whom, as chance would have it, she had known thirty years earlier, in high school. He, too, had had a long first marriage and several children. As a teenager, Russ had been sweet on my mother; to his everlasting joy, they once shared a kiss, chaste though my mother may have meant it to be. It was eight years now since my father had died; in those years, my mother had not spoken much to me about him. However, as I began my TV career, he was on her mind:

  Chris, I have no doubt that you will reach all your goals, even if they change along the way. You’ve got what it takes: ambition, perseverance, youth, and talent. My one concern is that you have a lot of the qualities that your dad had, the ones that helped him reach his career goals, but they also prevented him from taking side trips and relaxing once in a while. He was very hard on himself and could never quite reach the perfection he expected of himself.

  Was I a perfectionist? Did I work too hard? Was I setting myself up for failure? I was surprised by my mother’s warning; I thought I was doing merely what I was supposed to do. I hadn’t considered that there was an alternative.

  At KRTV, I was assigned to anchor the weekend evening newscasts. On weekdays, I would be an all-purpose reporter, my particular beat being the county courthouse: the affairs of the county commission and the local criminal justice system. But I had an idea of something else I might do. Two months after I began working at the station, I approached Ed, the news director, with an earnest but unusual proposal: what did he think about a cameraman and me driving down to Missoula, three hours away, and spending a day with Richard Hugo, who taught at the university there? We could make a thirty-minute documentary out of it.

  Ed looked at me blankly. “Who’s Richard Hugo?”

  “He’s a poet. An important one. And he lives in Montana—we’re lucky about that. He even writes about the state, about its rivers and little towns and taverns. I’d love to interview him and get a sense of his daily life.”

  “Poetry? I’m not sure I see the purpose in this. Let me think about it. I’ll get back to you.”

  I waited and waited, imagining in the meantime how I might approach the project: maybe Hugo would let me sit in on a class or two; maybe he’d take me fishing or drinking. Spending a whole day with me, he might loosen up, let his guard down, reveal something of the inner life of a poet, let slip a few secrets about the art.

  Weeks passed. I heard nothing from Ed about my idea. Finally, grudgingly, he agreed.

  The next morning, Ed poked his head out of his office door. “Forhan!” he yelled, and motioned for me to come into his office. He was holding a fragment of wire copy that he had ripped from the Teletype. He gave it to me, then sat back on the edge of his desk, his hands behind his head. “Your poet’s dead,” he said.

  Was he grinning a little?

  For the next few weeks, Ed teased me relentlessly about the Forhan jinx. Poets and I were a fatal mix. “I heard that Richard Brautigan came through town yesterday,” he’d say, “and he started to feel really sick.”

  A few weeks later, Kevin wrote to me. He was responding to a letter in which I had praised his poetry unreservedly. “The pride is brotherly,” I had written. “The awe is not.” I had reminded him how important his writing was to me, how important it was that he keep writing.

  Chris, you remember that letter you wrote? I’ve read it twice, once two months ago, and once again just now. I didn’t want anything to do with it in the meantime, and I believe you understand why, and that you’ll forgive the wait. It meant a great deal to me, more perhaps than it should have, and it came at a perfect time. The next day I made a deliberate decision about my writing, one I’d been on the verge of making for months, one I seem to have to make all over again every year or so—a choice, if you will, between cowardice and uncertainty. I always choose the latter, but it came a little early this year—thank you.

  A short while before your letter arrived I heard Richard Hugo read, he was in town. Everyone commented about his sad state, his weight, his limp, his wheeze—a couple of weeks later he was dead. The last poem he recited was a new one, about trees and grass and elfin spirits and lovers, and he read it magnificently. It was one of those poems that remind you of what’s possible.

  What’s possible: I wanted to achieve that in poetry. But I was a TV newsman. Had I chosen cowardice over uncertainty? Had I chosen the safety of a stable, respectable career over a more meaningful life, an unpredictable but vital one devoted to art and imagination? I had chosen steady health benefits and the possibility of professional advancement—I was thinking of the future. My brother, meanwhile, was summoning up, and summing up, a past that was waiting patiently to be reckoned with:

  Stranded shrub root.

  Brick, ash, boot. Brick cool.

  Shadow cool, palm to the fire.

  Toes on the hearth. Mother,

  Father. Oak twisps. Twist of smoke.

  Those lines were in a poem called “Adding Up Home.” It was my home; those were my parents; the twist of smoke was mine, too—my ungraspable childhood, its ungraspable implications. And the words were my brother’s.

  If my mother was right, I was following my father’s path of professional ambition and perfectionism and duty. I might be turning toward the world and away from myself. I might be living my father’s life over again. My brother was trying to make a different kind of life, in poetry—and he was trying to make sense in it of what our father was, of what our father did.

  A Strange Farewell

  I wish my father had grown old,

  troubled with wisdom, a bit daft, frayed

  at the edge, but of use, like a patch quilt.

  My father was a crazy coward,

  and I won’t live that life over again

  but it’s a strange farewell to want to live

  by strength of will, and die by accident.

  We all beg wisdom of the dead,

  but in secret: perhaps an ambitious weakness

  for saying the unsayable

  is the babbling of drunks, fools, a
nd poets.

  It seems that among the living

  wisdom is essentially incidental,

  silence in the presence of a child,

  baseball talk at a funeral,

  a loving nod in that odd moment of weakness.

  But I wish my father had grown old,

  not perhaps fully recovered, always wearing

  the same tie, occasionally ill at ease,

  and babbling away.

  I had been reading, still, mainly Stevens and Ashbery, and—although I would not have said so then—my own poems were intellect-driven, abstract, emotionally restrained, and generally impenetrable. I was so intent on manipulating language to make it inhabit an elaborate, projected poetic realm that I was often blind to what the language was really doing. Dana came north to visit once, and I showed her some of my poems. She had recently moved to Yuma, Arizona, her own remote small town, after marrying a marine stationed there. Like our marine father, he was smart, articulate, distant, and unyielding—Dana was only a few years away from leaving him. As she lay on my living room carpet, scanning a new, long, allusive poem I was proud of, I awaited, in silence, her verdict. The poem was spoken by a persona, some indeterminate actor; it was called “The Last Time I Played Hamlet.” Would my sister understand the concepts the poem was contemplating, the particular rocky philosophical path the language was traveling down?

  After a few minutes, she looked up. “It’s true,” she said, “what you write about Dad. I’ve felt that way, too.”

  No, no, I told her. The poem is about Hamlet, about an invented character playing Hamlet. Was she familiar with the play? The situation, I said, is all set up in the poem’s first few lines: