My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  My mother is not wholly pleased with the contents of these pages; she regrets that I do not remember my childhood with more pleasure. But she does not regret her gift to me: she talked to me; she told me the truth. She, too, has had her fill of silence.

  * * *

  I still dream about my father, although the dreams come less frequently than they once did. Almost always he is, astonishingly, alive—and ready, at last, to talk. He has returned, sheepish, apologetic, from the realm of the dead, or he never died in the first place. It was a horrible misunderstanding, he explains: he was kidnapped and kept under guard in a small room for years, away from any phone. Or he was an undercover government agent obliged to fake his own death; he might have revealed this to us from the start, but the mission would have been compromised.

  In one dream, he is a dapper, tuxedoed figure who appears at a table next to mine in an outdoor café. “Dad,” I say, “you’re dead. What are you doing here?”

  He looks at me, nearly expressionless, only halfway back in the world. “Woman,” he replies. “I never said thank you.” I understand: he is referring to my mother—the girl he married when she was only seventeen, the girl who could not nudge him awake on their honeymoon, the woman who bore him eight children, who remained loyal to him, entwined with him in marriage, even while he was slowly, silently unraveling. It pains him that he left so abruptly without telling her what she deserved to hear.

  In another dream, almost forty years after his death, I receive a letter from him. It is signed “Dad” in his familiar, elegant script and is written in a breezy, informal way, as if the letter is just the latest installment in a continuing conversation. He tells me that he hasn’t been traveling around the country in search of a new house after all, so he won’t be making plans to see me. Sorry: he knows it has been a long time.

  Is this letter really from my father? Is it possible? I think back to him lying outside his car; I remember his body in the casket; I remember the funeral and the subsequent decades of silence. In the letter, he makes no mention of the death I have lived with for forty years—as if it never happened, as if he merely still exists, as any number of fathers do, and he is sorry that we have not been in touch for so long and sorry we won’t be seeing each other again soon. How can I confirm that the message is truly from him? I need to be sure. If I can do that, I will respond to him. I will write, “I’ll come meet you anywhere. Just tell me where you are.”

  * * *

  Fifteen years after my father’s death, I was living in a little town amid the North Carolina tobacco fields. Only an hour’s drive away, in Jacksonville, lived the uncle I had never met: Jim, my father’s older brother. He was a retired marine, living with his second wife. Of my father’s family, he was all that was left—save perhaps Nat, his father, who had disappeared decades before, and who knew if he was dead or alive? When my mother and Russ, her new husband, visited me from Seattle, my sister Dana drove down from Virginia, and we all decided to pay Jim a visit. My mother had not seen him since the earliest years of her first marriage, four decades before. As far as she could recall, that was the last time my father, too, had seen or spoken to his brother. There had been no bitter estrangement; they just lived different lives, in different states, maybe different worlds. Jim, though only sixty, had suffered a debilitating stroke. We sat for an hour in his living room, and he hardly spoke; his wife did most of the talking. She was pleasant and engaging, chatting easily and exhaustively about their children and their life in Jacksonville, but, the entire time, I was thinking about my father. I was looking for him. I wanted something of him back—whatever my sitting in the same room with his brother might offer. Did we ask Jim about his past, about my father’s past? Whatever we asked, he stuttered and mumbled incomprehensibly in reply, and his wife swiftly interrupted, steering the talk toward another topic. I stared at Jim’s face. I stared into his eyes. I was searching for my father, searching for something that wasn’t there.

  * * *

  Skippy, my father’s drowned brother, lies in a cemetery a little over two miles from the house where I grew up. When we were young, we Forhan children drove by it hundreds of times, glancing at the passing headstones through the chain-link fence. We never entered the gates. Seventy-five years after Skippy’s death, Dana, Erica, and I decided to visit him. Knowing his plot number, we walked across the grass toward the corner section called Guardian Angel, the one reserved for children. Where was he? We paced methodically, peering at the ground, searching foot by foot, in widening circles, for his stone. At last we sought help in the cemetery office. The director opened his big book. “Your uncle’s there, trust me. It says here, though, that he was never given a stone.” My father’s mother, Bernadine, is buried in the same cemetery. We decided to search for her. We found her plot, but, again, there was only grass upon it, no stone. These people—our grandmother, our uncle—whom my father kept buried in his memory and would not speak of, were conspiring with him in death, lying hidden, unremarkable, unmarked, as if they had never been.

  * * *

  And Nat Forhan, Fred Forhan, Fred Grant—my father’s father? He died in 1994. Maybe. Probably. After not hearing from him in years, one of his sisters, Pauline, received a call from a nursing home in Portland, Oregon: someone had died there, and he was probably her brother. His name was Fred Grant, but in his papers were references to Nat and to her—and his birthday was listed as December 29, Nat’s birthday. True, the dead man had identified his year of birth as 1917, eleven years later than Nat’s, but that didn’t surprise Pauline: her brother was vain enough to be capable of lying about his age.

  However, there is this one problem, this mystery: there was an actual person, an actual Fred Grant, born in Oregon on December 29, 1917. He and his family—the Grants—are in the federal census records for decades. And this man is the only Fred Grant identified in Oregon death records for the 1990s. Is it possible that Nat stole, or borrowed, the identity of this real Fred Grant? Yes, except what are the odds of Nat—who, because of his middle name, Frederick, had long referred to himself as Fred—stealing the identity of someone else with that name? More confounding than that, what are the odds that the real Fred Grant shared his birthday?

  Beyond the intriguing puzzle of it, maybe it does not matter. Nat is the grandfather who was never my grandfather, the man who was never my father’s father, except biologically. He is the father my father was content to see once, then never again, whatever name or city he might vanish into. He is the man who remains what he seems to have devoted his life to becoming: a nothing, a name in the air.

  * * *

  Forty years after the death of our father, my youngest sister, Erica, like him, is a certified public accountant, a highly accomplished one. She was only five when he killed himself and is therefore haunted by him in a way different from that of her siblings. To her, as his own father must have been to him, he is not the parent who left her so much as he is the parent who never existed; he has always been wholly a ghost—an absence, an idea: the idea of absence. As he did, Erica dons a business suit each morning and drives to downtown Seattle to her office—for a time, it was in the same soaring black box of a building that housed our father’s office. And the plaque he received around the time of her birth, the one honoring his work as president of the local chapter of accountants? It hangs in Erica’s office in her home.

  * * *

  For two decades before she died, my sister Patty worked in a small factory in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, stopping off after work at her favorite local haunt: the Dock Bar and Grill, a modest one-story building at the northern lip of Lake Union, a block from the water. Years after Patty passed away, beginning to piece together the family history, I searched in an old phone directory, hoping to find a listing for Forhan’s Tavern, the establishment begun by my father’s uncle in the 1930s. Yes: there it was. I jotted down the address and got into the car. I would drive to take a
look—maybe the building was still there. It was. And it was unchanged, except for one thing: the tavern was now called the Dock Bar and Grill. On all of those evenings after work, when Patty slid onto a stool at the bar and ordered a beer, she was sitting where, fifty years earlier, her drink would have been poured by her great-uncle, a man she’d never heard of. On all of those evenings, she was surrounded by her own ghosts and did not know it.

  * * *

  Seattle is a palimpsest. Over the years, my siblings and I have made summer-evening visits to Gas Works Park, climbing its big hill to talk and gaze at the lake and the skyline. This is the park built on the grounds of the old gasworks where my great-grandfather worked as foreman; to our left, beyond the rusty generator towers that still stand, was once the small company house where he and his wife raised their eleven children. Behind us are the streets where my father walked with his mother when he was a small boy and where his uncles and aunts and grandparents, the people I never heard about growing up, lived and worked.

  How odd, I mention to Kevin one day. For years, my brother has been a brewer, working among the small and fervent group of beer aficionados plying their trade in Seattle. I am visiting him, sitting atop the small boat he calls home, docked at a marina along the Fremont Cut, not far from the old neighborhood where our ancestors lived. He has poured me a beer. How peculiar, I tell him, to learn for the first time about those relatives who preceded us, to think about those people who seem so different from us, who are such strangers, yet who not long ago walked the very sidewalks we do now. My brother the poet, he of the ruminative, mordant wit, replies, “Let’s see. I’m an emotionally wounded, metaphysically bewildered man with a vaguely literary bent who is lounging on a boat drinking a beer. I’m not sure I’ve fallen very far from the tree.”

  * * *

  Ten years older now than my father ever was, I am married again, contentedly, permanently, to another poet, a woman of great beauty and vigorous intelligence, wit, and feeling. In Alessandra, I do not see my father, and, with her, I try not to act like him. Sometimes I catch myself, in moments of conflict, in moments of frustrating misunderstanding, protecting myself by going quiet or by relieving the tension with a feeble joke, some easy irony upon which I can safely float. Then I stop myself. What am I feeling? Why? I try to talk about it—and Alessandra listens, with gratitude, with love.

  * * *

  We have two young sons, Milo and Oliver. I have not spoken often with them about my father—their grandfather. One day, though, I find myself chatting about my childhood. “Our daddy,” I say, “used to string Christmas lights along the edge of our roof.”

  “Whose daddy?” says Oliver, who is three.

  “Whose daddy? My daddy. He’s not alive anymore. But he was my daddy when I was a boy. His name was Ed.”

  “Ed,” Oliver muses. “Like dead. They rhyme!”

  * * *

  I am sitting in my office at home, squinting at the computer screen, fingers hovering above the keys. I’ve been at this for hours, adrift in the riddle of my long-dead, distant father, wondering how to decipher him, wondering how to imagine my way into his life through language. “Daddy?” The voice comes from behind me. “Daddy?”

  “Just a minute.”

  “Daddy?” It’s Milo, my five-year-old.

  I keep my eyes on the screen. “Give me a minute. I’m working.”

  No, no. I lower my fingers from the keyboard and turn around. Milo’s eyes are dark, his brow furrowed.

  “Come on up.” I reach toward him, hook my hands beneath his arms, and lift him onto my lap. “Sorry, buddy. What’s your question? What is it you want to know?”

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  Part I Ed Forhan, summer 1961

  Part II Ed Forhan and Ange Peterson, Roosevelt High’s White Clothes Day, 1946

  Part III The first six Forhan children: Patty, Kevin, Peggy, Chris, Terry, and Dana, Christmas 1961

  Part IV Bick Bark, spring 1974

  Part V Kevin and Chris, summer 1983

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This project began as a nagging itch, a question I wanted answered. Initially and for a long time afterward, I had little sense of whether I would end up with a book, let alone one that others would care to read. I am indebted to many people for their help in making this a real book. For their assistance in my research, I am grateful especially to my siblings: Erica Forhan, Kim Lambert, Dana Forhan, Kevin Forhan, Peg Forhan, and Theresa Steig; also relatives whose existence I discovered only when I started digging: Jim Stoeber, Mike Forhan, Virginia Forhan, Jeannine Forhan-Bruce, Shirley Nelson, and, ­particularly, Barbara Delaney; also Perry McIntyre, Paul David Merry, Debbie Davis, Andrew Ritchie, Nicholas Adam, Lisa Fusch Krause, and Kirk Lanterman.

  I wish to thank Butler University and the Indianapolis Arts Council for the gift of time and funding that allowed me to write this book.

  For their generous, thoughtful reading of early drafts, I am grateful to Carol Reeves, Andy Levy, Allison Lynn, Michael Dahlie, and Susan Neville. For their enthusiasm about the book in its final stages, I am thankful to Laura Kasischke, Larry Watson, Nick Flynn, Colin Harrison, and Nan Graham.

  I am indebted deeply to three people who instilled me with confidence about the project and guided me, with patience and a bottomless reserve of keen insights, through multiple revisions: my agent and masterful perceiver of the big picture, Bill Clegg; my editor at Scribner, the gentle and surgically precise John Glynn; and, especially, my wife, Alessandra Lynch, who reminded me in the first place that I did indeed have a story to tell.

  To Russ Scott, second father, my appreciation and love.

  My most profound gratitude is reserved for my mother, Ange Scott, who trusted me with her story even though its details, in the way I have conveyed them, necessarily have been subsumed into my own; she would not, as she reminds me, tell the tale in the way I have. I am astonished by my mother’s generosity and support, which can be understood only as acts of love—as were the daily ways, for decades, she protected, nurtured, and guided her children on their journey into the world.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photograph by Alessandra Lynch

  Chris Forhan is the author of the poetry collections Forgive Us Our Happiness, winner of the Bakeless Prize; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize; and Black Leapt In, winner of the Barrow Street Press Book Prize. He was raised in Seattle and earned an MA from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA from the University of Virginia. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. His poetry has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry and has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, New England Review, Parnassus, and other magazines. He teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis, where he lives with his wife and two children.

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  Copyright © 2016 by Chris Forhan

  Excerpt from “Dream Song 145,” “Also I love him:” from The Dream Songs by John Berryman. Copyright © John Berryman. Copyright renewed by Kate Donahue Berryman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  Certain names have been change
d.

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  First Scribner hardcover edition June 2016

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  Interior design by Jill Putorti

  Jacket design by Thomas Colligan

  Jacket photograph © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015034743

  ISBN 978-1-5011-3126-4

  ISBN 978-1-5011-3132-5 (ebook)