by Bill Clegg
Christopher’s two older brothers were both lawyers and married with children. All of the Fosters—parents, children and grandchildren—lived in big houses and worked and parented and socialized and went to school within the well-marked and rigidly observed boundaries of the Main Line. Christopher was the rebel but he’d only rebelled so far. He’d gone to school in New York but by agreement with his father, after completing Columbia Journalism School, and more than a year traveling in Europe and Africa, he took a job in Philadelphia. He’d been at The Inquirer just over two years when he and Alice met on the bus.
Christopher would later admit that in the week before he met Alice, he’d been rehearsing a speech he planned to give his parents, one that finally told them, among other things, that it was time for him to go where it mattered to report the truth of what was happening in the world, both in words and in photographs. Alice slowed the delivery of that speech down by eight months. But when he did finally make it—first to his parents and hours later to Alice—it was not about reporting the truth, it was about confessing his own: that he’d had male lovers since his freshman year at NYU and he needed to end their relationship because he could no longer lie to her, his parents, to anyone.
Alice sat still on the bench in the cafeteria at school and listened. In the seconds before she could speak, he filled the silence by lurching into a detailed account of how he’d explained who he was to his parents, and how they had rejected the news, actually disagreed with him! He was stunned, incredulous—but he was free. As she listened to him animate every appalling detail of their reaction, she recognized that he was, without malice, but with the solipsism of the self-righteous, recounting an exhilarating prison break to one of his unwitting jailers. He left no room for her to react. And she let him. She listened in horror as the future she’d only just begun to count on disappeared. Christoper’s upset was big and urgent and consuming, and she was able to duck her own by joining his outrage with how his parents had negated him. Alice was mortified when he described his mother’s reaction—It’s not true, she’d corrected him, crossing her arms and silently daring her son to disagree; and enraged by his father’s—You’ve spent too much time in New York, he’d declared, not for the first time, and then suggested that if he insisted on trying to embarrass the family, he should leave Philadelphia. Let us know when you’re ready to be reasonable, Christopher mimicked his father’s icy farewell. These words would turn out to be the last he spoke to his son.
A year later, Christopher called Alice to tell her that his father had died. By then, her own feelings—bickering siblings of grief and anger and resignation—had crowded into the space left by his absence. She felt badly for him, but it was from a new distance. That’s very sad news. Thanks for letting me know, she’d said into the phone in her office, sounding colder than she’d intended. By then she had taken a tenure track teaching position at Lehigh University in Bethlehem. Before she met Christopher she’d imagined going farther away—Duke in North Carolina, Sarah Lawrence or Barnard in New York, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor—but after their relationship ended, she retreated to the people and places she knew, the ones with few surprises, if any. She went home.
Hap
The food in the hospital cafeteria is how he had imagined food in the 1960s. Bright white bread, fluorescent orange cheese, casseroles with crusted toppings. The drink options, too, are from another era. Whole milk, Hawaiian Punch and grape Fanta on tap. Except for elementary school, Hap wonders if he’s ever been anywhere that sold a glass of milk as a beverage. And Fanta, hadn’t that gone the way of Tab in the late eighties? Clearly there were ample reserves of the stuff in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
The woman behind the counter is striking. Thick red hair, swirling and bound behind a clear nylon net; high cheekbones, bright blue eyes, and a very straight nose so perfectly proportioned and angular it looks, under the harsh fluorescent lights, as if it had been removed from a mannequin’s face and grafted somehow onto hers. Hap reflexively compares all attractive people he sees to celebrities, and he can’t help but think this woman is a dead ringer for Maureen O’Hara in The Parent Trap. Just like the food, he thinks, straight from the sixties. Her voice, however, is very clearly Now and unmistakably local.
Waddya want?
All business and obviously exhausted, the woman speaks as she stoops to pick something up from the floor behind the counter before flinging it into the trash can against the wall.
Lunch closes in a few minutes.
No lovely echo of mid-century Disney Studios here, only the sound of what Hap imagines is some combination or complete résumé of delinquent child support, credit card debt, online dating, and regret. And the accent is one hundred percent Bethlehem, PA. A hybrid mouth-swerve landing somewhere between the accent cousins of Philadelphia and Baltimore. In some mouths, like his mother’s, the inflection is subtle and warm. In others, like his best friend Gene’s, who still milked his up-from-the-bootstraps-scholarship-kid roots, the sound is plucky and endearing. Or at least it used to be. But in some, like this woman in clear plastic gloves, hairnet, and black jeans, it is, as his father said more than a few times, unlovely. She reminds Hap of his childhood. The hardscrabble and often fighting parents of many of his school friends, Gene’s especially; even some of the teachers and coaches. Bethlehem was and still is mainly a town of the working middle class, an hour’s car ride from Philly but a world away, with the unemployed poor and idle rich in disproportionate minorities on either end of the spectrum, the latter of course the least represented group in the Lehigh Valley.
Hap’s family fell into the educated part of the working middle. His mother was a history professor at Lehigh University, a gothic swath of lawns and buildings for visiting privilege wedged in the hills above the once mighty Bethlehem Steel mills. The campus is less than a quarter mile from the rust skyline of smokestacks and blast furnaces that overwhelm the short length of the Lehigh River dividing the town center, but for the sons and daughters of steel workers the journey from the charred Oz on the valley floor to the turrets of Lehigh, or places like it, was daunting. By the time the last mills closed in the mid-nineties, after decades of layoffs and pay-cuts, crossing that distance had become close to impossible. Hap knew two exceptions: the first was Gene, from a family of unemployed alcoholics, a gifted student who tested high and performed higher. Valedictorian of Hap’s class at Freedom High School, Gene got a full scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and then went to NYU Law School, after which he became the second black partner at an important Park Avenue firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions.
The other person Hap knew who’d risen from food stamps to graduate degrees was his mother. She was the daughter of a laid-off boilermaker who was the son of a welder from a family of blacksmiths and millwrights and bricklayers. Hap’s mother’s family could trace their employment at Bethlehem Steel all the way back to before the Civil War and the building of the first American railroads. Her father loved to brag that his father helped forge the gun turrets on the U.S.S. Pennsylvania. Doesn’t get more American than that, he’d told Hap when he was a kid, more than once, between coughs that would become the lung cancer that killed him. Hap’s mother would point out, usually on the way home from a visit with her family, that picketing the headquarters of Bethlehem Steel to protest for wage equality for women and minorities was just as, if not even more, American. And his grandmother, who’d been paid less than the men at the mill were being paid to lay bricks, had done just that. When Alice told this story she was always careful to leave out the part when her father found out, how he punched his wife in the head so hard she collapsed, was unconscious for several hours, and had vertigo on and off for the rest of her life. She shared this with Hap only once, when he was in high school, weeks after his grandmother’s funeral. Alice had uncharacteristically drunk five glasses of wine at dinner and was, it seemed, trying to make sense of her mother’s life. She was tougher than she was brave, she’d conclud
ed, speaking more to herself than to Hap, and with a rare bitterness.
Hap’s mother, Alice, whom he has called by name for as long as he can remember, was the first woman in her family to graduate from high school and the first in the family—man or woman—to go to college. She attended Bryn Mawr as an undergraduate on a full scholarship for daughters of Bethlehem Steel employees who showed exceptional promise, as determined by the widow of a former CFO, herself a Bryn Mawr alum. After four fully paid years at Bryn Mawr, Alice got her PhD at Penn and came home to Bethlehem, where she taught at Lehigh for almost forty years before retiring.
Hap’s parents met in New York—on a bus both had answered, vaguely and unconvincingly, on several occasions when Hap asked. Their stories of what happened after were also identically incomplete. As they described it, soon after meeting they married and moved to England where Alice had been given a fellowship at Oxford. Hap was born there and, almost immediately after they returned to Bethlehem together, he was living with his mother alone in an apartment two blocks down the hill from Lehigh. What precipitated his parents’ split was just as mysterious to Hap as was what brought them together. His assumption had always been that his father had married Alice after accidentally getting her pregnant and immediately realized that both she and the small city she lived in were too limiting. As Hap understood the story, his father left right after he was born, moved to New York to work for newspapers and soon after that began living abroad—Tblisi, Manila, Beirut, Jerusalem, Paris—where he worked as a news agency photographer.
Hap’s childhood memories of his father were brief, but vivid, and mostly in restaurants. He was usually too spellbound to speak to the bright-eyed, unshaven man who materialized in faded jeans and white button-down shirts and told stories of being kidnapped, blindfolded, shot at, and starved. From as early on as he could remember, he could not imagine a more handsome, intelligent, exciting human being. These were their roles and they played them perfectly and with little variation: Dad dazzling with monologues that left little room for engagement or response, and son starstruck and mute, the perfect adoring audience. Alice never complicated the exchange with her opinions or sarcasm or any of her own history with the man. She dutifully drove Hap to a nearby restaurant, usually one she’d picked and made the reservation at, and with a polite nod from the car, handed him off for dinner. Two or three hours later, she’d pick him up, and on the drive home listen to all the wild and exotic stories he’d just heard.
Alice let Hap have his fantasy father and meanwhile, when he was eight, she married a man named Mo. It was Mo, not his glamorous father, who taught Hap how to play soccer and make model ships with miniature tools and balsa wood, to bake with almond flour and hemp milk and make cake frosting with cashews. Yet for all that, Hap saw him as a man he and his mother shared a house with and little more.
Mo died two years after Hap graduated from college. When his mother called to tell him, Hap felt very little. She explained that an employee had found Mo at the bakery door, collapsed from what the doctors at St. Luke’s believed was a brain aneurysm. He listened to her get the words out and he worried for her, yes; was shocked, too, as Mo was vegan and in excellent shape for someone in his early forties, but he had no tears. Alice shed plenty and stayed in bed for three straight days while Hap did the best he could to help with the awful and rushed funeral arrangements until his mother’s aunts and cousins—no strangers to calamity or its duties—moved in quickly and took over.
It wasn’t until a few nights after the funeral, the night Hap returned home to the eastern shore of Maryland, that the finality of losing Mo pierced him. Hap had been working at a newspaper, living in a small rented house for more than a year and except for his college friend’s parents who employed him, and the people who worked there, he knew no one. He remembers coming home that night, turning the lights on and seeing dirty dishes in the sink, a wooden bowl of rotting fruit swarming with tiny black flies, a mug of half-drunk coffee wedged between books on the shelf next to the couch, and not one message on his answering machine. He thought about the preceding days—the platters of cold cuts and breads brought in enormous aluminum trays by Alice’s family; the stuffed grape leaves and kebabs Mo’s two sisters cooked. One of Alice’s many cousins brought trays of barbecued chicken and another two large bowls with meatballs covered in red sauce. Alice was vegan, so the ones who ate most of the leftovers were Hap and Mo’s sisters, Yana and Una, who lived in Philadelphia. Hap had only met these women a half a dozen or so times and as a boy thought of them as strange, with their hijabs and clothes that looked like they were made of sheets. He knew Mo’s family was Syrian but it wasn’t until he died that Hap heard the full story of how he fled Syria at seventeen with his mother and sisters during the Six-Day War.
The afternoon of the funeral, Yana told Hap that their father had been, like Mo, a baker, and was killed by a stray bullet that flew through the window of his restaurant kitchen on the first day of the attacks by Israel on the Golan Heights. A call came from someone at the restaurant and without retrieving his body or finding out any more about what had happened, their mother dropped the phone, grabbed her jewelry, papers, and all the cash in the house, screamed for the children to put their shoes on, each fetch a blanket, and meet her at the door. They walked all the way to Jordan and eventually, after several difficult years in Amman, and with the help of a cousin in Philadelphia, made their way to the United States.
That night on the eastern shore, Hap remembered Yana describing Mo’s life before he married Alice. She seemed detached from the events she detailed, as if they shaped a story she had long known every syllable to, but at the same time she seemed impatient, even angry, with Hap. When she finished speaking she stood up and scanned the living room, her eyes passing over but not landing on her children or sister or Alice. They returned to Hap, with what looked to him like pity. It’s important you should know how someone comes to your life. Now you know.
Yana had left him sitting in the living room, unable to stand or speak. He felt like a stranger in the house he’d grown up in. He watched his cousins and uncles crowding the tables spread with lasagna and hummus and trays of cupcakes from Mo’s bakery, but Hap didn’t recognize his old life or the people in it anymore—even Alice, who for days had not asked him how he was doing or what was going on with his job. From the moment he arrived home in Bethlehem, it was clear she’d changed, even if everything in her house remained precisely as it had been. Mo’s old Saab was still in the driveway, his blue canvas coat with brown plastic toggles remained ready on its peg by the door, as it had for years, and his many and mostly destroyed New Balance running shoes, which he’d never thrown out even when Alice bought him new pairs, lined the mudroom wall.
When Hap returned to Maryland a few nights later, he thought about the young man Yana described, the one who stole fruit for his mother and sisters from markets in Amman so they didn’t have to spend the money they needed to travel to America, who worked seven days a week as a dishwasher to help with the rent his cousin insisted they pay; who never went to college, who became a baker, like his father, and married a single mother with a boy whom he would teach what he knew about sports and baking and kindness. He would be patient with him, always, even though the boy looked past him to the father who arrived on clouds of fairy dust once a year. He continued to be kind when the boy yammered on about how brave and important his father was, never once asking questions about or showing any interest in the one who carried him into the emergency room when he broke his elbow, made him pancakes or eggs or sometimes both before school, and chaperoned his class trip to Montreal when he was in the eighth grade. He’d loved the boy. But the boy hadn’t noticed until he was gone.
That night in Maryland, Hap began to but could not cry. There were times like this when he was in elementary school, hungry, usually over-tired from having stayed up all night rough-housing with Gene, when something would happen—a favorite toy he’d break by accident, bedtime arriving
suddenly and sooner than he expected—and he’d feel overwhelmed, furious with himself for having miscalculated, making a mistake that was not correctable, and his whole body would tilt toward a big cry—his mouth wide, expecting the exorcism of sobs; his eyes and cheeks ready to be soaked by tears, the outside evidence of pain. So poised, and then nothing. Dry eyes and unbothered lungs. Fists of upset not thrown. Here it was happening again. Feeling sorry for and at the same time furious with himself, but with no outlet to express it. He was beginning to understand something that had never once occurred to him, until now: that he’d been spoiled. Yes, by a mother who was loving and kind and who saw to it that he had every educational opportunity; but his mother he thanked, in writing and in person, at graduations and birthdays, and moments in between. His mother he interrogated about her family and college years and how she met his father. His mother was a luxury he appreciated. But until now he’d had the unforgiveable luxury to take someone for granted who loved him unconditionally, generously, and without claim. It was only in Mo’s absence that Hap could begin to see him. The great claw of regret closed quickly that night and held him without mercy long after.
Hap’s father never asked him about Mo. His lack of interest never struck Hap as strange or selfish. Not that he ever thought it through to completion, but if he’d been asked then he would have responded as if the answer were obvious: Mo wasn’t that interesting and his father was, so why on earth would someone who traveled the world and regularly on the frontlines of pivotal events ask about a very nice but boring baker from Pennsylvania?