Love and Fury

by Richard Hoffman

  ALSO BY RICHARD HOFFMAN

  Memoir

  Half the House

  Poetry

  Emblem

  Gold Star Road

  Without Paradise

  Fiction

  Interference and Other Stories

  Richard Hoffman

  BEACON PRESS, BOSTON

  IN MEMORY OF

  Richard C. Hoffman Sr.

  1925–2008

  AND FOR

  Kathi, Robert, Veronica,

  Damion, and D

  Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception. It is up to the American writer to find out what these laws and assumptions are. In a society much given to smashing taboos without thereby managing to be liberated from them, it will be no easy matter.

  James Baldwin

  The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

  JAMES BALDWIN

  We’re sitting in the kitchen, at the scarred Formica table, my father and my brother Joe and I, having just finished the kind of meal we have had innumerable times in the twenty-three years since my mother died: take-out hot dogs from “Yocco, the Hot Dog King” with a side of deep-fried pierogies, or maybe it was microwaved Lloyd’s Roast Beef Barbecue from a plastic container in the fridge, or strip steaks on the George Foreman Grill, with a side of microwaved instant mashed potatoes. I can’t recall for certain what we ate that night, maybe because my father has asked us to meet with him after supper to go over his will, and the two steel boxes have been there on the table next to the tall plastic bottle of orange soda throughout the meal, keeping their secrets to themselves. I know what’s in at least one of them, though: birth certificates, death certificates, account numbers, records, directions, the deeds to graves. It’s two weeks since he’s been diagnosed with MDS, myelodysplastic syndrome, a condition that, at his age, eighty-one, almost always becomes leukemia. He has everything in order, he says. It’s all right here in the boxes.

  “Now the will’s pretty simple,” he tells us, “everything’s split down the middle so there’s nothing for the two of you to fight about.” He has told each of us the same thing in the past two weeks, and Joe and I have talked about it on the phone. “You want the toaster oven or the Foreman grill?” my brother joked. It’s true that there wasn’t much to split up.

  My father had a story he liked to tell about sitting down with my mother at the kitchen table once each month to pay bills and putting all the bills in my mother’s stockpot and drawing them out one by one, writing checks till the money was gone. “And that was that,” he’d say. “If we ran out of money before we got to you, well then you went back in the pot next month.”

  Once when I was young and knew, according to my father, neither the difference between shit and shine-ola, nor my ass from my elbow, on a holiday visit home from college, I chimed in with a lame coda to my father’s anecdote, trying to augment the good humor of it, give it a little extra spin. As my father drew the story to its canonical close, “well then you went back in the pot next month,” I wisecracked that I finally understood why we never had a pot to piss in, another expression of my father’s. “You guys were using it as the Accounts Payable Department!”

  My father looked at me blankly as if he didn’t get it. Then, before I could compound my mistake by trying to explain it, he rose from his chair.

  “You little punk,” he muttered as he left the room.

  I had tripped a switch and plunged my father from the safety of his lyric, humorous, emblematic scene into deep shame and remembered desperation, the very emotions that his ritual telling, with its shrug and goofball smile, its cavalier “fuck ’em” attitude, was meant to exorcise. I was of course the one who didn’t get it, sitting there on my elbow with a shine-ola-eating grin on my face. I was not the one who had stood against a wall at six in the morning for the shape-up, hoping to get picked to work like a donkey for the next twelve hours. I was not the one who’d had to go down to the PP&L office with money made from cleaning out somebody’s suburban garage just to get the lights turned back on. I was not the one who felt humiliated the year our Christmas presents came from the Salvation Army, complete with tags that said, Boy, 6–8 years old. My father had taken all those years and all that shame and locked them in a little box of a story, and just when he was clicking it shut again, as he had so many times before, I propped the lid open a moment longer with my fatuous cleverness, and a monstrous cloud, a genie of shame, escaped.

  Everyone in my family considered themselves middle-class, all my aunts and uncles, each and every household, whether anyone had a job or not, regardless of what kind of work they did when there was work, regardless of whether or not they had “a pot to piss in.”

  We never used the word “class.” My father called us working people. He always said we were working people, and he wanted me to be proud of it. I was a good student. School came easily to me, and I couldn’t wait to be the first in my family to go to college. And my father, conflicted in ways that he showed by barking, shouting, kicking things, and occasionally knocking me down, let me know that he was scared for me, jealous, proud of me, and betrayed.

  I remember the day I announced to my father that, football scholarship or not, I was going to college. “Whattya think, your last name’s Rockefeller?” I had asked him for his signature on the loan papers I’d left on the kitchen table with the glossy view book from Fordham University. When I first brought home the booklet, with its views of a Gothic clock tower, stained-glass windows, a wrought-iron gate, my mother held it at arm’s length and tucked her chin as if it smelled suspicious, but in fact she didn’t have her glasses handy and held it that way because she was what she called “far-sighted.”

  “Classy-looking joint,” she pronounced.

  “We don’t have that kind of money,” my father said. “Look around here, knucklehead, you see a Cadillac out front? A swimming pool in the back?” I’m sure I said something insolent then because he was after me as I headed for the door. He grabbed the neck of my varsity jacket and we pushed and pulled and wrestled until I escaped, leaving him holding the jacket, inside out. As I turned in the doorway to shout something else and get a good hold to slam the door, I saw him turn it back right side out and, quietly, tenderly, brush it off and hang it in the hall closet. Later, when I came back, the papers were upstairs on my bed, signed.

  My brother and I exchanged a look across the table. Neither of us is especially acquisitive. My brother has lived with my father in the house we grew up in for many years now; I’ve made my life elsewhere, and in our fifties neither of us was swinging at piñatas anymore. Besides, we both wanted to talk with him about his health, about how he was taking this news, and we wanted to assure him we’d be there for him through it all. He looked terribly pale and from time to time he would wipe his forehead with a ragged towel he kept next to him. Sweat beaded on his ashen face. Was it his illness that seemed to wring from him this sweat so strangely unaccompanied by warmth or color, or was it the fear, the grief, the agony he withheld from us seeping through his fatherly performance?

  Sometimes I think I’ve had two fathers: the one who made me, and the one I’ve made of him. One I talked to on the phone, the other I talked to in my head. I was sitting there at the kitchen table, waiting for a moment when my brother or I might turn the conversation to how he was feeling, maybe tell him how we were feeling. On my way from Boston to Allentown, in the car, I’d been talking to him in my head.

  I was listening to Greg Brown, Ted Hawkins, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme on the way. Earlier, just about an hour after I left my house, he called my cell phone.

  “Where are you?�
�

  “I’m just entering Connecticut.”

  “Well, it’s a blizzard here. We’ve got about three or four inches already.”

  “Really? Nothing here. Blue sky.”

  “Well, don’t be fooled. There’s no emergency here.”

  No emergency there. I’d been wanting to see him since he called to tell me of his diagnosis. After we hung up I had a conversation with him in my head in which we talked about dying. “We’re old souls, you and I,” I told him. “I don’t know what happens, but I know that.” I didn’t really. I was looking for comfort in a suitably skeptical story. It was a thin jacket against the cold, but better than nothing. Besides, it would afford my father respect for whatever belief he held while not encouraging him to profess anything he didn’t fully believe.

  It was no doubt my need, not his, to have such a conversation. A writer, I’m always trying to say what eludes saying and always falling short. Or maybe it’s my post-Catholic yearning for a metaphysics that makes this world a sad Platonic derivative of a better one. In truth, I can’t bring myself to profess anything wholeheartedly; it’s all made of words, I tell myself, and as a writer I know well what quicksilver words can be. Or maybe this is what children of any age need from their parents: where will you be when you’re no longer with me?

  It was my mother who believed in the afterlife. “We’ll all be together again one day,” she would say and waggle her index finger back and forth to squelch dissent. “Nobody can say it’s not true.” My father seemed, sometimes, to expect that she was waiting for him. Other times he would speculate about things metaphysical, but that often ended in a wisecrack or a shrug. It was as if he acknowledged beforehand that certain things were unknowable, that you could not draw conclusions, only doodle in the margins. Some years ago, during one of my flirtations with Buddhism, I’d left the magazine Tricycle on a chair in the living room, and when I returned he was thumbing through it. “Where’d you get this?”

  I told him I was intrigued with Buddhism because it was more a philosophy than a religion, and that I liked it that there was no God, only a path to try to stay on. I probably said a few other hokey things in a zeal that’s since cooled, but my father asked me what I thought about reincarnation. He said he’d watched a monk on TV discuss it, that the guy said that you get to keep trying to get to heaven, that there’s no such thing as hell, and that it takes most people several lifetimes; if you don’t make it this lifetime, then you come back and try again. “Is that a Buddhist idea?”

  I said that it seemed so to me. “Well, that makes sense,” he said. “No wonder the world’s such a mess. All the good people keep leaving.”

  Soon after my mother died, he retired, at age sixty-four, and for the next twenty years he hardly left his recliner by the window. My brother and I both worried he was depressed. He seemed fine as long as his sixty-inch rear-projection television was on (and loud; you could hear it half a block up the street), and it was nearly always on: sports channels, mostly, but also cop dramas, movies, and when he was alone, porn.

  Joe and I wanted to get him help with whatever continued to afflict him, depression or post-traumatic stress, to either of which, it seemed to us, he held clear title. Once he told me that sometimes during the day he sat there in his chair just thinking, and that when he looked up at the clock, hours had passed. “What if you had all your thoughts at once,” he asked me, “do you think that would be heaven or hell?”

  In our household, it’s my daughter Veronica who’s most given to spiritual questions. A few years ago, she prodded me about my atheism, about my turn, long before she was born, from Catholicism, from religion in general. “So, Dad, you really think that when you die that’s it. That there’s nothing after that?”

  “Well, think about it. There is no ‘after that,’ not for the person who’s dead.”

  “But what happens to you?”

  “I think you just become part of the fabric of things. You get buried or burned, and everything gets used making new life. That seems beautiful to me, don’t you think?” I may have used the Buddhist metaphor of a raindrop falling into the ocean. I may have quoted the Canadian poet Irving Layton: “Death is the name of beauty not in use.”

  “But that’s your body, Dad. I’m not talking about your body. I’m talking about you.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think there’s a me separate from my body. I think I’m a story, maybe a poem, that my brain composes. That’s how come I’ve been so different at different times in my life. I’m composing from the materials at hand to be what I need to be. Once I don’t need to be anything, I can let all that go. I mean, it will go when my brain dies.”

  “No, wait. You said you were composing yourself, not your brain. Your brain is what you use to do it. What about that you? See what I mean?”

  “I just think that all that makes me useful or important is what I do, and this one life is all the time I have to do it in. Maybe you live on in other peoples’ memories.”

  “Aarrrrgghhh! You are so frustrating!”

  I didn’t mean to be. It just seems to me that to believe in a separate spiritual destiny is a kind of metaphysical flight from our common predicament: we’re dying. And what is perhaps worse: people we love die. But I understand her yearning, and her wonder. It is impossible not to wonder what happens to the dead. To insist that nothing at all happens is one thing, but not to wonder means refusing to allow the play of imagination on the very ground that probably gave rise to it. Whatever else might our inescapable fear be for, if not for us to transform it to wonder? It is foolish to put all of one’s energy into not speculating, into a refusal to allow the mind both comfort and enchantment. Why diminish life? In this case the absence of dogma is the same as dogma; both positions are orthodoxies that forbid the myriad stories that offer themselves: not for belief, but for further wonder. It is to answer What if? with So what.

  “It’s a death sentence is what it is. Clear and simple.” I’d been on the phone with him from my desk where in the ten minutes since he told me of his diagnosis, I was Googling and scrolling through websites about myelodysplasia, cherry-picking any stray bit of information that made things more hopeful. A premalignant condition. Often leads to leukemia. Often isn’t always. “What kind of treatment are they talking about?”

  “It’s all about good days now. So long as there are some more good days I’ll hang in there and fight. Once there are no more good days ahead, then the hell with it.”

  “I’m looking at it on the Internet right now. Some people beat this thing.”

  “Not when you’re eighty. Don’t be fooled. When you’re eighty, you don’t beat anything.” There was no self-pity in his voice. There was something to his inflection, his timing, his timbre, that was different, something that seemed strange and out of place to me. I figured he was in some kind of shock.

  “I want to read up about this and talk to some people here,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “You do that.”

  Half an hour later, my brother called me. “Yeah, hi,” he said. “Dad told me to call you. He said call your brother and see if he’s okay. He said you seem to be taking this worse than he is.”

  Soon after that I had a dream: I was in a room with a giant map of the world on the wall. I held a long wooden pointer with a black rubber tip like the nuns used to use in school. My father was sitting on a kind of black leather throne with a gold seal of some sort above it while I advised him, explaining that this little war here, and this one here, and this one, and this one, were threatening to soon run together and become World War III. As I waited for his response, I saw fire at the windows, fire all around outside. It had begun. “I told you! I warned you!” I yelled at him.

  “Yes, but what the hell did you expect me to do about it?”

  How do people know how to grow old, how to cope with diminished physical prowess, with pain and stiffness, how to “act their age?” My Aunt Kitty, even at her ninetieth birthday part
y, insisted, “Don’t you treat me like an old lady! I’m not an old lady!” And we had only her chronological age as evidence; nothing else, nothing in her behavior anyway, suggested she was wrong. At her party she wore a golden plastic tiara one of her great-grandchildren had bought for her, several leis around her neck, jingling bracelets, and high heels. Though the party was in her honor, she went from table to table making sure people were having a good time, sometimes chiding the shy, pulling them from their folding chairs and leading them across the room to introduce them to someone. The party took place at an assisted-living facility where my aunt volunteered. She lived alone in her own home and drove to the facility every day “to help take care of the old people.”

  I recall watching my aunt at that party and thinking that if her joie de vivre was denial, then I hoped I had developed something like her capacity for it.

  Only a year after that party, she fell in her living room with her well-dusted Hummels and dolls and family photos covering every surface, and broke her ankle. She was able to turn on her television for company, but she couldn’t reach the telephone. One of her five daughters found her that evening when, unable to reach her by phone, she grew alarmed.

  When Margaret, no young woman herself, couldn’t get her off the floor, she said she was going to call for an ambulance. “The hell you are! You just bring me some ice for this thing. I’m just going to stay put and get better.”

  “Mother, I can’t even get you off the floor, and the bathroom’s upstairs.”

  “You just bring me some ice cubes in a tea towel for this here ankle, and a coffee can to piss in. I’ll be all right.”

  Although my aunt was treated at the hospital and sent back home, things were never the same. Her daughters took turns taking care of her in their homes, after bringing her back to her own little house of knickknacks and porcelain dolls and framed photographs for a few hours a day just so she could be there, just to try to help her hold on to her life.