Love and Fury

by Richard Hoffman

Will, as close to my father as either of his sons, is here from Michigan. He gives my hand a squeeze, looks down, shakes his head. “You were right. Remember what you told me on the phone? The world is different now.” Will once told me that my father found me a mystery. “How’s a kid leave home a quarterback and come back a poet?” Will, with his PhD in literature, must have seemed to my father the only person he could ask such a question. He didn’t say how he’d answered.

  There’s a large open area between the bier and the rows of chairs, and D is racing back and forth across it, Veronica running behind, scooping him up, putting him back down, redirecting him as much as possible. She has been crying, her eyes red, a wad of tissues in her hand, but she has to laugh despite that. So do several other of the mourners. Now D, dressed in a suit with a clip-on tie, pants big enough for his diaper, decides to run in a circle. He seems to have just figured out, or is delighting in the fact, that if he runs in a circle away from his mother and she stays put he will soon come back to her. Every time he slams back into her she picks him up and kisses him. The next time he takes off, Veronica gets down on one knee, ready to receive him when he comes back, but D takes that as a new wrinkle in the game: he teases her and then runs off in another direction, out into the hall, where his mother chases after him. Except for a few stern souls, people are smiling, wiping their eyes, blowing their noses perhaps, but then smiling. I wonder at him. How will he fare without his father, now in a cell awaiting trial? How will he fare at all? I wonder in both joy and fear: who will he become? And will it matter who he is, or only how the white world sees him?

  “I’m Bill Dolan. Your dad got me a job driving a mower in the parks in the summers when I was home from college. I’d sometimes see him around. He was one of the good guys.” I recognize Dolan as a guy I knew in high school. He was a senior who played varsity football when I was on the freshman team, so he doesn’t remember me.

  My cousin Don, here with his young family, shakes my hand. I recall my Aunt Marietta’s chagrin when he became a Jehovah’s Witness. “There’s no Christmas or nothing,” she complained. “I can’t even make him a birthday cake!”

  “Wow. Donnie. It’s been a long time.” I know the weight he carries: a father, my Uncle Pete, who drank himself to death, and I feel the urge to connect with him somehow. “We should get together sometime. Some other time, I mean.” But I know as I say it that it won’t happen. He gives me his card. He owns a car dealership. “I’ll shoot you an e-mail,” I tell him.

  A man is shaking Joe’s hand next to me, and I hear him say, “ . . . A long time ago, at the Boys Club.” A short, stout African American man, hair going to gray, he steps up to me, takes my hand in both of his, says, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and moves away. A member of the hambone team? I am staring after him, wondering, when a soft clear voice says, “Richard.”

  She is standing in front of me, radiant and tall although she must be in her eighties. She takes my hand. “I’m Mrs. McFadden.”

  “Of course,” I manage to say, “yes, yes of course,” though history has just now rung me like a bell. She is my childhood friend Patrick’s mother. Patrick was the oldest of, I believe, eleven or twelve kids. I remember only two of his siblings, Rosemary and Timmy, probably because they were old enough to play with us. I remember the house always smelled of ammonia from a diaper pail, which after five minutes you didn’t notice anymore, and Mrs. McFadden was almost continuously pregnant, with one child on her hip and another by the hand as she calmly answered our questions or told us what she wanted Patrick and me to pick up for her at the corner store. My other friends’ mothers were tolerant, at least if it was raining; otherwise they chased us outside to play. Mrs. McFadden seemed happy I was there. I don’t think I ever knew what Mr. McFadden did, but I remember that when there were nine McFadden kids, my father declared that now there were enough for a baseball team. A couple of years later he said there were enough for a football team. Once, when I was in high school, my father asked me what Patrick’s father did, and I shrugged. I didn’t care much about things like that, and in those days I didn’t care much for my father. “Well, he’s got eleven kids,” my father said, “so I know one thing he’s doing for shit-sure!”

  “This is my son, Robert.” She smiles broadly. “And that’s my daughter, Veronica, whose been chasing my grandson around here. And my wife Kathi’s there in the first row.” She looks back at Robert. “He looks like his mother,” she says to me. “Do people tell you that, Robert? That you look like your mother?”

  I haven’t seen this woman for decades; I might pass her on the street without stopping, but now I feel an affection so vast it summons another place and time. I am in the old neighborhood, in St. Francis of Assisi Parish, North Ninth Street running uptown to the public library and department stores and in the other direction ending in three glorious sledding hills declining to the freight siding and scrap metal yards of Sumner Avenue. Across town my uncle is under another chassis at Mack Trucks, welding; my mother is taking her tuna casserole from the oven, checking to see if she has time to run to Woodring’s grocery, where big Jim in his butcher’s apron would write down what she spent in a thick ledger—“Put it on the bill,” my mother would say to him— but no, the boys will be traipsing in wanting something to eat in fifteen or twenty minutes, so she can ask me to go for her then; Aunt Helen is in between customers at the diner, smoking in back and wondering if she might take off her shoes to ease her swollen feet or if she’d better not because she wouldn’t be able to get them on again; the public school kids are already out, a half hour earlier than us; along the south side of town trout see the surface of the Little Lehigh dimple with the first drops of rain. Mrs. Dries’s Doberman paces back and forth, looking pissed off that nobody has come by to terrify by snarling on his hind legs at the gate; traffic on Seventh Street circles the city’s Soldiers and Sailors monument, Nike, goddess of victory atop a ninety-foot marble pillar; my father is working at the brewery, grabbing longneck bottles of beer by the top, four at a time, off the conveyor belt—six times per case—laughing with his coworker Stanley; a few guys, out of work, are playing basketball at the Salvation Army court, where if you drive through the key and fall into the heavy doors you might go through and right down the steps; my grandmother starts out on her walk, six blocks from her apartment to our house in time to help my mother set the table; at my desk I’m watching the clock, which is next to the crucifix and above the twenty-six letters of the alphabet; Johnny Pacheco is, of course, in trouble again and the nun has him by the ear but he is grinning at us as she drags him away; the Royal laundry truck Ronnie’s father drives backs up to the platform for its final load of the day; the birds gather on wires above Freihofer’s bakery, in winter for the warmth coming out of the stacks from the ovens, and all year round for whatever crumbs might become available.

  “Are you still on Ninth Street?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “How is the neighborhood?”

  “Oh, it’s about the same. All the old people are gone, but the new neighbors are nice. There are lots of children. Everyone speaks Spanish, though, and I don’t understand a word they say. Well, it’s lovely to see you, Richard; I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  My cousin Margaret approaches me. She has her purse open, and I think she is going to offer me a tissue, but she takes out a compact. “I figured I should ask you first. Would it be okay if I just put a little rouge on him? They left him looking awfully pale.” I dissuade her. She leans in closer, a look of aggravation on her face, and whispers, “Did they let you pick out a casket?”

  “Why? You don’t like it?” She pats my hand, dabs at her eyes, and moves away.

  When all of the people are seated, the priest enters. Joe knows him. Father Marty, his name is. Already I feel the tone is off; it is a solemn occasion, after all, a man’s funeral, even if he preferred that things be kept simple. Father Marty seemed to bop in, bouncing on the balls of his feet, rubbing his hands togeth
er as if he were about to organize a picnic. He makes a brief stop at the bier, kneeling for a moment to whisper a prayer; he crosses himself as he rises. He comes forward and intones a blessing, crossing the air in front of him. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Only a scattering of people respond, “Amen.”

  He’s trying. I have some sympathy for him. He didn’t know my father. He’s sticking to the tried and true, to generalities he must have been taught in his coursework in pastoral care. He is facing a motley flock here: in addition to my Catholic cousins—varying from devout to lapsed—the room includes many Lutherans, at least one Buddhist, two Jehovah’s Witnesses, several Jews, a Unitarian, and a number of atheists. If he is aware of this fact, he’s not letting it impede his ministrations.

  When I was a young altar boy, sometimes the priest would come into our classroom, sixth or seventh grade, whisper something to the nun, and she would point to me and to one of the other altar boys, maybe Patrick, maybe Peter. And we would join Father Walters in the hall, where he would explain that there was to be a funeral Mass this afternoon and that we had been chosen to serve. I remember my first time, carrying a candle around the casket as the priest, just behind me, swung the censor—chingchingching . . . chingchingching—and I heard the weeping, a wail here and there, and saw the wet, red faces of the mourners and could not completely keep from crying myself. I can remember the scratchy rayon of my black cassock on my cheek as I tried to wipe away a tear. But I came to see, as I served at more funerals, a certain purity in the contorted faces of the grieving, a concentration of emotion, something so sincere that I felt deeply reassured. It was like seeing straight into a white light, the acetylene center of the soul, where all the colors meet, fuse, transcend distinctions. Later on, at the funerals of my own family members, I found this reassurance again, that we are all connected by grief to everyone else in the human web: a net, after all, is made of crosses. But there’s not sufficient comfort in transcendent understandings. We grieve, we mourn; we do not shrug. To survive the death of a loved one is to have withstood, somehow, all the sorrow of our species passing through us in a particular moment, like a dense speck of negative light, one of those imploded stars astronomers tell us change the universe forever.

  I can hear D in the hall, crying because his mother has picked him up, restraining him a bit, maybe to keep him from toddling into the funeral across the hall, but in my present state of mind I hear him grieving, too, complaining of the weight on him, the burdens he never asked for tumbling down the generations, his early and wordless apprehension of the way things are. I hear confusion and defiance; I hear the demand for an explanation, the need for comfort.

  Father Marty is giving it his best shot with what he’s been given to work with: only moments earlier I saw the funeral director whispering in his ear. When he says, “Beloved of many, many others, besides those who are here today,” I halfway think he is commenting on the paucity of those present. He acknowledges “the deceased’s sons and grandson,” bowing slightly in our direction, but neglects to mention Veronica, an omission that doesn’t escape Kathi’s notice. After a quarter-century of marriage, we have a rich lexicon of nuanced aspect and expression, and she gives me a look that tells me that she is thinking what I think she is thinking: that it is a not unforgiveable but nevertheless maddeningly predictable oversight from an officer of the world’s oldest boys’ club.

  My marriage to Kathi was the site of my fiercest battles with myself, disguised for a time as a battle with the alcohol that kept the whole rickety structure of what I thought of as myself in soft, or at least intermittent, focus.

  I loved her. She loved me. But not only did neither of us feel much joy in that fact, neither of us felt any confidence that we could keep the marriage. We tried couples counseling, and more than once. At a difficult moment in one session, the two of us in separate chairs, the therapist completing the triad, I cried out in frustration: “Jesus Christ, why don’t we just get your mother and my father in here and let them duke it out?”

  The therapist, an engaged and demonstrative psychologist, threw up her hands, pitched forward in her chair and flung her long hair in a veil over her face. We stopped. Silence. Then she sat up, parted the curtain of hair before her face, sighed, and said, “Richard, for God’s sake, what do you think we’ve been doing all this time?”

  Now I think it more that I wish we could have had my mother and father in that room, and that we could have brokered and judged that argument. In fact, back then I was still grieving my mother, dead less than two years, whose granddaughter, whom she would never meet, had just been born.

  Kathi and my father weren’t close. Neither disliked the other. Each was admiring—Kathi of my father’s resilience and fortitude, my father of Kathi’s accomplishments, intelligence, and practicality. Neither especially enjoyed the other’s company, however. No one knew better than Kathi the injuries, fears, and incapacities my father had bequeathed me, but she also saw him as a man who always meant to do the right thing.

  I could never talk with my father about my marriage. I did not rely on him to have any wisdom to offer. I’d seen my parents’ marriage crumble under extraordinary pressure of circumstance, devolve into a kind of “toughing it out.” And yet, during the time when it seemed our marriage was coming apart, he surprised me when I told him we weren’t doing well. “Just remember, you’re not an easy guy to live with. You’re not. Keep that in mind.”

  “Let us recite the prayer that Jesus taught us,” Father Marty instructed. “Our Father . . .”

  The murmur of the recitation seemed to calm D in Veronica’s arms with his thumb in his mouth. The words were on my lips but they stayed there.

  What are we called these days, those of us who have left the church? Are we lapsed? Failed? Fallen? I suppose we are officially apostates, but what does that really mean? I guess that depends on where you stand, or kneel, or if you have to keep your unbelief quiet: maybe you’re a florist or an undertaker or a church architect or that other guy, the sexton, who keeps the gold all shiny and the floors buffed and the wood polished, along with who knows how many other people who have reasons good and not so good all mashed together to keep them, at least nominally, Catholic. Only they know if they should also be counted in the roll of the lapsed, the apostate. Or are we the fallen, like the angels Michael threw out of heaven. Non serviam.

  When I was a kid you couldn’t eat for twelve hours before communion, a long, long time when you’re a child. You’re eight or nine years old, able to take communion now because after the age of seven, the “age of reason,” you are responsible for your own soul, no excuses. You went to bed the night before, hungry, without your usual bedtime snack of bread and butter or peanut butter crackers, starving as only a kid can be starving, with only a rosary and you can’t eat that. After a while, your stomach seeming to join you in the Hail Marys, you wonder what all those little yellow circles are floating around your room, and you finally decide they are the eyes of the many angels, drawn to your praying, flying through your room like those transparent tropical fish swimming in their tank at the pet store, just about invisible except for their bulging eyes. You can see them, the angels, only on those nights before you are going to communion. You take this as proof that you are holy in your post-confessional state of grace, and you would explain, if anyone asked, that the reason that their eyes were the only part of the fishy angels you could see was that the seeing, the looking, the taking it all in from as many angles as possible, is what we have in common with the angels, not our stupid thoughts that can’t even figure simple math, remember the times tables, the infield fly rule, or the differences between the ways the apostles were martyred.

  Sometimes turning things over and over, looking from different angles, can even trick you into thinking you’re just like Jesus: God’s son, not your father’s. But that is a terrible thought, a sinful thought, and you have to chase it away at once, this pride. Now you’ll hav
e to stay awake longer, praying for forgiveness so you can still be in a state of grace in case you die in your sleep. You’re hungry, scared that you’ve sinned, ashamed and begging forgiveness, but the fishy angels are still swimming round you, so you must be still okay.

  Next morning, at a Solemn High Mass, the incense gets to you. They even teach you, if you’re an altar boy, how to loop the chains over your fingers and let the burner—the thurible!, and what a great word to learn—hang down so you can swing it back and forth with just a little finger action like a puppeteer and pump out clouds of sweet smoke that on an empty stomach can take you out—bam!—just like that. One of the older boys warns you that when that happens you could piss your pants or even shit yourself because when you faint you have no control over that. So you make sure you go before you leave for Mass. You are learning your religion with your body. In church, you’re supposed to kneel up straight unless you’re old or fat; then you can rest your wide behind on the bench behind you. Everybody’s stomach is making sounds like squeaky hinges or wet feet in sneakers, and then finally it’s time.

  When you go up to the altar rail you get to the front of the aisle and stand there and wait until someone gets up so you can take their spot that the priest has already passed. You look to see if this is the priest who works his way back along the rail in the other direction or if this is the one who turns and marches back to the place he started from with the altar boy hurrying behind him. Soon he’s there and you close your eyes—unless the altar boy is a friend of yours who might try to use the edge of the gold-plated paddle (the paten, pronounced like the general) to deal a quick blow to your Adam’s apple. So you stick out your tongue, and this thinnest wafer of bread that wasn’t hardly bread to begin with and now isn’t bread at all but the body and blood of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ lands on your tongue and all the juices suddenly flow. Sometimes your mouth stings then, and for all you want to sink your teeth into this thin chip of God, you dare not. On your way back to your pew, the Lord melts in your mouth. He tells you, as you look as holy for your parents as you can manage, that He’s going to save you, your blood sugar rising now, just enough to keep you conscious till you get home and eat a bowl of cornflakes. Along the side of a house I once lived in, every summer tall fleshy bamboolike weeds sprung up. They stank and they had a nacreous milky sap in their hollow stalks that was hard to scrub from your hands. Over and over I yanked each stalk up from the ground by what seemed to be the roots—they dangled, dribbling clods—but they were really a kind of camouflage or trick. In fact, underground there was a long rope of a root, a rhizome, that stretched the length of the house and beyond and mocked my every effort.