My father always made instant coffee, but we’ve got a new Philips Cafe Classic. I paid about sixty bucks for it at Zeller’s, and within a month, somewhere in its innards a hose clamp came loose, flooding the kitchen counter with hot water. I ignored the warning on the bottom cover (“Do not remove—repair should be done by authorized service personnel only”), unscrewed it, and fixed it with needle- nosed pliers. Its parts spread open, exposed, it was, I realized at the time, a lot like an electric razor.
That night, I poured three cups from it, black, set them on the kitchen table.
“How come you never asked before?” Jeanne sipped the coffee, watching her son.
Adam hesitated, seemed to think about it. But I guessed that he’d already thought about it a lot. “Didn’t seem to be important.”
“Why is it important now?”
He shrugged.
“Is it because of Gramp?”
Gramp was my father. Tommy Nolan.
“Maybe.”
“It’s only natural.”
“Were you ever going to tell me?” he asked suddenly.
I sat still, watching them, seeing new things, things I hadn’t seen before.
“I told myself I’d tell you whatever you wanted to know if you ever asked. Well”—she tucked the loose strand of hair behind her ear, like she always did—“you’ve asked.”
I cradled my cup in both hands, feeling its warmth. Waited.
“He was in Dayton, last I heard. Dayton, Ohio. But that was a long time ago. Maybe he’s not there anymore. I don’t know.” Jeanne paused, did some more thinking. “You’re twenty-one, Adam. He left before you were born. That’s a long time. I haven’t seen him since.” She fixed her eyes on him. “I’ve always believed that it wouldn’t serve you well to speak ill of him, so I never spoke of him at all.” She sighed. “The long and the short of it is that he knew I was pregnant and he left. He didn’t want to get married. Your Aunt Amanda met him on the street in Cincinnati, must’ve been fifteen years ago. It was him spoke to her. She told me how she couldn’t believe his nerve, coming up to her like that.”
I listened to the Kentucky drawl that she had never lost, that I would never want her to lose.
“He told her he was working in a factory in Dayton. That’s how I know what I know.”
“Did Aunt Amanda tell him about me?”
“She told me she said to him that he had a son, and that he should go see him, do something about it, do what was right. But I never heard from him. He never called, nothing. This was about five years before Leo and I met. Leo’s your daddy, honey. He’s the one helped me raise you. He’s the one helped put food on the table, pays for your schooling. You know that.”
“I know it.” He looked at me. “You’ve been great, Leo. You know I know that.” He shook his head. “But this isn’t anything against Leo. And it’s not meant to upset you, Mom.” He folded his left hand into a fist and held it against his chin, under his lower lip. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
None of us knew. This was a new place. We hadn’t been here before.
III
That night was the night of the first dream.
I dreamed I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, thought it must be Adam. When I saw him, though, it was my father, wrapped in old, frayed towels mottled with bloodstains. I remember remarking that it was a disgrace the way those with whom he was staying were taking care of him.
When I woke up, it took me a long time to get back to sleep.
In the morning, dressing, I reached for my watch and rings—part of the daily ritual. I keep them on the bookshelf by my bed in a four-by-six ashtray that Jeanne bought me for $1.29 in Las Vegas. And I don’t even smoke. Nobody in our house smokes.
It’s adorned with a back-shot of three girls in thong bikinis, legs dangling in a pool. Adam tells me those bikinis are called butt-floss. You can always learn stuff from kids.
My watch, my wedding ring, and my father’s ring.
Only the red garnet—my father’s ring—wasn’t there.
Puzzled, I looked on the floor, on the shelf behind the tray, even on my finger. I saw it in the center of the dresser.
I had no memory of leaving it there. In fact, I had a distinct memory of studying it, then placing it in the ashtray, a new nightly addition.
I rubbed my forehead.
When I opened the drawer with my socks and underwear, his glasses and razor were sitting there staring at me. I was sure that I had left them on the night table in his old room down the hall.
Sliding the garnet on the ring finger of my right hand and the wedding band on the same finger of my left, I strapped on the watch, took out clean socks and underwear, and closed the drawer.
I turned and watched Jeanne sleeping, auburn hair tousled, to me, beautiful. I thought of Adam, equally beautiful, sleeping in his own room—its walls lined with new cracks, fissures that would keep opening no matter how many coats of paint were rolled over them—thought how lucky I was to have my whole family with me even while I slept.
And I looked at my hand. Looked at the ring.
Saw him on the stairs, in the night, coming up to get me.
Later that day, I put his tackle box in the basement, behind the furnace.
TWO
I
For a man like me, to have a woman is to have a destiny. Before I met Jeanne, I was going nowhere, heading for middle age like everybody’s uncle, off to work daily, making meals for myself, staying comfortable, living in a one- bedroom apartment here in Toronto. Taking no risks. Jeanne changed everything.
We met back in 1984, after my mother died, when I traveled down to Ashland, Kentucky, on that family thing. Looking for my mother’s brother, Jack. It’s a long story, one that I’ll save for another time.
We needed each other. Adam and I too. It was good. It still is. In fact, it’s better than good. I’ve got a destiny now.
I’d never met anyone like Jeanne. Hell, I’d never even been to Kentucky before. She was waitressing in Woolworth’s, but gave it all up, that fabulous career and all its myriad opportunities, to follow me, a northerner, here to Toronto, to another country.
She had told me about Adam and his father’s epic indifference on our first real date, that night in Ashland at the Chimney Corner Tea Room, on Carter near Fifteenth. It had baffled me then, and it baffles me now even more.
Since then I’ve heard lots more stories. I heard how strict her father was, how he wouldn’t let her talk on the phone on a school night when she was a teenager, how he’d unscrew the phone’s mouthpiece and keep it with him when he went upstairs to bed or out for the evening. And I got one of my first indicators of just how resourceful she could be when she told me that she went down to a phone booth on Winchester and unscrewed the mouthpiece from the phone there and kept it in her purse as a spare. There was no stopping her.
And when she’d gotten pregnant, I heard how she and her mother collaborated on the story that she was going to work in Cincinnati—live with her sister, Amanda, and her husband—to keep the truth from her father. His discipline and strictness were the stuff of family legend. (“Mark my words” was the catchphrase that reverberated throughout that little house.)
She had Adam in Cincinnati, but she didn’t want to live there. She wanted to go home, to Ashland, so she put Adam in a laundry basket, got on the bus, and slipped back to the family home on Carter, east of Thirtieth. I heard about the hand-wringing, the pacing all that afternoon, waiting for her father to come home from work, trying to construct a story, any story, that would help allay his certain outrage and the ensuing volley of condemnation—not to mention his embarrassment and the humiliation at having been the butt of such subterfuge from his own wife and daughter.
Phil Berney had ruled the roost in a pretty old-fashioned way.
And so it happened like this.
“Jeanne’s got something she wants to show you, Phil.”
These were her mother’s wor
ds, so the story went.
He was sitting in the big blue easy chair in the living room—the one that’s still there—watching the six o’clock news.
Jeanne brought the laundry basket out of the bedroom and set it on the carpet at his feet.
“This is your grandson.”
Nobody spoke.
“His name’s Adam.”
Phil Berney looked at the baby, at his daughter, his wife.
Claire Berney put her hands over her mouth. Without sound, she began to cry.
Jeanne looked at her father. “I’m sorry, Dad. I should’ve told you.”
He still said nothing.
“I was afraid.” She looked at her mother. “We were afraid. Of what you’d do, of what you’d say. I thought I was going to give him up for adoption, but I’ve changed my mind.”
She held her ground. Standing in front of him. The baby at his feet.
The silence was a chasm. He was searching for the pieces, trying to understand. Nobody could tell what he was feeling, what he was thinking. And when he spoke, finally, softly, there was no explosion, no anger. “He can’t sleep in a laundry basket,” he said. He looked at his wife. “He needs a proper crib.”
“Dad was nearly always right,” Jeanne told me years later. “I can see it now.”
The next day Phil Berney went out and bought a crib, and spent the hour after dinner assembling it. It had baseball players painted on the headboard, a ball and glove on the footboard. They think that’s why Adam loves baseball so much.
I only knew Phil Berney during that first year I was seeing Jeanne. He died the next summer, when Adam was eleven.
People were still marking his words, even when I knew him.
II
Jeanne and I were married Friday, September 2, 1988, at the Graceland Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. It was the Friday before Labor Day, before Adam had to start back to school. He was fourteen. He was my best man.
We’d been talking about getting married for over a year, but couldn’t figure out exactly how to do it. Neither Jeanne nor I attended any church regularly—still don’t— so that was a problem. There was which city to do it in—Ashland or Toronto. And then there was the cost—the paraphernalia, the attendants, the hall, the reception, the debates about the guest list, the gown, the tux. It went on and on. We got a migraine whenever we talked about it, so it became a topic we didn’t know how to deal with.
But there was the fact that we’d been living together, both in Ashland and whenever she and Adam came to Toronto, and the fact was that we were both becoming more conscious of Adam in the middle of our cohabiting. He was a teenager. He knew what was going on. Maybe he had always known, but at age ten or eleven he still seemed to think of Leo only as Mommy’s Friend. At thirteen and fourteen, he knew I was more than a friend. What kind of example were we setting? We weren’t sure. New territory for both of us. And what the hell. We couldn’t stay away from each other. Couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Why not get married?
But how to do it.
City Hall was a possibility. It seemed more and more like the logical thing to do. But there was something about being so logical, so conventional, that we stalled, eddied, procrastinated.
It all changed one evening in July of ’88.
“Read this,” I’d said, sliding the newspaper across the kitchen table to Jeanne.
“What is it?”
“Read it.”
It was in the Sunday Toronto Sun, one of those features that you only find in weekend papers. Not news. Human-interest stuff. The headline was “Goin’ to the Chapel.” It was datelined Las Vegas.
Jeanne read it quietly. A Toronto couple who had lived together for seventeen years had won a trip to Vegas. Something in the Nevada air, in the cascade of blue and orange neon, had made them decide, after all that time, to tie the knot.
I watched Jeanne’s face. She frowned, smiled, frowned again.
“Jesus,” she said.
“What?”
“Says there were over eighty thousand weddings there last year. There are forty-two chapels. They take up thirteen pages in the Vegas yellow pages.”
I waited a minute. Then I said, “What do you think?”
She looked up, met my eyes, thinking. That bit of smile came back.
The next day, after work, I went to the Metro Reference Library near Bloor and Yonge and photocopied thirteen pages from the Las Vegas yellow pages.
“Your mother and I are thinking of getting married in Las Vegas. What do you think?”
Everything was riding on Adam’s reaction. If he turned thumbs down, it was off. Our life was good. We didn’t need marriage. At least, we didn’t think so.
It was dinnertime. Simple routines had emerged: decisions and food just seemed to go together.
He didn’t keep us waiting.
“I think it’s cool,” he said. Then he added, “My friends will think it’s cool.”
“Will you be my best man?”
“Sure.” He smiled now, pleased.
Jeanne relaxed visibly. You could see it in her face, her shoulders. Her eyes came alive.
That night, at the kitchen table, with Adam and I listening, Jeanne called a handful of the chapels in the photocopied pages that I had brought home. They had 1-800 numbers to make it almost painless. Silver Bell (“Don Johnson, Diana Ross”), Little Chapel of the Flowers (“Elegant Reception Center”), Candlelight (“California Checks Welcomed”), Little White Chapel (“50 Years in the Business of Love!”). There were drive-in weddings, weddings in a plane flying over the Grand Canyon, weddings in a hot tub inside a limousine.
We were more sensible than all that. We selected Graceland (“Home of the ‘King’!”). It was the lady on the other end of the phone who swayed us. No pressure, easygoing, honest, funny. Jeanne asked all the questions, and liked her. We booked it.
We opened a dusty bottle of cabernet sauvignon, poured two glasses, even offered a glass to Adam. He made a face, got a can of Coke from the fridge instead.
When I told my father, later, that we were going to get married in Vegas, that there were eighty thousand weddings a year performed there, he said, “Yeah. And how many divorces.”
My father.
Jeanne’s taste in music contained a curious twist on Kentucky rockabilly. She had once told me that she preferred music by singers who had died violently in a motorized vehicle. I had to admit, there were plenty of them.
Elvis didn’t quite qualify. But he was close. He was close.
For a hundred bucks you got Elvis to sing at your wedding. We splurged. Why not the King? Why not.
Jeanne bought herself a little white dress. Her mother, Claire, was her maid of honor. The four of us went: me, Adam, Jeanne, and Mrs. Berney. We picked the Hacienda Hotel. I sprang for a room for her mom, one for Adam, one for us. Claire Berney had never stayed in a hotel in her life. She thought she had died and gone to heaven.
Graceland did a good job. Seriously. Elvis was great. I remember that the minister’s first name was Rudy, and that he was sensitive and kind about the whole thing. Cost, including Elvis, the limo ride to and from the hotel, flowers, video—the works—was three hundred and some dollars. Of course, that’s not counting the air fares, which backed up my Visa card for a couple of years afterward.
Jeanne keeps a five-dollar casino chip from the Hacienda Hotel in her purse as a memento. My hair was thin even then. I bought a hat at a shop in the Hacienda, to protect my head from the Nevada sun—an ivy cap that I wore till it fell apart. The one I wear now is a replacement.
A couple of years later, back home, on the six o’clock news, I watched them detonate the Hacienda, watched it collapse in a cloud of dust, onlookers roped back at a safe distance.
THREE
I
When I was twenty-two or twenty-three, my Uncle Jim, Dad’s younger brother, took me to a Legion Hall that he frequented for a couple of beers and a game of pool. I liked Jim. He drove my father crazy.
/> In his youth, Jim had gotten into trouble with the law and with his parents and with my father and mother. There were streams of stories. We’d heard how, in the thirties, he and a group of teens from Northern Vocational stole a car to drive to a dance at Lake Wilcox north of Toronto, how they drank, argued about who would drive home, how the keys got thrown into the bush. The details of his arrest are blurry, but he ended up in the Don Jail. The end of the story has Nanny, his mother, making him turkey sandwiches, and Da, her father, his grandfather, getting sent home with the sandwiches after trying to deliver them.
“He’s in jail. What’re you, crazy?” The man at the front desk hadn’t blinked.
When he was caught skipping school, Nanny threw him out and Da threw him back in. Nanny bought him a violin. He sold it. When my mother married my father she went to live in the Nolan family home on Maxwell Avenue. Jim was still there. The pram that my mother had bought for my sister Anne went missing. It came out later: Jim had sold it.
One of Jim’s legs was shorter than the other. He had operations on his hip, grafting bone from there to his leg. I heard how when he was a kid, the other kids playing outside, he had to lie on a flat board in the kitchen.
Jim. My father would shake his head. “I used to park my car down at the docks at night,” he’d say, “get on the cruise boats, play in the band all night, come back, and be puzzled why I had so little gas left in the tank. One night I came back a little early, the car was gone. I phoned the police. We’re standing there filling out the report, up drives Jim. He’d had a key made, took the car most nights.”
Jim, he’d say. And shake his head.
“We were all surprised when he married your mother.” Jim leaned against the pool table, taking the pressure off his bad leg.
Shadow of Ashland, A Witness to Life, and St. Patrick's Bed Page 30