I chalked my cue, looked at him. My uncle. My godfather. Usually he made me laugh, always had a funny story.
“He’d been going with another girl. We all thought he was going to marry her. Then he turned around and married your mother.”
It was information that confused me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“He used to go out with a girl down at Port Dover, where he played in the bands in the summer. That was the girl. You ever hear about this?”
“No.” I missed my shot, stood back.
“He was quite a ladies’ man. I always thought maybe he had other women even after he married your mother. What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” It was all I could think of to say. Such a thing had never occurred to me. My father was a mystery. All fathers are mysteries.
I never knew what to make of Jim after that. I had trouble understanding why he had told me that story. True or not, there was nothing I could do about it. But why would he tell me such a thing? He was talking about my father.
I’ve thought about it a lot, and I have an idea now. It’s taken me years. I had to get older, have my own set of unfathomable experiences, have life boot me around a bit.
I’d heard another story about Jim, this one from my mother. I’d heard how he and his wife tried and were unable to have children, how when my mother brought me home from the hospital after I was born, he had held me in his arms and said to my mother, “He’s beautiful. Can I have him?” No, he couldn’t have me. But he could be my godfather.
Jim and Anna Mae had eventually adopted two beautiful boys of their own, raised them strong, fine. Jim remained the likable con man. But he knew how to be a father.
In 1991, when we knew Jim was dying, I took Dad to the hospital to see him. Jim was delirious, had a respirator over his nose and mouth, lungs full of pneumonia. But when I held his hand, he focused, startling blue eyes, stared at me, knew who I was, squeezed hard, and I squeezed back. Hard as I could. He still wanted me. Wanted to be my father. That’s why he’d told me the story.
On the way home, in the car, Dad began talking. “Poor Jim,” he said. “He had to wear one of those built-up shoes when he was a kid. He hated it. He used to sit on the curb, take it off, and throw it across the street.
“Jim.” My father shook his head. I glanced sideways at him. His cheeks were wet.
“Those shoes were expensive,” he said.
Heading south back into the city, I could still feel the hand. Squeezing. Hard.
II
Tommy Nolan, my father, married Margaret Radey, my mother, on November 30, 1929, and they lived in his family home—the semidetached house at 55 Maxwell Avenue in North Toronto—until she died in 1984. Dad lasted there one more year without her, selling it in 1985.
I grew up in that home. It was crazy. But I now understand that I didn’t see the wildest years. They were before my time. Dad was one of five. Three of them as well were still there—Jim, Eleanor, and Loretta—along with his father (Bampi), mother (Nanny), and her father—Dad’s grandfather—Da. My sister Anne was born in 1930, my brother Ron in 1932. Eleanor married and left in ’32. But Loretta didn’t marry until ’36, and Jim was there until the early forties—he and Anna Mae weren’t married until 1943. My sister Judy came along in 1939. And I forgot to mention my cousin Jacquie, who was born in 1928 and spent most of her youth at Maxwell Avenue, raised by Nanny and my mother, after Jacquie’s mother’s marriage fell apart (her mother was Berna, my father’s sister, who married in 1926, before my father did).
My parents had nine children, but only five of us survived. There were a couple of stillbirths and twins that died at birth. Mom only named one of them—Anthony, in 1931. He was her second baby, the first boy, and she carried him around in a secret place inside herself as long as I knew her. There was even a statue of St. Anthony on a dressing table in her bedroom, which I used to study as a child. When you lose something, you pray to St. Anthony, she told me. He’s the patron saint of lost things. Then the story would come out. St. Anthony, I came to understand, stood for the other babies too—and for everything else my mother had lost.
Nineteen thirty to 1949. She had babies for nineteen years, from age twenty to thirty-nine. By the time my brother Dennis and I appeared in the mid- and late forties, the place had virtually cleared out. In comparison to the thirties, the house must have seemed either like a ghost town or like paradise. Nanny, my father’s mother, was still there though, a fixture as I grew up, sitting in the green, cloth-covered chair in the living room, watching The Edge of Night every afternoon on the RCA black-and-white TV. She didn’t die until 1974, age eighty-nine.
The house had three bedrooms. The basement was full too. The place was crazy.
Like I said, when Mom died, Dad lasted a year in the house alone. Then he sold it, moved to a senior citizens’ apartment on Yonge Street. He was there for three years—1985 to ’88.
In the spring of ’88, I went to see him and made a pitch.
“Jeanne and I are going to buy a house together. Here, in Toronto.”
Dad now occupied the green, cloth-covered chair, only now it was in his apartment at Fellowship Towers. The arms were more frayed than ever. He was watching TV. He always watched TV.
“Oh? You getting married?”
I was married a long time ago. It ended after three years. My one and only try. Fran. I shrugged. “Not yet. We’ve talked about it. Probably. But right now, we just want to do this.”
“Mm.” He pondered. “Adam?”
“He’ll start high school here.”
He looked at me. “It’s a big step.”
“I know.”
“Living together.”
I nodded.
“Don’t see what’s wrong with people just living together. Couldn’t do it in my day.” Then he thought about it. “Well, you could do it. But it wasn’t easy. Most people looked down on you, like you were doing something really wrong.”
“Like Berna.” I mentioned his sister. She had died in ’78.
“Like Berna. Ma nearly had a fit.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Where you going to buy? Got a place picked out?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
He waited. Even though he was looking at me, I knew he wasn’t seeing much of me, just like he wasn’t seeing much of the TV. His eyes were going. Macular degeneration. Still, he managed to get around. Good instincts, I thought. Good sense. Radar.
“You could come to live with us.”
He paused, surprised. Then: “Nah. Wouldn’t work. Besides, I like it here. It’s a good spot.”
“I know that. The thing is, though, we could do each other a favor.”
He sat back.
“Jeanne and I can buy a place of our own. That would be fine. But if you come to live with us, we’d buy a bigger place so that you could have your own quarters, as separate as possible. You just pay us the same rent as you’re paying here. Your finances stay the same. Hell, they’ll be better. It’ll include food too. Room and board.”
He was quiet, thinking.
“Meals … We’ll work it out. We’ll work everything out. It’ll be a work-in-progress.”
A long silence.
“What do you think?” I waited.
“What’s Jeanne think of it?”
“She likes the idea.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
More silence. Then: “And Adam?”
“Adam likes you. You like Adam.”
He nodded. “Mm. I don’t think these things usually work out. Your mother didn’t like living with Nanny.” He had a small reverie. “I made a mistake not getting our own place as soon as we were married.” A pause. “Suppose it doesn’t work out. Suppose we get on each other’s nerves. What then?”
“Good question. I don’t know what to say. There are no guarantees for anything, this included.
Let’s just say that it’s not a one-way street.” I looked at him sitting there, my father, in his eighties. “If it doesn’t work out, you can come back here. Things can be reversed. Not without a few scrapes, but certainly without any major damage. We wouldn’t let anything get that far.”
He was still thinking. Then aloud: “I’m not going to get any better, you know. I’m only going to get worse.”
I ignored him. “Adam could use a grandfather. You’d have a role. There’d be somebody in the house when we were out. I’d like that.”
He pressed the mute button on the TV, stared at the silent images. “You know,” he said, “fellow in the next room died last week. I’ve got a spare key. I found him. He was sitting in a chair just like this.” He gripped the worn arms. “Shook me up. Made me realize that some stranger was going to come in one day and find me sitting here, just like him.”
I waited a minute before trying again.
“If you don’t want to do it, I understand. But we’ll buy a smaller house—we’ll have to—and it’ll be too late. Now’s the time. We’d buy a house to suit.” A pause. “You’d be living in sin with us. At your age. Think about it.” I smiled.
He stared at the television’s silent, flickering images.
“You could eat Mexican food with us.”
He turned, looked at me, still silent.
Jeanne and I bought a big, old semidetached house in the South Riverdale section of the city. My brother Dennis and I moved Dad’s belongings in the day after Jeanne and I and Adam had moved our own stuff in.
He had this old table lamp, white shade, milky glass base shaped like a cluster of grapes. It was his mother’s—
Nanny’s. It had been at Maxwell Avenue—one of the things he had kept. Dennis and I dropped it, chipped the base. There’s a rough edge now, a hunk an inch or so missing.
The lamp’s another thing of his that I still have.
FOUR
I
Adam brought it up again a week or so later. I was watching a ball game on TV in the kitchen as I did the dinner dishes. Jeanne was on the phone upstairs talking with her mother.
He came in, sat down at the kitchen table.
“You going out later?” I rinsed a plate, set it in the dishwasher, picked up another.
“Yeah. Going to meet Jane. Go for a coffee.”
I nodded.
“Down in the Beaches. Queen Street.”
“Nice evening. Cool, but nice.” I squirted dishwashing liquid into an aluminum pot, worked the yellow nylon scrubby against the burned sediment stuck to its bottom.
“I think I’d like to go to Dayton this summer. See my father.”
I stopped scrubbing the pot, looked at him.
“You’re not upset, are you, Leo?”
I had to think. “No,” I said. “A little surprised, though.” I straightened. “Told your mother?”
He shook his head. “Not yet.”
I dropped the scrubby in the sink, rinsed my hands, tore off a piece of paper towel. “I don’t know what to say.”
He looked at me.
“Honestly.”
“I know.”
“Maybe it’s a good idea.” I dried my hands, dropped the towel in the wastebasket. “I don’t know.” I waited a few seconds, then: “You might be moving too fast. Maybe it’s not a good idea. You don’t know anything about him. We don’t even know if he’s still there.” I hesitated. “Does he even want to see you is another very real question, don’t you think?”
He toyed with the salt and pepper shakers in front of him. “Did you ever wish you knew more about your father? About Gramp?”
“Yes.” I leaned back against the counter. I watched Adam frown, run his fingers along the contours of the shakers. “Lots of times. Especially now.”
“That’s the way I feel.”
“I understand.”
“Like I have to know. Have to get it straight in my head.”
I let him talk.
“Who he is. What happened. You know.”
I nodded. “I know.”
“Do you think I’ll be disappointed?”
“Depends on what you’re looking for.”
“I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
“Most of us don’t.”
When my father had moved in with us back in ’88, after one night’s sleep in his new room, he told us that he’d slept like a baby. And when he woke, he said, there were kids playing outside in the back alley. He said it was a treat to hear, especially after where he’d been, living with so many old folks.
His life at Fellowship Towers was something that I knew little about. Three years there.
There was a lot of him that I didn’t know anything about.
Because Nanny was the oldest, we had to defer to her. My mother told us so. This was what we heard all through my childhood on Maxwell Avenue. You can’t have a bath on Thursday nights. That’s Nanny’s night for a bath. That’s Nanny’s chair. You get up and let her have it. We’re going to watch Ed Sullivan. Nanny likes it.
The word “matriarch” was one that I didn’t know back then.
My father was mostly quiet.
When his mother—Nanny—died in ’74, Dad’s brother Jim had a flask of whiskey at the funeral home. He kept disappearing downstairs into the washroom, coming back up smelling of rye, wanting my father to go with him next time. Dad drank pretty stupidly when he wanted. I’d seen it. We’d all seen it. But he wouldn’t go with Jim then.
Back at the house, after Nanny was buried, my mother sent me out for a bucket of KFC chicken and served it to the family and guests that had come back with us. There was some more drinking, some coffee, small socializing. Jim was there. Suddenly my father said, “I have to go upstairs.” I can still hear his voice. It was raspy. Soft. Like something was caught in his throat. No tears, though. “I have to lie down.” I watched him climb the stairs. He went into his bedroom, the sanctuary he and my mother had from his mother, from us, closed the door. He stayed there until the next morning.
I think of that climb up the stairs every now and then, wonder if my dream of him on the stairs is related.
I have a lot of memories of people, myself included, on those stairs. I’m not sure why.
“I won’t try going to see him until later in the summer.” Adam pushed the salt and pepper shakers away. “Got to make some money first.”
“Makes sense.”
I looked at him. What I felt was an impossible mixture, a quiet ache. I’ve felt it before and since. It’s a flood, a burst, soft, like my father’s voice going up the stairs to lie down, to be alone.
When my own son was stillborn, years ago, back when I was with Fran, it was in another life. That life disappeared. It scarcely seems real. It’s gone, like my mother, father, my brother Ron, like the past in general. In the here and now, sitting at the table in front of me, talking to me, man to man, was my real son, my only son, alive, needing me.
II
“He’s going to get hurt,” Jeanne said. “That’s all there is to it.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Why is he doing this? I don’t understand. Why?”
“Because he has to.” I shrugged. “It’s normal. Normal, healthy curiosity.” I turned to face her. We were lying in bed.
Searching for someone missing, from the past, was something that I understood. I’d done it. My mother’s brother, Jack. He led me to Ashland, down through the States, onto the Ohio River. In the heat and the glare and the smell of oil and steel, in Ashland, I’d found Jeanne and Adam instead. Or as well. I wasn’t sure. “Family is a mystery,” I said, “that we have to explore.”
Jeanne looked at me.
“We can’t help it.”
She was quiet.
“Adam can’t help it.”
Another evening, watching baseball on the tube, I said to him: “You’re an English major. There are books all around the place. You’ve read more than I ever have, probably
more than I ever will. I envy you.”
“You polish off those thrillers pretty well. Nothing wrong with them. They’re good. And you like Steinbeck.”
“But the courses you get to take. You’re lucky. The Modern Novel. Classics in Translation.” A pause. “You’re lucky.” I hadn’t gone to university. Right from high school to work. Jeanne hadn’t finished high school. My father had only finished grade school. Mom—she was the bright one, the talented one, the sensitive one: some time at the Ontario College of Art, before getting married and joining the ranks of full-time mothers and homemakers.
“I’ve got a question for you, Shakespeare,” I said.
“Shoot.”
“Are there any books about fathers and sons? Any classics? Something I should read?”
He sat, thinking.
“I did read East of Eden. Long time ago. I guess it qualifies as pretty good. Don’t know if it makes the ‘great’ list or not,” I added. “There’s even an Adam in it. He’s the father, though.”
“You read it? The whole thing?”
“Yup.”
“Wow.”
“Haven’t you?”
“Saw the movie. James Dean.”
“Teenagers,” I said.
“I’m twenty-one.”
“He died in a car accident. Your mom liked him.”
Adam thought some more.
“Great works that I should know,” I said. “You know, like if you want to read the classic about the Depression, you’ve got to read The Grapes of Wrath. Or you want to read the classic about alienated youth, you’ve got to read The Catcher in the Rye. You know. Like that.”
“Good question,” he said.
I let some time pass. “Well?”
“Very good question. Most of what I can think of is about how fathers and sons fight, or how the relationship is abusive. Long Day’s Journey into Night. Scary. Newer stuff: Russell Banks wrote a book called Affliction. Abusive relationship. Same with Tobias Wolff: This Boy’s Life. More abuse.” Some more thought. “Updike’s Rabbit books deal with it. They’re good. Death of a Salesman. Willy and Biff and Hap. Might be as good as it gets.” He looked at me. “You’re a genius for spotting holes in a fabric, Leo. Next year I’m going to bring it up in one of my seminars—how there’s a dearth, a gap.” He pondered further. “Maybe if there’s no abuse, no fighting, there’s no relationship. Nothing worth writing about.”
Shadow of Ashland, A Witness to Life, and St. Patrick's Bed Page 31