After Visiting Friends

by Michael Hainey

  My niece picks up two cicadas, their wings still curled, wet. She places them in her box and tells me, “The real name of cicadas is magicadas. That’s what scientists call them.”

  She circles the thick roots, eyes fixed, searching. She tells me she will set the two of them free before dinner.

  “Before it gets dark,” she says. “So they can go home to their mommy and daddy.”

  I’ll be sixty next time this happens. Sixty. Will I still be without a son, even then?

  Above us, the chorus continues.

  # # #

  In 1972 my mother signs up to be a den mother for my brother’s Cub Scout pack. Every week, a dozen or so boys, eight- and nine-year-olds, make a mess in our basement, usually involving some combination of balsa wood, Elmer’s glue, Testors paints, pipe cleaners.

  They’re preparing for Scout-O-Rama, a weekend-long gathering of Scouts held at the local horse-racing track. Every Scout pack or troop presents a play or stages an event. My mother has decided the boys will perform a “Meet the Solar System” pageant. One by one, the boys appear onstage, each holding a painted Styrofoam ball. Some of the boys are planets. Some, constellations. Some, meteors. Some, comets. One by one the boys emerge from behind the curtain to tell the audience of parents about their place in the heavens.

  I do not understand the heavens. I do not understand orbits. I do not know about gravitational pull. I do not know about escape velocity or why stars shoot and why comets streak. I do not know how to navigate by the night sky.

  When the show is over, I go backstage to find my mother and brother. My mother is preoccupied with the other boys, trying to gather up their costumes and props and make sure they do not wander off. I see my brother in a far corner. He sits alone, holding a Styrofoam ball, yellow as French’s mustard. He does not see me, and for a moment I watch him turn his sun over and over in his small hands.

  Years later, I ask my mother where she got her idea.

  “What are you talking about?” she asks me.

  “You know,” I say. “For the show you did when you were a den mother.”

  “I was never a den mother. Was I?”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “I don’t.”

  # # #

  I call my grandmother. Tell her I want to take her to a birthday breakfast. When I pull up, she’s at the front door, waiting, dressed in pale purple pants and a white sweater. The sweater, white as her hair. Before I even get the car into park, she comes down the path, pushing her walker with the sliced green tennis balls jammed onto the bottom of the rear legs.

  I lean down to kiss her, and she feels my lapel between her thumb and index finger.

  “Seersucker? Sharp, kiddo. But you always were.”

  We start driving to Mac’s, this local diner where I always take her. Where she likes to go. Where, every time, she says to Barbara the waitress, “This is my other grandson. From New York. He’s not married.”

  At a red light, she says, “Hey, where’s your honey?”

  I tell her that Brooke, the woman I’ve begun to date, is traveling for work.

  My grandmother reaches over and touches my right hand.

  “What do they say?” she asks. “ ‘Absence makes the heart wonder’?”

  “No, Gram. They say, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ ”

  She rubs her thumb along the back of my hand. My grandmother’s hands have always been—back to when I was a boy and she’d squeeze my hand two times under the dinner table to signal me that she was going to sneak my vegetables off my plate and eat them for me when my mother was not looking—the softest hands I’ve known. Softer, even, than my niece’s delicate hands with their tiny, deft fingers that pluck stunned cicadas from ancient trees.

  I look at my grandmother studying my hand. All I see is the top of her head, a white crown.

  The guy behind me honks. The light is green. My grandmother looks up at me.

  “That’s what I said, Mike. Absence makes the heart wonder.”

  #

  Later that day, I start in on the old gang. I call Roy Wiley, one of the guys my mother gave me. He’s not a newspaperman anymore. He tells me that he and my father had fallen out of touch by the time he died.

  “We were at a party and he said something about Bobby Kennedy. I took a swing at him. That put us on ice for some time. But I’ll tell you this—your dad was the best newspaperman I ever knew. He was a stand-up guy and I’ve always regretted our feud.”

  “What do you know about the night he died? The obits say he was on North Pine Grove. Did you know anyone up there?”

  “I don’t know anything about that night.”

  “You didn’t hear anything in the newsroom?”

  “No.”

  “You guys are newspapermen, the nosiest group in the world. You live to know the story.”

  Silence.

  “No one who was with him that night ever said anything to you?”

  He says, “Imagine if you are the guy who dragged him out that night.”

  And he switches voices, like he’s living that moment.

  Bob, let’s get a drink.

  Nah, I gotta get home.

  Whaddya mean? C’mon.

  All right.

  “Imagine you’re that guy. Are you really going to go up to your mother at the wake and say, Hey, I’m sorry. I was the guy who kept him out. When you’re the guy who had him in a bar or wherever, and he should have been home? You know how guys are.”

  “So you don’t know anything?”

  “Like I say, I’d drifted.”

  “Drifted?”

  “You know how guys are.”

  # # #

  I create stories of that night. I fill in the holes. I create scenarios.

  Here he is. Off work. Two a.m. Wife and children at home. In bed. His boys, six and eight. His wife, thirty-three. Him, thirty-five. But tonight he is ageless. Tonight, he doesn’t think about them or himself or tomorrow. Tonight, he is free.

  He walks out of the office building. Late April. Chill in the air slaps his face. He can feel the dampness off the lake—big and dark and voidy. Out there, where the horizon turns black. In the east.

  He flips the collar of his tan raincoat against his neck as he pulls his shoulders high. This is what Murrow did in London. This is what we do, he thinks. Journalists. Newspapermen. We are men alone.

  He pauses. Looks at the IBM Building rising across the street. Miesian monolith. He thinks, This is not a building. Buildings are made of stone cut out of the ground. Buildings have windows that a man can open at lunch, windows that require him to have paperweights on his desk on the piles of papers that he needs to get rid of.

  He turns. He knows where he is going. The route. The loop. The circuit. Every man has one. Point A to Point B to Off the Map. The places a man goes to forget and perhaps find himself.

  The man walks down Wabash. Makes a right onto Kinzie, then a left on Rush. The first stop of the night, Radio Grill.

  Hands reach out. Pats on the back. Nods. Shot of J&B and a Schlitz. On the bar. Waiting.

  It’s good to be a regular. This is what it means to be a man.

  Drink up! Join the party! Here’s to ya! What’s the good word?

  He knocks them back with his pals. Carps about the bosses. Cracks wise about the day, what has gone down. Cigarette smoke in the air. Jukebox. Bullshitting. It goes on this way for an hour. Maybe two. Three drinks. Maybe four.

  More of the same. More drinks. More gossip. More drinks. More laughs. Blow off steam. This is what they do. Newspapermen, after their shift.

  #

  Going on 4 a.m. Someone says, “Hey, let’s go up to so-and-so’s place. Keep the party going there.”

  Next thing, they’re heading north along an empty Lake Shore Drive. They turn off at Irving Park Road. Stop at the corner store. Grab beer. Grab bourbon. Grab Pall Malls.

  Eight, ten, a dozen of them all at so-and-so’s place. Drop the needle on the rec
ord. Turn the music up. Open the bottle. Let’s get it going. Let’s forget about it all.

  It’s a small place. Nothing fancy. There’s a couch in the living room, the arms stained from hair tonic and sweat. A couple of chairs. A black-and-white TV pushed up against one wall. Couple of tin TV trays holding magazines—Look. Life. Time. And ashtrays. There’s a coffee table, someone says. Let’s get those goodies out here. From the kitchen come glasses. Ice, in a soup pot. Booze.

  My father grabs a seat on the couch, presses a cold beer can against his forehead.

  Damn headache, he thinks. Maybe I’m more looped than I thought.

  Someone slaps him on the back.

  “Bobby, you gotta keep up.”

  “My head’s killing me.”

  “Have another drink. It’s good for what ails ya.”

  My father tilts his head back. He’s having trouble seeing. It’s like someone is making him stare at a white-bright spotlight. He’s getting hot. Clammy. Nauseated. He touches the shoulder of the man beside him on the couch.

  “Something is wrong with me.”

  “Nothing a drink won’t fix, Bob.”

  “No. Really.”

  A couple of people wander over.

  “Overserved,” someone says.

  My father can’t hear them now. Doesn’t have the strength to hear them now.

  They turn back to their drinks, to the party.

  A little later, his head is slumped onto his chest. A man shakes him, but he doesn’t respond. The man raises my father’s head. That’s when he feels it is cold. “Something’s wrong with Hainey,” the man says to no one.

  He says it again. This time, louder.

  The guys close in around him.

  “Someone call an ambulance!”

  “No,” someone says. “No, wait. Call his brother.”

  # # #

  I always knew where my mother had been by the matches she brought home. She doesn’t smoke. She just likes having matchbooks in the house. I always find them in the kitchen the morning after. They’re Checkpoint Charlies on her dates with men. Like passport stamps of her voyages through Chicago at night.

  My brother starts to collect them. Every other kid in the neighborhood is collecting beer cans. That’s the big thing. I spend stretches of a Saturday walking in the weedy woods lining the Kennedy Expressway, looking for the cans hurled out of cars speeding back from Wisconsin. Point. Blatz. Leinenkugel’s. Trash that I can make something of. It’s a strange time. Kids going nuts, telling you how their uncle just came back from Pittsburgh with something called Iron City beer and there’s a picture of the Steelers on it.

  My brother keeps the matchbooks in Folgers coffee cans in his bedroom. Red can after red can rings the baseboard. His collection, an exhibition of her life outside the house. Sometimes, when he is not home, I go to his room and study them. Cricket’s. Le Perroquet. La Strada. The list goes on.

  I start my own collection: miniature bottles of booze. The kind you get in first class, or that drunks on skid row buy with fistfuls of sweaty coins. Change they’ve begged for. Men my mother dates bring me empties from their business trips. Sometimes I find one flipped in the forsythia bushes in our alley. I line them up on my bookshelf, sort them from clear to dark.

  #

  My mother remarries. A man named Paul. This is 1988. When my father was alive, Paul lived across the way with his wife and two girls. The girls are older, and sometimes when my mother and father have a date, the girls babysit my brother and me. When I am four, his daughter Cathy plays “Up, Up and Away” by the 5th Dimension on our hi-fi and teaches me how to dance.

  Then they move away.

  In 1977, my mother runs in to Paul. He’s divorced by now.

  With Paul she gets the life she never got with my father. They travel. Fly to Europe on the Concorde. Eat at swank places like Chez Paul.

  From the time my brother and I are maybe thirteen and fifteen, my mother spends every weekend with Paul. He lives in a tall black tower on the shore of Lake Michigan. She leaves us on Friday afternoon and returns Sunday night around the time McMillan & Wife is coming on, or The ABC Sunday Night Movie.

  I get home Friday after school. She’s gone. Always the same note on the kitchen counter:

  Pizza tonight. Money on the counter.

  Saturday, steak in fridge. Pre-heat to 350. 5–7 mins per side.

  Problems, call.

  Number you know.

  Love,

  Mom

  Paul once said to me, “Your mother is the classiest woman ever.”

  He died, too. January 1994. In the depths of a brutal cold spell. Us, one long row of mourners’ cars, winding our way through the cemetery. From the backseat I watch a solitary deer shin-deep in the snow slowly chew evergreen boughs—a dead man’s grave blanket.

  #

  Paul’s death was different. He lingered.

  How we sat at his bed in the midst of too much medical. Watched his face fade to a skull. Waited for him to cease his heaving. The patient drip of a morphine bag.

  Paul dies. Pre-dawn.

  As a boy I heard a story about Jackie Kennedy returning from Dallas, her dress still bloody, wandering the stacks of the Library of Congress, flashlight in hand, looking for books about Abraham Lincoln’s funeral. She wanted to know how to do This Thing. She wanted to do it right.

  Some women just have it. That coolness in the moment.

  That morning, when my mother and I return to her house, she walks straight from the garage to the kitchen and, not even bothering to remove her coat, digs a paper grocery bag out from under the sink, then continues on to the bedroom.

  She opens a closet.

  “What do you think?” she asks.

  In one hand she holds a navy suit; in the other, a gray pinstripe.

  I point to the navy.

  She drops it on the bed and pulls a blue shirt and dark red tie from a drawer, then gathers up socks, underwear.

  “Find some shoes,” she tells me.

  I marvel at her ability in that moment to compartmentalize. She remembers the drill: a trip to the funeral home to select the casket and the Mass cards. Name the hours of visitation. All the minutiae of tying up a life. And they’ll ask for clothes to dress him in. Yes, she will be way ahead of them. She will come prepared.

  #

  Their wedding was a small thing—just family. His daughters. My grandparents. Paul’s three brothers, one of whom works for the State Department, one of whom is a Catholic priest, and one who lives in the house they grew up in, near the steel mills outside the city. Also my mother’s brother and his family. And then there’s my godmother, Lorraine, and her husband, Clarence.

  I’ve always loved Clarence. He died maybe ten years ago. Big bear of a Polack. Clarence Rychlewski. Six-four, maybe 250. Just enormous. From the North Side. When he was in high school he was in a gang of Polack kids called the Addison Bears. Graduated high school. Got a job selling aluminum for Alcoa. The kind of job for a kid with not much behind him, but the kind of job that let him put his hand on the throat of the American Dream and squeeze all that is good out of it.

  After my father dies, Lorraine and Clarence are two of the few who step in to help us. We start to spend a lot of time at their house. My mother and Lorraine have been friends since they were thirteen. A Polish girl and a Czech girl on the Southwest Side. They meet at Gage Park High School. They get married a year apart. Clarence once referred to my mother and Lorraine as “the Gage Park virgins.” I remember thinking at the time that it was right and funny. But if he had said the opposite, then what would I have felt?

  Lorraine and Clarence have three kids about my brother’s and my ages. Fourth of July, when I’m ten, they have a cookout and when night falls we launch bottle rockets toward the thin creek that snakes behind their house. Later, Clarence breaks out Roman candles. A sloshing rocks glass of bourbon in one hand, cigarette in the other, he weaves through the yard, setting fireworks ablaze. Suddenly, there
’s a flash. The bourbon on his hand has caught fire. For a moment, Clarence stands still, considering his hand as though it is not attached to his body. He is quiet. Until all at once he swings his arm aloft and says, “I’m the Statue of Liberty. Happy Fourth! Wait! Get the marshmallows!” Then he laughs one of those cigarette-hack laughs that starts as a laugh and becomes a cough and then he buries his hand in the washtub full of icy cans of Old Style. His hand hissing, like a torch in the rain.

  The night my mother marries Paul, we have dinner at the hotel, then go to the hotel’s bar, Cricket’s. And if I remember anything about that night, it’s not what my mother wore or my feelings that she was remarrying and closing the door for real on my father, on being a widow, on being defined by his name or anything. No, it’s Clarence and me at the end of the bar, drinking. Him, martini on the rocks. Me, twenty-four and trying to imitate what I think Chicago reporters do—I am just starting as a stringer for the Tribune—and I’m drinking Scotch on the rocks.

  And by now, Clarence and I have had a few, and he leans in to me, breath all sweet with vodka and says, “I never got over your old man dying. He and I? Sssshhhhhhhit. . . . ”

  He waves his hand across his face, past his eyes, and then, for a moment, stares at nothing I can see.

  He says, “I remember the night your brother was born. Your old man, throwing pebbles at my bedroom window. I look out and there he is. Crazy guy had driven across half the city in the middle of the night. ‘Hey!’ he says. ‘I’m a father!’ And he used to . . . He used to . . . He had on that raincoat. He had this raincoat. Wore it everywhere. Like he thought he was Bogart or Murrow. Sometimes we’d meet downtown, after work, go drinking. He’d take me to those newspaper bars and never take that coat off. I said, ‘Hey. What’re you? A flasher?’ ”

  We laugh.

  He takes a gulp of his martini.

  “But I’ll tell you . . . something. I’ll tell you something. Something I’ve never told anyone. Not then. Not since. Not my wife. No one. I never forgave him for dying. Never. He and me? . . . He and me? . . . You know, every Sunday I go to church with my wife. With my kids. And I walk in and drop to my knees on that crummy kneeler and pray. And I don’t pray for my wife. I don’t pray for my kids. I don’t pray for me. I pray for your old man.”