After Visiting Friends

“You read two books at a time?”

  “No, honey child. This is one book in two pieces. Old Testament here”—she pats the book on the left—“New Testament here”—she pats the book on her right. “Only way to read God’s word. Side by side. We must understand what the Lord foretold and we must remember what the Lord delivered unto us. We must know the past, but we must also be prepared for the afterlife.” She smiles. “Do you pray, Michael?”

  “I don’t.”

  She reaches out. Puts her fingers through the hole. This time, all of them.

  “Take my hand.”

  I knit my fingers to her fingers, hook them up against the Plexiglas. I look at her and her head is lowered. I do the same.

  “Lord, watch over your servant as he goes forward on the quest you have foreordained. Give him strength. Protect him from doubt and fear. The path to truth can be dark at times. But let him know you are with him. Show him the way. Amen.”

  I raise my head. She’s smiling.

  “Just remember, Michael. Wherever you go—life . . . life is all.”

  As she tells me this I have but one feeling: shame. That shame that engulfs me in the presence of a true believer. That shame at my inability to match her faith. The shame of my fallen-ness.

  She squeezes my hand.

  “Life, Michael. It’s everything.”

  Just as we’re letting go, the metal door next to her box opens. A man walks out. He’s thick, balding. Looks like he could be a construction foreman or a high school football coach. No-nonsense is the M.O. He’s got a short-sleeve yellow shirt and a moss-green tie.

  “You here for Miss Crenshaw?”

  “I am.”

  “Floyd Gartman. Supervisor. Come with me.”

  He leads me through the door and tells me to sit at a table.

  I say, “So, is this the morgue for the whole city?”

  Mr. Gartman peers over his glasses, says, “Yes. Where the dead come to live.”

  I have the feeling he’s said it before. And he goes on to tell me Miss Crenshaw is running late. Then he walks away.

  #

  Ten thirty, a woman walks in. She’s young. Maybe late twenties. Tight jeans, Timberlands, a tight pink velour sweater. She’s straightened her Afro into a Dorothy Hamill–style bob.

  “How y’all doing? I’m Miss Crenshaw.”

  And she smiles this big smile.

  “I’m sorry I’m late, but my car broke down.” Which means, she says, that we can’t get to the Records Building to get my father’s files.

  “You mean you haven’t already pulled them?”

  “I’m sorry!” she says. And then she covers her mouth and giggles. It’s totally fetching.

  I tell her I have a car. She says first we have to find my father’s case number. She reaches toward a slag pile of ledgers behind me. Each the size of a world atlas. All bound in faded blue bindings. Each bearing a year, written in ink, from 1880 forward. She drops 1970 between us. And she tells me that anyone who dies under suspicious circumstances in Cook County, that death results in an automatic inquest.

  “Was your father murdered?”

  “The story is he was found dead on the street by two cops and brought to a hospital.”

  “That means he was D.O.A. Now, any D.O.A., they has to be inquested because the police has found the body. So, till the coroner knows how the person died, it’s considered suspicious and criminal.”

  She turns 1970’s faded pages and finds April 24. Name after name, all entered in neat, perfect Palmer script.

  “Now, we need his case number if we want to find his file in the warehouse.”

  I look along the page, next to his name: 249.

  #

  We get in my rented Century. The Records Building is ten minutes away. It looks like it could’ve been a factory. Something repurposed. At the end of the street, a freight train rumbles north, a long row of cars in tow.

  “If anyone gives you grief,” Miss Crenshaw says as she leaves me waiting in the parking lot, “just tell them, ‘I’m morgue.’ ”

  If the morgue is where, as Mr. Gartman says, the dead go to live, the Records Building is where they go to be inventoried. Call it the Final Accounting. Floors of files. Row after row of files, one for every person who has died in Cook County.

  Inside, my father’s life, reduced to weights and measures: Coroner’s report #249 of April 1970.

  Seven things I learn about my father while reading his Pathological Report and Protocol:

  1. He was 5’10”. I always thought he was close to my height—6’3”.

  2. He deserved his high school nickname (Bones): He weighed 145 pounds.

  3. His eyes were hazel. I always thought they were like mine: brown.

  4. “No external marks of violence” were found on his body.

  5. His brain weighed 1,575 grams—slightly heavier than the average brain, which is 1,300–1,400 grams.

  6. His heart was normal: 350 grams.

  7. A “gaping defect” measuring 0.2 cm in his anterior communicating artery killed him when it tore open, letting blood flood his brain: “spontaneous rupture of congenital cerebral aneurysm, anterior communicating artery”—what doctors call the Thunderclap stroke. One minute you’re alive, the next you’ve dropped dead.

  Three things I learn while reading the Toxicologist’s Report on my father:

  8. He had no barbiturates in his blood.

  9. No opiates in his bile.

  10. His blood alcohol level was .16—twice the legal limit for today.

  I see how he died. And why. I see my mother signing her name.

  But nowhere here does it say where he died. Nowhere here does it record any witnesses. Any friends. And once again, his name is misspelled. Robert Haney. And there, too, on the Toxicologist’s Report: Robert Hanley.

  There’s still part of me that thinks this means he is not really dead.

  #

  Outside my Century, the sky is low, nothing but one giant gray cloud. Battered as an old aluminum canoe.

  I drive us back.

  When we get to the morgue, Miss Crenshaw says, “Can you come in for a moment? I have a favor.”

  We walk inside, through the back door.

  “Wait here,” and she points at the hallway outside her office.

  A minute later she returns holding a pair of rose-tinted wraparound sunglasses. The frame has a big rhinestone “G.”

  “Maybe you know someone at Gucci?”

  She holds up one of the temples. It is unattached.

  “I love me my Gucci’s. I wear ’em when I’m out dancing. See the color of the lenses? That pink? The boys go crazy for it.”

  I hold out my hand. “I think I can do something,” I say.

  “I told my girlfriend I was gonna ask you, but she didn’t believe I knew me a GQ man. She’s gonna die.”

  “Well, you’re the best, Miss Crenshaw. Thank you for helping me today.”

  I lean down and kiss her cheek.

  “Don’t be doing that here! Mr. Gartman will be writing me up.”

  #

  I walk into the waiting room. Jan waves me over, wants to know what I found. I tell her I didn’t get a name or address, that I’m dead-ended.

  “Have you tried the police?”

  “The only files going back that far are murders. Everything else is what they call a ‘burn.’ They destroy it.”

  “You have to go to the hospital where he was D.O.A.’d. Hospitals are like hornets—they live on paper. Go to their records department. Believe me.”

  She sticks her fingers through the hole.

  I touch her hand once more and she takes hold of mine and says, “Jesus, protect Michael on his journey. Keep him strong of heart as he does your work.”

  # # #

  I leave the morgue behind, head east to Lake Shore Drive, then north, to the hospital. Beside me, Lake Michigan is purple-black. The way it gets this time of year. A cold cauldron of winter storms waiting to be. November.


  I love this drive. The city on my left, the lake on my right. This is the route he would’ve taken that night. I see him in his LeSabre. Window down. Cool air streams in. The air that night rich with the first whiffs of spring. Maybe the radio’s on. The dashboard, big and wide. His face, illuminated from below. No seat belt. A time before restraints.

  His exit comes up—my exit, too: Irving Park Road.

  Is this how it went?

  A throbbing in his head. Everything blurry. He pulls over.

  I need some air.

  He opens the door, takes a step or two, and then—drops.

  Is that it?

  #

  Until a few years ago, Thorek Memorial Hospital was called American Hospital. Max Thorek, a surgeon from Budapest, opened it in 1911. A hospital for actors making movies. Before Hollywood, there was Chicago. Hundreds of movies were shot near Pine Grove. Selig Polyscope, started by a magician, was close by. Chaplin made some of his early films at Essanay Studios on Argyle Street. In the hospital’s early days, Max and his wife treated everyone from Mae West to Harry Houdini to Buffalo Bill. By the time my father’s body was taken here, all the stars were gone. The neighborhood, redrawn. After World War II, landlords chopped up apartments to take advantage of the housing shortage created by returning GIs. Most places devolved into SROs, filled with Appalachians who came looking for work. In the ’60s, developers built high-rises here for the young urbans starting to push in. Still, in 1970, Thorek was more likely to be treating stabbing victims and OD’s, not movie stars.

  #

  The records department is in the basement. When I walk in, all I see are wall-to-wall workstations. One false wall linked to another. I feel people are here, but I can’t see them. I hit the bell on the countertop. A woman’s head pops up from behind one of the low walls.

  “Whatchoo want?”

  I tell her.

  “Mister, we don’t have records that far back.”

  Her head disappears.

  I’m left talking to the wall. I say, “But can you check?”

  The woman comes out. She’s large. A badge on her chest says Lynne. She walks slowly. Like a linebacker after an overtime loss. When she gets to the countertop, she drops her forearm on it and leans in on me and says, “Now, just whatchoo looking for? Exactly.”

  I tell her. Again.

  She cocks her head and yells, “Gail! We got records to 1970?”

  #

  When I started as a reporter, my first boss taught me a trick of the trade: I look at my watch and say, “Where do you all get your coffee around here?”

  “Coffee?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s almost three o’clock. I’m just going to run out for some. I figure it must be time for your break. What can I bring back for you?”

  “Mister, I don’t drink coffee. However, I do enjoy me some sweet tea.”

  “What about your friend Gail?”

  Lynne doesn’t even turn to the room. Just yells out, “Y’all want coffee? This man here—what’s your name?”

  “Michael.”

  “Mr. Mike is buying coffees!”

  Five heads pop up. All women. “Large coffee!” “Iced tea!” “Raisin scone.” “Cappuccino.” A small white plastic fan is clamped to the wall, whirring away. Lynne says to one woman, “I know, right? The boy crazy.”

  And I say, “Maybe while I am getting coffee, you can check on those records?”

  “You got a Social Security number for your father?”

  “Right here.”

  “Okay, Mr. Mike. I’ll see what I can do.”

  #

  “Coffee Man’s here,” I say half an hour later.

  Women scurry to the counter. I feel like I’m handing out CARE packages. Lynne stirs three packets of sugar into her sweet tea and takes a long sip before she says, “You’re very nice, Mr. Mike. But I didn’t find anything.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No.”

  “Is there a place where you store records? Somewhere else?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “We don’t go back that far.”

  # # #

  Thanksgiving—the day after the morgue. My brother’s house. My grandmother and my mother, my brother and my brother’s wife and children sit at the kitchen table. The same one that was in our kitchen when we were boys—and the same one that was in my mother’s kitchen when she was a girl: My grandmother and grandfather bought it at Goldblatt’s for twenty-five dollars when they got married. Hanging on the wall, a battered zither. My father’s grandparents played it to entertain themselves in their sod house.

  My brother and I sit on a bench on one side of the table, my nephew, Glenn, between us. My mother and niece face us. At some point, my nephew reaches up and hooks one hand on my shoulder, one on my brother’s. I put an arm around him and my brother does, too. My nephew looks up at me, beaming. He looks at his father and beams at him. Pure bliss on his face. And then he looks at the others. Looking to be witnessed. I can feel—my palm flat against his boy-size back, a back still soft and in the process of becoming—I feel him vibrating with pride. It dawns on me—he has reached territory my brother and I never got to explore: He is a boy of eight, able to sit at Thanksgiving and embrace his father and uncle at the same time. I envy him.

  #

  The next day, I visit my grandmother. She asks if I want some coffee cake. Apple with streusel frosting that she keeps in a plastic bag with a green wire twist tie.

  “I’ve been having dreams of Grampa,” she tells me. “It’s always the same. I’m cooking. Chicken or a roast. Maybe a stick of sausage. And he’s at the table, waiting. But he never says anything. And every time, the same thing happens. I’m missing one ingredient. And right at the moment when I figure out I’m missing something, he disappears. Crazy, isn’t it?”

  I say, “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I like the dreams, anyway. I like seeing my little Franta.”

  #

  The day I leave Chicago I make one more stop, out in the western suburbs—it was there that some weeks earlier I had tracked down a reverse directory of 1970.

  Some people call reverse directories the Gray Pages. It’s a phone book organized by address first, then name and telephone. So if you want to know the phone number of a house, but you don’t know the name of the person who lives there, you use the reverse directory. Reporters rely on them all the time. It allows them to get quotes without leaving the newsroom. I have this fantasy that the reverse directory holds the way forward. I’m convinced that if I can get hold of CHICAGO 1969 and CHICAGO 1970, and see the names of the people on the 3900 block of North Pine Grove, I’d recognize one of the “friends.” So I make the trek to this place that publishes the reverse directories, because no library goes back that far. I stare at the list of names, of numbers, all up and down Pine Grove—Barbara Vanicek at 3915; Helen Jahns at 3917; Frances Flanagan at 3926; Penny Johnson at 3941; Margaret Sturm? Charlotte Klein? Norma Lauver? Jo Ann Tornai? I recognize no names but wonder if one of them is The One.

  #

  I have a fantasy. I play it out over and over: a woman, alone, at home. Margaret Sturm, let’s say. It’s just after lunch. She’s brushing crumbs down the drain. Wiping away what’s left of her tuna on white toast. The water warm on her hands.

  The phone rings.

  “Is this Mrs. Sturm?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you live on North Pine Grove?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know a man named Bob Hainey?”

  Silence.

  #

  I have a fantasy. A rental car. Something anonymous in that GM way. There’s me. In the car. Morning, nine thirty. I want to be here before the day gets going. Before she leaves.

  I’m around the corner. Mouth dry. Anticipate the moment. Foresee the worst case. Prepare for it. From a boy, it’s what I’ve done.

  Turn the corner. Keep walking. Address in my head. Reciting it over and over. Up t
he walkway, up the stairs.

  Now, ringing the bell. Peering into the window set into the door. Sheer curtains. It’s a hallway, dim.

  A shadow approaches. The door opens.

  “Can I help you?” she asks.

  #

  I spend a week cross-referencing the names in my reverse with names of friends in his college yearbooks. Names of friends from the Tribune and Sun-Times. Names of family friends. Nothing. I ask my cousin Mark if he knew of any other women working at the papers back then.

  “Only two,” he says. “Lois Wille and Sheila Wolfe.”

  They’re not in the reverse, either.

  # # #

  Christmas Eve, my mother’s house. When I take my bags upstairs, there’s a manila envelope on the bed. Inside are my father’s obituaries from all the Chicago papers—yellowed, pressed, neatly clipped.

  I go downstairs. My mother’s in the kitchen, staring at a recipe.

  “You said you never read Dad’s obits.”

  “I found those. I’ve been meaning to give them to you.”

  And she walks past me. From the other room I hear her say, “I need you to go into the basement and bring up two chairs for the dining room.”

  I stand in the kitchen, holding the envelope, and I know the conversation is finished. And I know, too, that she’s more of a mystery than ever. Still, I think, I have to change this. When she returns, I say, “Where’d you find these? Did you clip them that day?”

  “You have to pick up Gramma. She’s waiting.”

  I put on my coat.

  # # #

  A new year. The midwinter grind. Another year, and I’m still stumbling after my father, like a young boy who tries to match his father’s boot prints in the crusted snow—the father’s stride too large, his impressions too deep.

  I can’t stop thinking about those women that Mark and I had discussed—Sheila and Lois. I call Sheila. She says that she didn’t know my father, as she worked at the Tribune. “I knew your uncle well,” she said. “But not your father. How did he die?”

  I leave messages for Lois, but she never returns them. I sit at work, wondering why she is not calling. I convince myself she knows something. I Google Earth her building, looking for clues. I Street View. Zoom in. Nothing. I decide I will go to see her.

  #

  That morning. Still dark. A yellow cab to La Guardia. The Williamsburg Bridge to the BQE. From the back of the cab, I scan the dark cityscape of Queens. My eyes looking for the small square of light here, or there, in the darkness. Something electric. Tiny holes in the larger darkness. Sisters and brothers, I think. I know them. How we awaken in darkness each day. The shuffle to the bathroom, the feel for the switch. The water, on. A hand, testing it for the warm. The gaze into the mirror. And the scan of the face. Searching for our familiar flaws, the landmarks that confirm each day we are who we are. And inside always the thought, How many more mornings will be given to me? I see their light and I wonder, What is their mission today? I see their light and I say my prayer. May your day be strong, my brothers and sisters.