After Visiting Friends

  He says, “What’s in it for any of these guys if they tell you the truth?”

  “What’s to hide?”

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “I’m just looking for the facts about that night. As his boss, you must know something. Look,” I say, and I unfold a copy of the obituary. “Here’s the obit from the Today and the Daily News, both talking about ‘friends’ he was with.”

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

  He gets up from behind his desk. His hand, big like a steam shovel, reaches out toward me.

  “I wish we had more time. I need to get back to work.”

  # # #

  We all say we want The Truth, but we all want our secrets kept. Look at me. I know what I know and yet I will not tell my mother. And it’s not just guilt I feel about keeping it from her. It’s also the guilt I feel in betraying him. All my life, it’s been this struggle to leave his death—to leave him—behind. And all my life, it’s been the same: Just when I think I’m breaking free, I feel it—his cold hand around my ankle, grasping me from the grave, pulling me back.

  I never dream. Or I rarely remember my dreams. Except for this: Just after my nephew was born, I went to Chicago to meet him. I remember sitting in my mother’s kitchen—my mother, my brother, me, and Glenn: son, grandson, nephew. The three of us are cooing over this newborn and it hits me—for the first time in forty years, this family is defined no longer by His Death. For the first time, there is a future. A fresh heir.

  That night, the dream: The three of us are in the home I grew up in, sitting in the living room, holding my newborn nephew. And suddenly, descending from the staircase: a man-sized white cat. A cat that’s walking upright, like a man. It has my father’s face, even his glasses. When he gets to the landing, his eyes lock on us. And in that split second, I know exactly what I have to do. He springs toward us, his fangs bared and his claws unsheathed, aiming directly at my newborn nephew. I launch myself into the air and knock him off target. My brother and mother grab the baby and cower in the corner while I grapple with this big white cat, punching and rolling and kicking. Finally, I wrestle him out of the house. I slam the door and through the little window at the top see him on the sidewalk, jumping up and down, railing and waving his fists. Hate in his eyes. The look of a man who seeks revenge.

  #

  Whenever I’m getting close to the truth, a voice in my head—my father’s voice—yells at me: “Who do you think you are? I made you. Who do you think you are, trying to destroy me? I can destroy you.”

  There have been many times when that voice kept me from pressing ahead, made me feel that to discover his truth would be a betrayal. He really did a number on me. Made me wonder if I would be hurting my mother, if my quest for my answers and my story is selfish or hurtful to others.

  I used to have this fantasy, too, that I could stop him. I’d be on North Pine Grove and I’d see him getting out of his Buick, parked under a streetlight, a breeze pulling on the hem of his raincoat. I’d see him walking quickly down the middle of the empty street, sodium vapor casting its strange glow. And I’d see me, catching him. If somehow I could stop him from going wherever he is headed, I could save him and it’s all different.

  I touch him on the shoulder.

  Hey.

  He spins on his heel, fist cocked, ready to hit me.

  That look in his eye. I know that look.

  That look of a man who will not be stopped or separated from what he desires.

  # # #

  June. My mother’s birthday. I go to Chicago. I tell her to name what she wants to do. The day is on me.

  “Would you take me downtown? We never get to do that together,” she says. “It’s a nice day. We could see the park and have some lunch.”

  I’m relieved she has a vision. She usually leaves it all to me.

  We start in Millennium Park. Grant Park, the name it used to carry. That was before Mayor Daley had enough of the past and decided to remake it. Mayor Daley—son of the Mayor Daley I grew up with. The one we called Da Mare. The one who died in his doctor’s office, Christmas of ’76. Then his son follows him to the job. Sons following fathers—that’s the Chicago way.

  The first time I went into the city alone was 1976. I was twelve. I had a map that I stole from my mother. I found it in a drawer in the kitchen and hid it in my bedroom.

  Look how it unfolds. Chicago. A neat grid. Color-coded. Red, yellow, green. Businesses. Houses. Parks. Every night, I begin at the same place: 401 North Wabash. The Sun-Times building, snug along a gentle bend in the Chicago River. My hand moves over the city. Measures the distance from where he was to our house. And when I’m finished, the same struggle to refold the map, so she can’t tell. But once it unfolds, it’s never the same.

  I ride my bike to the train station. The conductor, not knowing what to make of me when I tell him I don’t have any money, does not charge me. When I make it to the city, I follow my map to the Sun-Times building and I stand outside the revolving door, watch men spin in, men spat out.

  I remember this place.

  I would have been four, maybe five. My brother and I are with our father. Walking through the newsroom. It is his day off. We are here to get his paycheck. The newsroom is bright and big and wide, the largest room I have ever seen. White lights hang overhead. Windows rim the room. And everywhere, desks and paper and men. Men in white shirts and black ties sit at battered desks. Some have typewriters. Some do not. Some read pieces of paper. Others type on pieces of paper. Men walk through the room carrying pieces of paper or in search of pieces of paper. Telephones ring. Men yell across the room. Clouds of cigarette smoke hang over the room like storm clouds in miniature. Some of the men are older than my father. They have hard guts and greased-back hair. When my father walks with us through the newsroom, his hands on our shoulders, guiding us through the labyrinth of desks, men stop us.

  “Your boys, Bob?”

  A cigarette jangles from the man’s lip, and he slides a red pencil behind his hair-pocked ear.

  “Put ’er there, son.”

  A big hand reaches toward my head. My father tells me to shake the man’s hand. I do.

  “Think you’ll be a newspaperman like your pop?”

  I nod.

  “That’s good! Remember, son—the only good man is a newspaperman, and the only good life is a newspaperman’s life. Ain’t that right, Bob?”

  The man laughs and huffs puffs of cigarette smoke down toward me. Through it I can see his face, veiny and rough as a cantaloupe rind.

  “He’s a good kid, Bob. He’ll make a good reporter. Ain’t got no fear. Just like you.”

  #

  A world of men, of stories, of knowledge. This is my father’s world, and I want to be a part of it—I want to be a man who knows the facts. A man who chases stories, who writes stories. A man who knows the stories of the city. Wrong and Right. Who’s up. Who’s down. Yes, I think: I want to belong to this.

  #

  We’re silent as we walk, my mother and I. Always the silence. Me still feeling like I’m nine, ten, eleven years old, afraid to speak. We walk amid all the Millennium has become. The new gardens and sculptures. Like the “Bean,” an enormous corpuscle-shaped silver orb that reflects and distorts the identity of whoever stands before it. Or the fountain where the faces of Chicagoans appear and disappear on a giant electronic mirror of glass cubes. Every so often, a plume of water spurts from someone’s mouth, and down below, children seeking relief from the sun splash in the shower, sliding and slipping along the slick stone. Some come with bathing suits, prepared for the deluge. Others in street clothes, dragged in just the same.

  I decide to push beyond my nine-year-old fears. It occurs to me the park is a door into her past. This is the site of the riots during the ’68 Democratic National Convention. “What was that like?” I ask her. “You weren’t much older than some of those people. And Dad? What did he say?”

  “I watched it
on TV,” she says, still walking, not looking at me. “I don’t remember much about it, or even thinking about it. You and Chris were six and four, and you took a lot of time. Dad was working nights, too, so . . . ”

  She trails off like she does, ends her answer without answering. After all these years, I still don’t know if this means she has nothing to say or she doesn’t want to reveal anything more. I end up thinking what I’ve always thought in these moments: Don’t ask her any questions. Don’t upset her. This is why I spent thirty years afraid to ask her about The Night.

  I think of something easy, something neutral.

  “What about music back then? What were you listening to? The Beatles? The Stones?”

  “I liked Trini Lopez.”

  Right.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just did. He was good.”

  “What about women’s lib? I mean, those women were your age—what did you think of them?”

  “I always thought that was for someone else. Other women.” She pauses. “Did I ever tell you about some of the guys who lived around us? How, after your dad died, they tried to hit on me? They all thought that just because I was alone, I was vulnerable.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went on. I mean, who were they? Right?”

  #

  We’re walking up Michigan Avenue, the boulevard unreeling before us, the glint of the lake, blue and clear on the horizon. At this spot, right here, I remember: 1974, hailing a cab. Right here in front of the Art Institute. She’d taken my brother and me into the city for the afternoon. She had to go to the bank, meet with men. And when we got in the taxi to go to the train station, the driver said, “Didja hear? Nixon’s resigning tomorrow.”

  That was the summer I never left the basement. The summer I watched the hearings. Men searching for answers to what men knew and when did they know it.

  Now we’re crossing the bridge. The Chicago River below. Such a great point of pride in this city—how men here defeated Nature’s will. How they were able to reverse the river’s flow, turn it in a direction it did not want to go. I still remember being taught that. Second grade. That and the city motto of Chicago: “I Will.” And always I wanted to ask, “I Will . . . what?”

  I check the Wrigley Building to see the time. The hands of the clock are gone. A scaffold shrouded in black mesh surrounds the empty face. A giant mantilla. Halfway across the bridge, my mother seizes my wrist.

  “Oh my God,” she says, and she pulls me to the rail. “See that?”

  She points to a place on the bank of the river, near the base of the Tribune Tower. Manicured lawn, tidy benches, and thick clumps of impatiens, red, white.

  “Summer days, Dad and I would eat lunch down there. We’d get greasy sandwiches wrapped in wax paper from the guy we called the Greek. No gardens there like now. It was just us, sitting on the grimy bank, watching the barges coming off of the lake, carrying raw newsprint from Canada. Colonel McCormick owned whole forests up there. The newsroom guys always joked that he grew newspapers, not trees. The barges would dock here and guys would come out and roll these big rolls right into the pressroom.”

  She goes quiet. We stand there, hands holding the rail. And I can feel upon us the eyes of passersby. Who stops on a bridge unless they’re troubled? Unless they’re about to draw the narrative to them? My mother, though, she’s just quiet. Feels like she’s quiet forever.

  #

  We cross the bridge. At the entrance of the Tribune Tower, she asks me to take a photograph of her. On my camera screen, she is framed by the door behind her.

  She says, “I always tell people, ‘This is where I was happiest.’ ”

  She smiles and I click.

  As she’s walking out of the frame, she sees the hole in Michigan Avenue, where the stairs lead to the lower level.

  “The Greek was down there. He had a small shack tucked beneath the stairs. The guys in the newsroom would send me out for coffee. I never took the tips they tried to give me.”

  “Why?”

  “I was too honest.”

  She cranes her neck, peers down the stairs. It’s dark at the bottom.

  “Let’s go down there,” I say.

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  This is so her.

  “Let’s look.”

  “Nah, there’s nothing left down there.”

  I start to descend. She follows. After a few steps she stops. She tells me that the stairs are different. “Everything’s in the same place,” she says, “but someone’s changed the steps.”

  We’re beneath Michigan Avenue now. We’re standing in front of a brick wall. Above, a security camera grinds away, locked in a black bubble.

  She wants to find a door.

  “It’s gotta be somewhere.”

  “What?”

  “The old Radio Grill. Where we hung out. It would’ve been right . . . here.”

  She touches her fingertips to the dark bricks. Gently. Like she’s testing fresh paint. That probing, tentative touch. Then she flattens her hand to the wall.

  I look at her, the bricks, the wall.

  “But it’s not.”

  A woman approaches us and asks, “Where do you want to go?”

  Where do you want to go? I want to go back, lady. I want to go to the past, to when he was alive. I want to see him walk off his shift at the Sun-Times, toss on his grungy tan raincoat, stride into the damp Chicago night, and descend these stairs to where I wait, and together he and I go into the night. To drinks. To the truth.

  Where do I want to go? I want to go back to when my mother and he were here, in love, eating sandwiches on the bank of the Chicago River.

  Where do I want to go? I want to go back to when my mother can remember what her life was with him. What we had as a family, what we had before that night our life ended.

  I want to go where we all want to go.

  # # #

  When I was in my twenties—after I had lost my faith and stopped going to Mass—my grandmother and I had a routine.

  “I prayed for you last Sunday,” she’d say.

  “You did?”

  And she’d say, “Of course. I pray for all sinners.”

  Then we’d both laugh.

  As I got older and remained unmarried, she changed what she said. It became “Every night all I pray is you’ll meet a nice girl.”

  I’d say, “It must be working, because every night I meet a nice girl.”

  Then she’d laugh and say, “Smarkacz. You’re gonna get it.”

  And I’d say, “I just told you, I am getting it.”

  #

  The day following my time with my mother, Brooke and I go to visit my grandmother. By now we have been dating three years. No matter. Soon as we walk in, my grandmother looks at Brooke, says, “You still with him?”

  “Yes,” Brooke says.

  “Married yet?”

  “Not yet,” Brooke says.

  My grandmother asks, “Are you living together?”

  “Yes, Gramma,” I say. “I told you that.”

  “When I was young, the priests told us that was a sin. Why do you get to do it?”

  “Because we love each other,” I say.

  “Aren’t you afraid what God will think?”

  Brooke and I pull up two chairs. My grandmother takes my hand in one hand, Brooke’s hand in her other. Her chin is trembling.

  “I’m so happy he found you,” she says, and she looks at Brooke. Then, “Do you like popcorn?”

  “Yes,” Brooke says.

  “Sex is like popcorn,” my grandmother says. “Once they get a taste, they want you to keep popping. Don’t be making popcorn until you’re married. Otherwise, they’ll stop buttering it.”

  Brooke tries not to laugh. She says, “What else should I know?”

  “If you feel you’re about to get hot with the other person, always take a walk around the block. Don’t say something you will regret.”

 
; #

  A few days after I return to New York, a nurse finds my grandmother wandering the halls one night at nine o’clock. The nurse tells my mother that my grandmother thought that it was morning and she wanted to go down for breakfast. But she couldn’t remember the way to the dining room. The nurse calls an ambulance and takes my grandmother to Resurrection Hospital “for evaluation.”

  After three days of tests, a doctor tells my mother there’s no sign of a stroke or anything “treatable.” He tells her that as we age, brain cells die. With my grandmother, who is ninety-five, this “has consequences” in regards to her short-term memory, where “she’ll be most challenged.” He tells her, “Your mother is ninety-five, but in many ways, her mind is like a five-year-old’s: at once steel-trap-like, and at the same time full of those ‘But why?’ questions. As long as she lives, she’ll be trying to fill in those holes in her memory, to gain knowledge. But unlike a five-year-old, she never will.”

  “So what the hell do I do?” my mother says.

  “Be there for her.”

  This is something my mother doesn’t understand, the vagueness of that prescriptive. My mother deals in lists and getting things checked off. There’s a reason her friends call her the General.

  #

  Before my grandmother can leave Resurrection, she has to be evaluated by a team of nurses and social workers from Central Baptist. They decide that she’ll need “monitored care.” Rather than make her move into the wing of Central Baptist that my grandmother calls The Nursery, they agree she can move to the Pavilion—what my grandmother has long called Purgatory, because it is a wing that is between Independent Living and the Special Care Unit. She’ll have her own room but no longer her own kitchen. When she wants to leave the wing, she needs to be buzzed out.

  Her first night at the Pavilion, she calls my mother. She’s sobbing into the phone, saying she can’t find my grandfather.

  My mother tells her, “Dad’s dead, Mom.”

  “You lie! Where is he?”

  She sobs harder, heaving. “Dad wouldn’t leave me. He wouldn’t leave us.”

  My grandmother drops the receiver to the floor and my mother is now yelling into the phone, “Mom! . . . Mom!”