After Visiting Friends

by Michael Hainey

  Dear Michael,

  My friend/daughter-in-law has suggested I send you the page that your dad wrote to me in our yearbook. Her thought is that you might like to see, in his handwriting, something that may give you a better idea of who your dad was.

  I have read this several times since visiting with you and, at times, think I didn’t listen to him well enough. But, you know what, Michael, I don’t remember ever getting a letter from Bob after he left for school. I know I would have written him if I had received one. Perhaps, after getting to school, he had second thoughts. Who knows. I am a firm believer in “the good Lord has a plan for all of us and everything happens for a reason.” I feel, perhaps, I have a second chance to make up for any sadness I may have caused your dad by talking to you. I hope you will learn something about your dad from this. God bless you and yours.

  Veneé

  I open her attachment. She has scanned in the page from her 1952 Bison:

  Reserved for Bob

  Dear Veneé,

  There really is very little that I can say here that I haven’t said or written many times before. You don’t need any more words from me to know how wonderful I find you to be. I wish and pray with all my heart that the year won’t be forgotten by you! As I look back on it, I find every wonderful moment I had, I have spent with you. Everything I remember, I remember because you were there with me. I realize I have been quite a hog about spending time with you and for that I ask both you and your parents forgiveness. However, if you were really aware, Veneé, of how really deeply I love you, you would be more understanding about it. I hope that I will see you some this summer and a few times next fall—between vacations and your other dates. I hope you’ll come to see me next year and that you won’t forget what I’ve told you and the way you once said you felt about me. I have thought as much of you for so long, from sophomore to senior as the class song says. It would be impossible for me to want another. I’ll always remember last year’s prom, the Xmas prom, New Year’s, Valentine’s dance, the night I asked you to go steady, the first time I told you how I felt about you, athletic banquet, and all the places and other things we’ve gone to together. However, Veneé, it doesn’t take any special event for me to have a wonderful time with you. All I need is you—and that’s all I want!!! Maybe next year at this time, you’ll be a little more decided about the future and your ring finger won’t be holding a ’52 class ring. That’s all if you’re really decided, though. Don’t let your folks think that I’m too screwy to wait until you and I are both sure. But as far as I know, honey, where in this whole wide world could there be another like you! You are the best, honey. Remember that I’ll always think that and have for three long years. Maybe it won’t work out for you to want me and if it doesn’t, I guess I’ll just go back to my old martyr complex and be a good loser—only I won’t feel good about it. Maybe next year at this time you’ll just look at me and what I’ve said and laugh. That, too, would be o.k. because, as I’ve said, just knowing and going with you, has filled my poor heart with a fortune of beautiful thoughts and memories. Just remember, honey, I LOVE YOU!!!—Nothing else matters.

  Bob Hainey

  P.S. Please write next year and let me know what you’re doing and whether or not there’s any hope for me. I’ll be waiting for you—and that I sincerely mean. Maybe someday!!! Bye now!!

  I write Veneé. I want to know about his “martyr complex.”

  “I’m not sure where the ‘martyr complex’ came from,” she writes, “but, yes, he did need to be told often that he was a good person. If I didn’t spend all my time with him, he was hurt. His mother appeared to be very strict. I remember Bob was always worrying about what others thought about him, such as his remark about my folks thinking him ‘screwy.’ I guess he really lacked self-esteem as a young man.”

  11

  RESURRECTION

  Part of me truly believes that if I tell my mother the truth—that my father died in the apartment of a woman with whom he was having an affair—it will be her undoing. And ours. She’ll cast me out. And then where will I be? A fortysomething son who has crushed his mother and broken her heart and lost her love. All because I believed I had a quest to make. All these years into my search, and I still cannot help but feel at times that I am the epitome of selfishness. All along I have told myself, So long as you are in pursuit of the truth, you can be doing no wrong. You have nothing to fear.

  Now?

  Fear of hurting her. It’s one thing to be the truth-seeker. It’s quite another to be the truth-bearer. The delusion destroyer. There’s a reason people don’t like revisionist historians.

  A memory: I am eleven. In the basement. I’m watching TV, and a woman with raven hair and big dark sunglasses that reflect the camera lights is encircled by reporters. She’s telling the reporters that her name is Judith Campbell Exner and she wants them to know that when John F. Kennedy was our president, she was his girlfriend.

  I think, This is impossible. There is no way he would have had a girlfriend. He was married. He was a father with two children. How can she tell lies about this great man?

  Consider it an early education in image versus truth. An introduction, perhaps, to men and their infinite ability to compartmentalize.

  Do I really want to be Judith Exner to my mother’s memory right now? The thought chills me.

  #

  Months go by like this. Twelve or more. Me, unable to find the courage to talk to my mother. Then: I’m in my office and my assistant sticks her head in. She says, “A woman named Jan Scott is on the phone. She says she works at the morgue in Chicago. She says that it is important that you speak with her.”

  I have not spoken to her in at least three years. I have not called her, either.

  I lift my receiver and say, “Jan?”

  She says, “In my prayers, I’ve heard your silence. You’re struggling, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need to be inspired. Do you read the Bible?”

  “No,” I say. “Or, I mean, yes. I mean, I used to. Or have, but I—”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Yes,” I say, surprising myself.

  “Sometimes we think we can do it all by ourselves. Across the miles, I’ve heard your doubt. The silent wail. I know that you’ve stopped your journey. Why?”

  Before I even can think, I blurt out one word: “Fear.”

  She says, “Fear is the trick of the enemy. And your enemy comes in many robes. But he has only one face. You know his face. You’ve seen it many times. You need not fear it. In your heart, you know you will triumph and you will defeat your enemy with the one weapon that you have inside you that he cannot touch and that he trembles before—truth. Your enemy fears you because he already knows that you will conquer him. But he uses fear to confuse you. So you must stay focused. Because most of all, fear is a lack of focus.”

  “I . . . ”

  “We are waiting for you to tell this story. When I think about the audacity of you, to hold back! Only God can make that choice. You and I were given to each other for a purpose. The day I met you, I felt your spirit at work. You didn’t even know your spirit was alive. But I felt it. I could see you were on a quest for truth. You need to get back to that quest. There is a new person in you, trying to be born. He’s just barely peeping out of the box. Are you going to slam the lid down on his fingers, or are you going to throw the lid off of that dark box and come out fighting?”

  “Jan, I—”

  “Please hold. My supervisor is here.”

  I sit in silence, my receiver pressed to my head, starving for her next words. The air, dead. Nothing but nothing coming in. Outside, I see two men on the giant beer billboard that makes my office glow red at night when the neon flickers on and off in programmed patterns. One of the men is on a ledge, the other is high above him on a scaffold. Over and over, the man on the ledge throws the end of a rope up to the man high above him, the man on the scaffold. The man on the scaff
old keeps missing it. Over and over the man gathers up the line and tosses it into the air, toward the man who cannot grasp it. For who knows how long, I am quiet, waiting. Watching the rope. Then—I hear a connection again.

  “Michael?”

  “Yes, I’m here. I wanted to say—”

  “I have to go, Michael. Good-bye.”

  # # #

  I tell my brother that I need to talk and he takes me to a bar near his house. He lives in the suburbs, one of those leafy older ones built along the commuter railroad lines in the early part of the last century. For the past few years, there’s been an influx of new money. Guys from the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, making small fortunes speculating on futures. People tearing down bungalows and center-hall colonials and building homes that are supposed to look like Normandy châteaus. My brother and his family live in one of the remaining original homes, a tidy Cape Cod built before the Depression.

  He knows the one old bar in town, too. Our regular place we slip out to when I’m visiting. After he’s put the kids to bed.

  We find two stools.

  There is something reassuring about sitting side by side with someone. Speaking is easier.

  “I found out about Dad,” I say.

  “Was he murdered?”

  “No.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yes.”

  I tell him about that night, about everything that happened before the doorbell rang that morning and our mother raised the shade.

  My brother takes a drink of his beer.

  “Does Mom know?”

  “I wanted to tell you first.”

  “What are you going to tell her?”

  “The truth. I guess? I mean, I have to.”

  I take a drink of my beer.

  “What do you think she’ll say?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Brooke says that deep down a woman always knows. That even if she gives no outward sign, even if she doesn’t want to admit it in the moment, a woman knows. Brooke thinks that it won’t be a shock to Mom.”

  “Maybe. But . . . ”

  “I know—it’s a big maybe, right?”

  “It is.”

  “Do you think I shouldn’t tell her?”

  “I think you need to be careful how you tell her.”

  “What do you think of him now? Are you mad at me?”

  “Why would I be?”

  “Maybe you don’t want to know the truth about him. Maybe you want to see him a certain way.”

  “It’s who he was. He has to take responsibility for it. Who knows what he was thinking. But it doesn’t really change my opinion of him. Who knows what would’ve happened if he had lived. He could’ve left us for this woman. Divorced Mom. And then where would we be? Or, you know, if he stayed at the paper he might’ve gotten a big job and we probably would’ve ended up on the North Shore or something, all messed up. Who knows what would’ve happened. We’re sitting here now, though.”

  “You think about that, too? The ‘What If’ game.”

  “There’s no point in it, really. You can scream all you want about what happened in the past, but nothing’s going to change. The past gives you no justice. Sentences are passed. But that doesn’t mean you get justice. You can stand there forever and rail and say, ‘Someone has to pay. I want what was taken from me.’ But you’re just going to get silence coming back at you. The past doesn’t pay. We pay. And we’re all free to decide when we’ve had enough. I only think about it sometimes to measure where I am now. Especially with the kids. As a father.”

  # # #

  My mother has pizza waiting. We sit at the table, just the one light on, overhead. She watches me eat, asks if she can have a sip of my beer.

  I am still eating when she says she is going to bed. She opens the freezer, leaves her ice in the sink.

  “You’re not leaving, are you?” she asks. “Going anywhere? Out?”

  “No,” I say.

  She kisses me, says, “ ’Night.”

  A moment later, the automated voice of the man—disembodied, tonally off—loud throughout her house: System armed! No delays!

  I open her junk drawer, find a scratch pad from Courtyard by Marriott. ACCOMPLISHED LIST, it says across the top. And then, MUCH MORE GRATIFYING THAN A TO-DO LIST, DON’T YOU THINK?

  I write notes for my speech to my mother. Lines to hold on to.

  #

  The next morning, I lean on the bathroom sink and whisper into my mirror, try to commit my lines to memory. Over and over I look at my Accomplished List. The sweatiness of my palm makes it curl up like one of those red cellophane fortune-telling fish they give you in Chinatown, the ones that reveal your fate.

  #

  She’s in the kitchen. Head bowed, fist to cheek, pen in hand. She hears me and turns her head. Nothing else moves. Like the pivot of a security camera, fixed to its base.

  “I can make eggs,” she says.

  I pour coffee. Her old percolator.

  “Don’t get mad,” she says, “but I had an idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I still haven’t seen Gramma’s plot. I haven’t been to Resurrection since her funeral. It’s a long way to go. I mean. But. Well. Maybe you’d want to take a drive?”

  “I would do that.”

  “Only if you want.”

  “Mom, yes. It’s Gramma.”

  And then the air chop with her hand. Her seeing conflict to cut off where none exists.

  #

  She makes my eggs “Polish-style”: cuts bacon into half-inch pieces, fries it, then mixes it in with scrambled eggs. It’s been one of my favorites, ever since I was a boy.

  We eat while she stares at her Jumble and I pretend to read the op-ed. The sun pushes through her shade. The edges, illuminated.

  “Are you finished?” and she’s out of her chair, my plate to the sink in one motion.

  “What else?” she says.

  She’s standing beside my chair, a hand on my shoulder.

  “Mom?” I say.

  And I start to cry.

  She taps me twice. Like I’m a staticky radio she’s trying to lock in to a signal.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just want to tell you—I know it was not easy raising Chris and me, alone. And you were not just the best mother I could have, you were a great father, too.”

  Her chin is trembling like my grandmother’s always did.

  She says, “Sometimes it’s hard being alone. I’m okay a lot of the time. But there are times when I’m not. You know, you and Chris and the kids are all I have. You’re everything.”

  She pulls me in to her. I feel her cheek against my skull, her chest against my arm, her breath on my neck.

  Never in my life have I felt these things.

  I say, “Mom, you are my hero. You need to know that.”

  “I need to get some Kleenex,” she says, and disappears into her bedroom.

  #

  We miss the signs for Resurrection. We’re supposed to be watching for Justice, the town where the cemetery is, but we get impatient with the road and exit too soon. The area is a hodgepodge of interchanges and switching yards, concrete-mixing plants and freight depots, one big manufacturing zone.

  For a half hour, my mother and I go on like this, lost in a widening circle, trying to find Archer Avenue. I say to my mother, “Gramma better appreciate this.”

  My mother laughs.

  Then she says, “Keep an eye out for Resurrection Mary. We can always pick her up and she’ll get us there.”

  That’s another thing about my mother—she loves ghost stories, crime stories, ideally stories that combine the two elements, like Resurrection Mary.

  When my brother and I were boys, whenever we were driving down to our grandparents’ house, our mother would tell us the story about how, every so often, a solitary driver on Archer Avenue comes across a beautiful young woman in a white ball gown hitchhiking on the side of the road. Aft
er people pick her up, they recount their tale to the newspapers, always telling the reporter that the woman was young and beautiful. “A real looker,” I remember a man said in a newspaper story I read as a boy. Blond hair. Blue eyes. And she always asks the driver to take her to O’Henry Ballroom, near Resurrection Cemetery. But when the driver passes by Resurrection Cemetery, the woman vanishes from the car. A ghost.

  The legend is she’s the ghost of a young Polish girl from the neighborhood. This is back in the 1930s. She and her boyfriend spend the night dancing at the O’Henry. At some point, there’s a fight and Mary—who knows how she got that name—stalks out into the night. Walking up Archer Avenue, looking to hitchhike, she’s hit by a car, killed. Her parents bury her at Resurrection, in her white dress and dancing shoes. Ever since, my mother tells us, her ghost wanders Archer Avenue.

  #

  We find my grandmother’s grave. My mother kneels and presses her palms to her mother’s gravestone, feels the smoothness, the warmth of the sun in the stone. Then the same with my grandfather.

  “They did a nice job,” my mother says, rising. “The headstone. Don’t you think?”

  We pick our way back to her Buick, stepping between the graves.

  My mother says, “I could show you the graves of my grandparents. But we’d have to look them up.”

  #

  When we get to the administration building, it’s locked. Sunday hours. Faces pressed to cupped hands, we look in. Near the entrance, I notice a small computer kiosk, like the kind that dispenses boarding passes at the airport. This one has a sign above it, FIND YOUR GRAVE. We touch the screen. Nothing. Dead.

  “I always loved coming to this building as a kid,” my mother says as I labor to revive the machine. “Every spring, Easter time, we’d have to make the pilgrimage. Two streetcars, plus a bus. And we’d be hauling everything, even the sprinkling can so we could water the graves of Gramma and Grampa. That was always my job. It’d be hotter than hell, and all I looked forward to was the chance to come into this building. It was dark and cool, like a cave. I loved it.”

  She looks at me, raises her hand to her brow, shielding the sun.

  “Things were different then, Mike. Gramma would pack lunch and we’d have a picnic. Spread the blanket on their graves. Sandwiches. Cold fried chicken. Kapusta. It was good.”