After Visiting Friends

  We walk to her Buick.

  “I have an idea,” she says.

  And then I’m driving us to the old neighborhood where she grew up. Fifty-fifth and Pulaski.

  “Long as we’re down here, we might as well go, right?”

  #

  We pull up in front of the old house. I click off all the things that are still the same. The sidewalk, pebbled. The silver maple, broad. The stoop before the front door where my father and grandfather sat drinking High Lifes on summer evenings, watching my brother and me ride our tricycles. The iron railing with the twisted, wrought H in it. The slim gangway and the narrow sidewalk that leads to the alley where my grandmother buried my father’s slippers in the trash can.

  I turn a corner and slow the Buick, a view over the fence of their backyard. The silver maple that grew here—gone. A stump now. All that remains of the broad canopy that softly rained green propeller seeds on my brother and me.

  I feel time ticking.

  Should I tell her now? Here? In the alley?

  “Let’s circle back,” she says. “Do you think we can go inside?”

  “All they can do is say no.”

  A boy answers the bell. He’s Mexican-American, maybe thirteen. He cracks the storm door.

  “Hi,” my mother says. “Are your parents home?”

  “No.”

  “They’re Jorge and Mary? Right?”

  The boy nods, his hand on the door, cracked still.

  “You were just a baby when they bought our house—my parents sold it to them in 1988. I grew up here.”

  The boy nods.

  I feel the need to jump in. “Would you mind if we came inside for a minute? My mother”—and I lead him with my eyes toward my mother—“she really needs to see it.”

  “My parents aren’t home.”

  “It would mean the world to us if we could see it.”

  #

  It’s tiny. Back then, my grandmother’s house seemed like a Wonderland.

  I hit my head on the hallway arch.

  Everything here is still the same. The doors, maple, varnished the color of syrup by my grandfather, solid as rock. My mother and I move from living room to bedroom to kitchen to dining room, tiny dioramas, all of them.

  My mother says, “She’d still recognize it.”

  We stand in the snug kitchen, the two of us.

  “My parents will be home soon,” the boy says. “You’ll have to go.”

  #

  We pass Saint Turibius Church. On the sidewalk, Mexican men stand with their wobbly pushcarts painted bright, selling shaved ice, waiting for Mass to let out. Bottles with neon liquids are lined up beside the ice, ready to transfigure.

  I see the church steps she descended with my father. Husband and wife.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  “Maybe we should eat?” my mother says. “Something before your flight?”

  #

  It’s after three by the time we get to Agostino’s, an Italian place we’ve been going to forever, over near Melrose Park. It’s in a little strip mall, but the waiters wear black vests, white shirts, and black bow ties. No one else is in the place. Why would they be? People in Chicago do the Sunday dinner early—but not this early.

  At best, I’ve got maybe two hours to talk to her. And what if she loses it and there’s me, walking from the wreckage, heading down the jet ramp, getting on my plane. Her, behind me, trying to pick up the pieces. Cursing me.

  I go to the men’s room, murmur aloud from my Accomplished List. Like a man saying a Rosary. I wash my hands and go back to the table.

  My mother, alone, eating a piece of bread. Behind her, an Alitalia poster. ROME, it says. And there’s a photograph of the Colosseum at night.

  “Mom,” I say, and I look down at my empty plate, because if I look at her, I will lose my words. “Mom, while we’re on the subject of family today, I’ve been thinking that I need to talk to you about my father. About what I’ve learned about him. Stories about him that we’ve held to be the truth, they’re not. Beginning with how he died. And where he was the night he died.”

  She looks at me, all quizzical, holding her bread, half-bitten, in her hand.

  I say, “The night he died? The story about him, on the street, dead? The cops finding him? That never happened. That’s not the real story.”

  “Did I tell you that story?”

  I think, What do you mean? Yes, you did. For decades it lived in my head.

  But all I can manage is “Yes.”

  “I told you that?”

  “Don’t you remember? We talked about the obits? And how I told you the story had holes in it? The stuff about Pine Grove? About the friends?”

  She puts what’s left of her bread on her bread plate.

  “Maybe . . . ,” she says, “maybe I should have delved into all of this more at the time. But all I could think about that day and all the days after that day was you and Chris. That I needed to take care of you two guys. That I had a job to do. Because we had nothing, Michael. Nothing. Your father was dead and nothing was going to change that. I remember, that night, sitting there at the kitchen table all alone and telling myself that I had to focus on today. Not on what was.”

  “I always had these questions,” I say. “The obits. My whole life I couldn’t get them out of my head. The details in them about ‘the friends.’ Friends we never knew, friends we never heard from.”

  “All I know, Michael, is that he ended up in that hospital. Then Dick came over that morning and told us. I always thought it was odd that he was involved. Then Gramma and Grampa showed up later.”

  “No, they came together. With Dick and Helen. Don’t you remember? Because Dick coordinated it all.”

  “He did?”

  “Once you told me, ‘Dick took care of everything.’ And he really did. I know how he got involved.”

  “How?”

  “Dad didn’t die on the street outside the Sun-Times. He died in the apartment of a co-worker.”

  “Is this the moving-furniture part of the story?”

  “That part is not true.”

  “But someone at the wake or maybe later that first day at the house, when everyone came over, someone told me that after he got off that night he went to the apartment of someone he worked with, to help move furniture, and he had a heart attack there.”

  “Well, it’s true that he died in a co-worker’s apartment. And that person knew Dick and called him. Dick went to her house and he fixed it with the cops and the papers.”

  “Fixed what?”

  “To say that Dad died on the street. On North Pine Grove. Not in this person’s apartment.”

  She catches the waiter with her eyes. “Can we order?”

  Then, she says, “Did you ever talk to Dick about this?”

  “I talked to Mark.”

  I tell her the whole story Mark told me. I tell her how he told me, “I always knew this day would come.” I tell her, too, about how Dick covered it up because he wanted to protect our family from the truth, but that the one thing he could not control was the obits. I tell her, “Dad died in this woman’s apartment. I don’t know what precisely their relationship was. I’ve heard a lot of ideas. But the woman, she’s dead, too.”

  “Who was the woman?”

  “Her name was Roberta Hess.”

  “I don’t know her. Did she work at the Trib?”

  “Sun-Times. Bobbie, they called her. He was her boss. She worked the rim when he was in the slot.”

  She says nothing.

  “What if it is true that my father had a relationship with this woman?”

  My words, carefully chosen, theoretical.

  Her words, chosen just as carefully: “I would have to think about that.”

  The storm I feared I would unleash? Her face is without emotion.

  “Whatever our relationship was, Michael, wherever your father and I were in our relationship, you need to know that he loved you and your brother more than any
thing. He lived for you two.”

  “I know,” I say, realizing that I didn’t really know, until now.

  “But what about you and him?”

  “I’m not sure your father was a happy man. He had his demons.”

  “Demons?”

  “He could get violent.”

  “What do you mean? Did he hit you?”

  “Never that. But a couple of times he pushed me around. You know . . . hard. Everything was fine, and then I’d say something that triggered something.”

  “Did you have to go to the hospital?”

  “No. Once, I had a bruise and I couldn’t go out of the house. I never told Gramma about that.” She pauses. “I don’t know what triggered him, if it was something in his family, or how he grew up, or what.”

  “Do you think that he didn’t want to be in the family, in our home?”

  “All I know is he loved you two boys more than anything. He was always happy when he was with you two guys.”

  “And you? Did he love you?”

  “I think he did. But he had those demons. And work was not easy for him. There was a lot of stress, and odd hours, too. He was on Valium. But I coped. It’s what I had to do. I had to find my way through it. Especially for the sake of you and Chris. He worked all night, came home, and slept during the day while I had to take care of you two guys running around the house, trying to keep everything quiet for him. It wasn’t the best of times. He and I barely saw each other. Breakfast, maybe. And then before he left for work each night. But how many nights did I go to bed alone? That was the deal. I coped.”

  “Do you think that he had a girlfriend?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” She pauses again. “Sometimes I wonder if maybe there was something wrong with your father’s head. I read somewhere once that people with brain tumors act strange because of the pressure on their brains. Maybe his brain was being affected before he died.”

  She shrugs her shrug.

  And I think, It’s a kind assessment, a generous—even forgiving—understanding of his actions: The idea that something he could not control—something physiological—led him to die in the bed of a woman who was not his wife.

  But correct, it is not. The plain truth is that he had health issues and he had demons.

  I say, “Kay Flaska told me something a few years ago. She said she felt Dad always was of two worlds. He was smart and funny and sensitive and kind, but there was a dark, melancholic side. She said, ‘I don’t think living in this world was easy for your father.’ ”

  My mother says, “Well, this world is all we have.”

  She goes silent, and in that moment I see her anew. And I realize, Here I am—a son who went looking for his father, and found his mother.

  She lifts one hand from her lap and places it on the table before me, closed. A tight fist. Her way of saying she wants to hold hands.

  I reach out to her, put my hand over her fist.

  Paper covers rock . . .

  She flattens her hand against the tablecloth, then rolls it over. We are palm-to-palm.

  We test our grasp, feel our grip.

  We lock hands.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Impossible without Andrew Essex, Nan Graham, Bill Clegg, Chelsea Cardinal, Mark Hainey, Barbara Dow Shields, Alessandra Stanley, Jim Nelson, John Hodges, Punch Hutton, Junno Lee, Maximillian Potter, Daniel Burgess, Ted Heller, Iris Johnson, Nate Berkus, Andy Comer, Rachel Greene, Thom Browne, Andrew Bolton, Christian Jail-lite, Cindy Viera, Stephen Kong, Becca Kong, Meg Castaldo, James Wright, Richard Hugo, John Duffy, Rick Meyer, Amanda Puck, Julie Duffy, Andrew Santella, Ren McKnight, Anthony Sunseri, Mark Seliger, Lisa Kogan, Seamus Heaney, Laura Vitale, Ed Hirsch, Christopher Swetala, Susan Morrison, David Remnick, Nora Ephron, Nick Pileggi, Nicholas Christopher, John Bramsen, Norma Bramsen, Karen Kulzer, John Cundiff, James Hoge, Nancy Bonetti, Mark Flashen, Graydon Carter, Peter Mezan, Fred Woodward, Aimée Bell, David Kamp, Kurt Andersen, Bill Drennan, Susan Moldow, Kay Flaska, Paul Berning, Tom Moffett, Natty Bumppo, Craig Klugman, James B. Strong, Rick Soll, Laura Wise, Rick Kogan, Juanita Zink, Bess Kalb, Kate Lloyd, Wendy Sheanin, Elizabeth Gilbert, Nick Flynn, David Sheff, Peter Orner, Lisa Hutcherson, Van Hutcherson, Pete Hunsinger, Roy Wiley, Anne-Marie Colban, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Gabrielle Hamilton, J. R. Moehringer, Liz Farrell, Jan Scott, Erica Crenshaw, Lynne Codjoe, Carol Ness, Jim Houck, Veneé Heimerl, Antonio Sersale, Carla Sersale, Albert Camus, Nate Erickson, Linsey Fields, Anne-Marie Colban, Andre Mellone, Andre Viana, Brian Sawyer, Lois Wille, Sheila Wolfe, E. J. Samson, Jessica Glavin, Morgan Kondash, Si Newhouse. Most especially, Tim and Teresa Hess and the Hess Family. Also, Wendy Hainey, Glenn Hainey, Eleanor Hainey, Beatrix Hainey, Brooke Hainey, Estelle Hudak. Finally, Christopher Hainey and Barbara Coriden.

  PHOTO CAPTIONS

  1 My grandmother and me, outside her house. October 1964.

  2 My father, mother, brother and me. Christmas 1968.

  3 My father’s press pass.

  4 My parents on their wedding day. May 6, 1961. Saint Turibius Church, Chicago. PHOTOGRAPH BY RON BAILEY

  5 My brother and me in our alley with the Buick. July 1970.

  6 My father and his brother, Dick Hainey, in the Chicago Tribune newsroom. 1958.

  7 My father, age eight, on the steps of his house. McCook, Nebraska. 1942.

  8 Christmas, 1968.

  9 Christmas, 1968.

  10 My father, age four. McCook, Nebraska, 1938.

  11 My mother and me. October 1968.

  12 My mother, brother, and me. Summer 1968.

  PERMISSIONS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted material:

  “Leaving on a Jet Plane”: Words and music by John Denver. Copyright © 1967; renewed 1995 BMG Ruby Songs and BMG Rights Management (Ireland), Ltd. All rights for BMG Ruby Songs administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  “By The Time I Get to Phoenix”: Words and Music by Jimmy Webb © 1967 (Renewed 1995). EMI SOSAHA MUSIC INC., JONATHAN TREE MUSIC, R2M MUSIC, and LASTRADA ENTERTAINMENT, LTD. All rights for R2M Music administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  “(They Long to Be) Close to You”: Lyrics by Hal David. Music by Burt Bacharach. Copyright © 1963 (renewed) Casa David and New Hidden Valley Music. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  “One Less Bell to Answer”: Lyrics by Hal David. Music by Burt Bacharach. Copyright © 1967 (renewed) Casa David and New Hidden Valley Music. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  “Stones”: Written by Neil Diamond. Copyright © 1972 Prophet Music, Inc. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “If You Could Read My Mind”: Words and music by GORDON LIGHTFOOT. Copyright © 1969, 1970 (copyrights renewed) by EARLY MORNING MUSIC, a division of EMP LTD. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  © MARK SELIGER

  MICHAEL HAINEY was born in Chicago and now lives in Manhattan. He is the deputy editor of GQ.

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  Jacket Photograph: RON BAILEY

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  ISBN 978-1-4516-7656-3

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