The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  Now the rouge on his face looked perverse even though the mortician, in her overwrought voice—the voice she’d been taught to use, a sympathetic grating I felt along the notches of my spine—had told us before entering that “he looks great.” For a corpse, she must have meant. Auden: We are not prepared / For silence so sudden and so soon. I leaned over the casket to touch his face and found that the texture of his skin was about what I’d expected: plastic or latex, an alabaster Halloween mask, not cold but cool. His fingers, too, had been sewn together. So much sewing, yet nothing mended. So much shutting, yet nothing closed. The foul breath of lilies, roses, mums kept pushing through the room’s dormant air.

  One of the many oppressive realities just then? In about twenty minutes I would be embraced by a score of friends from my past, a phalanx of well-wishers who’d come to offer their on-the-spot obsequies and homages, to show me kindness, yes, but in showing that kindness they’d no doubt have questions too:

  Where’ve you been, Billy Boy?

  What’ve you been up to since you left town?

  Someone said you went to college. What’s that all about? I don’t remember you being too good at school. By which they would mean When’d you become too good for us?

  Most of my boyhood friends were an odd fit for me. One pal was a muscle-car fanatic who’d somehow got hold of a half-complete 1969 Dodge Charger. The car sat for several years in his parents’ one-bay garage, the hood always open, like a mouth with punched-out teeth, and I remember thinking what a terrific waste of a garage it was. At fifteen, another pal, with the aid of his mechanic dad, began revamping an ordinary VW bug into a turquoise show car. I was there the night its sheath was sprayed onto it, and the paint fumes nearly felled me. They and others were experts with wrenches; if it had gears or used gasoline, they knew how it worked, could break it down and reassemble it too, turn a lawnmower into a go-kart. I had trouble telling a flathead screwdriver from a chisel.

  When it was time, a line formed from the casket, twisted through the panel-ceilinged room, filed through the double doors, down the glossy hall, out the front entrance, around the building, and into the parking lot, which wasn’t wide enough to fit all the Chevys and Fords. I’d been hearing my whole life how beloved my father was in Manville, but this was the first time I’d ever truly seen it, truly felt it as a fact.

  Mourners wanted to show my siblings and me what type of man our father was, strangers and once-a-year relatives who suddenly appeared, who knelt before us, trotting out vignettes in which our father had starring roles. He’d built one couple’s lovable house twenty-five years ago and it stands as unbendable now as it did then. When he’d been wrestling coach at Manville High School, he purchased the right kind of sneakers for one woman’s penniless boy. He gave sandwiches and back pats to the town hobo, a toothless wobble, some smear of a man everyone else derided or shunned. A dozen other stories just like that.

  After a while I could still see their lips moving but could not discern the words, only noises I knew were trying to become narratives. I nudged away a woman I’d never seen before, someone trying to assault my sister with memories she did not share, a tale about our father that involved, I think, a Dalmatian. That’s what we do with the dead: we turn them into tales. How else can they help us now? How else to make them stay?

  Earlier that day, my brother and I asked Pop if we could display a poster-size photo of my father and his bike, and that photo was the first thing you saw at the wake: my father grinning behind the machine that killed him. We wanted it there without fully comprehending why; we probably would have told you that he loved the thing, and we loved him, so there it was, an effort to honor his unstanchable passion.

  But I suspect now that we were trying to remain faithful to our family’s legacy of motorcycle eros, to those particular codes of esteem, to the cult of speed to which our father and uncles and Pop belonged, as if this cult were his singular source of definition. Why not photos of him as the devoted father and son, photos that vaunted his talent for friendship and carpentry? That lone photo must have been a dare, an act of macho provocation—I dare you to say something about its tastelessness—and perhaps I was waiting to see someone jump at the sight of it. This was the bike as crucifix, as True Cross, so fitting for a clan of Catholics. The instrument of death became the object of veneration.

  The photo also must have been a form of self-protection, a way of burying the disruptive suspicion that our father died a fool’s death, a pointless death, that he wasn’t cut out for speed, and that he wasn’t just chasing down an unhaveable dream but trying and failing to outfly a flock of demons. And so we needed that defiance, needed to boast of that machine, despite its being the reason we’d all been undone, all been collected in that room. To boast as if not to feel the shame of the waste, the wreckage wrought by such speed.

  I sat slumped near the casket in a stupor that felt like the first work of sleep, near that nauseating smack of flowers, an obscene swelling of them. Flowers in a field let you breathe their beauty; flowers at a funeral punch at your lungs. Anna and my immediate family sat beside me, behind me, the oxygen in that room altering me in a way I could not then apprehend. It had something to do with physics, I was sure. But physics was a mystery to me. It shouldn’t have been, I knew, because the physics was simple enough for any high-schooler to grasp: velocity, vector sum, acceleration, trajectory. An object in motion stays in motion unless . . . Unless it hits a guardrail, and then makes a void of your life.

  Soon the procession of carpenters and plumbers, roofers and masons, excavators and mechanics, electricians and general contractors with whom my father had worked for twenty-five years, men whose days were spent in begrimed boots and jeans, in T-shirts bearing their names and trades, all of whom looked awkward now, their faces tweaked by grief, hastily groomed and handicapped in decennial suits.

  The most colorful in the procession went by Woody, five feet tall with a mustard ponytail and chaotic goatee (“My lady likes a little tickle when I’m down for a visit”). A gearhead and backhoer whose business card read THE DITCHIN’ MAGICIAN, he was a natural, enthralling storyteller—interstate car chases, dirt-bike crashes, sexual circus acts, wheelies in his pickup truck—who instantly improved the weather of whatever room he walked into. When Woody approached my father’s casket, he performed as expected: hands somberly folded at his belt, head bowed in silent benediction. But when he turned to go, he put out both arms, as if they were gripping handlebars, and he cranked his right fist, his throttle hand, in a pantomime of acceleration, his mouth moving in what I knew was the sound a superbike makes. It was the energy we needed, that three-second respite from the funereal, an expression of Hell yeah, live fast, of Gun it down the back roads of heaven—of the Manvillian ethos to which I was trying to remain loyal with that lone photo of my father and his bike.

  After the wake that night, my cousin said to me, “You see Woody at the coffin?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “He’s goddamn beautiful, ain’t he?”

  “He sure is,” I said, and we both grinned for the first time in four days.

  I remembered that Parma had once told me as a teenager that she had never, in all her years of being married to him, seen Pop weep. A fabled tough guy who roostered through whatever room he was in, Pop had always seemed to us above the effects of common affliction. But now his giant frame quaked with sobs when we left him alone at the casket, and I could guess at the chief thought twisting in him: that this mess was his fault. He’d passed the motorcycle eros to my father. He’d taught him to ride. He’d been the only one with the influence to curb that passion, to convince him that the peril outdid the pleasure. But he never did. He never even tried. Because he didn’t believe that any peril ever outdid its pleasure. And because he knew he didn’t have that right.

  Or maybe he preferred to cross his fingers and hope that my father might escape as he himself had escaped, hobbling away from a dozen motorcycle crashes, bruised, fr
actured, bleeding badly but conscious still, whole enough to heal, to ride again another Sunday. Never mind the yearly, sometimes monthly funerals of friends that Pop had attended, all those riding buddies who’d been flattened, broken beside him on the road. They were the unblessed. His mantra could have been Some guys are lucky, some ain’t. Because funerals are for other people, never for you or your own.

  If Pop could not, would not, do it, and if no one else could or would—not Parma, not my siblings, not his friends or fiancée—why didn’t I try to convince my father that mounting that motorcycle each Sunday was probable suicide? Look at the statistics, see the chances of dying on a superbike; they aren’t in your favor. I didn’t try to convince him because I didn’t know how they rode each week, the risks they took, how they pushed. No one had ever told me that each Sunday was a suicidal race against the road, against the others, against each rider himself. But how could I have been so willfully unaware? Those bikes are birthed for racing. They don’t know how to do, how to be, anything else.

  He’d stopped riding by the time I was born, and I’d been out of the house for two years already when he began riding again. In those five years before his death, I’d lived in three different states and was doing what some do in their late teens and early twenties: the fashioning of a selfhood far from the tug of family, from its corrosive influences on independence. And so I seldom had an accurate notion of the scenes and vicissitudes of my father’s life. We exchanged letters and phone calls, and we emailed in the months before his death, when he at last stepped into cyberspace.

  We saw one another several times a year, and I knew when he upgraded from the Honda CBR900 to the Yamaha R1, and I knew why. In the mid-1990s, the CBR had an aggressive, bent-over riding position, the foot pegs high and back, the handlebars low, lots of weight on the wrists, and it had a high-revving engine too, what my father’s set called a “busy motor.” The R1 had a larger engine and faster top speed, but it was also more comfortable to ride, and that’s why my father switched bikes. I knew about his racing regalia too, the custom-made suit, the helmet and boots. I just couldn’t have guessed at the intensity and seriousness he harbored, the degree to which he needed that velocity, needed to soar after decades of rectitude and responsibility. I just didn’t think to guess. My own living seemed so paramount.

  And if I had known about his road racing, the Sunday madness in which they all often came within a centimeter or second of oblivion? “By the displacement of an atom,” said Wilde, “a world may be shaken.” Just try to take away someone’s fervor, try to dilute it. It can’t be done. When what you crave is what you require, you will have it. And if by some hocus-pocus I had succeeded in taking that fervor from him, what then would that have made me? It would have made me a Promethean thief. Some fires can’t be extinguished or exchanged.

  I spoke at the funeral, spoke drivel beneath a slapping May sun, its light trying to sting my vision, light that did not illuminate but wanted to obscure the day and everything in it. “Dismantle the sun,” Auden wrote—dismantle the son—and I thought, Yes, dismantle this damn thing. I can’t recall ever being so bothered by a midday sun, the sizzling azure plate above. Here’s how my heat-stroked mind was tacking in those moments:

  We are sustained by explosions on the sun, its interior concussing of hydrogen and helium, such eruptive exhaling. The first sliver of a tick, when the pinhole universe became a grape, became a grapefruit, became a galaxy. In billions of decades, the scientists tell us, the sun will bloat in its dying, will ingest the earth. All the nothing out there that doesn’t know our name. Space is curved and curving more, with no cure for us here, wide-eyed and inaudible. We never had a chance. Auden: The day is too hot, too bright, too still, / Too ever, the dead remains too nothing.

  I don’t know who nominated me to speak but I know I didn’t nominate myself. Perhaps there was no nomination at all. I was the eldest son, so maybe it was assumed, all around, that this is what the eldest son must stand and do on a day such as this. I was, I am, the fourth William Giraldi, part of a familial structure whose grooves were worn long before my birth, and I was not exempt from certain expectations, certain rules of comportment. In my own conception of my placement in this family, I was a kind of low-level pariah, the only Giraldi male who hadn’t gone into construction, who hadn’t sworn a permanent oath to the primal ticking of the masculine. I’d made literature into my lodestar, and I always felt that in the eyes of my family there was something daintily suspect, something unmanning, about that choice, even though it was never in the strictest sense a choice. I didn’t choose literature any more than I chose my lineage. Literature, rather, chose me. We don’t always know what we’re born into, and it can be either a blessing or a blow to find out. And what I’ve found out in the years since my father’s death is this: haltingly manful though I may be, I am nevertheless the one my family goes to when something significant needs public saying.

  For whatever reason, I can’t remember the ceremony at the church, can’t see in my mind the casket at the altar, can’t hear the priest and his homily, the holy sentences he would have said. I have no reason to have wanted to bar this from my memory, but barred it is. The graveside scene I remember well, in part because this cemetery had been a daily sight in our lives. It lay between our house and my grandparents’ house, and each day we’d driven past its gated green sprawl. People rarely visited this cemetery, but still it was tediously groomed, a placid last stop along the railroad tracks, beside the small regional airport. You could hear and see the red, the yellow, the blue prop planes descending just over the oaks and spruces at the rear.

  As a depressed teen—after sunk friendships, after family quarrels, after breakups—I’d walk here with a pen and notebook and sit on some stranger’s grave to vomit doggerel I wanted somebody to discover after my suicide. The child isn’t certain of literature’s personal utility; he understands storytelling but not storytelling’s repeatable application to his own living. The adolescent, romantic though he is, begins to see, to intuit, how the right sentence or stanza, how the elevation of language, connects to his too-frequent upheavals, how it can offer the promise of rescue. My teenage melancholy buttressed my investment in literature; it was then, during those years of puzzling and private anguish, that I fully understood what my life would become, how my vista on the world would form itself.

  And now—I was back at this cemetery much too soon. When Freud wrote that the death of the father is the most defining moment of any man’s life, he must have meant that the son becomes the father if he wishes to keep the father’s essence alive. He must annex the father’s selfhood and spirit. I was agonizingly aware of that at my father’s funeral: the immensity of it, a central largeness that made my mind buzz, made my senses dulled under such an insistent sun.

  It’s sweet to think you suffer as a unit, withstand the barrage as a family, but each suffers, each tries to withstand that barrage, entirely on his own. Pain doesn’t transfer; it insists on you, wants only you. What are those annealing properties of pain we hear so much about? We’ve turned Nietzsche’s macho lie—that which does not kill you makes you stronger—into a T-shirt mantra for suburban moms and the many disciples of self-help. The truth is that there are plenty of forces in the world that diminish you in the process of not killing you. A human soul is not a bone; it will not necessarily become reinforced at the broken places. Pain does not put up with bright alterations to its meaning: it is not a lesson, not a learning experience, is never useful. Randall Jarrell: Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

  My family’s silhouettes sat beneath a tent to my right, the sun throbbing behind them as I squinted, trying to make out their faces. Sweat-damp, I twisted in those miserable clothes, a cousin’s navy three-piece, too baggy through the crotch, too cramped at the shoulders. Then I blathered graveside, telling a hundred mourners or more that this grief felt like arson, like acid crashing through my arteries. I said that no one had had t
he right to ask my father to stop riding that Yamaha, and that if he had stopped in order to mollify our concern, it would have been a death of another kind. To keep a man from his passion, to withhold from him the daring he needs, the ebullient, engrained desire that wakes with him each morning—that is death. We should all be so fearless, I said.

  Then I told them that this day, May 11, was my twenty-sixth birthday, and to bury your father on the day of your birth is to become truly born. And I’m certain that when those last words left my mouth I didn’t fully know what I meant by them. Only later did I understand how Freud’s declaration lent them a sliver of meaning: I would have to become my father. In his absence, I would become him. Which meant, I thought, racing motorcycles—for several hours that seemed a very real possibility for me—and also impregnating Anna just as soon as I could manage it, having a child of my own in order to replicate my father, and in that way, keep him alive.

  It was nonsense, of course, every inch of it. The next week, Nicky would tell me that a longtime friend of my father, a fellow carpenter, after hearing my spontaneous eulogy that day, said of me, “He’s a man. To stand there, to say those things. He’s a man.” More nonsense, though, however pleased I was to hear it then. Later, I’d feel somewhat ashamed of this eulogy, the muttering of the expected bromides, just as I’d feel uncertain about our decision to display that lionizing photo at the wake. I’d acquiesced to my family’s masculine code that day, done what the code demanded.