Love and Fury (24 page)

It is a complicated plot, all of which I'm sure was lost on me as a child. Costa's platoon contains a Jewish soldier, Bernstein, whose wisecracking does much to keep up morale. When he is wounded and Nazis are about to overrun their position, they decide to stay and fight: “These guys are SS, Lieutenant, you know that we can't leave Bernstein here.” I would not even have asked why this would be so. A good portion of childhood's innocence is simple ignorance.

What I'm sure was also lost on me but would nevertheless have made an impression, was that there were no women in the film, none. There is a woman's voice on the radio early in the film, from Armed Forces Radio, seductive and encouraging to the soldiers, but there are no women on the roads, in the villages, in the countryside. There are no civilians; everyone in the film is in uniform.

And so I am five, and I'm holding on to my father's thumb. We are on our way back home from the movies. Because I am shaky and weak and confused, I will watch my father; work to assimilate his walk, his mannerisms, his attitudes. I have somehow forgotten how it is to be me. When we left home I was a child; now I am a boy, and I will school myself in the world of my father, a world of heroes and cowards, of honor and dishonor, a world with no women, where men must contend with other men to stay alive.

T
he real man, whoever he had been, had suffered and now was dead: this was all that was sure and all that mattered now. Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity.

JAMES BALDWIN

What the hell is Henry doing?” Joe asks me. My cousin Margaret's husband is walking all around my father's casket, shooting pictures. At one point, leaning over the bier, he stumbles, recovers, knocks a flower from a bouquet. He tries to stand on the padded kneeler to get a little more height so he can take a shot looking down at my father's face but thinks better of it.

“He just got a new camera.”

Earlier, in the hall, I'd seen him down on one knee, taking a shot of the placard on an easel with my father's name. Across the hall, someone else's name in an elegant script. Henry showed me a picture he'd taken of the outside of the funeral home. “The trick with digital is to try all different settings. You don't have to worry about using up film. And you want to shoot from as many angles as you can. Look, look here, with the digital zoom I can zoom in even after I've taken the picture.”

“He wants to shoot from different angles,” I tell my brother.

“Yeah, but what the hell is he
doing?
”

Joe and I are standing next to each other off to the side of where the folding chairs are arranged for the mourners who have just begun arriving. My son, Robert, has joined us and stands to my right. Kathi and Veronica are in the first row of chairs with D, only days past his first birthday, on Veronica's lap. It is a moment of calm after all the necessary inanities about caskets and vaults, talk of waterproofing, of warranties and reinforcements so the grave will not cave in, of how many limos will roll slowly through the streets to the cemetery, all our delusional begrudging the earth what it rightfully owns.

Shoulder to shoulder with my brother, I am thinking about our different engagements with our father. For decades mine was long distance, made of phone calls, holiday visits, and scripted versions of my life usually more true than not but always wary and defensive. My brother, on the other hand, lived all those years in that dark house, the curtains drawn, our father in his chair sinking ever deeper into an irascible depression. Somehow, for his psychic survival, Joe managed to distance himself as surely as I had by remaining hundreds of miles away. And yet we loved the man, each of us.

Standing there, the brother who left, next to the brother who stayed, I find myself wondering where it is written that a son must be dutiful and obedient, must sacrifice himself for his father's love, its expression withheld and replaced by a promise, an assurance that is unfelt and unseen?

Above my father in the casket, a crucifix hangs midair, suspended by invisible wire, as if presiding over the arrangements of flowers and the gathering mourners.

Only weeks before, as we sat before his gigantic television, my father had made his wishes known. He pressed the mute button on the remote. “I hope it will be okay with you and your brother, but I've decided not to have a funeral Mass in the church.”

“Okay? You know me. I think 99 percent of religions give all the others a bad name.”

He gave me a disgusted look as if to say that this was no time to be cute.

“I just don't want to be a hypocrite,” he said. “I stopped going to Mass a long time ago. I think Joe still goes, maybe Christmas and Easter, so he might feel strongly about it. . . .”

“It doesn't matter to me.”

“Well, then, unless your brother objects, I'd just as soon have the priest just come over to the funeral home and say a rosary or something.” He jabbed the remote at the TV and
SportsCenter
drowned out any further talk.

In the dream I had the night before the funeral, I had written the story of my life, and my father, like a circus strongman tearing a phone book, ripped it in half, then in half again, and yet again until he scattered the pieces to the wind like confetti. He was calm, not enraged, undisturbed, as if to say, “So, what else have you got?” The dream was too transparent, even to me, asleep, to be a nightmare so I didn't feel terror, only a kind of resignation, a sigh: Oh, not
again.
I even wondered, in the dream, why I gave him the story to read, knowing what he would likely do. But who was this dream father, really? Surely not the man who worked to bend his desires to his obligations; who sacrificed, loved, grieved, and survived; not the man who, confronted with his failures, determined to set things right; not the man who we were grieving here today.

And yet that same man could be a monster, a wanton agent of psychic destruction. My brother told me a story once that should have made me angry on his behalf but only chilled me to the bone and left me grateful once again that I left home when I did. Joe had been working in those days for the local chapter of the Nature Conservancy, and he'd been asked to give a talk on the preservation of a waterway in a neighboring township. Our father had been watching TV, of course, and, surfing channels, discovered my brother's presentation on the local station.

“Hey, you never told me you were going to be on my television!” he said while my brother was hanging up his jacket. “I sat here and thought, This is a damn good speech. This guy sounds like he really knows what he's talking about!”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot,” Joe said, a little wary. “Glad you thought so.”

“You know, it's too bad the way you look. People would pay more attention to what you say if you just weren't so fuckin' ugly.”

“What did you do when he said that?” I asked Joe.

“I went upstairs to my room. What the hell else could I do?”

I could see him, anger shaking him, pulling himself up the bannister, climbing the stairs deliberately, and closing, not slamming, his bedroom door. I'd witnessed our father shaming him before, many times. And I hadn't done a damn thing.

Another time, when my brother was dating a young Korean woman, he mused, resigned, “What am I going to do, bring her home so he can ask her, ‘Now, just what kind of a gook are you, exactly?'” I wanted to say that he could move out, but somehow, for some reason I can't understand, that wasn't true.

Once I told a therapist that it seemed to me my father must have given me my sense of myself as competent and resilient. I was thinking of my mother's unworldliness and insecurity. He asked me if it wasn't more likely that my father had not succeeded in taking that confidence away from me. Now I have come to think that I made my escape before he could do that, before he could finish the job.

My brother and I, of course, each had our own relationship to our father. We're talking here about love, after all, not sociology. Grief has always seemed to me to be love made briefly visible, like a crackling tree of lightning forking across the night sky. But that glimpse of love's ramifying light, all its meanings in a single instant, vanishes, and all you're left with is the knowledge that more things are connected to one another and in more eccentric and surprising ways than you can possibly trace. Maybe in his way this is what Henry is trying to capture. Maybe it is what I was doing staring at my father naked on a rusty gurney.

Maybe I am trying to fix that lightning, or at least the memory of it, here, in these words.

Arrangements of flowers surround the casket, and there is no other way to approach, to come close to my father this last time, except to kneel. And so I kneel beneath that molded figure of agony twisted in the same pose as a billion others, stamped out like so many pennies, and I am shaking like a man with Parkinson's, wanting to feel something coherent and simple and untangled. I can't.

I stare at my father's hands that fed me and struck me, teaching me gratitude and terror. I recall a time he threw me against a wall so hard my head snapped back and I lost consciousness, coming to with a touch of nausea and a taste in the back of my throat like nothing else. And then my father shined his flashlight in my eyes to watch my pupils respond, his hand steadying my chin—“Keep still, damn it!”—his look as if searching in my soul for something. “You'll be okay,” he said, switching off the light.

Entwined in his fingers, a rosary. Who had requested that? I feel an invitation to anger on his behalf; what did his being Catholic ever afford him but shame? And yet it doesn't matter. It's a bit of tribal superstition, a vestige of Catholic exceptionalism, packing off the deceased with the means to prove he was of the one true church, but it would no doubt comfort some of the people who'd come and, other than me, it was likely to offend no one.

I want to reach into the casket and touch his hands but I know how icy they will be. His left is crossed over his right, his thumb perfectly the shape of mine, at precisely the same angle to the rest of the hand. And suddenly I want to thank my father for my thumb. It clearly came from him, or through him, and science would say it is the most important tool he left me, more important than his whole red metal box of tools with its trays and drawers, its wrench with a socket for every occasion, its place for everything and everything in its place. But this is not just any thumb, no. It's plain as day to me that whatever my mother left me of all that I am, this thumb came from him: same shape; same angle, exactly; same size relative to my hand. I don't mean to suggest that my father's thumb was odd or remarkable, only that I, his firstborn son, know the lineaments, texture, movements of that thumb that I could never mistake for another. I probably watched that thumb holding a baby bottle in the middle of my first ferocious hungers when, as my mother told me, he walked the floor with me night after colicky night. Buckling buckles, tying my shoes, cutting up my food. And, some furious years later, pressing on my Adam's apple, his hand around my neck. And telling me to hit the road. I know that thumb. This thumb.

Then Henry's kneeling next to me. “Here, look at this one,” he says, and he shows me the screen of his camera where I am in focus, kneeling there, my father's face a little blurry in the background. He understands the look I give him: “Sorry. I'll leave you alone.” Then he whispers, “I'll save this one for you. This is a good one.” As Henry leaves, my father's face seems a comment, a bemused, “Yup. That's Henry.”

I'm still trembling, not yet ready to rise. I feel certain there is something here I am supposed to understand. I want to mourn my father, mourn him and be done with it, mourn him and be done with him. But the contradictions pull at me, twist me. I am grateful and outraged, sorrowful and relieved. The judgments, the recriminations, the guilt, the anger all get in my way. And the questions. I am still trying to know him, still asking who he was, unable to make even my own experience of him cohere.

Or maybe this is just my reluctance to let him go. Who, after all, has a continuous sensible experience of oneself? It's more like a passage we must make through the dark, underground, with a miner's lamp on our helmets: at any given moment we can only see a little part of where we are.

I have to admit he was more comfortable with his many contradictions than I am with mine. I am always trying to make sense, doing a kind of corrective surgery on myself. Is this striving for coherence a disguise for narcissism? I hear my father's voice, “What are you bucking for, sainthood?” I was a kid in Catholic school when he first made that crack. I don't remember the occasion, but I recall thinking, why not? What else is worth aiming for? Now I hear a world-weary wisdom in his remark and a warning against a certain spiritual arrogance.