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Authors: Richard Hoffman

BOOK: Love and Fury
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My father was raised in a German family, in a Prussian culture, in fact, the son of a coal miner and an Irish Catholic daughter of the Great Hunger. He grew up in the Great Depression, left school for the army, and when the war was over, he married my mother and attempted to begin a life that would make some sense, that would be orderly and satisfying and good. For a few years it was. I was born first, then my brother Bobby. Soon Bobby was sick. Joe was born. Mike was born. Bobby and Mike were diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. Life became hardship, the daily struggle against despair and cynicism. That struggle never seemed to take place in any kind of way he could articulate. He had no vocabulary except the harsh Catholicism he was raised with and which he walked away from (farther after each death, for which it offered him neither comfort nor consolation), so that by the end of his life he was left shuffling fourteen kinds of pills to try to manage his moods, his digestion, his energy, his appetite, his sleep. It was all he could do to survive. Why insist on coherence with courage in such supply? My father does not have to be understood, or even be understandable, for me to have loved him all my life and to love him still.

And to remain furious with him.

Why is it that when I let the anger kick in the tears finally come? Somebody says to me, “Come on, come on. They want to get this show on the road.” It can't have been my father. I did hear it though, in his voice, complete with his impatience, right in the middle of my head.

And as I rise from the kneeler, glancing up at the crucifix, I cross myself before I know what I'm doing, my body reminding me it doesn't need my permission to remember.

When I return and stand between my brother and my son, Robert touches me on the shoulder, and I need my handkerchief. I've just about got things back under control when I feel D collide with my leg and wrap his arms around it tight. When I look down at him, at his one-year-old face, I see empathy, spontaneous, instinctual. I pick him up and kiss him and he squirms to go back to Veronica.

The undertaker directs the people who have been filing in, sitting in folding chairs. Joined by some who have been waiting in the hall, they form a line to pay their last respects to my father, and then to express their sorrow to my brother and me, and to Kathi and the kids. Singly or in twos, they make their way to the bier and kneel a few moments. Some of them look at my father's face, some cross themselves as they rise.

At first I was surprised at how few of my father's old pals were at his funeral. I thought I might see Eddie, who ran the newsstand at Sixth and Turner streets where I picked up my bundle of evening newspapers for my afternoon route; rows and rows of colorful magazines, and newspapers not only from out of town, but from several countries represented in the immigrant population of the city. There were publications in Spanish, German, Polish, Greek. I thought that Eddie must be very smart to be able to read all those different languages, but my father set me straight. “Don't be fooled. He only sells those things. He don't read them. Eddie's an old prizefighter. I'd be careful of him. He's a good guy but a little punchy.” And I remember there was a section close to the cash register where the magazines were covered in brown paper.

Or Tooty, the groundskeeper at Irving Street Park, where the infield was smooth and level as a clay tennis court and the outfield was like a putting green. Or Schmidty, assistant coach of my father's American Legion team, for which I'd been the batboy.

But of course, it dawned on me, they were all dead. My father, with his many griefs, who had buried two sons and his wife, who had been angry, abidingly angry every day of his life, who had lived to know his grandchildren and meet his great-grandson, had survived them. I felt a foolish momentary pride I knew better than to take to heart.

My father preferred the company of men. He felt that he understood men. In fact, it would have been impossible for him, in his time and place, class and circumstance, to have ever been friends with a woman. My own coming-of-age coincided with the rise of second-wave feminism, and my friendships with women have been a crucial part of my life. Once, I mentioned to my father that I was having dinner with my friend Suzanne, a fellow writer, and frowning he asked, “Does Kathi know about this?”

Most of the people who approach us to express sympathy are strangers to me. My brother Joe knows a good number of them, but many are people my father worked with in the years after I left Allentown.

Will, as close to my father as either of his sons, is here from Michigan. He gives my hand a squeeze, looks down, shakes his head. “You were right. Remember what you told me on the phone? The world is different now.” Will once told me that my father found me a mystery. “How's a kid leave home a quarterback and come back a poet?” Will, with his PhD in literature, must have seemed to my father the only person he could ask such a question. He didn't say how he'd answered.

There's a large open area between the bier and the rows of chairs, and D is racing back and forth across it, Veronica running behind, scooping him up, putting him back down, redirecting him as much as possible. She has been crying, her eyes red, a wad of tissues in her hand, but she has to laugh despite that. So do several other of the mourners. Now D, dressed in a suit with a clip-on tie, pants big enough for his diaper, decides to run in a circle. He seems to have just figured out, or is delighting in the fact, that if he runs in a circle away from his mother and she stays put he will soon come back to her. Every time he slams back into her she picks him up and kisses him. The next time he takes off, Veronica gets down on one knee, ready to receive him when he comes back, but D takes that as a new wrinkle in the game: he teases her and then runs off in another direction, out into the hall, where his mother chases after him. Except for a few stern souls, people are smiling, wiping their eyes, blowing their noses perhaps, but then smiling. I wonder at him. How will he fare without his father, now in a cell awaiting trial? How will he fare at all? I wonder in both joy and fear: who will he become? And will it matter who he is, or only how the white world sees him?

“I'm Bill Dolan. Your dad got me a job driving a mower in the parks in the summers when I was home from college. I'd sometimes see him around. He was one of the good guys.” I recognize Dolan as a guy I knew in high school. He was a senior who played varsity football when I was on the freshman team, so he doesn't remember me.

My cousin Don, here with his young family, shakes my hand. I recall my Aunt Marietta's chagrin when he became a Jehovah's Witness. “There's no Christmas or nothing,” she complained. “I can't even make him a birthday cake!”

“Wow. Donnie. It's been a long time.” I know the weight he carries: a father, my Uncle Pete, who drank himself to death, and I feel the urge to connect with him somehow. “We should get together sometime. Some other time, I mean.” But I know as I say it that it won't happen. He gives me his card. He owns a car dealership. “I'll shoot you an e-mail,” I tell him.

A man is shaking Joe's hand next to me, and I hear him say, “ . . . A long time ago, at the Boys Club.” A short, stout African American man, hair going to gray, he steps up to me, takes my hand in both of his, says, “I'm sorry for your loss,” and moves away. A member of the hambone team? I am staring after him, wondering, when a soft clear voice says, “Richard.”

She is standing in front of me, radiant and tall although she must be in her eighties. She takes my hand. “I'm Mrs. McFadden.”

“Of course,” I manage to say, “yes, yes of course,” though history has just now rung me like a bell. She is my childhood friend Patrick's mother. Patrick was the oldest of, I believe, eleven or twelve kids. I remember only two of his siblings, Rosemary and Timmy, probably because they were old enough to play with us. I remember the house always smelled of ammonia from a diaper pail, which after five minutes you didn't notice anymore, and Mrs. McFadden was almost continuously pregnant, with one child on her hip and another by the hand as she calmly answered our questions or told us what she wanted Patrick and me to pick up for her at the corner store. My other friends' mothers were tolerant, at least if it was raining; otherwise they chased us outside to play. Mrs. McFadden seemed happy I was there. I don't think I ever knew what Mr. McFadden did, but I remember that when there were nine McFadden kids, my father declared that now there were enough for a baseball team. A couple of years later he said there were enough for a football team. Once, when I was in high school, my father asked me what Patrick's father did, and I shrugged. I didn't care much about things like that, and in those days I didn't care much for my father. “Well, he's got eleven kids,” my father said, “so I know one thing he's doing for shit-sure!”

“This is my son, Robert.” She smiles broadly. “And that's my daughter, Veronica, whose been chasing my grandson around here. And my wife Kathi's there in the first row.” She looks back at Robert. “He looks like his mother,” she says to me. “Do people tell you that, Robert? That you look like your mother?”

I haven't seen this woman for decades; I might pass her on the street without stopping, but now I feel an affection so vast it summons another place and time. I am in the old neighborhood, in St. Francis of Assisi Parish, North Ninth Street running uptown to the public library and department stores and in the other direction ending in three glorious sledding hills declining to the freight siding and scrap metal yards of Sumner Avenue. Across town my uncle is under another chassis at Mack Trucks, welding; my mother is taking her tuna casserole from the oven, checking to see if she has time to run to Woodring's grocery, where big Jim in his butcher's apron would write down what she spent in a thick ledger—“Put it on the bill,” my mother would say to him— but no, the boys will be traipsing in wanting something to eat in fifteen or twenty minutes, so she can ask me to go for her then; Aunt Helen is in between customers at the diner, smoking in back and wondering if she might take off her shoes to ease her swollen feet or if she'd better not because she wouldn't be able to get them on again; the public school kids are already out, a half hour earlier than us; along the south side of town trout see the surface of the Little Lehigh dimple with the first drops of rain. Mrs. Dries's Doberman paces back and forth, looking pissed off that nobody has come by to terrify by snarling on his hind legs at the gate; traffic on Seventh Street circles the city's Soldiers and Sailors monument, Nike, goddess of victory atop a ninety-foot marble pillar; my father is working at the brewery, grabbing longneck bottles of beer by the top, four at a time, off the conveyor belt—six times per case—laughing with his coworker Stanley; a few guys, out of work, are playing basketball at the Salvation Army court, where if you drive through the key and fall into the heavy doors you might go through and right down the steps; my grandmother starts out on her walk, six blocks from her apartment to our house in time to help my mother set the table; at my desk I'm watching the clock, which is next to the crucifix and above the twenty-six letters of the alphabet; Johnny Pacheco is, of course, in trouble again and the nun has him by the ear but he is grinning at us as she drags him away; the Royal laundry truck Ronnie's father drives backs up to the platform for its final load of the day; the birds gather on wires above Freihofer's bakery, in winter for the warmth coming out of the stacks from the ovens, and all year round for whatever crumbs might become available.

“Are you still on Ninth Street?”

“Oh, yes.”

“How is the neighborhood?”

“Oh, it's about the same. All the old people are gone, but the new neighbors are nice. There are lots of children. Everyone speaks Spanish, though, and I don't understand a word they say. Well, it's lovely to see you, Richard; I'm very sorry for your loss.”

My cousin Margaret approaches me. She has her purse open, and I think she is going to offer me a tissue, but she takes out a compact. “I figured I should ask you first. Would it be okay if I just put a little rouge on him? They left him looking awfully pale.” I dissuade her. She leans in closer, a look of aggravation on her face, and whispers, “Did they let you pick out a casket?”

“Why? You don't like it?” She pats my hand, dabs at her eyes, and moves away.

When all of the people are seated, the priest enters. Joe knows him. Father Marty, his name is. Already I feel the tone is off; it is a solemn occasion, after all, a man's funeral, even if he preferred that things be kept simple. Father Marty seemed to bop in, bouncing on the balls of his feet, rubbing his hands together as if he were about to organize a picnic. He makes a brief stop at the bier, kneeling for a moment to whisper a prayer; he crosses himself as he rises. He comes forward and intones a blessing, crossing the air in front of him. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Only a scattering of people respond, “Amen.”

He's trying. I have some sympathy for him. He didn't know my father. He's sticking to the tried and true, to generalities he must have been taught in his coursework in pastoral care. He is facing a motley flock here: in addition to my Catholic cousins—varying from devout to lapsed—the room includes many Lutherans, at least one Buddhist, two Jehovah's Witnesses, several Jews, a Unitarian, and a number of atheists. If he is aware of this fact, he's not letting it impede his ministrations.

When I was a young altar boy, sometimes the priest would come into our classroom, sixth or seventh grade, whisper something to the nun, and she would point to me and to one of the other altar boys, maybe Patrick, maybe Peter. And we would join Father Walters in the hall, where he would explain that there was to be a funeral Mass this afternoon and that we had been chosen to serve. I remember my first time, carrying a candle around the casket as the priest, just behind me, swung the censor—
chingchingching . . . chingchingching—
and I heard the weeping, a wail here and there, and saw the wet, red faces of the mourners and could not completely keep from crying myself. I can remember the scratchy rayon of my black cassock on my cheek as I tried to wipe away a tear. But I came to see, as I served at more funerals, a certain purity in the contorted faces of the grieving, a concentration of emotion, something so sincere that I felt deeply reassured. It was like seeing straight into a white light, the acetylene center of the soul, where all the colors meet, fuse, transcend distinctions. Later on, at the funerals of my own family members, I found this reassurance again, that we are all connected by grief to everyone else in the human web: a net, after all, is made of crosses. But there's not sufficient comfort in transcendent understandings. We grieve, we mourn; we do not shrug. To survive the death of a loved one is to have withstood, somehow, all the sorrow of our species passing through us in a particular moment, like a dense speck of negative light, one of those imploded stars astronomers tell us change the universe forever.

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