My Father Before Me (2 page)

3

Suicide is a paradox: self-expression through self-annihilation. It's the last word: perfect, unanswerable. The content of the message is ambiguous, and the ambiguity can never be fully resolved; a suicide leaves behind it a wake of silence. I have wanted to fill that silence. I have filled it with
Daddy, come back
. I have filled it with
What kind of man could do that to his family
? Or
Life is essentially absurd; he who mocks it most relentlessly is most relentlessly alive and honest
. Or
Poor man, sad man, deeply troubled for years—he's to be admired for lasting as long as he did
. I have filled it with
I must try not to live as he did—silently, suffering silently, out of shame or pride or fear or some intractable habit of obscure origin
.

And I have filled it with poetry. Or, no: poetry has risen from that silence and contains it. Of that which is most unsayable and wreathed in uncertainty, I have found, to my relief and comfort, poetry speaks.

In the private act of reading or writing a poem, in the solitary immersion in language, in its exquisite balancing of meanings and its nuanced music, I have felt most deeply myself, most intimately aligned with my sense of the mystery of existing, with my sense of being small and temporary compared to whatever it is that is operating beyond me, maybe through me. A poem can feel like an intermediary, a minister, between me and the bewildering universe. It completes an electrical
circuit between the known and the unknown, between my own individual experience and the shadowy operations of the reality of which that experience is a part. That might be why, reading a good poem, I feel a jolt.

Such pleasures, I nonetheless remind myself, occur in solitude, in the safe cave of the mind. I am, finally, my father's son—and my mother's. I crave my privacy, including privacy of thought.

Picturing my mother and father as children, I imagine them, even among their siblings and parents and grandparents, as being essentially alone, within a spotlight and surrounded by shadows. They were products of the Depression and were not long removed from their ragged ancestors who first came to this continent: hungry, hard-drinking Irish immigrants, illiterate but skilled at farm and railroad work; and sturdy, stoic Norwegians and Swedes who helped people the hardscrabble landscape of the upper Midwest. From family habits passed down to them and from their own uncertain circumstances, my father was trained to rely on himself and my mother on herself. If the story of their lives together is a tragedy, maybe it is the tragedy of two people who never learned fully to rely on each other. My father was expert at the wry aside and explanations of the intricate workings of a home's electrical wiring, but he kept the intricate workings of himself to himself—the feelings and thoughts that would have helped his wife and his children know him better, maybe love him better. And he passed that inwardness on to his children.

In the household created by my parents, I learned to speak carefully, with forethought, or not speak at all. I am not gregarious. In a group of people, I sometimes find myself watching myself being among them; I watch myself watching myself. “What are you thinking?” someone asks, and I can't say. How could I begin to? I tend to be reticent, slow to articulate my thoughts to myself, measured and deliberate in my articulation of them to others. As a child, I had a
word for what I was: shy. As an adult, I forgive myself sometimes for my reserve, telling myself that I merely desire to express my thoughts as accurately, as precisely, as possible. At other times, I tell myself I am lazy or scared, unwilling to say aloud the wrong thing for fear of making myself vulnerable: to some hazy, undefined reprisal from my listener or, worse, to some discomforting knowledge about myself.

Silence, truly listened to, can begin to whisper and reward us with inklings of understanding. It can remind us of the unfathomable mysteries into which, and out of which, we are born; it can reward us with the consoling news that we are necessarily small and imperfect and therefore deserve to forgive ourselves; it can reward us with poetry. Silence, retreated to long enough, and used by a man as a hiding place, even as he projects to the world one identity after another—soldier, husband, father, career man—can make that man a stranger, to his family and to himself.

– Part II –

Asleep at the Post

4

Girls are lined up on one side of the gym, boys on the other. It's a high school mixer, 1946: the big-band records are playing. Eddie Forhan, sixteen, a junior, is there; he doesn't miss many dances. A few teachers—chaperones—stand discreetly in the corners, responsible looks on their faces. Most of the boys and girls linger shyly on their side of the room. Only a few brave souls have met in the middle. Among them is someone Eddie hasn't noticed before: a slim, pretty girl with wavy dark brown hair who has been twirling dance after dance in and out of the arms of a boy named Brodie. The two of them seem to know each other well, but Eddie is interested and bold. In a pause between songs, he approaches Brodie and asks if he can take his place for a dance, and Brodie replies, “Be my guest.”

The girl is a sophomore but only fourteen: round-faced, with a smattering of freckles across her high cheekbones and a cute swoop of a nose. She tells Eddie her name is Ange—it sounds like
Angie
but has no
i
in it. Her last name is Peterson. She will one day become my mother.

But now they're just dancing, first to one song, then another. Brodie, poor, courteous, understanding Brodie, who has recently begun dating Ange, doesn't stand a chance. “Your father asked me to dance,” as my mother explains, “and we were together ever after.”

On the gym floor, Eddie is smooth, and he knows it—a jocular talker and slick dancer, though not as slick as he thinks. He and Ange are doing the slide, and Eddie can't help himself: he's sliding this way, sliding that way, sliding in exaggerated fashion, goofing off, showing off. To Ange, he's adorable. And nice. Handsome. Charming as all get-out—and she's a sucker for charm. As a child of divorced parents—a mother glum and inward, a father far off, with little affection to spare her—she hasn't had much of that in her life.

They begin acting as smitten teenagers do. At basketball games, they sit in the bleachers side by side, hand in hand. When other dances are held, they attend them together. When Eddie learns to drive, he escorts his sweetheart to a movie or to the Triple XXX drive-in. He cracks silly jokes—real groaners—and nudges her, telling her she ought to lighten up, abandon some of that Scandinavian reserve. Sometimes he visits Ange's house; less often, she visits his, where he lives with his grandparents. They are not keen on the idea of him being so involved with a girl, and such a young one. The welcome in that home is chilly.

But what, think Eddie and Ange, can be wrong with their devoting so much time to each other? For their ages, they are quite grown up, they think. And they understand each other well, they think. Still, there are parts of Eddie's life—some invisible, tangled shadow he trails behind him—of which he will not speak. When Ange asks about his father, Eddie clams up. The man is gone. Why mention him? And his mother, yes, is dead. Forget it. There's nothing to say, nothing to figure out about that.

Why talk about the past when one can sing? “To each his own, and my own is you,” Eddie croons. This is their song, he informs her. The first months of their romance, they can hardly listen to the radio for an hour without hearing “To Each His Own.” “I need you, I know, I can't let you go.” They might be, they probably are, in love, whatever that might mean. They have a chance to prove that to the camera one
spring day—Roosevelt High's White Clothes Day. From the school, they amble down to a nearby lake, Eddie in a white button-down shirt, white sailor pants, white socks, and white shoes; Ange in a plain white knee-length dress, white ankle socks, and dark penny loafers. For one photo, they stand near the water, on a wooden dock, arms around each other, gazing into each other's eyes; they look gorgeous and jubilant. For another, they sit on a low wall at the edge of the dock; their knees point in opposite directions, but Ange falls backward into Eddie's arms, her arms wrapping fully, decisively, around his neck, and he leans down and kisses her on the mouth. It is their version of the famous Times Square VJ Day sailor's kiss, but they seem to mean it more.

In this brief moment, existing only in each other's arms, they are citizens of a kingdom of innocence and bliss; they wear its white uniform. If only they could stay here, stay in this moment—alive in it, alive to it—in the way the image of their kiss will remain, unchanging, in the photographs. If only they could remain as they are: impossibly young, impossibly happy, possibly wrong for each other, but with no clue of that yet. If only they could cling to each other on this dock forever: marriageless, childless, deathless, eyes half closed, each wave of lake water stilled, the camera in mid-click.

5

They were thinking about the future; they were getting serious. College—that would come next. They would go together. But Eddie's grandparents, who had been raising him for the past five years, didn't see much point in college, and it wasn't likely they would have money to help him, anyway. There was this, though: the war was over at last—not a bad time to join the military. If Eddie could find a way to leave high school early, skip out on his senior year, and enlist, he could take advantage of the original GI Bill, which might expire soon, and get government help with tuition. As many soldiers and sailors were doing, he could try to earn his high school diploma by passing the GED tests.

He picked the marines—maybe they were the only branch that would take a recruit so young. One of Eddie's first orders: return to the orthodontist. “If you're old enough for the marines, son,” he was told, “you're old enough to get those braces off.” His grandparents, my mother imagines, must have been livid; living on little, they had nonetheless scraped together enough to fix their grandson's teeth. The braces came off. Until his death, my father's teeth stayed crooked. Semper fidelis.

He might have had a steady girlfriend, his best pals might have been tossing spit wads at each other in chemistry and trigonometry, and he might have just celebrated only his seventeenth birthday, but
Eddie was suddenly in San Diego, at boot camp, all 140 scrawny pounds of him, crawling across the dirt on his belly, rushing up steep hills, breathless, suffering rope burns on his palms and thighs, being deprived of food and sleep, being jawed at by a pit bull of a drill instructor until he was mentally broken, until he thought of himself as nothing, until he did not think of himself at all.

In a boot camp photograph, wearing his khaki service uniform, utility belt, and garrison cap, holding his upright rifle at his side, Eddie is gaunt; the brilliant southern California sun bleaches his pale Irish skin. He looks done in, ready to come home.

He did come home, in time for Christmas, but within weeks he was off again, this time for his twenty-month assignment to a military base where, six years before, he would have had a target on his back. Now the most meaningful thing on his back would be tanning oil. He was going to Pearl Harbor.

For the two-thousand-mile journey from Seattle to Hawaii, he boarded the USS
General William Mitchell,
a troop transport that, during the war, had carried soldiers to England, North Africa, and the Pacific; on return trips, it had brought home veterans of battle: the weary, the wounded, the dead. The hulking ship must have felt thick with ghosts. It was enormous: two football fields long, its sides lined with gun mounts, two mammoth smokestacks looming above. I can picture, some late evening, Eddie on the ship's deck, leaning on the rail, peering at the ragged spumes of the Pacific, wind whisking through his crew cut and billowing through his jacket sleeves. A century earlier, his father's father's father had sailed west across another ocean, improvising a future he would have to struggle into, as into an ill-fitting suit. That ancestor was young—about the age Eddie was now—Catholic, and barely educated; he brought little with him, I imagine, but his youth, muscle, faith, and desperation. And how much more than that did Eddie possess? He had a rank: private. A modest
monthly salary that was sent to his grandparents. A girlfriend who, though only fifteen, was intent on waiting for him until his return. And, like that Forhan of a hundred years before, a vaguely formulated notion of what the future had in store for him. He was a skinny American kid, absurdly small on that colossal ship, on that broad ocean, beneath that star-strewn sky, in that trim uniform that signified his sworn allegiance to a set of immutable values: the necessity of acting with honor and courage, of doing his duty, and, no matter the duress he was under, of always making the right decision.

Upon his arrival in Honolulu, Eddie went with a couple of buddies to a portrait studio and posed in front of a painted backdrop that made them appear to be, in fact, in Honolulu: wind-tossed palm trees, an ocean beach receding into a mountainous background. The three of them stood before this simulated scene in their pressed khaki service uniforms, caps at a requisite jaunty angle. Eddie threw his arm over the shoulder of his pal in the middle, and the third marine, from the other side, did the same. Each of them, wearing a look of exaggerated self-assurance, held a full bottle of whiskey, supporting the bottom of the bottle with his hand as if advertising it, as if making certain it was understood that the seemingly fresh-faced teenager holding the bottle was no boy but a man, a real man, a marine, no less, and by God, this marine drank—oh, how he drank.

The result is that it looks as though none of them has tasted a drop of liquor in his life.

Ange wasn't impressed with the picture, which she found slipped into one of the regular letters Eddie mailed to her. She liked better the other one he sent: the formal photograph taken a year into his stint at Pearl Harbor, the one in which he flashes a wide, genuine grin, the one in which his hair is exquisitely combed and long enough on top to be swept up neatly over his forehead, Errol Flynn–style—the one he signed,
With All My Love, Eddie.

A third photo from his time in Hawaii shows a different Eddie. This is a military document, a mug shot, meant simply to depict a soldier; there is nothing theatrical about it. By this time, my father has been at Pearl Harbor for a year and a half; he is only three months away from the end of his assignment. He stares straight ahead, expressionless. His eyes are slightly narrowed, as if he's sleepy. His stiff uniform collar looks on the verge of choking him.

Two months later, Monday, August 9, 1948: the day dawns bright and balmy on Oahu. The sky is cloudless. A light breeze rustles the palms. Three years before to the day, the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Less than seven years before, soldiers and sailors at Pearl Harbor looked quizzically toward the sky, hearing the drone of Japanese fighter planes approaching. This morning, on the same base, Marine Private 1st Class Edward Forhan is on guard duty. And he is fast asleep.

It is ten
A.M.
when he is caught. How long has he been snoozing? And why? What could have caused him to slip into sleep so early in the day, especially when his duty is to be alert, eyes fixed on the area assigned to him, hand ready to reach for his pen and inscribe in his log any suspicious activity or to salute smartly any passing officer? Has he been out on the town, carousing late with his buddies?

Whatever the reason, the infraction is serious. It could mean a court-martial, even a dishonorable discharge. Eddie has no explanation. “I just fell asleep,” he writes to Ange. “Big trouble.”

Luckily, the trouble is smaller than he feared. He pleads guilty and is sentenced to a hefty fine: thirty dollars a month for the next three months—more than half his pay. In September, he leaves active duty with an honorable discharge and returns to the U.S., where he enrolls in the marine reserve—and where Ange awaits. During his two years away at boot camp and Pearl Harbor, she hasn't been merely lying on her bed mooning over his weekly letters. She is a teenage girl—she
recently celebrated her seventeenth birthday—and she hasn't considered the fact of her boyfriend being out of town a reason to miss two years of dances and parties. Ange has been dating a very nice fellow named, go figure, Eddie, who, as is often the case in these situations, has fallen hard for her, while she, on the other hand, finds him to be a very nice fellow. The day my father is scheduled to arrive home, the other Eddie, the stopgap one, has arranged a date with her. As my mother explains it, “I had to tell Eddie, ‘Well, the real guy showed up. I can't go out with you tonight. Sorry.' It must have been hard for him, but he was a peach.”

My father's unexpected and expensive morning nap is soon forgotten. It was an accident, after all. It might have happened to anyone.