Townie (48 page)

It was not this simple, though. Pop kept calling me about doing that interview and I kept resisting, but it wasn’t because I did not want to share time and attention for a book I had just finished, nor was it to avoid sitting in the long shadow of his substantial body of work either. No, it seemed to go beyond work and “career” into something far deeper, into blood and bone and spirit and what comes after we all leave this earth: it was having to be joined to him forever by name, the way the Alexandres were, and the Hanks, as if the sons had never separated from the fathers and become fathers themselves. What got lost in this public reflection of us were deeper truths, not just of my life so far, but his too. And what got lost was my mother, who had stayed.

In the end I drove to Pop’s house for that interview. My resistance had begun to feel too self-serving, and I was glad I went. The editor was my age, an affable and intelligent guy, and the three of us sat in Pop’s narrow living room for six hours and talked and talked and laughed and talked some more. Around the fourth hour, we switched from tea and coffee to Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. Then we were talking trash the way men drinking often do. Pop brought up my fighting, and again, I could hear the pride in his voice, and I fell into telling a few stories like some drunk asshole telling shopworn jokes, but even as we all got louder, the testosterone rising in the air, my eyes caught Pop’s above his beard and that small voice we all seem to have inside us like some eternal flame, said,
You need to tell him how it was. He still thinks this was just a sport for you. He’ll listen now. Tell him how it was
.

But sitting there alone with him in front of the De La Hoya fight, to tell him how my boyhood really was was to tell him how it was not, and I did not want to hurt this man who’d been run over and crippled for stopping on the highway to help someone. I did not want to hurt this man in black sitting in his wheelchair. But this seemed to be the moment given us, didn’t it? How could all eight or nine men who would usually be here
not
be here now? Wasn’t this the time to tell my father that since that night train in England, a story I’d told no one, I’d been on a new road, and one I preferred? With physical violence there was always the wreckage after, not just the bruises and lacerations, the chipped teeth or fractured bones, there was a hangover of the spirit, as if all those punches and kicks had pushed you into a gray and treeless landscape where love and forgiveness were hard to find.

I was a father now. All day and all night of every week of every month of every year since becoming one, I’d felt surrounded by love, responsible to it, careful not to hurt it, and so grateful to get it. To punch another man in the face was to punch another father, was to punch some father’s son.

As much as I admired the heart and the skills of the two fighters we were watching, for me it was like a recovering alcoholic sitting at a bar with a glass of soda water while his friends drink tequila shots. I wanted to tell Pop this. My crippled father, the new one, the one who looked at me and listened more fully now, he would hear all this if I told him. And maybe he wouldn’t feel blamed. Maybe the younger father in him, the one who had had so much work to get done and so little time in which to do it, maybe he would listen too.

Soon the fight was over, and De La Hoya lost. Pop and I sat there surprised. He muted the TV’s volume and in its pale glow we talked awhile about the judges’ decision. We talked about how hard both fighters had fought, how really, it could have gone to either one of them. Halfway through the fight Pop had poured us each a cognac and I sipped from my glass and felt myself lean forward. It was close to two in the morning. My clothes had dried and felt stiff against my skin. I could feel the word
Pop
rising up my throat. There was that itch in my chest that I needed to set the record straight. I needed to tell him about the lives his children had really led on the other side of that river. I needed to tell him about the boy in the mirror.

Was I being greedy? What I had with my father was already so much more than he’d ever had with his. We sat before the muted blinking shine of the TV, and my father started talking about his boyhood. He was with friends in a car sitting outside a whorehouse. It was a summer night outside Lafayette, the vanilla scent of camellias in the air. His friends had French and Irish names, and they got their nerve up and left the car and climbed the steps and went inside.

“But I couldn’t go.”

“Why not?”

“I’d just gone to Mass. I didn’t want to ruin how I felt.”

“How did you feel?”

“Holy.” He smiled. In the gray-white light of the TV, there was a puffiness around my father’s eyes I hadn’t noticed before. He didn’t look well. He had both elbows on the arms of his wheelchair, his shoulders hunched, and he told me of his friend who came down after and couldn’t stop shaking. He had just sinned and could not keep his hands and fingers still. As Pop drove them away from the house, the shaking one began to pray to himself prayers Pop knew by heart.

He began talking about his own father, and while I don’t remember one detail of what he said, I can still hear Pop’s voice, the acceptance in it, the forgiveness, and it brought me immediately to one of those weekends when I’d spent the night at his and Peggy’s house on campus. When I woke in the spare room late in the morning, Pavarotti was singing and I knew my father was in his room writing. He sometimes played opera as he wrote, and lately he’d wear a Japanese kimono at his desk.

But when I climbed the stairs to the kitchen, he was standing in his kimono at the countertop, a cup of steaming tea there, and he was crying. I asked him if he was all right. Did something happen?

He glanced at me, his eyes shining. “I’ve been writing about my old man.” He shook his head. “I’m more like him than I ever thought I was.” He lowered his chin and cried and I hugged my father and he hugged me back.

Maybe my father’s forgiveness for his father had begun then, maybe later or earlier, but as I sat on Pop’s couch at nearly three in the morning, my glass long empty, Pop talked about his own father as if he were simply another man in the world like he was, just another man climbing out of bed each day to try and do the best he knew how to do. I listened and I nodded. I said little and did not need to say much. That had been true of my father too, hadn’t it? He’d done the best he’d known how to do, and if it wasn’t enough, then we still had this, didn’t we?

Across from me in the window was my reflection lit by the artificial light of the TV, a grown man sitting near another man in a wheelchair. Nine miles down the river, my own children slept in a house without me, and tomorrow I was leaving.

I stood and told my father it was time for me to go.

“All right, man.” He smiled up at me and raised his arms for a hug. I leaned down, the glass in my hand, and hugged him with one arm. His back felt broad and thick, and I could smell his Old Spice, the dried cognac on his whiskers. He held on and looked into my face and said to me what he said to all six of his children all the time, those three words his father had never said to him. I said them back and kissed him on the lips.

He took my glass and rested it in his lap with his, then he turned his chair around, gripped the railings, and pulled himself up the plywood ramp into his dining room and kitchen. He switched on the overhead light. I put on my jacket and opened the door. The stars were out, the air so cold my lungs ached with the first few breaths. Pop followed me out in just his black shirt and sweatpants. He stopped at the end of the landing before the descent of the first ramp. He was talking about this new novel I’d written, his tone generous and encouraging, the way it was with most young writers, including me.

I turned and waved and headed down the first ramp, then the second, third, and fourth. From the driveway I could see him in his wheelchair beneath his porch light, his breath thin and white, rising into the air where it vanished. Beyond him was the steep hill behind his house, the bare poplars in snow, their upper branches against the stars.

Pop was talking, and while I couldn’t make out his words, his tone was upbeat, and I knew he was still speaking about me and my new work.

“I’ll call you from the road, Pop.”

He called out something else I couldn’t hear. I started my car and didn’t give it enough time to warm up. I backed it to the frozen snowbank, drove down the hill, and away.

T
HE COFFIN WAS
a simple pine box with a domed lid and it took Jeb and me all night to build. Even with power tools it took two men twelve hours, though our work was interrupted by visits from people who’d come for the funeral—Pop’s agent, Philip Spitzer, who was like a brother to him, his wife Mary, Reverend Bob Thompson from Exeter, others too. Jeb and I would be at the table saw or the chop saw, or we’d be clamping and gluing pieces of pine together on the worktable, when the front door of Jeb’s shop would open and people would move slowly toward us down the long concrete corridor. We’d stop and walk over to them. There’d be long tight hugs, a shake of the head, tears and sometimes even a teasing or two. Jeb would describe his design, that he’d decided on a coffin with no nails, just glue and dowels. He’d show them the cardboard template he’d sketched to get the arc of the domed lid, how he’d used that to trace the final shape onto pine boards he then cut on the band saw. My main job was to rip the forty staves we would need to cover those supports for the finished cover.

We told them this, and we told them other things, and we listened to whatever they had to say. Our father’s body lay in a funeral home in Haverhill not far from the courthouse and police station, but as his coffin began to take shape in Jeb’s shop, people who loved Pop would stand before it and lower their voices. They looked from the coffin to Jeb and me then back at the coffin. Before leaving, they’d take a small scrap of pine we no longer needed, pushing it into their coat pockets or holding it in one hand. They hugged us once more and walked back down the concrete corridor out into the night.

For long stretches Jeb and I were alone. In many ways it felt like old times. Jeb was the artist at this; I was the slow, careful, mostly competent worker. While Jeb glued and clamped the planks of the side panels, a smoking cigarette between his lips, three-day-old whiskers across his chin and cheeks, I was cutting the shorter lengths for the end panels. Sometimes we’d glance over at each other at the same time, and our eyes would catch and we’d shake our heads and well up. Other moments, we’d be busting each other’s balls the way you did on a job: “You call that
square
? What a butcher.” More than once, one of us would pass closely by the other on the way to a new tool or task and we’d reach out and squeeze a shoulder or upper arm, then pull each other in for a quick hug.

Many times during the night—pine dust in the air, smoke from Jeb’s Marlboros, the heated electric engine smell of the power tools—one of us would shake his head and say, “Three hours, my ass.”

Just before dawn, we began to tire but not much. We had just screwed the lid to its long piano hinge when the shop door opened and against the gray light stood the silhouettes of two men. One of them pulled the door shut behind them and they came walking down the corridor, a cooler over the shoulder of the shorter one, a bag under the arm of the other. Walking into the light were Sam Dolan and Kourosh, who had flown all night from Seattle, and they’d brought beer and sandwiches. There were hugs and some laughter, quiet words that got quieter as we stood back and looked at my father’s nearly finished coffin. It was long and straight, the corner joints tight and clean, a router bead running the length of the closed lid whose arc was slight, all forty staves glued tightly together and sanded smooth, this new pine the color of bone.

We four sat against the wall. We ate our sandwiches and drank cold beer. Maybe we talked about the wake that would start in less than twelve hours. Maybe about the funeral the next day and how the ground was too frozen for the burial and we’d have to wait till spring for that, Pop’s body to be kept in a vault in a local cemetery until then.

While we talked and ate and drank, I kept looking at the coffin sitting over on the worktable, this last project for our father. I stood and brushed the crumbs and sawdust off my legs. I walked up, opened the lid, climbed onto the table, then stepped inside and lay down. I asked Jeb to close it, told him I wanted to make sure there was enough room for a body inside. These are the words I said, and part of me was thinking that, but another part of me had to feel what our father would not, had to see what he would not, the new lid closing, then the darkness, the nearly milk-sweet scent of drying glue, the sap and sawdust, the walls of this final box at my shoulders and toes.

When the call came, I’d been standing in the lobby of my hotel in San Francisco. It was cocktail hour. Business men and women sat around a small fireplace sipping complimentary wine, talking quietly to one another or on their cell phones. Jazz was playing softly on the sound system, light brushwork on cymbals, a throbbing bass, a lone horn. Outside, on the other side of the street, candles burned in the windows of a restaurant, and I stood near the revolving glass door with my new book in my hand, this novel that was now being reviewed around the country, the response overwhelmingly positive. It was strangely hard to take, all this good news, and earlier that day, cold and sunlit, I’d walked up and down Nob Hill, I’d walked through Chinatown and Ghirardelli Square, I’d looked for gifts to buy my kids, and I felt blue. Nothing good ever comes for free and something bad was going to happen and when would it come knocking?

This was neurotic and self-absorbed, I knew, but as I stood in that lobby, just minutes from walking out the door and down to the Clean Well-Lighted Place bookstore to read, it was as if I hung suspended in this membrane I’d learned all those years ago to break, this barrier between what was and what would be, and now came the ringing of the phone at the front desk, then my last name being called in the air. It was from the man who’d checked me in hours earlier. He was older, his hair short and gelled, his tie in a snug Windsor at his throat. He held his hand over the receiver as if it were a home phone. “There’s a call for you, sir.” Then I was standing at the desk, the jazz and cocktail chatter behind me. Fontaine was crying so hard she couldn’t get her breath to speak.

“Honey, what?
What?
”

I saw my children’s faces—six-year-old Austin’s deep brown eyes, swollen from allergies, his curly hair; Ariadne and how she’d make a face at me and laugh, as if she were fourteen and not four; two-year-old blue-eyed Elias, his big hands and feet, his patient sweet stillness—which one, which
one
. “Fontaine—”

She kept crying and couldn’t stop.

“Just tell me. Tell me.”

There was the shudder of her breath. “Your dad—”

Relief jabbing into my heart, a half-breath of gratitude, then the knowing and a right cross of black grief before I even asked the words and she confirmed them, and I was climbing carpeted marble stairs, the stairwell bright and quiet, a sound coming from me from so long ago, Pop’s breath in the air just three nights before, just three nights, and I was unlocking my door, then I was facedown on the mattress crying
Daddy Daddy,
a word I hadn’t used since I was a young boy and in it was mine but also the voices of my own children calling for me, and my father’s voice for his father, too. I had lived thirty-nine years without ever losing someone this close, so fortunate really, so blessed, so why did it feel so familiar? Why did this feel like the second punch following the first?

Then I saw it, Pop’s back as the four of us followed him down the porch stairs, Mom crying inside the house. There was the glint of frost on gravel, Pop tousling my hair, then his old Lancer driving down the hill and Jeb running after it,
You bum! You bum! You bum!

Jeb opened the lid and I climbed out. I was blinking in the light at my friends, at my younger brother who held out his hand.

THE LADY
I’d bought the plot from said her men would dig as soon as the thaw began. I asked her if she owned her own backhoe. She said no, they dig it themselves.

I could feel the blood descend into my hands. “Would you mind if we did that then? His sons?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

But we would have to wait over two months, Pop’s body kept in a concrete crypt in that same cemetery behind the old Hale Hospital and the doctor’s office Mom had rented for us at the base of Nettle Hill. Life continued. Despite this black grief, I was working on something new and needed to do some research at the local county jail. I called them and soon was standing in a glassed-in walkway twenty feet over the main population. Below us, over a hundred men sat in orange or tan jumpsuits at tables and benches bolted to the concrete floor. They were playing cards or checkers, reading newspapers, or watching one of the TVs hung high in the corners of the room. From where I stood behind thick protective glass, I could see a lot of shaved heads and homemade tattoos, some of the men sitting with their legs spread wide and their chins up, an unlit cigarette between their lips. Others, narrow-shouldered or obese, sat off to themselves and avoided making eye contact. The public affairs officer beside me, an easygoing and talkative man in his late fifties who’d worked here for years, was brimming with stories. He was doing his best to give me good material, though I wasn’t looking for any; one of my characters had found himself in a jail like this, and I just had to see it for myself.

The man from public affairs pointed out one inmate after another. “That big one there? He kidnapped his own wife. You don’t even want to know the rest of that story. See those two under the TV? That old man and the other one? Uncle and nephew, only they never met each other till they got in here at the same time.”

I nodded and listened. The uncle was no more than fifty, his graying hair tied back in a ponytail, his nephew a foot taller and half-black or half-Latino. The officer kept talking about them, about the good story their lives would make, but ten feet away from them sat someone I knew.

He was thin. His hair was short, the color of old tea, and he was playing checkers or dominoes with a bald man. The one I knew said something, and I could see the chipped front tooth, that wise-ass mouth in a lined and pallid face.

“’Scuse me.” I pointed down to him. “I know that guy.”

“Who?” The public affairs officer followed my arm and finger. “Murphy? How do you know him?”

Dennis Murphy, his pine branch flicking out and slapping the old woman in the face. “We’re from the same town.”

“Yeah? Good story about him.” And the man from public affairs told me how two or three Thanksgivings ago, all four Murphy brothers were in at the same time, some awaiting a hearing or trial, others serving a sentence. “And Frankie, the bank robber—he’s dead now, by the way—he comes up and asks us since it’s Thanksgiving and all the brothers are together, would it be all right for their mother to bring them a turkey dinner? What the hell, we allowed it. We even had the kitchen make up some side dishes for them. So there’s Ma Thanksgiving Day, sitting down there at one of the big tables with all her boys. They had a good feed, too.”

He laughed and shook his head. I stared at Dennis Murphy. Except for the desiccated hair and yellowed skin, the lines around his mouth, he’d changed little since we were teenagers and his brothers were in their twenties and the four of them would walk into house parties down on the avenues and do whatever they felt like, later cruising by my gas station booth on Winter Street looking for revenge.

I followed the public affairs officer off the walkway for the rest of the tour, one concrete room and corridor after another. In the mess hall a gang of men in white jumpsuits were on a cleaning detail. They scrubbed tables and swept and mopped the floor, their faces hard, their bodies too, but they looked like boys to me, and when one or two of them glanced up at us—two men in suit jackets and pressed pants—in their eyes was the dull light of resignation, not, it seems, to the time they’d yet to serve, but to this, two village fathers walking by without a nod or a word, as if these young men were not right here in front of them, as if they never had been.

IT WAS
a weekend in April, the sun high in a cold sky, and Jeb and Sam and I wore sweatshirts and sweaters and had been digging for three hours. We were only down two and a half feet. Nearly halfway through the day, our mother showed up with water and sandwiches she’d made herself.

One of the caretakers of the cemetery had cut into the grass the shape of the grave we were to dig: four feet wide, eight feet long, and we were to go down six feet. I’d brought two picks, two long-handled spade shovels, and two short. I’d brought work gloves and a jug of water, too.

The cemetery was less than a mile from Pop’s house. There were nearly as many hardwoods and pine trees in it as there were graves, and most of those went back before the Civil War. Sam started in first with the pick, tearing up the brown earth, then he stepped back and Jeb and I began shoveling into a pile the clumps of dirt and leaf-rot and lingering turf. After ten inches or a foot of this, we hit rock and it took all three of us two hours taking turns with both picks to get through it. When we finally got back to dirt, we’d only gone down another foot and a half. We stopped and passed around the water jug. Not far off, someone was burning a trash pile, the woodsmoke drifting through the pines behind us. The air was still and cool, and high overhead a chicken hawk soared south toward the Merrimack.

I wiped the sweat off my forehead. We went back to work. Less than an hour later, it was a sweet surprise to see Mom’s tired red Mitsubishi pull up to the cemetery gate, to see her walking toward us with a picnic basket and more water. She was wearing sweatpants and a black wool sweater, her hair blonde and gray. We hugged and thanked her. We dropped our pick and shovels, pulled off our gloves, and sat on the ground to eat.

Two months earlier, just minutes after the coffin was done, she and Fontaine had walked down that long corridor carrying measuring tapes, scissors, a staple gun and staples, a roll of cording, and the beige satin sheet off Pop’s bed. While Jeb and I and our friends went home for a few hours’ sleep, my mother and wife lined the inside of Pop’s pine box with the same sheet he’d slept in the last night of his life.