After Visiting Friends (22 page)

I ride my bike to the train station. The conductor, not knowing what to make of me
when I tell him I don’t have any money, does not charge me. When I make it to the
city, I follow my map to the
Sun-Times
building and I stand outside the revolving door, watch men spin in, men spat out.

I remember this place.

I would have been four, maybe five. My brother and I are with our father. Walking
through the newsroom. It is his day off. We are here to get his paycheck. The newsroom
is bright and big and wide, the largest room I have ever seen. White lights hang overhead.
Windows rim the room. And everywhere, desks and paper and men. Men in white shirts
and black ties sit at battered desks. Some have typewriters. Some do not. Some read
pieces of paper. Others type on pieces of paper. Men walk through the room carrying
pieces of paper or in search of pieces of paper. Telephones ring. Men yell across
the room. Clouds of cigarette smoke hang over the room like storm clouds in miniature.
Some of the men are older than my father. They have hard guts and greased-back hair.
When my father walks with us through the newsroom, his hands on our shoulders, guiding
us through the labyrinth of desks, men stop us.

“Your boys, Bob?”

A cigarette jangles from the man’s lip, and he slides a red pencil behind his hair-pocked
ear.

“Put ’er there, son.”

A big hand reaches toward my head. My father tells me to shake the man’s hand. I do.

“Think you’ll be a newspaperman like your pop?”

I nod.

“That’s good! Remember, son—the only good man is a newspaperman, and the only good
life is a newspaperman’s life. Ain’t that right, Bob?”

The man laughs and huffs puffs of cigarette smoke down toward me. Through it I can
see his face, veiny and rough as a cantaloupe rind.

“He’s a good kid, Bob. He’ll make a good reporter. Ain’t got no fear. Just like you.”

#

A world of men, of stories, of knowledge. This is my father’s world, and I want to
be a part of it—I want to be a man who knows the
facts. A man who chases stories, who writes stories. A man who knows the stories of
the city. Wrong and Right. Who’s up. Who’s down. Yes, I think: I want to belong to
this.

#

We’re silent as we walk, my mother and I. Always the silence. Me still feeling like
I’m nine, ten, eleven years old, afraid to speak. We walk amid all the Millennium
has become. The new gardens and sculptures. Like the “Bean,” an enormous corpuscle-shaped
silver orb that reflects and distorts the identity of whoever stands before it. Or
the fountain where the faces of Chicagoans appear and disappear on a giant electronic
mirror of glass cubes. Every so often, a plume of water spurts from someone’s mouth,
and down below, children seeking relief from the sun splash in the shower, sliding
and slipping along the slick stone. Some come with bathing suits, prepared for the
deluge. Others in street clothes, dragged in just the same.

I decide to push beyond my nine-year-old fears. It occurs to me the park is a door
into her past. This is the site of the riots during the ’68 Democratic National Convention.
“What was that like?” I ask her. “You weren’t much older than some of those people.
And Dad? What did he say?”

“I watched it on TV,” she says, still walking, not looking at me. “I don’t remember
much about it, or even thinking about it. You and Chris were six and four, and you
took a lot of time. Dad was working nights, too, so . . . ”

She trails off like she does, ends her answer without answering. After all these years,
I still don’t know if this means she has nothing to say or she doesn’t want to reveal
anything more. I end up thinking what I’ve always thought in these moments: Don’t
ask her any questions. Don’t upset her. This is why I spent thirty years afraid to
ask her about The Night.

I think of something easy, something neutral.

“What about music back then? What were you listening to? The Beatles? The Stones?”

“I liked Trini Lopez.”

Right.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just did. He was good.”

“What about women’s lib? I mean, those women were your age—what did you think of them?”

“I always thought that was for someone else. Other women.” She pauses. “Did I ever
tell you about some of the guys who lived around us? How, after your dad died, they
tried to hit on me? They all thought that just because I was alone, I was vulnerable.”

“What did you do?”

“I went on. I mean, who were they? Right?”

#

We’re walking up Michigan Avenue, the boulevard unreeling before us, the glint of
the lake, blue and clear on the horizon. At this spot, right here, I remember: 1974,
hailing a cab. Right here in front of the Art Institute. She’d taken my brother and
me into the city for the afternoon. She had to go to the bank, meet with men. And
when we got in the taxi to go to the train station, the driver said, “Didja hear?
Nixon’s resigning tomorrow.”

That was the summer I never left the basement. The summer I watched the hearings.
Men searching for answers to what men knew and when did they know it.

Now we’re crossing the bridge. The Chicago River below. Such a great point of pride
in this city—how men here defeated Nature’s will. How they were able to reverse the
river’s flow, turn it in a direction it did not want to go. I still remember being
taught that. Second grade. That and the city motto of Chicago: “I Will.” And always
I wanted to ask, “I Will . . . what?”

I check the Wrigley Building to see the time. The hands of the clock are gone. A scaffold
shrouded in black mesh surrounds the empty face. A giant mantilla. Halfway across
the bridge, my mother seizes my wrist.

“Oh my God,” she says, and she pulls me to the rail. “See that?”

She points to a place on the bank of the river, near the base of the Tribune Tower.
Manicured lawn, tidy benches, and thick clumps of impatiens, red, white.

“Summer days, Dad and I would eat lunch down there. We’d get greasy sandwiches wrapped
in wax paper from the guy we called the Greek. No gardens there like now. It was just
us, sitting on the grimy bank, watching the barges coming off of the lake, carrying
raw newsprint from Canada. Colonel McCormick owned whole forests up there. The newsroom
guys always joked that he grew newspapers, not trees. The barges would dock here and
guys would come out and roll these big rolls right into the pressroom.”

She goes quiet. We stand there, hands holding the rail. And I can feel upon us the
eyes of passersby. Who stops on a bridge unless they’re troubled? Unless they’re about
to draw the narrative to them? My mother, though, she’s just quiet. Feels like she’s
quiet forever.

#

We cross the bridge. At the entrance of the Tribune Tower, she asks me to take a photograph
of her. On my camera screen, she is framed by the door behind her.

She says, “I always tell people, ‘This is where I was happiest.’ ”

She smiles and I click.

As she’s walking out of the frame, she sees the hole in Michigan Avenue, where the
stairs lead to the lower level.

“The Greek was down there. He had a small shack tucked beneath the stairs. The guys
in the newsroom would send me out for coffee. I never took the tips they tried to
give me.”

“Why?”

“I was too honest.”

She cranes her neck, peers down the stairs. It’s dark at the bottom.

“Let’s go down there,” I say.

“Why would you want to do that?”

This is so her.

“Let’s look.”

“Nah, there’s nothing left down there.”

I start to descend. She follows. After a few steps she stops. She tells me that the
stairs are different. “Everything’s in the same place,” she says, “but someone’s changed
the steps.”

We’re beneath Michigan Avenue now. We’re standing in front of a brick wall. Above,
a security camera grinds away, locked in a black bubble.

She wants to find a door.

“It’s gotta be somewhere.”

“What?”

“The old Radio Grill. Where we hung out. It would’ve been right . . . here.”

She touches her fingertips to the dark bricks. Gently. Like she’s testing fresh paint.
That probing, tentative touch. Then she flattens her hand to the wall.

I look at her, the bricks, the wall.

“But it’s not.”

A woman approaches us and asks, “Where do you want to go?”

Where do you want to go?
I want to go back, lady. I want to go to the past, to when he was alive. I want to
see him walk off his shift at the
Sun-Times,
toss on his grungy tan raincoat, stride into the damp Chicago night, and descend
these stairs to where I wait, and together he and I go into the night. To drinks.
To the truth.

Where do I want to go? I want to go back to when my mother and he were here, in love,
eating sandwiches on the bank of the Chicago River.

Where do I want to go? I want to go back to when my mother can remember what her life
was with him. What we had as a family, what we had before that night our life ended.

I want to go where we all want to go.

#  #  #

When I was in my twenties—after I had lost my faith and stopped going to Mass—my grandmother
and I had a routine.

“I prayed for you last Sunday,” she’d say.

“You did?”

And she’d say, “Of course. I pray for all sinners.”

Then we’d both laugh.

As I got older and remained unmarried, she changed what she said. It became “Every
night all I pray is you’ll meet a nice girl.”

I’d say, “It must be working, because every night I meet a nice girl.”

Then she’d laugh and say, “
Smarkacz
. You’re gonna get it.”

And I’d say, “I just told you, I
am
getting it.”

#

The day following my time with my mother, Brooke and I go to visit my grandmother.
By now we have been dating three years. No matter. Soon as we walk in, my grandmother
looks at Brooke, says, “You still with him?”

“Yes,” Brooke says.

“Married yet?”

“Not yet,” Brooke says.

My grandmother asks, “Are you living together?”

“Yes, Gramma,” I say. “I told you that.”

“When I was young, the priests told us that was a sin. Why do you get to do it?”

“Because we love each other,” I say.

“Aren’t you afraid what God will think?”

Brooke and I pull up two chairs. My grandmother takes my hand in one hand, Brooke’s
hand in her other. Her chin is trembling.

“I’m so happy he found you,” she says, and she looks at Brooke. Then, “Do you like
popcorn?”

“Yes,” Brooke says.

“Sex is like popcorn,” my grandmother says. “Once they get a taste, they want you
to keep popping. Don’t be making popcorn until you’re married. Otherwise, they’ll
stop buttering it.”

Brooke tries not to laugh. She says, “What else should I know?”

“If you feel you’re about to get hot with the other person, always take a walk around
the block. Don’t say something you will regret.”

#

A few days after I return to New York, a nurse finds my grandmother wandering the
halls one night at nine o’clock. The nurse tells my mother that my grandmother thought
that it was morning and she wanted to go down for breakfast. But she couldn’t remember
the way to the dining room. The nurse calls an ambulance and takes my grandmother
to Resurrection Hospital “for evaluation.”

After three days of tests, a doctor tells my mother there’s no sign of a stroke or
anything “treatable.” He tells her that as we age, brain cells die. With my grandmother,
who is ninety-five, this “has consequences” in regards to her short-term memory, where
“she’ll be most challenged.” He tells her, “Your mother is ninety-five, but in many
ways, her mind is like a five-year-old’s: at once steel-trap-like, and at the same
time full of those ‘But why?’ questions. As long as she lives, she’ll be trying to
fill in those holes in her memory, to gain knowledge. But unlike a five-year-old,
she never will.”

“So what the hell do I do?” my mother says.

“Be there for her.”

This is something my mother doesn’t understand, the vagueness
of that prescriptive. My mother deals in lists and getting things checked off. There’s
a reason her friends call her the General.

#

Before my grandmother can leave Resurrection, she has to be evaluated by a team of
nurses and social workers from Central Baptist. They decide that she’ll need “monitored
care.” Rather than make her move into the wing of Central Baptist that my grandmother
calls The Nursery, they agree she can move to the Pavilion—what my grandmother has
long called Purgatory, because it is a wing that is between Independent Living and
the Special Care Unit. She’ll have her own room but no longer her own kitchen. When
she wants to leave the wing, she needs to be buzzed out.

Her first night at the Pavilion, she calls my mother. She’s sobbing into the phone,
saying she can’t find my grandfather.

My mother tells her, “Dad’s dead, Mom.”

“You lie! Where is he?”

She sobs harder, heaving. “Dad wouldn’t leave me. He wouldn’t leave us.”

My grandmother drops the receiver to the floor and my mother is now yelling into the
phone, “Mom! . . . Mom!”

But the only sound she hears is my grandmother’s distant crying. My mother calls the
night nurse, who goes to my grandmother’s room and calms her, puts her to bed. The
nurse tells my mother that my grandmother is suffering through something the doctors
call “sundowning.” She says it means old people with what they call “memory issues”
fall apart at sundown. “There’s something about the creeping darkness that triggers
it,” the nurse says. “We think the darkness reminds them of the enormity of what they
no longer can remember. It overwhelms them.”

A few weeks later, my grandmother is transferred to the Special Care Unit, a.k.a.
the Nursery.

#

I was in New York during all of this, getting updates from my mother. The weariness
in her voice crushed me. She’s always had a complex relationship with her mother.
Now it’s one more chapter. I can be there for her. But I also know she has to go through
this as we all must—alone.