You Can Say You Knew Me When (3 page)

I walked to the bedroom door, pushed it open, flicked on the light. Medical supplies—pill bottles and swabs and a thermometer—cluttered the dresser. The bed frame, devoid of its mattress, sat empty in the center of the room, a fuzzy coating of dust on the brown rug beneath. In a span of five years, my father had been transformed from that imperturbable figure arguing rationally from the foot of his bed to an emaciated shell withering away under the covers. Perhaps he was already heading into dementia the night we’d fought—plaque forming along his nerves, the viral conspiracy to bring down his brain fomenting deep within.

A couple of months after that, he called me in San Francisco to chat. Literally, just to chat. For small talk. When I brought up
the subject,
he seemed perplexed, as if things between us hadn’t gotten so heated. “I consider that matter settled,” he said, as if reviewing a policy dispute with a co-worker. It was all I needed to end contact, once and for all.

But now I wondered, when he’d made that call, had he literally forgotten the previous argument? Was he, in general, beginning to forget? It was only six or eight months later that Deirdre first started reporting Dad’s strange behavior—how he’d begun repeating himself, misplacing things, losing his sense of direction and time.

Her reports continued, always worsening, and Deirdre began urging me to come home. She had always been like our mother in her willingness to compromise for him, to build a game plan around his inflexibility. “You’re his son,” she would inevitably say. But I couldn’t come home. I wouldn’t. I had stopped caring, had stopped making myself crazy because my father disapproved of me, and this stopping had unburdened me. Case closed.

Long before my father died, I’d made peace—not with him, but with our estrangement.

And yet.

N
ana woke me the next morning with a hand on my shoulder, an urgent whisper in my ear. “Up, Jimmy, up!”

The sky was still dim outside the window. Nana had a sympathetic, silvery glow about her. “Mass is at eight. You’ll take me, then?”

“What time is it?”

“Seven. But the driveway’s covered in snow. It could use a good shovel.”

“Okay,” I groaned. “Will you make me coffee?”

“Of course,” she said. “A fair trade.”

Maybe not so fair—Nana’s coffee was percolator-burnt, the charcoal taste lingering on my tongue. She really was slipping; I couldn’t remember Nana cooking anything that wasn’t just right. The night before, she’d microwaved a lasagna and a freezer-pack of vegetables, all of it bland, and during the meal she’d hardly spoken. When Andy tried to draw her into the conversation by asking about her girlhood in Ireland, she responded tersely, with a gaze in my direction, “We didn’t have much, but we took care of each other.”

She was born Margaret Carey and had come to the United States as the bride of John Garner, a boy from a neighboring West Irish farm; they’d always been Nana and Papa to me. They raised my dad and his sister, my aunt Katie, in an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, back then still an immigrant ghetto on Manhattan’s West Side. A few years after Papa died, Nana took a lump sum from her landlord, who was condo-converting the building, and moved to a nondescript garden apartment in Hackensack to be near her children. Three years ago, she moved again, to Greenlawn, taking charge of my father’s care. The side-by-side bedrooms that were once Deirdre’s and mine were transformed for her into a floral-print-covered sleeping area and a tchotchke-filled TV room. She’d always seemed strong enough to survive anything—her husband had died, then my mother, then Uncle Angelo, who was Aunt Katie’s husband—but perhaps this, the death of her only son, Edward, was just one blow too many.

She was already dressed for church, sitting in the kitchen, once again glued to the TV, watching one of those courtroom entertainment shows. A female judge narrowed a hawkish brow and wagged her finger. “Sir, sir, just a minute, sir. This is
my
court. You speak when I tell you to.”

Out the window, day was breaking, revealing the shocking brilliance of icy tree branches and white rooftops. “I haven’t woken up to snow since forever,” I said. “I forgot how beautiful it is.”

“The roads will be slippery,” she said. “Your father keeps the shovel in the garage.”

Father
had a dull magnetic force to it, drawing her gaze from the TV and mine from the window. Between us vibrated some combination of bond and rift; the thing that tied us to each other was also the place where we were worlds apart. In the bitter gloom on Nana’s face I glimpsed her years as Dad’s caretaker—feeding and washing and changing him like he was an infant again. I was reminded of gay guys I’d seen survive their lovers or their best friends; death offered no real relief, no catharsis, just the cold reality of inevitable demise. Nana bore the same kind of battle fatigue.

I felt my face getting hot. “This must be hard for you,” I offered.

Something sharp flickered across her face, but all she said was, “He’s no longer suffering, thank God.”

Years ago, I had talked to Nana about the tension between my father and me, about the reasons behind it, about who I was. We were at her apartment in Hackensack, and she’d cooked me lunch and made a rhubarb pie for dessert. I remember the queasiness I felt as I ate, preparing to break a silence, unsure of what to expect. When the moment came, she listened without interrupting, and then told me, “You’ll always be my grandson.” At the time this had seemed like a great generosity, but when I asked her to talk to Dad on my behalf, she replied, “When Edward had words with his father, I kept out of it. I’ll stay out of this one, too.” I had tried not to hold this against her. She was old, even Old World; I could hardly expect her to wave my flags. But why wouldn’t she cut me any slack now? Was it so hard for her to understand my reasons for staying away? Was I really so unforgivable?

Outside, the air was so crisp my cheeks felt slapped. I used a shovel that had been in our family for as long as I could remember, its handle worn smooth, its blade gouged in two places. Each push left behind snaky parallel trails of powder on the black driveway, a sight that had the force of déjà vu: the teenage me clearing this same path with this same faulty shovel, my father examining the work and scolding me for not scooping it all up:
Everything you leave behind will be ice by tonight.

I drove Nana to St. Bartholomew’s in Dad’s boxy Chrysler K-Car. Before she got out, she asked, “Will you come to mass, then?”

“I don’t go to church, Nana.”

“This is a time for prayer.”

“Say one for me while you’re at it.”

“Well, then,” she sighed, lifting herself from the car.

I drove through the slushy streets of Greenlawn, to the Athenaeum, the Greek diner where I’d spent a lot of time as a teenager. I took a seat at the counter, read the
New York Times
and slowly came to life over bottomless cups of strong coffee and single-serving boxes of cornflakes. Amid the red vinyl booths and faux-marble tabletops, a memory ignited from fifteen years earlier: sitting here, across from Eric Sanchez, deliberately pressing our knees together under the table, while around us our friends complained about how life
majorly sucked
, how
totally stupid
teachers and parents were, how
so fucking boring
it all was. Eric and I passed a cigarette back and forth, his dark bangs rising upward with the force of each exhale, our eyes stealing time with one another’s, sending wordless messages.

I returned to find Nana already waiting for me on the sidewalk, complaining about the cold. She presented me with a list of places she needed to go: a rotation of doctors, then the pharmacy, then Coiffures by Diane, where she had a standing appointment with Diane Jernigan, the older sister of a girl I went to high school with. Nana was very proud about her hair, still thick and full, and though she rarely left the house for anyone to see it, she kept it dyed a deep brown, like stout, like wet earth. It took years off her looks.

“Jimmy Garner!” Diane exclaimed when she saw me
.
Through Nana, Diane already knew about my father, and her sympathy commingled with reports of other dead parents, dead siblings, dead spouses, the accumulated losses of our high school peers as we left our youth behind. While Diane went to work on Nana, I listened to updates on people I hadn’t thought about in years, their marriages and divorces, the births of children, descriptions of the houses they’d bought. A remarkable number of my former classmates still lived in the area, their lives still knowable, without the mystery of departure. I thought of Deirdre among them, caught in this grind, an item of gossip for the Dianes of the world.

“Do you know what happened to Eric Sanchez?” I asked.

Diane paused above Nana’s dye-slick head. “Barbara’s brother?” she asked. “The one who went into the Navy?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s right.”

“I think he’s married and living in Maryland or something.”

“Really? Married?”

“Barbara was living in Paramus for a while, but she moved a few years ago…”

As Diane continued on, I tried to imagine Eric at thirty-three, a husband, probably a father. The head of a household. Eric, who taught me how to kiss—slowly, with anticipation, with all the right pauses—in the backseat of Barbara’s Galaxie 500. Eric, who told me he loved me
so fucking much
a week before high school graduation, punching his fist into a wall until the skin broke, until I pulled him by the wrist into an embrace, promising him,
You know I totally feel the same
, asking him,
How can I prove it to you
(as he had to me, in blood)? Eric, who whispered,
If we love each other we should try more stuff
. Eric, whose swollen cock was in my mouth at the moment my father, home early from work for some unremembered, fateful reason, entered my bedroom to find me on my knees, in the midst of worship, surrender,
proving it
—the kind of moment, explosive and unequivocal, that separates everything into before and after.

It went like this: My father’s eyes sweeping from me on the floor, wiping my mouth, to Eric, yanking up his jeans, the clasp of his belt rattling as he turned his face away. My father shouting “What the hell are you doing?” though I could see he knew exactly what this was. I tried to throw it back at him: why did he push the door open, why didn’t he knock? “No way,” he bellowed. “No, no, no, no
way,”
negation repeated like a chant, disapproval and denial in equal measure.
No way
could this have happened,
no way
would it happen again,
no way
is my son this kind of boy. Eric was banned from our house—the official punishment—but worse than this was the scornful silence that descended like a sudden downpour.

“I love him,” I said.

“There’s no way you can,” said my father.

We didn’t talk it out; there was no way we could, or so it seemed to me.

I managed to see Eric a few more times that summer before I went to college and he to the Navy—furtive, tongue-tied encounters at the edge of group activities. Each locked gaze was more wrenching than the last, until we learned to avoid each other’s eyes, to fake indifference, as was needed, to get away from each other and the mess we’d created. At some point, Deirdre asked me, “How come you aren’t hanging out with Eric?” and what I told her was, “We were getting on each other’s nerves.”

My father never saw me the same again. Before, I’d been a problem child—one to boss around, bargain with, try to fix. After, I ceased to be a child at all. Just a problem—permanent, irreparable. Before, I’d thought it possible to fall in love with a boy. After, I lived with the knowledge that genuine love didn’t spark revulsion in others. My first month in college, I got myself a girlfriend.

“Jimmy?” Diane was waiting for an answer. “What about you?”

“Sorry—what?”

“Girlfriend? Someone special?”

I looked at Nana, who sat stiffly under Diane’s kneading hands. My relationship with Woody wasn’t a secret from her; still, it wasn’t something she probably cared to see dropped into the boiling vat of Diane’s gossip-stew. “Someone special,” I replied, and left it at that.

Ryan’s Funeral Home had apparently decided that mourning went down easier in pastel: mint-green cushions, rose-flocked wallpaper, a beige rug. The chairs, cream colored, had been lined up in a semicircle around the coffin, as if the deceased might rise up and recite to the crowd. Most of the guests hovered in the back, near the door, or in the hallway, conversing. The surprise was the music, all old, cool jazz, which my brother-in-law, Andy, had compiled from my father’s CD collection. “I forgot he liked this stuff,” I said to Andy as we stood side by side beneath a wall-mounted speaker amplifying a melancholy version of “My Funny Valentine.” Andy was an accountant. His suit was an accountant’s suit, his haircut an accountant’s haircut. Years ago, my friend Colleen had dubbed him Average Andy.

“It was all I ever heard him listen to. This is Chet Baker,” he said. In Andy’s voice I heard a hint of pride, as if my father’s connoisseurship had rubbed off on him.

“I think he only started listening to jazz after Mom died,” I offered.

“No, he told me he liked jazz when he was young.”

“Oh, right.” I dimly recalled my father tell of seeing Thelonious Monk play live, in San Francisco, where my father had lived for a handful of months at some point between high school and marrying my mother. We’d hardly ever spoken of his time there; what might have been something that bonded us to each other became just another point of contention.
A lousy place to make a life,
he’d said, writing off his entire SF experience, and by association, mine, as wasted time, a youthful lark. A dart of jealousy pricked my chest as I pictured Andy and my father together: Andy listening earnestly while Teddy’s baritone boomed out a point-by-point exegesis on early-sixties jazz.

The casket loomed up front, its glossy brown lid emphatically shut. According to Deirdre this was how my father wanted it, though I suspected it was her own choice. “Looking at a dead body is just creepy,” I heard her whisper to one of her friends as I drifted through the room, doing my best to keep conversations brief and superficial. As relatives and friends of the family, none of whom I’d seen since the barbecue for AJ’s birth, shuffled forward, one after another spoke to me in the apologetic language of grief.
I’m sorry, I wish I knew what to say, I’m so sorry.
My five-year withdrawal didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I was the son, so I got the sympathy.

At one point Deidre pulled me into the hallway, away from the crowd. “I’m a little freaked out,” she said through clenched teeth.

I patted her on the shoulder, tentative. “You’re doing great.”

“When I got here this morning, I got a look at Dad.”

“In the coffin? Is he embalmed?”

“Of course he’s embalmed. He’s all fixed up. You can look, after everyone leaves.”

“No, I don’t want to,” I said, absolutely clear on this.

She wagged her hands, frustrated. “Why I’m freaked out is, he’s not wearing his wedding ring.” She explained to me that he never took that band off his finger. Though maybe, in the end, in his bedroom, or in the hospital, it had been removed. Or fell off. Or was taken.

“It’s probably just misplaced,” I said. “Who would steal something like that?”

We were interrupted by a gust of frigid air from the door, whisking in Aunt Katie. She paraded to the viewing room in a full-length fur coat, her frosted hair swept up dramatically, her pumps sporting heels treacherously high for an icy winter night. An entourage fanned out behind her: her son, Tommy; his wife, Amy, cradling a baby; and their three other children, all under twelve. Deirdre and I watched as Katie took the aisle and marched straight to Nana, swallowing her up in furry hugs and air kisses. I let Deidre join them before I made my way toward their conversational pantomime.