Читать книгу The Vision Will Come - Joseph Dylan - Страница 3

It has always been my contention that there was nothing better in this world than a good marriage, and nothing worse than a bad one. It is a celestial cathedral for the washed and the unwashed, the inspired and the uninspired. It is a refuge to the hopeless. Somehow, though, that was not enough to suffice my parents. As far as my family went, the gods above must have smiled in mirth as they witnessed the dehiscence of my parent’s marriage, for it crumbled in its very essence. In the beginning it was just too perfect, and perfection was the bailiwick of the provident. Whether it was due to the gods or not, but after a year of two, it slowly disintegrated. My father was a tall man with rugged good looks, facile charm, and a fast way with the ladies; while my mother was a true lady. with a winsome face, a pert body, a mind that had little time for fools. For the first few years, their marriage was as warm and inviting as the fireplace when the house was enveloped by a winter storm. There might be snow on the ground, but inside there was a fire exhausting itself in the fireplace. Like some living thing, this blaze inhaled and exhaled, grew and gave way. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was the very combustion in its raging heat, consumed itself. Looking back on it, it was almost entirely my father’s fault, for it was his inherent imperfections that drove them apart. I blame him no less now, then a I did when I was in my parochial junior high school. In the early years of their marriage, they looked like a content, complacent couple out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The blaze, though, was dying in its own conflagration. That is just my supposition. But I truly doubt that it didn’t cross some other people’s minds.

My father’s father was the shop keeper at a small haberdashery in Denver and he wanted better for his son. Pulling connections, he got him a job as a teller in at First United Bank. Conscientious and polite and competent to all his clients, my father came into the favor of the immediate manager at the bank. In no undue time my father was promoted to a loan manager. His talent at this position continued much as it had at his previous position. He managed to thrive in his position for three or four years. Finally, at the behest of his employers at the bank, my father moved from Denver to Riverton to be groomed as a bank manager in the small town at the western lip of the Rocky Mountains, where they had just established a bank. That’s where he met my mother, who fitted proper women into their proper finery in Mr. Bond’s Dress Shop at the Fourth Avenue and Main Street, an avenue in which it seemed Mr. Julius Bond had a finger in every pie. Her people were forbearers in the valley and had been farming corn and other crops near Fruita since the Grand Valley opened to venturers. But the valley was arid, the valley was barren and white, with alkaline patches of caliche, looking like the burns of dog urine dotting a green lawn, did all but defeat these sodbusters. The land was good for little else, though, so the farmers ran cattle and sheep and chickens on the side. In time, the hamlet became a village, and the village became a small town. By the nineteen fifties, the valley walled in twenty or thirty thousand souls. Labouring in every profession or calling, they formed the largest collections of beings between Denver and Salt Lake City.

The Beresfords went back at least two generations in the Grand Valley. They were among the sodbusters who battled the caliche and the pestilence of their crops in outside of Fruita, a village in the lower part of the valley. Rebecca Beresford left my mother, and sister, two brothers, and left the farm vowing she’d never again strain her back tending corn or hay, chasing pigs or culling the chickens. Farm life was never going to be her vocation. Instead, she decided she was more cut out to work in the teaching profession. As soon as she finished high school she obtained her teaching degree. Her first posting as a teacher was in Windsor, just outside Fort Collins. Teaching English to junior high students, while at the same time introducing her wards into the world of Pythagoras and Euclid, she found her profession both challenging and fulfilling. Weary of the Front Range, tired of being separated from her relatives, she wrote the principal of Riverton High School a letter. Fortune must have been looking down on her when she sent the letter for as it turned out, they had a sudden vacancy in the math department there. Rebecca Richards was to remain there for thirty years teaching the foundations of arithmetic, geometry, and differential equations to those from sophomores to seniors at Riverton High School and the intricacies of English to younger students. Though she would have preferred teaching younger students mathematics, she didn’t mind teaching the older students. Mother seemed to find an almost religious faith in the implacable theorems of mathematics. Passing these on to her students, she found the highest fulfilment.

Returning to the Grand Valley, my mother met my father when she opened a checking and saving accounts at First United Bank. Professionally, as a bank manager, my father could be nauseatingly unctuous to his clients. Rebecca, in her later years, thought my father rather abrupt and too quick to take liberties with people whom he barely knew. This was particularly the case when the customer was a woman. Taking her application, he proposed something of her: he asked her out to dinner. Like a proper woman back in the forties, she didn’t accede to his initial overtures. But my father, who was not the canniest of men, persisted. Finally, after numerous denials, she accepted his invitation to dinner. That first meal was at Pantuso’s Italian Restaurant, one of the few eating establishments in the valley at the time. Theirs was a whirlwind romance and within four months they were married at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. In those early days of the marriage, my father seldom drank more than a beer or two, usually turning down any offers of hard liquor. Then, as in succeeding years, my parents lived in a two story house on the corner of Eighth Street and Main Street. Until I reached my majority, and went of to college, it remained my home. There was a wooden, white-washed porch with a roof wrapped around the house. From the house, my father could walk to work at Fourth Street and Main, where the bank was located. My mother, though, drove the Ford family LTD station wagon back and forth to her classes to the new high school, a good three or four miles from our house. There, mother took a teaching post to inculcate the mysteries of mathematics in the careless and thoughtless minds who were only in her class to get their high school degree. During the day, while my parents toiled away at their respective jobs. The budding town, was spilling out to the north, and what had been simply marshes became a large brick building that became Riverton High School.

For the first few years of marriage, things went well for John and Rebecca Richards: there were no silent resentments; there were no major fights; there was no simmering smoke to signal a major engagement. Within a few years of taking her vows with my father, Claire had me. She took to motherhood with all the enthusiasm she had brought to her profession of instilling mathematical knowledge and English language skills to those of her docents. Evidently my father was conceited; evidently he was obsessed with keeping the blood line going. Thus, he bestowed his name upon me: John Richards, Jr. It’s a name I’ve been bridled with to this day, for better or for worse. Those who know me well know that I prefer to be called Jack. Scarcely a year passed before I was succeeded by a brother. My parents named him Brent. I daresay where the name came from for there were no for there was no Brent on either the Richard’s or the Beresford’s lineage. Perhaps it was from the Bible; perhaps it was from an old Celtic fairy tale. Wherever it came from, it wasn’t an auspicious appellation for my brother seemed to have been born under a bad star. Although my brother inherited my father’s looks and charm, he had not inherited my mother’s common sense or keen intelligence.

It was when Brent was a year or two old, and still in nappies, that the Troubles began in the family. At work (as I was to learn later), my father’s eyes began to wander. But the wandering eyes did not stop at that stage. My father’s form of indenture became philandering. Hardly did it matter if the women were chaste or unchaste, married or unmarried. He seemed to have no decency when it came to such small matters. As he became a philanderer, his thirst for alcohol at first lagged behind his thirst for women. This tom-catting would lead to a several short-lived affairs that my mother would quickly put an end to, each and every time, threatening to leave my father. Darkness descended upon my father at these times. Dark was the world he created; dark was the world he wallowed in. To deal with this darkness, I think, he drank. In this world of darkness, I think the alcohol chased away the ghosts that inhabited his realm. Most often it was Johnny Walker Red Label he drank. He’d sit in his recliner in the living room and drink his shots of Johnny Walker with ice and soda water. Most days, he went through half a fifth of Johnny Walker. But on a bad day, be it cast from a bad star on a moonless night, or a day when we all avoided him, he’d drink a full fifth. They say a drunk drinking passes through four stages: jollicose; bellicose; lachrymose; and, finally, comatose. My father was the exception. When drinking, he would immediately pass to the bellicose state, and then almost as quickly into the lachrymose state. Inherently a man with a stiff upper lip, my father would beseech my mother when he was drinking, when she’d just caught him out on one of his affairs and chased the tart away, crying like a toddler who’d dropped his bottle whenever she caught him out on one of his many seductions. Abashed to see him this way, my mother would gradually give in and agree to let him stay. Despite my age, I, too, was embarrassed for my father when I saw the tears. But they didn’t cease to flow. There was, I believe, some hidden he realized somewhere within himself he would not fully flower without her by his side. And seeing him there, begging her not to leave, she would give him a tongue-lashing fit for a stevedore. I was no less abashed to see my father in such form. But more than discomfited, I was confused. Of course, at that age, I was scarcely aware of the all too often detrimental relationships between men and women. It was all a mystery to me. It still is. I was confused. I was confused then, no less than I am now.

But the philandering gradually faded away. Why, I can’t say. As the philandering faded, drinking became more an end in itself. In fact, I think the alcohol itself diminished my father’s once unbridled libido. My mother begrudgingly ignored him as much as possible, first when he was on a binge, and then, only then, when he was coming off that binge. With time, my father no longer became tearful when he was drunk and at odds with my mother. She’d let him sit in the basement nursing a bottle of Johnny Walker, while the rest of his family went on with their lives. What first began as a library in the basement, turned into a parlor, and then a part-time bedroom. When he was drunk, she preferred he slept downstairs. The next day, sober, though no doubt hungover, he had all the dignity of a bank president. At least he did in the first years he abused alcohol. She did what she could to shield Brent and me from his drinking. Soon, sleeping down in the basement was not good enough. Soon, when he was drunk, she packed his beige canvas and leather Gladstone bag and would call a taxi to take him to the Randolph House. Located downtown, this male boarding house hosted similar lost souls for a couple dollars a night. We could almost feel a heavy weight being lifted from my mother’s shoulders as the taxi pulled out of the driveway with my dad. My father would remain at the Randolph House, where he continued to drink away his troubles. Per his wont, this would last three or four days. Then the first days he would return to appease the gods of withdrawal. Although initially petrified that my father’s drinking would out, she soon found that there was no way to hide it. Soon, the neighbors got used to seeing the taxi departing our house with father. Soon, the community knew that John Richards was a lush. Congruent within that circle were those who knew he was also a philanderer. Once they knew those facts, they saw him in a different light. My father to them was now just a doppelgänger of the man they’d known. He was now a man of little substance.

Given his affair with the bottle, his profession at the bank soon suffered. Mr. Robert Winthrop, the bank president, turned his eyes away from father’s habit as long as he could. But when my father failed to secure adequate collateral on two large loans he made to the bank’s customers, and the bank lost a considerable amount of money, Winthrop let him go. Had the stars been in the right alignment, he might have taken this as proof he needed to quit imbibing. However, they weren’t. Fortuity only seemed to fuel it. Within a few weeks of the bank letting him go, he found a job selling shoes in the Mercantile Emporium a block away from the bank. His boss was one of his drinking buddies. Unlike my father, he was one of those functional alcoholics whose drinking never seems to interfere with their performance in life. Drink, however, ruined my father’s. So there, from the porch he staggered with that weathered Gladstone, the piece of luggage that she always kept packed. In time, I half hoped he would take the Gladstone and be gone for good as he weaved out the front door and down the sidewalk. Eventually, when she was sure he was sober and that his binge had stopped for the moment, she’d let him return. But with each episode, she grew colder, she grew less sympathetic for the foibles inherent in the man, the inherent weaknesses\ in all men. With each episode, she made him spend longer periods at the Randolph House. As time passed, she would set down new rules about how he behaved in the house when he was not on a binge. With smouldering irritation he followed her new rules and regulations. In essence, she would let him know that he wasn’t the one really in charge of the household. But he would go along. He was no less distressed than a sailboat hugging the coastline in a tempest.

About this time, I recall a haunting vision of my father. One I’ll never forget. He was on a binge, a really heavy binge. Mother was packing his Gladstone downstairs. As I passed down the upstairs hallway that led past the master bedroom, I looked in at him. He had just retched all over the carpet in the master bedroom. Shortly after literally spilling his guts, he passed out one more time. The whole tableau would have made a recruiting poster for Alcoholics Anonymous. Passed out on the floor was my father, a man in his boxers and sleeveless, muscleman t-shirts lying in his own vomit on the carpet. There, for the fascination of the provident, lay my father on his side, and the strong, suffocating smell of scotch he had just vomited. Lying in the emesis, was a half-smoked cigarette. It would add one more cigarette burn to the dozen or so that were already there. At first, my mother did all she could to keep Brent and me from seeing our father in such a condition. She had little luck in this enterprise.

Not a year later, I have a similar image of him. This one would certainly amuse the followers of the late Susan B. Anthony of the village. Bringing up my father up the sidewalk to the front door of the house was a police officer. He was supporting my father. He politely introduced himself as Officer Ben Martinez. Seeing Martinez there, my mother ran out and grabbed my father’s free arm. “I think this one belongs to you?” inquired Martinez. Back and forth they flailed, half-walking, half-weaving, down the side walk to the front door of the house, like palsied parishioners dancing at a church social. As soon as they reached the stoop, my father bent over and vomited all over Ben Martinez’s tan officer’s pant leg. I remember mother apologizing to the officer who was a true gentleman, and him telling her not to worry herself about it. A day later she baked a cake for Martinez and left it at the police station with a short “thank you” note.

As the years passed, her resolution grew. Less and less she’d tolerate about my father’s drinking especially when he was around his two boys. No longer was he allowed to sleep in the master bedroom of the house, even if he was sober. Where Rebecca Beresford had been such a warm and wonderful mother, one with nothing against an individual, I watched her become hard and bitter, I watched her become worn; I watched her become old before her time, time when she was back at teaching to put food on the table for Brent and me. This transformation grieved me, even at that young age. How she must have tired of raising Brent and me; how tired she must be of taking care of father; how tired she must of become of teaching. I also think that she wanted Brent and me to see how we’d end up if we became too enamored of the bottle. Brent’s eyes widened as he witnessed our father soil himself. Then my mom came up the stairs and into the master bedroom where we all stood. She pushed the two of us out the door into the hallway, saying, “Go do your homework.” Like disoriented and disappointed footmen waiting upon their besotted master, we retreated. We retreated to the first floor where I had my Latin to conjugate and Brent had his geography to piece together. Both of us studied at our homework, afraid to look at each other, as we heard our mother mopping up the soiled carpet with wet rags, directly above our heads. Then we could hear her try to wake our father, but knowing it was to no avail, she laid him on his side, so he would not aspirate anything he vomited. Then Brent said, ”Perhaps we should help her.”

I looked over at my younger brother. “Leave her be. She’d only get mad. In about an hour, a taxi pulled up. My father was sober enough to stumble into the taxi, which would deliver him to the Randolph House where he could sleep it off. She grew where she knew all the taxi drivers by their first name; they, on their part, knew exactly where they were going when she called them.

During the week, when he was relatively sober, father would sip Red Label throughout the day, in the back of the store by his stacks of shoes, but almost always remaining just this side of inebriation. Were he obviously drunk, it would be the Randolph House for my father. No farther than the threshold would she let him in the house when he was in this state. He would sit on the stoop as she packed his Gladstone, and waited for the taxi.

Missing work, my father would sip Johnny Walker at the Western Slope Lounge, peeling the label from the bottle as much as one would the label from a beer bottle. In his escape from reality with the bottle, he would often be joined by two or three other buddies. My father would drink for a few days, staying at the Randolph House at night until he then returned to the house on Main Street when his sea legs were back and his mind was clear. When he had withdrawn from the heavy drinking sufficiently, he’d return to the Mercantile Emporium where he’d line up the shoes as though they were toy soldiers. Because his superior, Greg McCue, was also one of his drinking buddies, he and the rest of the staff, would make excuse after excuse for his absence.

Finally, before my father’s drinking gave out, his liver did. It was something that shouldn’t have surprised any of us who knew him. Still, it did. In the end, his liver could not outlast the Johnny Walker. But he gave it his best shot. He was like a fighter who had gone too many rounds fighting a boxer who far outclassed him. Before his body gave out, father was spending more time at The Western Slope Lounge and the Randolph House than he was at the family house on Eighth and Main. Making no excuses for his behaviour, he would suddenly appear at the door, with his tail between his legs. One night, when he had too many, he argued with Rebecca about his drinking, she would have none of it. “John,” she told him. “It’s a weakness of character. You hear me. It’s not the stars that are responsible for your drinking. It’s no more than a weakness in your character.” I was not yet in junior high.

So the pas de deux continued.

As with the passing of the years, each succeeding cycle became shorter than the previous one. With time, my father developed a paunch, the glimmer was gone from his eyes, crinkles formed in his forehead like the creases in a bed sheet.

Then, one night he showed up at the door of the house, all sheets to the wind, but feeling rough, really rough. That was the way he put it to mother. Dr. Reed, the family doctor, diagnosed alcoholic hepatitis. Reed placed him in the medical ward, sedating him heavily; all the while lecturing him at length as he examined him about the pernicious and the inevitable nature of the medical sequelae of consuming alcohol at the rate he was. For a month or two, it seemed to work. He abstained from the bottle and took the vitamins that my mother left out for him on the breakfast table. But then, like the inexorable whirling of the stars in the firmament above, the drinking began anew. After another one or two cycles of drinking, my father developed hepatitis again. Abrupt about his drinking, Reed seemed to have little time for those who did not follow his homilies when it came to the rapacity of alcohol. Reed gave him sedatives to keep the miseries of withdrawal at bay. But it invested her much more than it invested Dr. Reed. Today, the medical profession regards alcoholism as a disease. Both Dr. Reed and Rebecca Beresford Richards ascribed my father’s drinking to some defect in his makeup, an erosion of his character. Standing next to my father in his hospital bed, my mother listened to Dr. Reed lecture my father about his drinking, “Just buck up John. Due your duty to your family and to your religion.” I truly wanted a father, but I had no idea what a real one was.

While taking a toll on his body, the alcohol aged him. It made him senescent long before his time. His hair turned prematurely grey when he was barely forty; he shuffled like a man twice his age; he forgot things the way a grandparent would. But still he continued to drink. Still he continued to be admitted to the medical ward of St. Mary’s for alcohol-induced hepatitis. Over the years, his liver enzymes rose and fell, rising and falling as much as a mercury in a thermometer hanging by the door registering the tempestuous seasons of the high Southwestern Desert.

Over the next year or so, the hepatitis inevitably developed into cirrhosis. When asked to explain what cirrhosis was, Rebecca Richards told Brent and me that father’s alcoholism had permanently injured his liver. Concisely, his continued indulgence changed my father’s liver into a shrivelled and scarred organ, hardly any use to him. Seeking further explanation about cirrhosis, mother directed me to ask one of the nuns at school. So, I asked Sister Mary Arthel, my seventh grade teacher, asking her what it meant. She just said, “It means the liver is shutting down.” She didn’t realize that I was asking in regards to my father’s condition. “Just what does the liver do?” I asked her. She told me that all she knew was that it metabolized many of the toxins in our body. It was also the main metabolic organ of the body. I left from our brief talk hardly the wiser. That was more of an explanation than I had from either Dr. Reed or Rebecca Richards. Finally, because of the cirrhosis, his belly would fill up with fluid like a reservoir after the dam gates had been closed. Were he a woman, he’d look just about due. Were he a television character, I’d have to say he looked like a malignant ochre Michelin man. As this developed, his eyes lost their sparkle, while the whites of them turned the color of a pumpkin. It looked as though his whole body had been doused in a bath of thin, dilute curry. This while his arms and legs became like sticks.

One morning, after several nights on a binge, he showed up on the stoop of our house complaining of belly pain. At the hospital, Dr. Reed tried to delicately explain to us that he had peritonitis. When my mother asked how this had occurred, he seemed as flummoxed as a high school chemistry professor trying to explain to his high school class just what quantum mechanics exactly was. We could hardly blame him. Father was in bad shape that admission. When finally we were able to see him, he was unwashed and unshaved and his lovely Celtic hair splayed out in all directions. Picking things out of the air, he didn’t seem to know who Brent or I were, and appeared more intent on gathering things that were not there. Neither did he know what day it was, nor did he know the month. Coming and going, like acolytes in a church, the nurses hung bottles of antibiotics and vitamins, while withdrawing with partially filled plastic urinals. They, in turn with my mother, applied cool, wet wash clothes to father’s forehead. Brent and I stood there mutely, feeling ridiculous, as though we had been caught in some passion play.

I remember Dr. Reed guiding my mother outside the door, out of what he thought was our earshot, and saying, “I don’t think he’s going to make it this time, Rebecca. Hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst.” Then he moved onto the rest of his patients. He had a full house of them, not a few of them suffering from the same ills as my father, sicknesses induced from the contents of a bottle of liquor.

Easing her way between the nuns and nurses, my mother moved back into my father’s room. Standing at the railing of the hospital bed, she bent over and kissed my father on the brow. Squeezing his hand, she said, “I’ll be back up after class, Johnny.”

One nun had the temerity of asking my mother if her husband desired a priest to give the last rights?”

“The last rights.” She smirked. “The last rights. Only if he can give it to him in a shot glass,” she replied. I witnessed this from the foot of my father’s hospital bed.

Then my mother took Brent and me back to Immaculate Heart of Mary grade and junior high school, which sat lying beneath the very hill where the hospital perched and John Richards, Sr., lay fighting for his life. Brent and I were still not cognizant of exactly what death entailed. Like a bolt of lightning, it had never struck close to us.

Then she drove back to Riverton High School, to her waiting class, her pupils expecting her to explain the numeric subtleties of differential equations. It was the first week of November. The wisp of a weak winter storm had just blown through the valley the day before. The snow that fell the day before had merely kissed the earth, much like a mother kissing the brow of her infant. None of it remained, though the sun was now obscured by clouds.

To our surprise – a surprise as profound as finding out that there was no Santa Claus – Brent and I were amazed when he pulled out of his nose dive that November. The third day he was in the hospital, his temperature came down, he quit complaining to the nurses of abdominal pain and he asked for something to eat. Normally, children were not allowed in the hospital to see patients. When the child’s parent was about to die, or there was some other equally dramatic and disastrous situation looming, the nuns would allow the patient’s children or other relatives into the patient’s room. Because my father’s condition was so precarious when he was first admitted, the Sisters of Charity, the nuns whose Order ran the hospital, let Brent and me see our father. We were standing there next to the bed, my father looking like he had been out trick-or-treating with us, his hair mussed, his face unshaved, his eyes still like a carved out pumpkin’s, wearing a hospital gown, when Dr. Reed came in with my mom. My father was sitting on the edge of the bed, eating something that looked like mashed potatoes; and Reed, examining my father like he’d lost a pitched engagement that had just transpired, singly saying, “Harrumph.” There was no small irony in Reed’s triumph, for he was known particularly like his martinis at the lounge in the Bookcliff Country Club. My father spent almost two more weeks in the hospital before being discharged. Just where she found the money for the hospital and Dr. Reed’s bills, I have no idea. During all of this, my mother held the fort back at the house, keeping both me and my brother clothed and fed, while making mortgage payments on the house and instructing. Not a day did she miss teaching at Riverton high school. The only clue to the stress she was under at the time was that she was particularly hard on any of her students who failed to do the homework assigned them. Not even a missive from the Pope would have excused the miscreant. Years later I learned from my mother that she had even consulted her parents. She informed them about dad’s problems with the bottle, about the appalling condition of their marriage. “I want a divorce,” she told them. But being devout Catholics, they just consoled her, telling her of the sanctity of the sacrament of marriage, telling her to last it out, telling her to stick by the man she married. Looking back on it now, it was all a horrific mistake. Things would have been so different for all of us had the Catholic Faith not had such a hold on my mother. How she must have suffered keeping that marriage going.

Father had one more bout of hepatitis to start the new year, then a minor one in February. The Ides of March were his downfall, though. He went on a particularly long bender and was not seen by any of us, mother, Brent or me. Then one night as sleet was falling forming a thin layer of ice crystals in the lawn, and glazing the streets, he showed up on the porch. It was at the front door that he appeared, and he appeared almost like a vagrant, in soiled denims and wool shirt, his ball cap in his hands. His yellow eyes looking like those of a pumpkin, knocking once on the front door and then entering. My mother greeted him with no undue concern. “Rebecca,” he said. “It’s my stomach again.”

As if he was a child, she put the back of her hand on his forehead. “You’ve got a fever now, Johnny.” He walked with a strange gait, each step being light as though he might crush something with each footfall. He must have made that walk from the Randolph House to ours, a mile or so, in tremendous pain. With each step, he groaned and held his swollen belly. Bacteria had taken the high ground again in his abdomen. There were rapidly melting snow crystals on the shoulders of his woolen coat, for a wet snow was falling in still air just out the door.

“Baby,” he said to my mother. “I’ve got this horrible gut ache.”

“You do?” she asked matter-of-factly. With our help, she settled him into the passenger seat of the Ford LTD station wagon. He slipped and fell before he got into the passenger side of the station wagon. Before proceeding to the hospital, she gave us strict instructions on how much longer the chicken pot pies needed to be heated in the oven, and then warned us that our homework better be done by the time she returned. She didn’t return until about midnight, long past our bedtime. The sleet had turned to wet snow that was only gathering on the lawns and in the hedges in front of the house.

“Pray for your father,” she said as she readied us for bed. “Your father has another bout of peritonitis.” Sighing, she was exhausted; and she had to teach the next day. Realizing that was too complicated for us to understand, she reiterated, “Your father has another infection in his abdomen.” Then, before she went to bed, she did something she never did normally: she took a shower. It was as though she was trying to wash something tangible from her husband off.

The following day, Sister Charles Marie McCallister, the principal at Immaculate Heart of Mary Junior High School, called us into her office. The only time we had been in her office before was to be disciplined. She stood up when Brent and I came in. She came around her desk and stood in front of us, as erect as a survey rod. She tousled Brent’s hair.

“You know Brent, you’re the spitting image of your father.” She brushed the hair back from his forehead. She paused and didn’t say anything for several moments. “You’re father’s quite ill,” she said. Then she looked at the floor, and then she looked at the two of us. The three of us stood there mutely for at least a minute as though we were offering up a prayer. But we weren’t praying. Brent and I shuffled our feet and waited for sister to say something.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” I blurted out.

She nodded. “The Lord has taken him away.” Neither crying, nor talking in any manner, we waited silently for our mother to pick us up as we waited outside Sister Charles Marie’s office. We waited outside her office until mother picked us up in the station wagon. We had to wait while she made the appropriate arrangements for our father.

Despite the mortician’s dark art, my father looked to be sixty as he lay in the casket, though I knew him to not yet be forty-four. In his casket, he looked as yellow and insubstancial as the Straw Man in the Wizard of Oz. Most in attendance at the rosary, the night before the funeral, were coworkers of my mother’s at Rivertown High School. For all my father’s good-time friends, not one was there. I can still remember the tinkling of the beads and the mumbling of the prayers, barely audible, as they performed the rosary. Nor were they there the next day for the funeral. Still, I had a hard time believing he was dead. At any moment I expected him to spring up and have one last round. I guess the joke was on me. Outside the wind tore at the trees, tugging at the bare limbs like fish lines playing out with a fresh catch. But though one of winter’s last fronts was coming through, the skies were clear. There was no moon. Orion and the Big Dipper glimmered. My maternal uncle, William Beresford, came over and put a hand on my shoulder. He was the older of my mother’s two brothers. “You’ve got to pick up where your dad left off. That won’t always be easy.” My other uncle, Joe, had joined us.

“Your Uncle Bill is telling you the truth. From now on, you’re the man of the house.” I stared up at my two uncles as we stood outside on the concrete entrance to the church. Then, I stared back at the stars. I felt so inadequate. For as young as I was when my father passed away, though I was far away from my majority, I knew that adults who knew the family now expected the two of us to become adults before our time. I could sense being watched in everything I said and everything I did. More so did it seem when she assumed her maiden name again. And so a chapter had been closed in my life.

As I stood by my mother that evening, listening to people trying to say comforting things as they passed by, I remember someone suggesting a wake might be in order after the funeral. In a terse voice, my mom replied to the man, “HIs whole life was a wake.” That was my father. No less, that was my mother.