Читать книгу Seven Mile Bridge - Michael M. Biehl - Страница 9

2

I decide to start the project by tackling what used to be my bedroom. The house is a Cape Cod, and my room, a second-floor dormer, has one of those ceilings that slant down to meet the wall, so designed in order to carve a few extra square feet of living space out of an attic. Once I hit puberty I was constantly bumping my head on the slanted part, and on the even lower ceiling in the gable, where the room’s only window affords a view of the backyard.

The room now appears to be used exclusively for storage, like much of the rest of the house. My old bed is still there, with brown cardboard boxes stacked up on top of it. The desk I studied at in high school is piled high with stuffed manila folders. Bundles of papers and magazines tied with twine cover much of the floor. The closet is packed tight with clothes, some of them mine, most of them my mother’s, all of them ludicrously out of date. Madras and paisley shirts, bell-bottomed corduroys, tartan wrap skirts with giant safety pins, rust-colored polyester pants suits. You wouldn’t want to let go of any of that good stuff, would you, Mom? I expect I’d find my old Davy Crockett coonskin cap in there if I looked.

One item I want to get out of the way first. I don’t want to stumble across it three days into the project when I might be feeling sentimental. I suspect it is somewhere in those manila folders where my mother kept important documents. Given the chaotic condition of the house, I am surprised to see that the folders are labeled and alphabetized, sort of, which should make finding things a whole lot easier. Or so I think until I start looking into the folders and find that the logic of my mother’s filing system was entirely her own. The contents of the folders are, as far as I can tell, completely haphazard. I see no discernible order or organization regarding which papers are in what folders.

Yes, the “A” folders include one labeled “Auto Insurance,” and there are a bunch of car policies in there. But they are on cars my parents owned in the ’50s and ’60s, and the same folder also holds recipes, newspaper clippings, Book-of-the-Month Club mailings, and a coupon for 25 cents off on a can of Alpo.

That starts with A, but my mother never owned a dog.

The more recent auto policies are in a folder labeled “Insurance,” which also contains several life insurance policies, every one of them surrendered or cancelled for failure to pay premiums. The policies are mixed up with personal correspondence, business cards, and pages of advertising ripped from old Newsweek magazines.

The folders labeled “Taxes” each have a year on them — 1975, 1992, 1956 but they are not in numerical order, and the most recent one is for five years ago. It looks like my mother has not filed a return for the past five years, and I wonder what kind of headaches that will inflict on the executor of her estate. She has kept hundreds of bank statements from dozens of accounts at different banks, but a quick flip-through reveals that they are sown like wildflowers across folders from “A” to “Z” and it is impossible to tell which accounts are still open and which aren’t.

Another hassle for the hapless executor.

One of the folders is labeled “Jamie,” and it is adjacent to one marked “Jonathan.” That makes me think the item I am looking for might be under “D,” for David, my father’s name. While shuffling through the “D’s,” I come across my mother’s will. Not under “W,” nor “L” for Last Will and Testament, not “T” for Testament, nor “E” for Estate Plan. Why “D”? For Death? Who knows? I check her will, not for the bequests (that can wait), but just to see who she has named as the executor of this hopeless mess.

It’s me. Thanks, Mom.

There is no “David” file, but there is one labeled “Dad.” This strikes me as odd, even though it seemed perfectly natural that my mother continued to refer to my father as “Dad” even after she remarried, since she had no children with her second husband. I open the folder.

The scrap of paper I am looking for, my father’s obituary from the Sheboygan Press-Gazette, is right on top.

Local Man Found Dead in Garage

David H. Bruckner, a lifetime resident of Sheboygan, died Tuesday. He was 50.

His body was found in the garage of his home in the Glen Oaks subdivision. The cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning. Police have ruled the death a suicide.

Bruckner worked for the past 15 years at Falls Dieworks, Inc., in Sheboygan Falls. “He was a loyal employee who will be missed,” said Falls Dieworks corporate president Leon Bridette.

Bruckner is survived by his wife, Louise, 48, and by two sons, Jonathan, 17, and James, 13.

The obit hits me like a faceful of scalding water, the words evoking the same mix of anger and mortification they did the first time I read them.

Local Man, they called him. Not “doctor” or “professor” or “business executive” or “journalist” or “philanthropist.” Not “corporate president” like that bastard, Leon Bridette. Just “local man.” I was angry that they tagged him with that insultingly commonplace epithet. I was mortified because, at that point, that’s about all he was. The statement that he was 50, which seemed sad and strange at the time, seems all the more so now that I am over 50.

Found Dead. They didn’t say by whom he was found dead, which was a relief.

But after three decades I can still remember the shame rising in my cheeks and behind my eyes at the word suicide, and I feel it again. The first time I saw it, I couldn’t believe the Press-Gazette would do that to us, to me. Didn’t they (I say “they” because there was no byline, which I, in my wrath and ignorance, interpreted at the time as cowardice on the part of the reporter) have any idea how it would affect me and Jamie socially? I did. I knew immediately we would henceforth be the worst thing you could be as a teenager: different. We would be the oddballs whose spooky weirdo dad offed himself in the garage. The tainted apples that could not have fallen far from the bent, sapless tree.

I was furious that they quoted Leon Bridette, after all the trouble that asshole had caused us. At the time I thought they should have said that it was Bridette’s fault my father was dead. The quotation had made me want to rip the article to shreds, since it was my father’s loyalty that Bridette had misused to screw him, and because the words were so outrageously phony. Bridette had fired my father months before he died.

Survived by. Now that phrase was good. Succinct, accurate, complete and, with the benefit of over thirty years’ hindsight, almost clairvoyant. If you want to describe what my mother, Jamie, and I did after my father died, “survived” sums it up pretty well.

A drinking buddy of mine in the Keys once suggested that I enhance the sign over the door to my dive shop by appending a piece of driftwood to it with “Jonathan Bruckner, Proprietor” painted on it. Typical Keys kitsch. I found a piece of driftwood that was actually a plank from an old skiff, weathered smooth with a few splotches of marine paint still clinging to it, something naive tourists might think came from a shipwreck. I shellacked it and dangled it from my sign out front, but what I put on it was: “Jonathan Bruckner, Survivor.”

The clipping of my father’s obituary is only about three inches long and two inches wide, so I can see what is directly underneath it — a yellowed, dog-eared letter addressed to David H. Bruckner on Bank of Wisconsin letterhead, dated April 5, 1971, which was about half a year before “local man” was “found dead in garage.”

That letter was a grenade lobbed into my family’s foxhole.

* *

April, 1971

The letter arrived on a Tuesday. I don’t remember what the weather was like but it must have been either cold or rainy because Jamie and I were both in the rec room watching television after school. I was stretched out on the sofa. Jamie was sprawled on the floor, insensitive to the cold hardness of basement linoleum.

We were not much alike in appearance. He was quite tall for thirteen and husky, while I was only average height for my age and thin. Jamie was blue-eyed and sandy-haired, like our Polish-American mom, while I had brown eyes and almost black hair, like Dad. I had a flat pie-face; Jamie had a foxlike face with a high-bridged, pointy nose. We had the same mouth and chin, though — thin lips, slight underbite, lopsided grin — so that people often told us we looked like brothers.

“Wow! Look at those guys go!” Jamie yelled, wild-eyed with enthusiasm. “Dynamite! Those guys are dy-no-mite!”

We were watching footage of the Chinese men’s table tennis team. It was in the news that day that Mao Zedong, whom we then called Mao Tse Tung, had invited the U.S. team to visit China, one of the opening moves in the diplomatic ping-pong that led to Nixon in Beijing, which we then called Peking.

“They’re gonna kick our butts,” said Jamie. “Chinks are amazing at ping-pong. They must all play it like, all day, every day.”

The Chinese team was amazing. The ball moved so fast it was almost impossible to follow it. Still, I couldn’t let Jamie’s stupid remark pass.

“Chinese people can’t afford ping-pong tables, Jimbo,” I said, as snidely as possible. “Those guys are an elite corps selected and trained by the government, like Russian gymnasts. And don’t say ‘Chinks,’ you Polack-kraut.”

“Chinks, Chinks, Chinks,” said Jamie. I flung a sofa cushion at his head. “Greet for me Valhalla!” he shouted.

Jamie would do that when he got excited, just suddenly yell something that made no sense. I was compelled to needle him about it.

“What did you say?” I asked superciliously.

“Never mind.”

“You said, ‘Greet for me Valhalla.’ What does that mean?”

“Don’t blame me if you can’t figure it out.” Jamie would never give an inch.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said.

“It means I saw you in the quarry with Lori.”

“You’re nuts. You’re bonkers.”

I knew Jamie was sort of peculiar and annoying, but I never seriously considered the possibility that he was actually mentally ill. After he was diagnosed I stopped telling him he was nuts, but I never stopped feeling guilty about having said things like that to him. I probably said it this time because I was afraid Jamie might actually have seen me at the quarry, which was the neighborhood teen make-out spot, with my girlfriend, Lori.

“It means,” said Jamie without missing a beat, “that any Chink could kick your butt at ping-pong.”

“Maybe, but you can’t.”

Jamie gave me a look out of the corner of his eye and a crooked-mouth grin that said, “You’re on.” Without another word, we leapt to opposite ends of the ping-pong table our dad had set up in the basement, grabbed our paddles, and started whacking the little white ball back and forth across the smooth green tabletop. Ordinarily, Jamie gave me a run for my money in spite of our age difference, but on this occasion he ill-advisedly tried to employ the grip used by the Chinese players, with the thumb in front on the forehand. He had never practiced that way, so I was beating him handily when my mother’s voice rang down the stairs.

“What about homework?”

“All done,” I shouted. Jamie didn’t say anything, and I suspected his wasn’t done. He struggled in school, but it didn’t seem to bother him.

“Dinner’s ready in ten minutes. Jon, set the table. Jamie, bring in the mail. Pronto, pronto!”

“Whoever loses the last point,” I said to Jamie, holding the ball out in front of me ’twixt thumb and index finger, “gets the mail and sets the table.”

He assumed the pose of a shortstop with men on base, up on the balls of his feet. I served conservatively, and he struck like a cobra. He had switched back to his usual grip without me noticing. I dove ineffectually at the spiked ball. Jamie whooped and danced around the basement with unreserved joy.

I know that I had no premonition about the white business-size Bank of Wisconsin envelope mixed in with the regular bills and junk mail, because when my mom asked if we got anything interesting, like she always did, I said, “Nope.”

My dad was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing wrinkled chinos and a plaid flannel shirt with the top button buttoned, reading the newspaper as I set the table. He had a softly constructed face, with low cheekbones and thin, tentative lips.

The table, which had a fake marble laminate top and tubular steel legs, is still in the same place where I would drink a glass of Old Crow thirty-six years later, and it still seems way too big for the room. Back then, the Formica was gray and flat, not yellowish-brown and curling up in the corners.

My father had just recently begun using reading glasses, and I thought they made him look old; the black frames brought out the gray at his temples, and the lenses exaggerated the puffiness around his thoughtful eyes.

“How was school?” he asked, with a sing-songiness that mocked the triteness of the question.

“It was fine,” I said, echoing his cadence.

“What did they teach you today?”

“English and math and social studies.”

“What social things are you studying?”

“The war.”

“Did you talk to Lori today?”

Naturally, I had no appreciation for my father’s bland, predictable questions, his attempt to show interest without being intrusive. I didn’t disdain his efforts, but I was never aware of how the gentleness and regularity of his mealtime inquiries contributed to my equilibrium, the safety there was in the expectation that no matter how perfunctory my answers, he would keep asking. I suppose nobody appreciates this sort of thing about their parents at seventeen, or even notices it, unless it suddenly stops.

I don’t remember what we ate for dinner that night. Other than the Chinese table tennis team I don’t remember what we talked about. I wish I did. I wish I had a clearer recollection of the countless dull, normal, placid dinners my family had before my father opened the envelope from the Bank of Wisconsin. I wish we’d had a video camera back then and I had taped some of those family suppers before the letter, suppers that I now recollect only vaguely in the soft focus and pastel colors of old faded snapshots.

I remember that my father would make corny jokes that elicited gentle scolding from my mother and giddy laughter from my brother, but I don’t remember the jokes. My father would often over-compliment my mother’s cooking, and she would accept the praise with the patently false modesty of an Oscar recipient. But I don’t remember what my parents said, what their exact words were. I wish I did.

I remember thinking that we were happy, but I don’t remember what it felt like.

After dinner that night, my father took the mail and sat down in his red and gold striped overstuffed easy chair in the living room. He read by the light of a brass floor lamp. My mother sat cross-legged on the sofa, knitting. Most evenings we were all in the same space reading, knitting, studying, playing games, whatever, always with the television blaring the whole time. We had an obsolete black and white Philco console with a cabinet the size of a washing machine. I was on the floor reading the sports page of the Milwaukee Journal and half-watching The Mod Squad when I heard my mother say, in a tone of voice that alarmed me, “What’s wrong, David?”

I looked at my father. He held the Bank of Wisconsin letter in one hand, while with his other hand he squeezed the side of his face so hard it looked like it must hurt. Behind the black-rimmed reading glasses, his eyes had an expression of terrible agitation. Jamie was glued to the TV set, unblinking and oblivious.

My mother put down her knitting and asked again, “What is it? David, what’s the matter?”

* *

My hand is shaking as I put the letter down and look again at my father’s obituary. The item is accompanied by a tiny black and white photo that the Press-Gazette must have gotten from my dad’s employment file at Falls Dieworks. The portrait is barely an inch high, less that an inch wide, and grainy, but even so I can see that my father has optimism and confidence in his eyes, that “young man looking to the future” expression. Maybe the photographer posed everybody that way, I don’t know. I do know that I never again saw a look like that in my father’s eyes after he opened that letter.