Mom eventually accepted this as just a little bump on the road less traveled. To her way of thinking, Harry was still destined for sainthood but, like Paul, had to endure some hardships along the way. (You know Paul, that guy who wrote all those indecipherable epistles in the Bible in a secret code unbreakable even by my Captain Midnight Decoder Ring?) And I could not agree with her more that South Catholic High School was a hardship, having endured more detentions with Mr. Baracco than I could count.
Dad, on the other hand, seemed to take it harder than Mom. He actually became friendlier with me after that, and we did things together without Harry there to bug me. I suppose desperation drives people to do crazier things, but I can’t say that regaining some of my former stature with him was much of a plus. Dad and I had little in common at that point. I loved him but I was a deposed king and he a workaholic engineer. And being a junior in high school, I was more interested in girls and in making trouble than in baseball games and grabbing a bite to eat at the diner to talk about life.
The road less traveled became even bumpier after I left home for college. God, I was hell on my parents, even from hundreds of miles away. And Harry? Well Harry was now officially a fallen away Catholic. He traded in his clarinet for a guitar, spent all his free time teaching himself to play folk music, let his hair grow long, and began frequenting the coffee houses in Oakland and Shadyside — Pittsburgh’s dreaded hippy districts of the sixties. He was never into drugs — I knew that for sure from my Pittsburgh-based spy organization — but he had definitely gone weird. To say that he had joined the fringes of society would have been a major understatement. Harry was out there, way out there.
So, it was no surprise to me when he chose the seminary-avoidance route again and applied to only one college — Kenyon — some non-sectarian place in the middle of Nowhere, Ohio, that I had never heard of. I mean, they had zero computers on campus, no mainframe, not even a mini-computer. Zero. Even in the late sixties that was a sign of a totally backward institution. Mom and Dad were crushed, absolutely devastated, and totally against it. I wanted to kill him for going back on his promise to go to seminary not only because he was threatening my rule by refusing to move quietly into the non-aggressive realm of the religious, but also because he really hurt Mom and Dad with this one, him and his damned independent thinking. What a jerk!
But Harry had received a full scholarship and was going. He wouldn’t argue about it. There was no fighting, nothing to talk about. He simply said that this was the next step on his life’s journey. Believe it or not, Dad even had me talk to him at one point toward the end of the summer after high school, right before he went away, but I confess that metaphysics has never been my strong suit. I freaked on him when he lost me in the distinction between rationalization and conceptualization, and that was that for my “talk.” To me there were good guys and bad guys, black and white, Vic Morrows and Sergeant Krugers. Harry simply couldn’t understand this at all.
When Harry left for school for his freshman year at Kenyon, he almost left without saying good-bye. I remember to this day the last thing he said to Mom and Dad. I know you’re expecting something profound and flowery from the boy who cut his own path through life, but all he said was, “Don’t worry about me, Mom, Dad. I’ll see you later. I love you.” And that was that. He was gone.
For four years Harry never came home, and Mom and Dad never went to visit him. He wouldn’t let them and he always had some lame excuse for it. He rarely wrote, never called, and invariably found a job there over the breaks and summer vacations. His letters were overly formal typed, report card-like messages — “Got all As, very happy with classes, people are great, miss everyone…” Even I realized they were emotionless and not like Harry at all. He had transformed into someone so completely different that he was unrecognizable as Harry to any of us. No one spoke of him at the dinner table or wondered aloud how he was really doing or why he had changed. His picture disappeared from the living room mantle. It was as if he had ceased to exist, had never existed, that the shining star had in fact been but a passing comet lost in time and memory. It hurt Mom and Dad a lot, so much that even I realized it. It hurt everyone — except me. I didn’t care.
But enough of that… Me? Miracle of miracles, I was headed to grad school at M.I.T. My parents had tolerated well my rebellious years and apparently it paid off. I turned a corner my junior year, my ship came in, my star rose in the East, and the king was reborn. Actually, it wasn’t quite that dramatic but I’ll take what I can get.
I had lucked into getting partnered with Kelly Erickson for our junior honors Computer Science project at Pitt and we (well, actually she more than me, but who’s keeping track?) invented “in concept” a punchcardless computer that would revolutionize the industry. All we had to do was build it. Kelly and I continued the project through our senior year and were both accepted at M.I.T. on full fellowship with the expectation that we would continue the grandiose plan, making us famous and them richer. So when Harry left, I left, too, though my departure was with far more fanfare, pomp, and circumstance.
But believe it or not, I somehow missed that boat, as big and unstoppable as it appeared, and ended up a designer for a board game company that was looking to the computer as the future of its business. They sent a recruiter to campus the first week of school, he found me, and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I accepted on the spot. All I had to do was work with them to develop games and
my
invention and get it patented before Kelly did the same at M.I.T. Piece of cake. I had their resources behind me and Kelly had nothing. No contest.
That was the last I saw of M.I.T. and it was good riddance — what a bunch of over-achieving dopes. I didn’t have to leave if I didn’t want to, though. I could have stayed and gotten my degree and enjoyed torturing the nerds. The company didn’t care. They would have paid for it. They just wanted the technology and the games. But it was better that I left then — it never sat well with Kelly that all our work had somehow been mysteriously lost in the move to M.I.T.
In one of those spur of the moment decisions, I made up my mind not to tell anyone in the family that I had left. After all, it was none of their business and it made for better dinner conversation. “Oh yes, Tom is at M.I.T., you know. He’s working on a fellowship with… What’s her name, Tom? Judy? Kelly? How is she doing anyway? Any future plans for you two?” It was just so much more convenient for them to think I was still there. Actually, the company told me I could work from
anywhere
as long as I kept in touch and fed them work on a regular basis. I could have set up shop in Hawaii, or Alaska, or even Nowhere, Ohio.
There had been so much snow the Christmas Eve of Harry’s senior year that I was lucky I had gotten in several days before. My drive home had taken me twice as long as usual. The roads were a mess. The Pittsburgh airport had been shut down around midday and all flights canceled in and out. But the entire family had made it, well, everyone but Harry. We weren’t really expecting him, so it was no big deal, at least not for me. I had pretty much written him off and assumed everyone else had done the same. It was easier that way, less painful. Just forget about him.
The world had bigger problems. It was a real mess. Nixon had just been reelected in November, him and his stupid silent majority. I had voted for George McGovern. George was our only hope for getting us out of Vietnam. Nobody liked that war, not even me, and I’m not exactly a peacenik. Army was my favorite game to play and picking on other kids my favorite pastime. You’d think that going to war would be a perfect fit for me, but along with millions of other draft-age young men I desperately wanted us out of that war.
Everything seemed subdued to me on Christmas Eve. I guess it was the snow. There was a lot of staring out the windows at the wonder of a white Christmas by Mom and Dad, not much singing of carols (thank God), and plenty of punch and cookies. But the holiday warmed up Christmas morning with the traditional opening of presents and continued to build in spirit throughout the day. It was almost like old times. Sam opened a present that I promptly commandeered and broke
accidently
when he tried to get it back by putting me in a headlock. Kate mysteriously misplaced a bracelet that we later found dangling from the dining room chandelier. Just like old times.
We were at the dinner table Christmas night, laughing and joking about all the crazy things we had done on Christmases past, filling in the cracks with pumpkin pie and coffee when Kate started retelling a memory, “Remember when Harry…” She stopped; everyone stopped. But once the lid to the forbidden box had been opened, there was no going back. Pandora was out, Christmas was officially over and we all knew it.
Mom had begun clearing the dishes when the phone rang. Dad answered it in the kitchen with his usual, “Yallo.” You have to elongate the first syllable to get the full effect of Dad’s patented greeting, something like “eeeeee-allo.”
None of us paid much attention to the conversation until we all heard him say “What? What did you say? Dear Lord…” He paused. I think he was crying, but Dad never cried. Mom stood frozen to the terrazzo floor with a stack of dishes in her hands. Kate was studying her in horror. Sam and Mary were looking at each other. I looked out the window. The snow was pounding on the window like a hammer… no, that was my heart racing.
“No, that will be fine. Tomorrow then… Yes, good-bye.” We heard the click when he hung up the receiver and the creak of the third step as he headed upstairs to his bedroom. I had doctored that step myself to create the telltale creak so I would know when the enemy was approaching my bedroom. This came in very handy when I was shooting my BB rifle out the window at the neighbors. A chilling dismay spread across the room. The blue-white ice collecting on the windows as the snow melted and refroze on them bore the face of a cold, heartless death.
“Mom?” Kate whispered hoarsely.
She ignored the little brat and whispered, “Tom, make sure your father’s all right.” Mom set the dishes on the table, sat down and tried to take a sip of tea. Her cup rattled on the saucer. I made a mental note that this would make a great lie-detector test at some point. I would call it the “Rattling Cup” and copyright it.
Instinctively I wanted to respond, “Who elected me?” but for some odd reason I simply nodded and left the table. Even I, with my usual insensitivity, knew that something was really wrong — really wrong. My mind jumped at once to thoughts of death. After all, it was the Christmas season and that was usually when old relatives kicked the bucket. Maybe Great Aunt Nola had finally passed. She had to be at least a hundred. Or Uncle Bill — he had been battling cancer for years. It’s amazing how many names of potential candidates can crowd into one small corner of your brain in those thirteen steps from the first floor to the second floor of the family split-level home. There’s probably a Guinness World Record for it. And the more names I filled my pea brain with, the less room it had for the dread we had all felt. The list grew until I knocked lightly on Dad’s door and entered.
“Dad? You okay?”
He was sitting on his bed rummaging through an old Thom McAnn shoebox. He pulled a black and white photograph from the box and slowly ran his thumb over it. Physically I was there in that time and place with him, but when I glanced at the photo I was suddenly eleven years old again and was standing beside Harry in front of our house on Gaylord Avenue. The six-year-old Harry was holding a leg brace bravely in one hand, staring stoically at the camera. I was smiling and packing a snowball to throw at Dad when he was done taking the picture.
Harry had just come back from the hospital with Dad after the doctors removed his brace — the last vestiges of his yearlong bout with a broken leg. When he was five, Harry’s leg had been crushed under a car when the wagon he had been riding in hit a bump and flew into the street, putting him directly in the car’s path. But after one year and three operations and months in the hospital, he had triumphed. Even I had to admit, it took a lot of guts for a kid his age to pull through that ordeal.
“He was so brave…” Dad’s voice trailed off.
“He wrecked my wagon,” I answered angrily, without thinking, realizing I had just replayed my eleven-year-old response when I had seen my Radio Flyer in pieces on the pavement, totally oblivious to my brother lying under the car screaming.
Dad looked up at me, his eyes glistening with moisture. A faint smile crossed his face. “Yes, I remember that. You weren’t a happy camper for the longest time.”
Something I had not remembered in years came back, “And that story you made up about it being insured and not to worry — that was a good one.” He had replaced the wagon a week after Harry’s accident. That sort of made it right, but it was not the same.
“You were such a damn brat, Tom. I knew you’d be whining for weeks if I didn’t get you another wagon. And I didn’t want you to feel bad about your overreacting.” Dad’s voice softened. I could barely hear him. “But, you turned out okay. You’re a good boy, Tom. A good man… And I’m proud of you.” His gaze returned to the photo and he kissed it lovingly. This was one of those awkward moments normally requiring an appropriate response from me, something attributing all my success to him, but he gave me no opportunity to reply. He was crying. Dad never cried.
“Dad?” I sat beside him and surprised myself — I put my arm around him. It was then that I noticed that the shoebox was full of photos. The box lid, which lay on the floor, had one word written on it in red magic marker: “Harry.” My journey into the forbidden reaches of Mom and Dad’s bedroom was always one of revelations and here was yet another. Harry had not ceased to exist these past four years. He had merely been put away in Mom and Dad’s closet into a shoebox to be brought back at the appropriate time, that time when he would be returning to the family. And that time was now. The phone call — it had been Harry.