My Father Before Me (11 page)

27

A benefit of my father working for a lumber and pulp company was that he kept us supplied with free stacks of cardboard and reams of paper that he lugged home from the office. On the paper, I painted watercolors of houses, front walks curving away from them and off the page, wood smoke swirling from their chimneys. I lay them on the floor to dry, the paper puckering. I drew a crayon portrait of my new pet gerbil, LBJ, named after the most famous person I could think of. LBJ was an agreeable roommate, keeping to himself, sleeping amid his wood shavings, crouching in the corner discreetly emitting pellets, making his wheel squeak forlornly in the night. In his portrait, I drew him huddled behind the bars of his cage near his hanging water bottle—above him, on the wall, a portrait within a portrait: the Sacred Heart of a black-bearded Jesus, orange flames bursting from his chest.

As the weeks went by, Christ and I watched over my gerbil. Then, one morning, I noticed that LBJ's left eye was purple and swollen. Was this normal? I told myself that it was, that gerbils' eyes are prone to bulging grotesquely and that the problem would go away. I wanted it to; the eye was not easy to look at. But what if it didn't go away? That would be my fault, wouldn't it? LBJ was my gerbil; he was my friend—I was responsible for him. In a perverse misapplication of that responsibility, as day gave way to day, I kept the fact of LBJ's condi
tion to myself. I did not tell my parents, and I did not offer aid to him. I hadn't a clue how I might do so. Instead, I waited, I temporized, my shame and secrecy feeding each other. Like a small version of my father, perhaps, I was ignoring a warning sign because it was easier to do so: easier merely to hope for the best and say nothing than to admit that I was inadequate to solve the problem alone, or to admit that I might be the problem. LBJ's bulge grew larger, more freakish, so I understood that he was truly suffering and that his suffering was indeed my fault, so much so that I could bear to glance at him only occasionally and then chose not to look at him at all, shielding my eyes with my hand when I fed him or changed his water. Finally, one day, no rustling noises came from his cage. LBJ lay still on his side in the corner. I prodded him with a pencil. He did not unstiffen, to my relief. With a trowel, I dug a deep gerbil-sized hole in the corner of the backyard and deposited him in it, marking the grave with an upright Popsicle stick.

I had not been able to reveal to my mother or father that my pet was sick, let alone that I had allowed his condition to worsen because it repelled me. I had begun to nurture a protective privacy, a silence within which I might hide and ward off censure. Instead of speaking freely and spontaneously about what I felt and thought, I preferred to show off the parts of myself that I felt safe in revealing, the unassailable parts: my artistic flair and high-mindedness. I was beginning to try my hand at verse. My earliest extant poem is an occasional one, written for my mother when I was eight:

There are daisy's that grow,

and tulip's sometimes too,

but ofcourse they'll never do!

So there's the carnatain.

Because Mother's day is a celebratoin.

The poem was cunningly original, I thought: my best effort yet.

My imagination was glutting itself not only on the poetic implications of nature, and not only on tales of superheroes and villains of the Wild West and knights and kings, but on the stories shared with me by nuns and priests. As my father had been once, and his father before him, I was a Catholic schoolboy, sitting rigidly in my seat each morning, hands folded before me, in my uniform of salt-and-pepper corduroy pants, white button-down shirt, and navy blue sweater, the school insignia sewn over the left breast. It was here—with Sister Aida, white-habited and black-shoed, looking down upon us as she patrolled the rows of desks—where I practiced my penmanship, penciling
O
after
O
after
O
and, when it was time to try a whole sentence in cursive, was instructed to try my hand at this: “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee.”

God was watching me. Like Santa Claus, He was tough on criers and pouters. He likely didn't approve of my wobbly penmanship. He seemed generally unpleasable—strict and particular, having concocted a dauntingly long list of sins, venial and mortal, for me to steer clear of, and those were on top of the nasty original blotch on my soul that I had earned just by being born. But God was also capable of extravagant generosity, most of all in His final gift of eternal, ecstatic life in heaven alongside Him, although I would have to earn that reward every day, every minute, throughout my entire life, and He would never apprise me of how I was doing. I would have to die and be surprised.

I believed in heaven as an actual place, a geographical location. One day, during art hour, our teacher asked us to draw our private vision of it. On that rough grayish paper we used for everything in school, with bright-colored crayons, orange, yellow, and green, I drew something that looked suspiciously like the Emerald City: slender, tightly gathered towers soaring skyward, sparkling with stars. Beyond that, I had only the fuzziest sense of the place. Would ice cream be served?
Would we be issued wings and, if so, would they be feathered? Assuming Dana would also be present—a big assumption, considering her general and intensifying brattiness—would she and I be together on the same family cloud, bound eternally, or would we be free to roam independently? Would kickball be played, or would we only lounge eternally in the glow of God's love? And what would that feel like? I wanted specifics.

More relevant to me and real, because I had seen them, were the remote, secret places of television: Maxwell Smart's underground headquarters, which you got to through a phone booth concealed behind five sets of doors; the Batcave, sheltering a sleek black convertible and blinking computer consoles; and the scrubby, prehistoric world of club-wielding cavemen into which two astronauts, falling backward through time, crash-landed their capsule.

Christ had done something like that, hadn't he—fallen from a far star and awoken in the desert, burbling, wrapped in swaddling clothes? Christ I could understand better than his father because I could picture him—or, rather, because he was pictured for me. He was there in my slim children's missal, the gilt edges of its pages sleek and gleaming: gazing upward, his face full of tender yearning, tawny hair falling in gentle curls upon his shoulders; standing atop a rock, palms uplifted, preaching to his kneeling, rapt apostles; or, barefoot and robed, riding up, up, and away on a shaft of golden sunlight streaming through a hole in a cloud.

But church was filled with riddles. I was told that, as the priest mumbled, waving his hands like a wizard over the silver tray of wafers and the chalice of wine, Christ himself was present there before us. But I never saw him. I looked and looked. And what about this business of the Communion wafers being Christ's body? Every picture of him I had seen indicated that our Lord was no giant; after all of these hundreds of years and all of these Masses in all of the churches
of the world, by now he should have been entirely punched through with holes.

Nobody told me I might think of it as a metaphor. True, at seven, eight, or nine, I had limited capacity for abstract thought. But someone could have tried. Did all of these Catholics—did my parents, my older sisters—really believe all this literally? When, on my own, through years of careful observation and deduction, I had determined that Santa was a pretty fiction, and I had begun to consider that the same might apply to the biblical miracles and the empty tomb, I did not feel free to speak my thoughts. When I was fourteen, a confirmed doubter being asked to proclaim in front of the congregation that I was a believer, I felt alone with my awkward secret; it would have been a great gift, though a highly unlikely one, for some priest to take me aside and whisper, “You know, it's only the
symbolism
of the stories that matters, really.” I was years away from being able to think of the strange and glorious Christian story as a poem, a way of expressing indirectly, in images and words that humans comprehend, those things that, by definition, transcend comprehension.

What did my father—the lifelong Catholic, the altar boy—think? I do not remember asking him. Perhaps when I was three or four I posed, as children do, rudimentary theological questions to my parents: What is God? When you die, where do you go? But what I remember of my parents' conception of faith is just one thing: they went to church, and they required their children to do so. My mother had come to Catholicism late, at seventeen, because she married my father. But he, like generations of Forhans before him and like his children after him, was born into it. Is it possible he doubted this faith he had not chosen? He was a practical man. His job was to make things add up. Did the story of Christ and the concepts of sin and salvation in which he professed belief make sense to him? Maybe it didn't much matter. Maybe he was a Catholic in the way he was an orphan and
grandson and father: it was something that happened to him, so it was something that he was, not something to think about. And because he was Catholic, he weekly expressed, in ritual and song, his understanding of his insufficiency, his sinfulness, his duty to be humble and strive to reach the ideal of absolute love and sacrifice embodied by Christ.

Like my father, I was told that Jesus was conceived by a ghost and that, because of him, when you're dead, you're not really dead. And I believed it. In second grade, wearing dark slacks, a white shirt, and a clip-on bow tie, I took First Communion, sticking my tongue out so the priest could set a thin bit of our Lord upon it. He tasted kind of good. The next year came my first confession: the ritual of opening, with quivering hand, the polished wooden door, then stepping into the small dark box of a room, lowering myself onto the creaky kneeler, waiting for the little window to
shhh
open before me, the dim figure of the priest leaning at his ease on the other side, his ear toward me. Regularly afterward, groups of us children were brought from the classroom into the church to do this. Peering at the blurred outline of the priest as he waited for me to speak, I had to think, and fast. Had I hit my sister? Talked back to my mother? Dillydallied and daydreamed and not made my bed? I didn't think so, but I had to say something; I would tell the priest that I had done those things. Given a penance of two Our Fathers and five Hail Marys, I got up off my knees, then exited the confessional as if floating; it really did work—I felt absolved, scrubbed clean. At the front of the church, I knelt before the altar, bowed my head, and murmured my assigned prayers. But the relief was only temporary. I felt deflated when I thought of what I had been taught: that there would be a lifetime of this—decades of monitoring my misdeeds and loathing them, of pleading for another chance, of asking for forgiveness that, stained from the start, I might not deserve.

Even in my twenties, long after I had left the church, Catholicism remained in my muscle memory. If I would not, as my father did, con
tinue to practice the public rituals of the faith into adulthood, I nonetheless would find myself unable to shake it entirely: certain habits of mind and body had been shaped by it. In graduate school, I worked for a summer in a candy store in a Maine resort town. One afternoon, in a moment when I hadn't anything else to do, I grabbed a broom and started sweeping. A customer remarked, “You're Catholic, right?”

I looked up from my work. The woman was smiling.

“I was raised Catholic,” I said. “How did you know?”

“I recognize the sign: doing more than you have to because you know you can never do enough.”

28

In third grade, I was a good boy. My grades in deportment and attention were exemplary. Regularly, I promised to do my best to do my duty to God and my country, to be square and obey the law of the pack: like the other boys I knew in school, and like my brother before me, I had joined the Scouts. I was a boy; it's what a boy did. “Do you like to pretend you are someone else sometimes?,” I had read in the
Wolf Cub Scout
Book
. “Well, Cub Scouts in their meetings pretend they are cowboys, space cadets, firemen, policemen, knights, and almost any kind of hero.” This sounded promising. And I admired the uniform: the smart blue pants and shirt, the gold belt buckle, the neckerchief, the cap. In it, I was unimpeachable. This is a boy, the uniform said, on the side of right, a reverent boy, a courteous boy, a boy aware already of what will make him, one day, a respectable man: a knowledge of knot-tying and pocketknife safety.

Week by week, in my official Scout book, I checked off accomplishments that proved me a worthy member of the pack: I played catch with someone twenty feet away. I showed three ways we give respect to the flag. I wrote a fifty-word essay on what I liked about America. I practiced my religion as I was taught. I explained what to do in case there was an accident in the home and one of my parents needed help.

I was practicing my reading, too. Sister Aida was fond of the Dictionary Game: at our desks, each of us sat before a closed dictionary. She called out a word—
disciple, tabernacle, resurrection
—and the first student to find it in the dictionary raised his or her hand and read aloud the definition. I often found the word first: I was becoming proficient in spelling, at least.

Outside of school, I read everything that entered my line of sight: cereal boxes, Richie Rich comics, mattress tags. There were few books in our house; my parents had sprung for a set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias and a few
Reader's Digest
condensed books, but there were no Jane Austen novels, no collections of Shakespeare, and I doubt I would have cracked their spines if I had discovered them. Instead, I let the language of advertising flow into me unimpeded. Riding in a car, I made a silent game out of trying to read every word on every billboard and business sign as it passed.
Eat Energy-Packed Hansen's Sunbeam Enriched Bread. Dag's Beefy Boy Burgers 19 Cents. Nixon's the One.

When I wrote, I did so primarily to convince people that I was admirable. In a flamboyant effort to please Sister Aida, I wrote a seventy-­word illustrated novel about an insect who knows nothing but then goes to school to learn and becomes so smart and appreciative of teachers that he opens a school of his own.

Only once that I recall did I use writing privately, as sheer self-expression, as personal catharsis. I had been bullied—as many in my third-grade class had—by a boy named Leslie. Maybe his girlish name made him surly. He was stocky and blond, his head flat as an anvil, and, when he wasn't scowling, he smirked. As all of the students in the class paraded single-file out of the building to the playground, he was fond of stepping swiftly out of line and shouldering someone hard toward a wall, like a hockey player checking an opponent against the boards. On hot days at recess, he grabbed the sweater I'd wrapped around my
waist and tossed it into the bushes. In the classroom, when I rose from my seat and walked to the pencil sharpener, he followed, then stood behind me, poking me repeatedly, rhythmically, in the lower back with his pencil tip. One morning, outside of school, when he was certain that no one was watching, he spat at me, the bubbly white stuff hitting my pant leg and dribbling down. This was too much, finally: I reported to Sister Aida what Leslie had done. I don't recall the punishment he received, but it was not enough for me. Later that day, sitting on the asphalt playground, leaning my back against the wall of the gym building, I lifted my pencil to the red brick and wrote, slowly, deliberately, pressing down hard, “Leslie is a moron.”

I lowered my pencil and looked up. Striding stern-jawed across the playground directly toward me was one of the older nuns. She reached down, yanked me up by the elbow, and pointed at the wall. “What's this?” she demanded.

“I don't know.”

“Yes, you do.” She spied the pencil in my fist. “Is that yours?”

“No.”

“You're staying after school today, and you're going to scrub your handiwork off this wall.”

So I did. But writing those words—pushing my pencil lead emphatically against the brick, making palpable my unequivocal judgment of Leslie's mental capacity—had been exhilarating. He had spat on my pants, so I had spat on his character. I had felt something real and expressed it. Still, I had hoped to do so anonymously, the vandalizing of church property being a sin and all.