My Father Before Me (28 page)

“Whose daddy?” says Oliver, who is three.

“Whose daddy? My daddy. He's not alive anymore. But he was my daddy when I was a boy. His name was Ed.”

“
Ed,
” Oliver muses. “Like
dead
. They rhyme!”

* * *

I am sitting in my office at home, squinting at the computer screen, fingers hovering above the keys. I've been at this for hours, adrift in the riddle of my long-dead, distant father, wondering how to decipher him, wondering how to imagine my way into his life through language. “Daddy?” The voice comes from behind me. “Daddy?”

“Just a minute.”

“Daddy?” It's Milo, my five-year-old.

I keep my eyes on the screen. “Give me a minute. I'm working.”

No, no. I lower my fingers from the keyboard and turn around. Milo's eyes are dark, his brow furrowed.

“Come on up.” I reach toward him, hook my hands beneath his arms, and lift him onto my lap. “Sorry, buddy. What's your question? What is it you want to know?”

PHOTOGRAPHS

Part I
  Ed Forhan, summer 1961

Part II
  Ed Forhan and Ange Peterson, Roosevelt High's White Clothes Day, 1946

Part III
  The first six Forhan children: Patty, Kevin, Peggy, Chris, Terry, and Dana, Christmas 1961

Part IV
  Bick Bark, spring 1974

Part V
  Kevin and Chris, summer 1983

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project began as a nagging itch, a question I wanted answered. Initially and for a long time afterward, I had little sense of whether I would end up with a book, let alone one that others would care to read. I am indebted to many people for their help in making this a real book. For their assistance in my research, I am grateful especially to my siblings: Erica Forhan, Kim Lambert, Dana Forhan, Kevin Forhan, Peg Forhan, and Theresa Steig; also relatives whose existence I discovered only when I started digging: Jim Stoeber, Mike Forhan, Virginia Forhan, Jeannine Forhan-Bruce, Shirley Nelson, and, ­particularly, Barbara Delaney; also Perry McIntyre, Paul David Merry, Debbie Davis, Andrew Ritchie, Nicholas Adam, Lisa Fusch Krause, and Kirk Lanterman.

I wish to thank Butler University and the Indianapolis Arts Council for the gift of time and funding that allowed me to write this book.

For their generous, thoughtful reading of early drafts, I am grateful to Carol Reeves, Andy Levy, Allison Lynn, Michael Dahlie, and Susan Neville. For their enthusiasm about the book in its final stages, I am thankful to Laura Kasischke, Larry Watson, Nick Flynn, Colin Harrison, and Nan Graham.

I am indebted deeply to three people who instilled me with confidence about the project and guided me, with patience and a bottomless reserve of keen insights, through multiple revisions: my agent and masterful perceiver of the big picture, Bill Clegg; my editor at Scribner, the gentle and surgically precise John Glynn; and, especially, my wife, Alessandra Lynch, who reminded me in the first place that I did indeed have a story to tell.

To Russ Scott, second father, my appreciation and love.

My most profound gratitude is reserved for my mother, Ange Scott, who trusted me with her story even though its details, in the way I have conveyed them, necessarily have been subsumed into my own; she would not, as she reminds me, tell the tale in the way I have. I am astonished by my mother's generosity and support, which can be understood only as acts of love—as were the daily ways, for decades, she protected, nurtured, and guided her children on their journey into the world.

Photograph by Alessandra Lynch

Chris Forhan is the author of the poetry collections
Forgive Us Our
Happiness
, winner of the Bakeless Prize;
The Actual Moon, The Actual
Stars
, winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize; and
Black Leapt
In
, winner of the Barrow Street Press Book Prize. He was raised in Seattle
and earned an MA from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA from the University
of Virginia. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two
Pushcart Prizes. His poetry has been anthologized in
The Best American Poetry
and has appeared in
Poetry
,
Ploughshares
,
New England
Review
,
Parnassus
, and other magazines. He teaches at Butler
University in Indianapolis, where he lives with his wife and two children.

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris Forhan

Excerpt from “Dream Song 145,” “Also I love him:” from
The Dream Songs
by John Berryman. Copyright © John Berryman. Copyright renewed by Kate Donahue Berryman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Certain names have been changed.

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First Scribner hardcover edition June 2016

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Interior design by Jill Putorti
Jacket design by Thomas Colligan
Jacket photograph © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015034743

ISBN 978-1-5011-3126-4

ISBN 978-1-5011-3132-5 (ebook)