Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Family History (1)

(1940s)

Boston. In the winters the cold stalked you, stealing your warmth by using the wind. Especially at night in a not-warm-enough house-that dark chill arrived and never left. Winter days that were a dull, gray cloud hanging over the city, clinging to bodies and buildings like a leech.

The bond with her mother had been intense and, for almost two years, uninterrupted. Her father left for the war before she was born and didn't return until she was old enough to understand what she'd been missing. Reunited, two parents and one child; she experienced love but also fear. Her first memories of her father were a blur of smiles and silence. A child, through no fault of her own, sees-and senses-when something isn't quite right. The development of an awareness that becomes instinctual, certain words, certain looks that indicate when a father should be left alone, or avoided altogether. Indifference followed by ever-shifting signals of affection. The child not only becomes cognizant of, but sensitive to the tense sounds of a quiet house. The more still and silent a house, the more frightening everything that this silence signifies becomes. Certain things that a child learns to fear become things that can never be forgotten.

...

Later, she understood her father had his own fears. The fear of God, the fear he might lose his job, the fear that he could be replaced. The fear of getting hurt or losing his house. The fear of some circumstance that would prevent him from being a husband, father, and man. He was a difficult man, a hard man. This was not a choice he made but was, rather, the result of experience and expectation: the worse those factors had been-for him, for fellow sons of immigrants-the harder he became. An austere, inextinguishable specter of poverty hung around every happy thought, an inescapable component of their existence. His doubts: would there always be work? Without a job there was no money, and without money there was no security. No security meant death. Providing security was a source of identity. The source. For a man, no worse affliction loomed than being unable to provide for his family. No excuses, laments, or regrets could be offered to counteract this truth. It is this solitary burden that equates to silence, and fear. And, occasionally, anger.

The chronic angers of that house. Much later, she came across a poem that helped explain him, and made more sense of her unwelcome memories. It usually requires the scope of perspective and distance-from one's parents; from one's childhood-to recognize the redemptory grace that a man who always put his family first is entitled to receive.

Sundays too my father got up early

And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

Then with cracked hands that ached

From labor in the weekday weather made

Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

...

Nonno. He wasn't a complicated man: he had struck a balance, and proudly considered himself an American, but he wasn't far enough removed from the old traditions to expect more than he was entitled to, and she'd never known him to question the life he'd made for himself. His accent was so strong it seemed he was speaking a different language. His hands were workman's hands, with the maps of labor and care imprinted on their clear, creased palms. Hands that had touched the earth, produced and created. Hands, she imagined, like God's hands-large, ancient, capable of molding and shaping the world to their design. His eyes were dark, like his close-cropped hair.

His son, her father, loved to work, and he was proud of the post office. He thought he had the greatest job in the world, even in the early days when he delivered mail in the city, on foot, wearing his scuffed and ragged boots through the slush, coming home to soak his callused feet in the bathtub. He never complained; he would say that every day in the city he saw people who reminded him how bad things could be, and how fortunate they were.

...

Childhood. The nights she would wake up, frightened and alone. In the middle of the night you heard all the things you didn't notice during the day. The refrigerator's internal engine talking to itself; the floorboards shifting and stretching; the wind and all the creatures outside that came to life when the sun went away; the house, straining against the burden of holding itself together. And then the other noises, the old ghosts, the spirits talking, knowing you won't sleep, or making sure you can't sleep so you'll hear them. How she would get out of bed and lean her head against the window, feeling its cold surface on her brow. Looking into the night sky and sensing her superstitions, carried over from her earliest memories. Those voices-was there ever a time when they weren't part of her? Had she simply discovered a way of remembering those who had gone before, preserving those lives in her memory? She knew they were connected to her in ways that death and time could not touch. She was connected to these feelings the way the sublime images in the stained glass were connected to the saints we sing about. The way the sun's rays, captured in that glass, refracted light and warmth through the church-God's light, giving life to that glass, just as He gave life to our souls. If you prayed carefully enough He would hear you. If she listened attentively enough the house itself could speak to her. The voice, languid, aware, seemed to whisper as though it understood the lives inside it would eventually expire, like candles that have burned through the night.