My Father Before Me by Chris Forhan

obligations as a husband and father, to acknowledge his children, to write to them, to call, to pay a nickel. I searched for him decades later. Eighty years after he abandoned his family, forty years after my father killed himself, I scoured old phone directories and census records, looking for a sign. Year after year, in the Bay Area, there are no Forhans, but there are a few Fred Grants, unmarried and without a distinguishing middle initial. Or perhaps there is only one Fred Grant, continually on the move. In 1937, he’s on Larkin Street, near Nob Hill. Later, he’s on Hyde, then Castro, then Cayuga, then Post, then Polk. He’s listed as a lodger. He lives in apartments. He’s a bartender. A gardener. A printing press operator. He might be my father’s father. He might not be. Nat Forhan has disappeared into Fred Grant, and Fred Grant into the vast anonymous crowd.
    Wherever he is, he is not there for my father’s third birthday party, or fourth or fifth. He is not there when his three young sons decide to play near the water, at the west side of Lake Union in the middle of the city. They walk down to the narrow shore from a houseboat they are living in with their mother and, probably, her new boyfriend. The gasworks, where the boys’ grandfather worked as foreman for two decades, is visible a mile away, its tanks and trestles and smokestacks stark against the blue sky at the northern edge of the lake. He died a month ago, their grandfather Forhan, at only sixty-four. Have they heard about this? Had they even known him? And do Eddie and Jim, in the midst of their play, notice how long it is taking Skippy to return from the houseboat with a jar of ice? Whatever they are up to, they need that ice, but Skippy is only five, easily distracted. What’s keeping him this time?
    He does not come back. After collecting the ice and running downthe gangplank that connects the house to the shore, he slips. For too long, no one notices he is missing. His brothers believe he is on his way back from the house. His mother believes he has returned to his brothers. Later, when the sheriff’s bloodhound, King, arrives, the dog needs little time to sniff his way to the end of the gangplank and stop there. Skippy’s body, a few hours later, is hauled up from the lake bottom.
    For almost forty years, until his own death, my father rarely spoke about Skippy. A couple of times when I was young, while driving past Calvary, the Catholic cemetery near our neighborhood, he’d say, “My little brother’s in there.” Or maybe I have that wrong; maybe it is only my desirous memory putting those words into his mouth and placing him behind the steering wheel. Maybe it was my mother who pointed at the simple chain-link fence and said, “You know, your dad’s little brother’s in there.” My father certainly never told us the whole story, or even part of it—but for all of those decades he kept a newspaper clipping about the drowning. I discovered that only when I began writing this book, and my mother said, “I have a small box of some of your father’s old things. There’s nothing special in there, probably, but you’re welcome to give it a look.” Before I held the newspaper article in my hands, I’d heard so little about Skippy, the poor drowned boy, and his name sounded so unlikely—too cute to be true—that the whole sketchy story seemed the wispiest of fairy tales. But it happened.
    Skippy was buried in the graveyard where his grandfather had been laid to rest the month before. They were placed acres away from each other, with a hill between them. According to cemetery records, the address of the person paying for Skippy’s burial was that of Bernadine’s in-laws. Maybe Ellen Forhan, Skippy’s grandmother, took it upon herself to pay. Maybe even Nat—Fred—did, if he had the money. The plot cost ten dollars and the box, made of