My Father Before Me by Chris Forhan Page B

Christ.” Almost until the end of his life, he attended Mass weekly, sidling into the pews with his grandparents and brother, then later with his wife and children, standing to sing, kneeling to pray, muttering, “Thanks be to God, thanks be to God.” He professed that the dead are not truly dead, that they will be resurrected.
    As a child, if my father could depend on little else, he knew that the church, with its enduring rituals, was unchanging: the hushed gathering at the baptismal font, the splash of water and the murmured prayers; the flickering banks of white votive candles; the sticking out of your tongue at the priest as he lifts the almost weightless wafer to your mouth; the altar boys’ little tinkling bells; the intermittently explicable Latin— Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus; and always the bleeding Christ gazing forlornly and expectantly down from where he’s been nailed, his mind half in this world, half in the next.
    My father would have found, in the church, a version of what he heard at home: that his ceaseless mission was to prove himself worthy. Almost any impulse within him must be scrutinized as a sign of possible trespass. Even an unconsummated thought, a fancy fueled by desire, could be an offense to God, so one had to be careful to keep the mind clean. And as for the hands, any number of things they were capable of could mean damnation: stealing, masturbating, taking another’s life, taking one’s own.
    He would have been taught the importance of honoring his mother and father. But what could that mean, exactly, with his mother dead and his father vanished?
    A mile to the west of where their mother and little brother lay, Eddie and Jim moved into their grandma and grandpa Carey’s house: a modest clapboard with a brick porch fronted by a tiny raised lawn. The old folks had the dust and calluses of the old country upon them still; they believed in discipline, duty, and honest labor; they had learned, I suspect, to demand little from life and to respect those whose ambitions and expectations were comparably humble.
    They tried to track down Nat, the boys’ father—and Bernadine’s widower, though Nat might not have known that. The Careys had no interest in talking to the heel; they wanted only to know whether he was dead. His mother had died in 1942, and Nat hadn’t shown for the funeral. Afterward, one of the Forhan daughters wrote to her brother, “John, do you know anything about Nat? Sister Dolorita told us that she knows that he is dead. She told us quite a story, but I do not know whether or not to believe it.”
    So Nat’s oldest sister, who had become a nun, claimed he was dead. The story apparently involved his coming to a bad end at the hands of gangsters; her own sister, also a nun, suspected she was lying. Maybe, for Sister Dolorita, loyalty to her brother trumped the commandment not to bear false witness; maybe she was covering for him so no one would worry about him any longer or come looking for him.
    Or maybe the tall tale was an act of charity toward the Careys: an invented story that would allow them to keep Eddie and Jim in their home. It might be no accident that, only three weeks after Dolorita announced the death of Nat, the Careys’ legal adoption of the Forhan boys was finalized, the adoption papers indicating that Nat had “deserted and abandoned” his children and had not contributed to their support.
    Also, if Nat were dead, he might have left behind a pension or insurance money. Responding to the Careys’ inquiry, the adjutant general’s office wrote that it had no record of a Nathaniel Forhan having been enlisted or inducted into the military. Nat’s life insurance company reported that if the Careys could show evidence of his death while the policy was in effect, they could make a claim for full benefits. In the meantime, the surrender value of the policy was