Witness

“He wasn’t your real father.” We were sitting at the kitchen table, two days after we had buried Dad in the cold February earth, the early thaw lending itself to quick work for the grave diggers, the sun shining down on the Father, new to the parish and one I’d never met, intoning debts of gratitude and hopes of eternity for the beloved, the twisted logic of the trinity slipping and sliding through his homily, a wind gust whirling as I threw my handful of dirt on top of the coffin as if to spit it back out at me. And now Mother sat there, still wearing a mournful black, the lines drawn down her face to her mouth, deciding now to break her silence.

“What?”

She said again, “He wasn’t your real father.” I looked at my aunt for reassurance, for confirmation my mother was swimming in her own grief-hued reality, grasping for something to hold. My aunt, her hair grayer than my mother’s though years younger, would not look at me.

“What are you telling me?”

Now my mother looked at my aunt, who slowly shook her head, to suggest no, Lauren, you are on your own, this was your choice all the way around the circle. My mother sighed. “I don’t know how else to say it. That man, my husband, the man we just had a funeral for, the man you grew up calling Daddy – that man was not your biological father.”

“But you and Dad were married for nearly forty years. I’m thirty.” I don’t know why I said that, when I think about it; mathematics and biological urges don’t always align. My mother looked at my aunt again, seeking some kind of lifeline, but my aunt refused to accept the plea.

“Well, we had a bit of a rough patch. I had a bit of a rough patch. I wasn’t quite myself for a few months or so there.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” My temper was starting to flare, something I’d always attributed to my Irish father’s bloodlines. My dad’s family came to Detroit by way of New York City by way of a boat from Ireland, the search for a better life finally leading them to the promised land of auto factories and war machines. Here he met my mother, a woman of stout German stock, and they married. They lived all their married live in the suburbs, moving from a trailer to a one-bedroom to finally the current iteration, what passed for upper-middle-class in this world. “Why the hell do you think I want to hear this now?”

“Well…” and she seemed for once to choose her words carefully, this woman who thought nothing of when I was fifteen yelling across a store aisle if I needed more tampons, if I was on my period still. “I guess you should know the truth.”

“Is it the truth?”

My mother sighed. “Yes.”

“Why didn’t I need to know the truth years ago? Before now, when I could have talked to Dad about this, too?”

“I’m sorry,” said my mother, and she looked small sitting at the kitchen table my father built from trees in the woods behind our house, the woods that didn’t exist anymore because developers had swooped in and turned the woods into a veritable metal kingdom of money for white landlords, greedily feasting on the fearful white flight from the city. So much had changed.

“Great,” I said. “So who is my real father? Do I deserve to know that?”

“Ah, well…” and now my mother twisted a bit in her chair. “Do you want to know?”

“I damn well wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t. I’ve been mourning Dad for the past week and now you decided to tell me, oh, honey, by the way, I had a little period where I tried to find myself, and decided to try ‘slut’ on for size – and by the way, how’d it feel going to church every Sunday and teaching Sunday school to little kids while you were whoring yourself out? Who the hell was my father?”

“Clov, language,” urged my aunt. I threw up my hands but didn’t respond. In this my aunt and mother mirror one another – my casual cursing in anger is more a concern than my mother cheating on my father.

My mother mumbled something, but I didn’t hear it. “What?”

“I said who your father was.”

“You mumbled it. Who was it?”

“Mack Plank.”

“The baseball player?”

Mack Plank was a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers in the 1980’s; many fans still remember him more for his heroics starting Game 7 of the 1984 World Series, his long frame winding up time and time, despite having pitched only two years hurling, long hair flying as his tireless right arm flung ninety-five miles-per-hour heaters into the ninth, the scream he let loose from that bearded face as he sent the final Padre down swinging, face uplifted to the heavens

           His name sounded like a tall tale, a modern Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill, and some of the stories passed around matched a decedent legend: he drank all night long, took a half-hour nap before game time, threw back a little hair of the dog before the top of the first, and thew a 15 strikeout one hitter. He impregnated the entire Detroit Lions Cheerleading squad, and at least half the strippers in the Metro Detroit area. He once ran the Detroit Marathon without any training, won it, and then decided to run a marathon in every country in the world in a year. He jumped out of a plane without a parachute and landed on his feet, smoking a cigar all the way down.

My mother left the kitchen soon after admitting the name of her long-ago affair, the admission causing more questions than answers. She did not elaborate, nor did my aunt.

“It’s your mother’s story,” was my aunt’s only reply when I fixed my gaze upon her, and she left not only the kitchen but also the house, sitting in her car with the window cracked, smoke drifting out as she smoked and drained her battery listening to right-wing talk radio, promising relief for the liberal hatred of our nation. I took a bottle of wine to the sunroom; upper Midwesterners know the lack of sunlight in winter months makes the moniker a cruel joke architects play on the pale inhabitants of Michigan. Even the more dark-hued among us turn an ashy shade of their normal tone during these months, the only glow we see coming from a radiant lie of a tanning bed.

I sat and drank straight from the bottle, something I hadn’t done since I was nineteen, home from college, and my parents on their annual anniversary trip, driving around the west. My father always made certain to view at least one baseball game in person on these trips. He did not care if it was major or minor league, or some semi-pro affair dotted with bellies protruding over the belts, stolen bases and hints of speed rarely exhibited. I nearly vomited at the memory, because this remained one of my biggest questions – what did my father know? Did he know any of this, the affair, the man, his non-biological parentage?

A third of the way through the wine bottle I stopped staring at the trees missing leaves, the snow that seemed to vacuum the light rather than reflect and called Jack. Jack still lives in the area, and at the viewing for my father I saw him for the first time in nearly a decade and about burst into tears all over again.

           A few minutes later tires on gravel crunched, a slam, and the mumbled conversation as Jack talked to my aunt. He appeared around the side of the house and entered through the sunroom’s outer door, a paper sack in hand. I waved the bottle at him.

           “Brought my own,” he said and cracked the first Natty Light of the evening. I never understand that; if you’re going to destroy your liver, at least do it with something worth drinking.

           I told him about my mom and her story, and he listened silently. When I finished, he tipped the beer and emptied the last drops into his mouth before crumbling it into a mess of metal, tossing it next to his chair.

           “Wild,” he said and reached for another soldier from the six-pack. “Plank must have been quite the cox man, huh?”

           “Or my mom quite the loose woman,” I said.

           Jack laughed, a sharp retort that ended humorlessly. “If you can’t laugh about it…”

           “You’ll wind up killing someone. Or yourself.”

           Jack raised his eyebrows. “You’re much too smart for that. Well, at least too smart to get caught.”

           The Tigers are one of the best teams in baseball, and all the press lauds team effort but always focuses on the best individuals, like middle infielders Sweet Lou Whitaker and steady Alan Trammell. A Sports Illustrated cover story one week, Sporting News the next, all here for a cover story on the Tigers and their ace, Max Plank. Tall, bearded, throwing heat with a sneer and a determination to get an out or die trying, Plank stands on the infield and talks to the female reporter for the Free Press, tossing a ball in the air as he speaks, a curve of smile showing his teeth. She smiles in return, taking deep breaths to push back the blush she feels creeping over her face.

           After work, she sits in a nightclub with Diane the style reporter, not that Detroit is having too much of that lately. Diane comments obscenely as they drink their dry martinis and ogle men on the dance floor. Diane’s three times divorced and hoping four times will be the charm.

           Diane lights her cigarette. “I can’t wait to get out of this shithole town.”

           “Is that bad?”

           “Wait until you’ve been here for a half a decade. This place is sinking so fast in its own shit, no one wants to admit because that means they gotta stick their heads out of the pile – and that’s when the odor really hits you.”

           “Hey, you write for a living don’t you?”

           “What gave it away – my witty metaphors for life?”

           “Something like that.”

           She watches Diane blow smoke and sips her drink. She never wanted to live in Detroit but that’s where she moved, that’s where she met Al, so now it looks like that’s where she’s trapped. Female sports reporters are rare, she knows that, but hopefully she can make a name for herself, get some good bylines, and hit the road. Al’s good to her, in a 1950’s husband sort of way, where he wants to provide for her, but she’s sick of sitting at home on Thursdays while he goes to bowling night, she’s sick of the little apartment, so she’s started going out weeknights on her own without Al, sometimes calling at midnight to say she’s staying in Diane’s apartment with her, too much to drink so she’ll stay downtown and not take a cab back to their place, and when they both hang up she thinks he believes her about as much as she believes herself, right before she crawls back into the stranger’s bed she left whichever dumpy watering hole with that night, taking a drink from the beer on the bedside table, the one she always takes with her so she can sleep that night.

           Al might know but he would never tell her. He will keep on being that 1950’s husband, even when she’s an eighties girl.

           She heard a buzz in the room, the quickening pace of chatter alerting her and Diane to the presence of something special. A group of men, in fashionable clothing, some white and some black, walked to a corner cordoned off a red robe. It was Diane’s idea to come down here today, to this club she had never been in, and Diane insisted.

           “Oh my, my, my,” said Diane. “Look who just walked in.”

           “I just interviewed him today,” she said.

           “Which one?”

           “Plank. He’s having a hell of a season.”

           Diane drained her drink. “I don’t know much about that, but he’s looking like one hell of a man.”

           She nodded, and watched Max laugh with his teammates, all of them with the ease of athletes who know they rule the world. He scanned the room, his eyes occasionally lingering until they reached hers, and he smiled and raised a fresh beer.

She stared at the clinic, the sign small and insignificant seeming, the parking lot freshly plowed from the sudden fall snowstorms that whipped down from Canada overnight.

           “Are you going in or just going to sit here all day?” Diane blew smoke out the window. She had already been chastised once for blowing it in her friend’s face, thinking, what’s the difference if her pregnant friend got some secondhand today?

           “Can you let me alone for a minute?” She snapped.

           Diane smirked. “I don’t really know what there is to think about. You want to stick with Albert, fine. Just make sure you can explain why your little baby can throw a ninety mile an hour fastball at age five.” She lit another cigarette. “Personally, I think you’re making a mistake.”

           “So I shouldn’t go in?”

           Diane frowned. “No, you should definitely get your little problem there taken care of. You should also leave Albert. You could go anywhere and write for a paper – some of your pieces are getting noticed, now’s the time to make good. This town is dying. Get out while you can.”

           “He’s a good man.”

           “Honey, if you haven’t figure it out by now, there are no good men. They all want to get in your pants, and if you let the same one in too much, he gets bored of you and you get bored of him. We’re not supposed to stay with one person, that’s just a sociological fact. Besides,” Diane said, staring out the window, “if we are, why the hell did you sleep around so much this last year?”

           “Albert’s a good man,” she repeated. “It’s me. I’m what’s wrong. I’m not a good person.”

           Diane laughed, a cynical jolt. “Oh, honey. I don’t think either of us knows what that means.”

           In twenty years, a priest in the small seaside town in Mexico, the kind too poor for tourists and the cartels alike, will hold a funeral, and all the townspeople will attend. They’ll stare at the simple wooden coffin and remember the drunk who littered upon their streets for the past year, who begged for drinks and spent hours staring at the sea. One woman will hold her child’s hand as they sit on a pew in the back row, watching the priest intone in Latin, the smell of incense strong in the air. The woman talked this man only a few times during the year he lived in their town. She would often come upon him when she took morning walks along the beach. He would ask how she was and she the same to him. Her daughter squeezes her hand and she looks down, her gaze moving from the crucifix to her daughter, who asks why they have come when they did not even know the man.

           “He was a famous baseball player,” she tells her daughter, whose eyes widen.

           “Was he born here?”

Her mother shakes her head. “No. But he died here.” She thinks about her own mother and father, passed from the plague in the last year, and her husband across the border, building a life and waiting for them. “But every life needs a witness. Even in death,” she added.

She took a deep breath, looked at the small baby resting on her chest, the breaths of the baby moving in and out, quickly, as though afraid it might not get the chance again if it didn’t take it now. The contractions came on quickly last night, and she nearly delivered her child in the back of the Dodge. Perhaps she should give her a name to reflect that sort of luck, making it where you needed to be just in the nick of time.

Her husband returned from the hospital bathroom down the hall from her room and sat on the chair next to her. She looked at him and gave a tired smile.

           “Say hello to your daughter.”