The first call was from my father-in-law. It happened barely an hour after my daughter had been born. He was in Asia on business and had found out about the birth of his first grandchild in a call that we had relayed to him through his wife. News like this travels fast in families – even back then more than two decades ago – and, when my father-in-law called across seven time zones and three continents, the hospital quickly patched him into our room.
I can honestly say I forgot what I said to my father-in-law as soon as I handed the phone to my wife. I was never that close to the man in the first place and even this new generation which we both – oddly enough – had a hand in bringing into the world wasn’t going to change that. That unremarkable phone call was the high point of our relationship. Looking back, I can see how it went downhill from there.
The second call didn’t happen until later that night as I was coming home from the hospital after my daughter and wife were finally asleep. Once I got in the door it took very little time to figure out that another man was trying to get in touch with me. Walking in I turned on a lamp and the light popped like a flashbulb – the room went white with a spark and then again turned suddenly, startlingly black. It left phosphenes of light and the images of furniture and window casings playing across my retinas as if they were photographic paper.
I wandered around the room temporally blinded, not really knowing where I was going until my ankle rammed the bottom step of the bedroom staircase. Falling on the stairs, my knees hit the plane of the second step with a thud that shook the stairwell and knocked down one of the pictures we had hung on the inside staircase wall. I couldn’t see the picture but I could feel it; so I picked it up and groped my way into the kitchen looking for a light I could count on. That was when the phone started to ring.
I grabbed at the sound of the bell in the darkness until my figures touched the receiver, my legs still shivering from the bruises to my knees and ankles. But the line went dead as soon as I brought the mouthpiece near my lips. That’s when I’d had enough and I flipped up the wall switch in the kitchen only to look down at my hand and see that I was staring at a picture of my father.
When someone burning with love for you wants to get your attention, when they demand you answer their call no matter how much you may not want to talk with them, no matter what is unresolved between you or how much you might be trying to crawl out from under them - even if that person has been dead for five years – it’s just better if you answer that call as soon as possible. My old man was dead and he was pissed. He wasn’t there to see his first granddaughter. He hadn’t been able to call me on the phone from Asia or anywhere else. Where my father was there were no phones. All he had to work with were the supercharged, supernatural physics of the hereafter – the air of earth that could be electrified to pop a light bulb, the shove from a ghost he could use to send me careening into a staircase, the phone he could make ring through the will of his rapidly diminishing spirit. My father made sure he got in touch with me that night. He wasn’t going to let another man, another father (in-law or otherwise), take this moment for himself.
I walked back into the front room and hung the photo of my father back in its place above the stairs. I sat on the steps and looked at it for some number of minutes. In the framed photo my father was dressed as a soldier. He was smirking just like I do, cocking his head in those simple, youthful black and white shadows that I will always see when I look in the mirror. I don’t know what he was thinking in the picture. But I know what I was thinking. I was thinking that I would now have to use my own body as the bridge between my father and my daughter. That was really what my father had in mind when he called. He just wanted to make sure I knew that. And then he was gone.
Over the years allowing my daughter to walk across my back to get to my old man has not always been pleasant. Of this, I can assure you. When you take on such as task, somebody is going to get hurt and mostly it will be you. But this had to be done. How else to let the girl know that she is the daughter of an imperfect son of an imperfect father? In the absence of my father, I’ve had to be the one to lead my kids through the darkness and into the light of their history. I really didn’t have much choice in it anyway and it was really the only decent, fatherly thing to do to help them truly see who they are. I think my kids will be happy that I allowed them to use me to cross the river to my father’s humor, his rage, his crazy love. But who can say.
Do I believe in ghosts? Ask my first child. She just happens to be 21 years old today and she can now legally, officially, answer for herself. Ask her if she thinks I believe my father is still around us. Ask her if she believes her long dead grandfather is still with her. The way things have turned out neither of her grandfathers are in her life. But the call could come for her any time now. And when it does, I’m pretty sure she’ll know who’s calling.
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