I'll Be Gone in the Dark(10)

The man looks at Terry with no recognition. I see Terry is undeterred, and unease washes over me. I have a mother’s instinct to reach out, redirect, and quiet down. But I can see Terry wants to distinguish himself in the man’s memory. They are old neighbors after all.

“I’m one of the boys that found the body!” Terry shouts.

The man stares at Terry from the side of his car. He says nothing.





The blankness is emphatically hostile. I look away, directing my gaze at a tiny Virgin Mary statue planted in the northeast corner of the front lawn.

It’s Saturday afternoon, June 29, 2013—an unusually cold and windy day for midsummer Chicago. In the sky, a block to the west, I can see the steeple of St. Edmund Catholic Church, my family’s old church, where I went to school from first through third grades.

The man returns to tinkering with his car. Terry peels off to the right. He spots me thirty yards down the sidewalk. I light up at eye contact and wave furiously at him, compensation for what just transpired. Terry was a year above me at St. Edmund’s. The last time I remember seeing him was thirty-five years ago. I know little about him aside from the recent discovery that the same night in August 1984 changed both our lives.

“Michelle!” he shouts, walking toward me. “How’s Hollywood?”

We hug awkwardly. His manner brings me back immediately to the Oak Park of my childhood. The flat vowels in his thick Chicago accent. The way he announces later that he has to “haul ass.” He’s got a cowlick, a raw, pink color to his cheeks, and an utter lack of artifice. No calculating mechanism filters his thought from speech. He starts in right away.

“So yeah, what happened was,” he says, leading me back toward the house. I hesitate. Maybe it’s fear of the already unhappy homeowner’s reaction. Maybe it’s my sense that walking might help transport us to that muggy summer night when we still rode bikes but had tasted our first sip of beer.

I look south down the alley.

“How about we retrace the path you guys took that night?”

Oak Park borders the West Side of Chicago. Ernest Hemingway, who grew up there, famously referred to it as a town of “wide lawns and narrow minds,” but that wasn’t my experience of the





place. We lived in a drafty three-story Victorian on the 300 block of South Scoville, a cul-de-sac in the center of town. North of us was the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio and an affluent neighborhood of prairie homes and liberal professionals intent on staying hip. My friend Cameron lived in one of the Wright homes. Her stepfather was a civil rights attorney, and her mother was, I think, a potter. They introduced me to vegetarian salt and the word “Kabuki.” I remember the stepfather recommending that Cameron and I, who both tended toward black smocks and confessional verse, cheer ourselves up by going to see the Talking Heads’ concert movie Stop Making Sense.

South of us was mostly blue-collar Irish Catholic families. The houses were always a few degrees too cold and the beds lacked headboards. Occasionally a father would disappear with a twenty-year-old, never to be seen again, but there would be no divorce. A college friend who spent sophomore year spring break with my family was convinced that my father was doing a comedy bit when he began updating me on the local gossip. The last names, she said, were so exclusively, defiantly Irish. The Connellys. The Flannerys. The O’Learys. And on and on. I overheard a weary Irish Catholic mother from Oak Park field a question about my family once. “How many McNamara kids are there?” she was asked.

“Only six,” she said. She had eleven.

My family had a foot in both sides of Oak Park. My parents were natives, members of the tribe commonly referred to as West Side Irish. They met in high school. My father was gap-toothed and jolly. He liked to laugh. My mother was the teetotaling eldest daughter of two hard partiers. She loved Judy Garland and had a lifelong fascination with Hollywood. “People used to tell me I resemble Gene Tierney,” she told me shyly once. I didn’t know who that was. When I saw Laura years later, the mysterious central character who shared my mother’s cascade of golden-flecked brown hair and delicately cut cheekbones mesmerized me.





The story is that my parents got together when my father knocked on my mother’s door looking, allegedly, for a friend of his. I believe it. The indirect approach to emotional matters suited them. They both had enormous eyes, my father’s blue, my mother’s green, that expressed with great feeling what they frequently could not.


My father briefly considered the seminary while away at Notre Dame. They called him Brother Leo. My mother considered other suitors and doodled alternate possibilities of her future last name. But Brother Leo decided the seminarians didn’t drink enough. Their friend, Rev. Malachy Dooley, officiated their wedding the day after Christmas, 1955. My eldest sister, Margo, was born the following September. Tease my mother with a raised eyebrow about the math and her cheeks burned. Her nickname in high school was Goody Two-Shoes.

After Northwestern Law School, my father went to work for the firm Jenner and Block downtown. He stayed thirty-eight years. Most days began for him in a chair on our screened-in front porch, one hand holding the Chicago Tribune, the other a cup of tea, and ended with a very dry Beefeater martini on the rocks with a twist. When he decided to get sober, in 1990, he announced the news in his usual quirky way. Each child received a typewritten form letter. “To my favorite child,” it began, “I’ve decided to join the Pepsi Generation.” He later claimed that only two children believed the salutation. I was one of them.