But to explain what he actually took out of his coat, and why it nearly knocked my mother off her feet, I have to go back. Back to the spring, and the layoff, and the things about my father that I had known my whole life without ever once knowing them.
My father's name was Tadeusz Dombek, but nobody called him that except the priest at Holy Rosary and his own mother, who was dead by then. Everybody else called him Ted. He was forty-one years old in 1985. He had worked at Sparrows Point since he was eighteen, first in the yard gang, then in the cold mill, then for eleven years in the tin mill, running a recoiler on the electrolytic tinning line, which as far as I could tell meant standing next to a machine the length of a city block while steel the thickness of a cereal box came screaming out of it at a thousand feet a minute, and making sure it didn't kill anybody. He was good at it. Men who worked with him told me so, at the bull roasts and the union picnics at Bay Shore, men with big red hands who'd lean down and say, "Your old man's got a feel for that line, you know that? He can hear it go wrong before it goes wrong." I believed them. My father could hear anything go wrong. He could hear a fan belt starting to slip on a car going by outside. He could tell you which of the Iannuzzi kids was crying across the street from the kitchen with the water running.
He was not a big man, but he was put together like something built to last. Short and wide, with a neck like a fire hydrant, black hair going gray at the sides, and a mustache he kept trimmed with my mother's sewing scissors. He had a burn scar on the inside of his left forearm in the shape of Florida. He whistled through his teeth when he was thinking, always the same three or four notes, which I found out years later were the opening of a polka his father used to sing. He was patient with machines and with animals and with me. He was less patient with himself.
My mother was Rosalie Dombek, born Rosalie Pokorny, from Brooklyn Park, across the harbor. She was thirty-eight. She had red hair from a box, a laugh you could hear from the alley, and a waitress's memory: she could hold six orders in her head and get every one right, down to which man wanted his crab cake broiled and which wanted it fried and which wanted extra tartar on the side. She'd worked at Haussner's on Eastern Avenue for nine years, the big old German restaurant with the paintings crammed up every wall, floor to ceiling, in gold frames, and the giant ball of string in the front that the waiters had been winding for decades. Tourists came from all over to eat there. Senators came. My mother waited on Johnny Unitas once and on the mayor twice, and she said the mayor tipped worse. She wore a black uniform with a white apron and soft black shoes with thick soles, and when she came home at night she'd sit on the bottom step of the stairs and take them off and say "Oh, Mother of God" to her feet like they were people who had let her down.
She did all the paperwork in our house. I want to put that down plainly, because I took it for granted for eleven years and I don't anymore. The mortgage, the gas and electric, the insurance, the forms from school, the letters from the union, the tax return every April at the kitchen table with her reading glasses on and a cup of Sanka going cold. The Christmas cards, all of them, signed "Ted, Rosalie and Joey." Birthday cards to my father's sisters. Notes to my teachers. When something came in the mail with a window in the envelope, my father would hand it to her without opening it. "That's yours," he'd say. "That's your department." I thought that was just how husbands and wives split things up. I thought that because it was how my parents split things up, and I didn't have any other parents to compare them to.
There were other things. I'll lay them out the way I've laid them out to myself since, over and over, the way you go back through a ballgame in your head after you lose.
My father never read me a bedtime story. He told me stories, every night until I was nine or ten, sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark with the hall light coming in. Wonderful stories. Long ones that went on for weeks. There was one about a cat who lived in a steel mill and could walk through the fire because his fur was made of copper wire, and he had a war with the rats in the coke ovens, and a crane operator named Big Ziggy who was his only friend. There was one about a boy who found a door at the bottom of the harbor. He did all the voices. But if I brought him a book, if I held out Charlotte's Web or one of the Hardy Boys from the library, he'd take it and look at the cover and turn it over in his hands and say, "Ah, you know this one already. Let me tell you a better one." And then he'd tell me a better one. And it always was. So I stopped bringing him books. Why would you bring a man a book when he had better ones in his head?
My father never ordered first at a restaurant. On the rare nights we went out, to the Double-T Diner or to Ikaros on Eastern Avenue for my mother's birthday, he'd hold the big menu up in front of him and frown at it, and then he'd say, "What are you having, Ro?" and whatever she said, he'd say, "Yeah, that sounds good. I'll have that too." Or he'd say to the waitress, "What's good tonight, hon?" and order whatever she said. My mother thought it was sweet. She said it was the one time in his life my father let somebody else decide something.
My father couldn't do instructions. When I got an Estes rocket for my tenth birthday, he sat down at the kitchen table to build it with me and handed me the sheet of directions right away and said, "Here, you read, I'll build. My eyes are shot from the mill. Too much glare off that tin." And I read, and he built, and it flew higher than anybody's on the block, over the roof of St. Casimir's in Canton practically, and we never found it. He bought reading glasses at the Woolworth's on Eastern Avenue, the kind that come on a spinning rack, and kept them in his shirt pocket, and I never once saw him put them on.
My father signed his name like he was drawing it. I noticed that once at the bank. He bent over the counter and wrote it very slowly, T-a-d-e-u-s-z D-o-m-b-e-k, his tongue at the corner of his mouth, each letter separate from the next, and it came out the same every time, exactly the same, like a stamp. My signature at eleven was already sloppier than his.