Seven Mile Bridge. Michael M. Biehl
I decide to start the project by tackling what used to be my bedroom. The house is a Cape Cod, and my room, a second-floor dormer, has one of those ceilings that slant down to meet the wall, so designed in order to carve a few extra square feet of living space out of an attic. Once I hit puberty I was constantly bumping my head on the slanted part, and on the even lower ceiling in the gable, where the room’s only window affords a view of the backyard.
The room now appears to be used exclusively for storage, like much of the rest of the house. My old bed is still there, with brown cardboard boxes stacked up on top of it. The desk I studied at in high school is piled high with stuffed manila folders. Bundles of papers and magazines tied with twine cover much of the floor. The closet is packed tight with clothes, some of them mine, most of them my mother’s, all of them ludicrously out of date. Madras and paisley shirts, bell-bottomed corduroys, tartan wrap skirts with giant safety pins, rust-colored polyester pants suits. You wouldn’t want to let go of any of that good stuff, would you, Mom? I expect I’d find my old Davy Crockett coonskin cap in there if I looked.
One item I want to get out of the way first. I don’t want to stumble across it three days into the project when I might be feeling sentimental. I suspect it is somewhere in those manila folders where my mother kept important documents. Given the chaotic condition of the house, I am surprised to see that the folders are labeled and alphabetized, sort of, which should make finding things a whole lot easier. Or so I think until I start looking into the folders and find that the logic of my mother’s filing system was entirely her own. The contents of the folders are, as far as I can tell, completely haphazard. I see no discernible order or organization regarding which papers are in what folders.
Yes, the “A” folders include one labeled “Auto Insurance,” and there are a bunch of car policies in there. But they are on cars my parents owned in the ’50s and ’60s, and the same folder also holds recipes, newspaper clippings, Book-of-the-Month Club mailings, and a coupon for 25 cents off on a can of Alpo.
That starts with A, but my mother never owned a dog.
The more recent auto policies are in a folder labeled “Insurance,” which also contains several life insurance policies, every one of them surrendered or cancelled for failure to pay premiums. The policies are mixed up with personal correspondence, business cards, and pages of advertising ripped from old Newsweek magazines.
The folders labeled “Taxes” each have a year on them — 1975, 1992, 1956 but they are not in numerical order, and the most recent one is for five years ago. It looks like my mother has not filed a return for the past five years, and I wonder what kind of headaches that will inflict on the executor of her estate. She has kept hundreds of bank statements from dozens of accounts at different banks, but a quick flip-through reveals that they are sown like wildflowers across folders from “A” to “Z” and it is impossible to tell which accounts are still open and which aren’t.
Another hassle for the hapless executor.
One of the folders is labeled “Jamie,” and it is adjacent to one marked “Jonathan.” That makes me think the item I am looking for might be under “D,” for David, my father’s name. While shuffling through the “D’s,” I come across my mother’s will. Not under “W,” nor “L” for Last Will and Testament, not “T” for Testament, nor “E” for Estate Plan. Why “D”? For Death? Who knows? I check her will, not for the bequests (that can wait), but just to see who she has named as the executor of this hopeless mess.
It’s me. Thanks, Mom.
There is no “David” file, but there is one labeled “Dad.” This strikes me as odd, even though it seemed perfectly natural that my mother continued to refer to my father as “Dad” even after she remarried, since she had no children with her second husband. I open the folder.
The scrap of paper I am looking for, my father’s obituary from the Sheboygan Press-Gazette, is right on top.
Local Man Found Dead in Garage
David H. Bruckner, a lifetime resident of Sheboygan, died Tuesday. He was 50.
His body was found in the garage of his home in the Glen Oaks subdivision. The cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning. Police have ruled the death a suicide.
Bruckner worked for the past 15 years at Falls Dieworks, Inc., in Sheboygan Falls. “He was a loyal employee who will be missed,” said Falls Dieworks corporate president Leon Bridette.
Bruckner is survived by his wife, Louise, 48, and by two sons, Jonathan, 17, and James, 13.
The obit hits me like a faceful of scalding water, the words evoking the same mix of anger and mortification they did the first time I read them.
Local Man, they called him. Not “doctor” or “professor” or “business executive” or “journalist” or “philanthropist.” Not “corporate president” like that bastard, Leon Bridette. Just “local man.” I was angry that they tagged him with that insultingly commonplace epithet. I was mortified because, at that point, that’s about all he was. The statement that he was 50, which seemed sad and strange at the time, seems all the more so now that I am over 50.
Found Dead. They didn’t say by whom he was found dead, which was a relief.
But after three decades I can still remember the shame rising in my cheeks and behind my eyes at the word suicide, and I feel it again. The first time I saw it, I couldn’t believe the Press-Gazette would do that to us, to me. Didn’t they (I say “they” because there was no byline, which I, in my wrath and ignorance, interpreted at the time as cowardice on the part of the reporter) have any idea how it would affect me and Jamie socially? I did. I knew immediately we would henceforth be the worst thing you could be as a teenager: different. We would be the oddballs whose spooky weirdo dad offed himself in the garage. The tainted apples that could not have fallen far from the bent, sapless tree.
I was furious that they quoted Leon Bridette, after all the trouble that asshole had caused us. At the time I thought they should have said that it was Bridette’s fault my father was dead. The quotation had made me want to rip the article to shreds, since it was my father’s loyalty that Bridette had misused to screw him, and because the words were so outrageously phony. Bridette had fired my father months before he died.
Survived by. Now that phrase was good. Succinct, accurate, complete and, with the benefit of over thirty years’ hindsight, almost clairvoyant. If you want to describe what my mother, Jamie, and I did after my father died, “survived” sums it up pretty well.
A drinking buddy of mine in the Keys once suggested that I enhance the sign over the door to my dive shop by appending a piece of driftwood to it with “Jonathan Bruckner, Proprietor” painted on it. Typical Keys kitsch. I found a piece of driftwood that was actually a plank from an old skiff, weathered smooth with a few splotches of marine paint still clinging to it, something naive tourists might think came from a shipwreck. I shellacked it and dangled it from my sign out front, but what I put on it was: “Jonathan Bruckner, Survivor.”
The clipping of my father’s obituary is only about three inches long and two inches wide, so I can see what is directly underneath it — a yellowed, dog-eared letter addressed to David H. Bruckner on Bank of Wisconsin letterhead, dated April 5, 1971, which was about half a year before “local man” was “found dead in garage.”
That letter was a grenade lobbed into my family’s foxhole.
* *
April, 1971
The letter arrived on a Tuesday. I don’t remember what the weather was like but it must have been either cold or rainy because Jamie and I were both in the rec room watching television after school. I was stretched out on the sofa. Jamie was sprawled on the floor, insensitive to the cold hardness of basement linoleum.
We were not much alike in appearance. He was quite tall for thirteen and husky, while I was only average height for my age and thin. Jamie was blue-eyed and sandy-haired, like our Polish-American mom, while I had brown eyes and almost black hair, like Dad. I had a flat