And it is in this driveway, in the not-too-distant future, that a thing of beauty will appear, shining in the summer sun. Not a Schwinn Sting-Ray but its motorized equivalent, the color of champagne, and with the same intoxicating properties.
Dad doesn’t leave his new car in the driveway for the neighbors to see. If they’re so inclined, they can see it soon enough, sharking through South Brook in the predawn or early evening on his travels to and from 3M. And he certainly doesn’t wash it in the driveway on weekends. Senior executives of the Mickey Mouse Mining Company with a quarter of a century of tenure get their cars washed and gassed up at the corporate headquarters garage.
And yet there is an undeniable pride of ownership when Dad calls Mom’s mom from the kitchen. “I told you thirty years ago that one day I’d be driving a Cadillac,” he says, as Grandma pretends to remember.
“Well, I’m driving a Cadillac,” Dad says.
Comfort has never been a concern of his. Dad has never owned a pair of jeans—he calls them “overalls”—and sleeps by choice beneath a single thin sheet. This car is his sole indulgence, the only material good he has quietly coveted in his life as a father.
He would have preferred to drive his champagne Seville to Cincinnati to show it to his mother-in-law in person, but those trips are in the past—all of them made in the butterscotch Impala or the blue Country Squire, or the baby-blue Impala that Jim now drives to college—trips made when five children were fighting in the back for elbow room, attention, and a sliver of air rushing in through the window vent.
In those days, tired of buying him tennis balls and socks and Old Spice for his birthday, we annually asked Dad if there wasn’t anything else he would like. And he always said the same thing. He gathered us to his side—Amy and The Boys; one redhead and four shitheads—and told us that he already had everything he ever wanted. The car is just a box to keep it in.
Epilogue
Oh, Oh, Telephone Line
The five Rushin siblings gathered in that driveway two more times. The first was on September 5, 1991. Mom had been sick for the previous nine months with a rare disease that was eventually diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic as amyloidosis. Abnormal proteins were building up in her organs, including her heart. Her physical decline was swift, but she always put on lipstick before receiving visitors in the hospital, as she had every night when waiting for Dad to come home from Mickey Mining.
That summer, when she called me from the banana-yellow phone in the kitchen to deliver the news of her prognosis—that she might live another three to five years—I cried for the first time as an adult, alone in the squalid New York apartment I shared with three roommates. Before she hung up, she said, “I love you.” It didn’t occur to me until that very instant I’d never heard her say it before. To me, the declaration wasn’t remotely necessary. I think she just wanted it entered into the record.
“I know,” I said. And then, after a too-long pause: “I love you too.” But I think by then she’d hung up. I didn’t call back to say it again, even though the number still was—and will always remain—at the forefront of my brain, thanks to her: 888-2872.
Jim and Tom were living and working in Chicago at the time. Amy and John were both attending college in South Bend, Indiana—Amy as a premed junior at Saint Mary’s College, John as a freshman on a hockey scholarship at Notre Dame. The little brother we assaulted with slap shots in the basement was now six feet six. He had declined football and baseball scholarship offers to Division I universities. He was drafted out of Kennedy High School by the New York Rangers. The notion that his not-yet-toothless smile might one day appear in Goal magazine, to be scissored out and taped to a basement wall somewhere in North America—as we had done with head shots of Jude Drouin and Yvan Cournoyer and Bobby Clarke—was yet another illustration that dreams routinely came true to the blessed citizens of Bloomington.
Mine certainly had. In 1991, I was the baseball writer for Sports Illustrated, whose editors had dispatched me to Chicago on the night of September 4 to write about White Sox slugger Bo Jackson. Somehow the baseball cards I’d kept in Velveeta boxes in the bedroom closet had sprung to life all around me.
After returning to my hotel late that Wednesday night from the game at Comiskey Park (the White Sox beat the Royals 4–1), I was wakened in my room by a predawn phone call. In the blackout-curtained darkness of the Marriott on Michigan Avenue, I didn’t know where I was or even who I was.
But I recognized Jim’s voice.
“Mom died,” he said.
He had already made flight arrangements. Jim, Tom, Amy, John, and I were all meeting at O’Hare at midmorning and flying to Minneapolis. It would be an aerial version of the same trip we made twenty-two years earlier in the butterscotch Impala, but without the stopover in Wisconsin Dells.
Mom had died in bed in the middle of the night, hours after Dad had returned home from his own mother’s funeral in New Orleans. Having buried his mother and lost his wife in a span of hours, Dad now awaited the arrival of all his children, our safety at the mercy of Northwest Airlines.
“If this plane goes down,” I said to Tom, somewhere over Wisconsin, “Dad replaces Job as the standard for biblical suffering.”
We laughed nervously and squeezed the armrests at the slightest turbulence.
The plane landed safely, and we all piled out of a taxicab like clowns from a clown car at 2809 West 96th Street. Home again, home again, jiggety-jog. For Dad, a firm handshake—a modified Knuckle Floater—was always the proper greeting after many months apart. But in his grief, he gave each of us a bear hug in the driveway.
In the house, through the window, we could see neighbors bearing submarine sandwiches, tuna hot dish, and other good intentions disguised as pies and casseroles. Having packed in New York for three baseball games in Chicago, I attended Mom’s funeral in a borrowed suit and borrowed shoes.
A visiting priest none of us knew was assigned to say the funeral Mass at Nativity. He sat in our family room and asked each of us to describe Jane Rushin for use in his eulogy. I said she liked to do crossword puzzles and darn socks. It dawned on me as I was saying it that these were maternal acts of completion, of repairing or filling in holes. How many times had she done this for us—replenished our bellies, closed our wounds, had me rushed to Dr. Popovich to fill the space in my smile where my front teeth used to be? The priest didn’t use any of this.