The Quiet Men

June 19, 2017. I am standing in an apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, holding a Father’s Day card addressed to a dead man.

It had been mailed a several days earlier, while Juan was still alive. It arrived the morning of his funeral, slipped through the mail slot while we were dressing in black, as the coffee was going cold on the counter, and as his wife and children moved through the apartment in that particular slow-motion that grief imposes. Someone picked it up from the mailbox and showed it to me. I recognized our handwriting. The room went quiet, differently than it had already been quiet.

My husband said nothing. Neither did I. Maybe we did. I can’t remember.

Harold and Juan never should have had anything in common. The evidence against it was considerable.

Harold, my father, was born on May 2, 1920, in Ottawa, Ontario — a city of a hundred thousand souls still sorting itself out after a war and a pandemic, cautiously optimistic, faintly British in its self-regard. He was the product of northern European ancestry, fair-skinned, with blue eyes so striking they were the first thing anyone mentioned when they described him. He was university-educated, an executive, a man who had studied Latin, and could read and write in French and Italian. He had one child. He read and travelled widely. He wore his learning quietly, the way some men wear a good coat — not to be noticed in it, but because the cold is real.

Juan, my father-in-law, was born on September 27, 1935, in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico — a small agricultural town built on sugar cane and slavery, on the northeast coast of the island, carrying in its bones the layered history of the Taíno, the Spanish, and the sea. He had the dark complexion and strong features of that blended ancestry, a face that was a kind of map. He left school after the elementary grades. He worked with his hands all his life. He had four children. He lived, in his final years, in a housing project in Hoboken, New Jersey, on a fixed income, on a balcony from which he could watch the city and, beyond it. He spoke almost no English. He needed none.

By any conventional measure — education, class, language, nationality, the century each inhabited — these two men had nothing to say to each other.

They were both roughly 5ft 6in tall.

They both had full heads of white hair when they died.

They were both Roman Catholic — Harold by deliberate adult choice, Juan by birth and by the bone-deep faith of a people who had been praying in that language for five hundred years.

They both married women who talked.

And they were both, at their cores, profoundly, constitutionally, almost philosophically quiet.

I met Juan’s silence on a balcony.

This is how it worked: after dinner, Juan would go out to smoke, and I would follow him. We would stand together in the Hoboken night — the city noise below, the red glow of our cigarettes — and drink his coffee, which was strong enough to constitute a separate food group, and say almost nothing. My Spanish was barely serviceable and certainly not intimate. His English was a handful of words, carefully deployed. We didn’t need much. He would look out at the buildings. I would look out at the buildings. The cigarettes burned down. We went back inside.

I think he trusted me because I didn’t try to fill the silence. Or perhaps because I drank the coffee without flinching and enjoyed a good smoke. Or perhaps, most simply, because he watched me make his son happy, and that was the whole of what he needed to know.

Whatever the reason, his trust was not theoretical. When his daughter — my sister-in-law, a woman in her thirties — died suddenly, it was me he asked to organize the funeral. I did. When he wanted someone to safeguard his life savings, it was to me whom he sent them. These were not small gestures from a man who made no large ones. These were, in Juan’s language — which was not English— declarations of love and faith.

We never spoke much. There was, in the end, nothing much to say. He saw what he needed to see.

My father’s love also came through the hands.

Once, at age 16, I was in a hospital in Italy — we were living there then — recovering from an emergency appendectomy. I had been flat on my back for days, and my hair, which was long and fine and given to tangling, had matted itself into something approaching felt at the back of my head. My mother, who was practical and impatient, and made no apologies for either quality, began pulling at it with a brush and threatened the scissors. My father took the brush from her hands. He put it down. He found a fine-toothed comb and began, with a patience I have never forgotten, to work the knot out one hair at a time.

It took him two hours. We barely spoke. He never hurt me once.

The room was warm, July-warm, Italian-warm, with gauze curtains lifting in the breeze and the smell of stracciatella drifting in from the corridor. My roommate was a nun whose hand lotion smelled of lily of the valley. I sat with one arm extended stiffly because of the IV needle, and my father stood behind me, and his hands moved like a whisper through my hair, and outside the window the light was the particular gold of an Italian summer afternoon, and I understood, without words, what I needed to understand.

He was away for most of my childhood. Work took him, as work does. We had a quiet relationship — affectionate but not demonstrative, proud on both sides, tender in the way that reserved people are tender, which is to say indirectly, and perhaps all the more real for that. He hugged me at my wedding. That I remember. Before that and after, there were other languages between us — the two hours with the comb, the way he tracked my career with a satisfaction he expressed mostly through calm appreciation, asking for details. A particular quality of attention, which was complete and unhurried, which felt, when it landed on you, like being the only person in the room.

He had studied Latin. He read Italian. He could navigate French. He was an expert in computers back when no one knew anything about them. He was a business executive. He painted in oils. He was a woodworker and a handyman. He had assembled skills the way some people assemble tools — not for display, but because you never know what you will need.

His hands moved like a whisper. I wrote that about him once, after he was gone, and I have never found a better sentence for who he was.

They met a few times, Harold and Juan. There were years of occasions, holidays, the ordinary furniture of two families joined by marriage. But I am thinking of a particular meeting, the quality of it.

Two quiet men. One fair, one dark. One with his education and his career, one with his elementary school Spanish and his life savings in a wire transfer. They sat together in whatever room it was, and they did not perform for each other. There was no competition, no assessment, no display of credentials. There was the comfortable, slightly formal courtesy of two men who have both learned that silence is not a problem to be solved. The women talked. The room was full of noise and food and the ordinary chaos of family. Harold and Juan sat in the middle of it like two stones in a river, letting the water go around them.

I imagine they found each other quite restful.

Harold died on June 19, 2005. Father’s Day.

My mother had been buried in May of that same year, on Mother’s Day. That was the year the calendar turned on us. I have no good explanation for it and have stopped looking for one.

I was with my father at the end. We were in a hospital in Mississauga, and for the last two days he was beyond speech, and so I simply stayed. I sat beside him and did not try to fill the silence, which seemed, under the circumstances, the only appropriate thing I had ever learned to do. There was nothing to say. He knew I was there. I knew he was leaving. The room had its own quality of time — slower, thicker, a different substance than ordinary hours.

When it was over, I walked out of the hospital into the June night. It was dark and chilly in the way that southern Ontario nights can be even in June, that particular freshness that comes off the lake. I picked up a hospital blanket somewhere along the way — I don’t remember the exact moment, only that I had it — and I wrapped it around my shoulders and sat on a bench outside and smoked a cigarette. Actually, several cigarettes. Then I got into my car and drove home. I still had the blanket.

I was reading, in those hospital days, The End of Nature by Bill McKibben. It was 2005, and McKibben had written it in 1989, one of the first serious attempts to bring the reality of climate change to ordinary readers — the end of a world, the loss of something that could not be recovered. I do not think I chose it deliberately. It was simply what I was reading while I sat beside my father and waited. The end of one nature. The end of another.

The blanket is still in my house. It has been here for twenty-one years. It lines the place on the sofa where the dog settles in for the night.

He doesn’t know what he’s sleeping on. I know, every night, when I pass by.

Twelve years later, June 19 came for Juan.

We had mailed the Father’s Day card a week before, while he was still living — or while we still believed he was going to live on, which amounts to the same thing when you are standing in a post office. The card was a gesture, ordinary and warm, the kind of thing you send because it is June, and he is your father-in-law, and you want him to know he is in your thoughts.

It arrived the morning of the funeral.

I held it for a moment. Our handwriting, cheerful and oblivious, addressed to a man who was already gone. The room was full of his family and their grief, and someone had handed me this card as though I would know what to do with it, and I did not know what to do with it, and I stood there holding it, and thinking about June 19.

Thinking about a cold hospital night and a blanket and a bench.

Thinking about two men who were 5ft 6in tall, who had full heads of white hair, who married women who talked, who carried their faith quietly, who expressed love through what they did with their hands — one man with a comb, one man with other practical things, one man two hours patient, one man trusting across a language barrier because he had watched enough, seen enough, understood in his bones what did not require translation.

The same date. Twelve years and the width of a continent apart. The same door.

I don’t know that anyone kept the Father’s Day card. What does one do with something like that?

The blanket is still on the sofa. The dog is on it now, as I write this, settled in for the night, warm and entirely unaware.

My father’s hands moved like a whisper. Juan’s coffee was strong enough to constitute a separate food group.

The quiet men. Gone on the same day, twelve years apart, as if they had arranged it — as if two men who preferred silence had found, in the end, one last thing they had in common.