The Canals of Mars: A Memoir

by Gary Fincke

Overview

The Canals of Mars is a memoir that explores and ponders "weakness," which in Gary Fincke's family was the catch-all term for every possible human flaw-physical, psychological, or spiritual. Fincke grew up near Pittsburgh during the 1950s and 1960s, raised by blue-collar parents for whom the problems that beset people-from alcoholism to nearsightedness to asthma to fear of heights-were nothing but weaknesses.
     In a highly engaging style, Fincke meditates on the disappointments he suffered-in his body, his mind, his work-because he was convinced that he had to be "perfect." Anything less than perfection was weakness and no one, he understood from an early age, wants to be weak.
     Six of the chapters in the book have been cited in Best American Essays. The chapter that provides the book's title, The Canals of Mars, won a Pushcart Prize and was included in The Pushcart Book of Essays: The Best Essays from a Quarter Century of the Pushcart Prize.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780870138805
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	03/02/2010
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Gary Fincke is Emeritus Charles Degenstein Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University. A two-time winner of a Pushcart Prize, he has also won seven book prizes, including the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction, The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, and the 2017 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose.

Read an Excerpt

the canals of mars

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By GARY FINCKE

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Gary Fincke
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-880-5

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Chapter One

Beginnings

The Ass-End of Everything

"I want to find the farm where The Prince fell off the silo," I tell my father as we cross Route 8 and head into territory I haven't visited in nearly thirty years.

"A farm like that won't be there after all this time," he says. Passing another new housing development, I see the sense of his caution, but I say, "Let's find out."

We drive for almost an hour, taking each of the through roads, looking for where The Prince, my grandfather, lived for nearly fifteen years in a sort of halfway house between a dissolved marriage and the charity home where he spent the last two decades of his life. We cross and then recross the Pennsylvania Turnpike, so I know we're close because I remember my father pointing and saying how that road, just completed, was the first of its kind in the United States. The third time we pass over the turnpike, I remember the mink farm we drove by just before we arrived. I never saw those minks, but each time my father would announce it—"There's the mink farm"—and I'd stare at the long, low buildings, expecting to see women in brand new luxurious coats saunter out the doors.

"Turn up here," my father suddenly says. "This is it, right across from what's left of that orchard. That's where Huggins' Farm was." The sign, when I crest the hill, says Treesdale, which turns out to be a luxury golf course and expensive houses. "My guess is out there somewhere is Huggins' Farm. Maybe a half dozen of those holes and some of those mansions."

The golf course looks perfect, as if nobody plays on it. As if it were there for scenery from the windows and decks of the half-million-dollar houses set back to shank distance from the fairways. Were he alive, The Prince, skillful with a knife, could have carved miniature sets of clubs from balsa wood or, more profitably, from soap. Those wealthy enough to belong to this club would refuse the wood, but they would buy soap shaped like the head of an oversized driver or the grooved face of a sand wedge.

I slow down, but we keep moving, leaving the fairways behind. "I thought it was Rabold's Farm," I say. "I never heard of Huggins' Farm."

"The Prince lived at Huggins'."

"But we visited Rabold's?"

"Yes. Your mother walked to Huggins'. It was almost next door. The rest of us didn't visit The Prince. I worked for Rabold when I first started in the bakery."

"They had a retarded kid who scared me."

"Down Syndrome," my father says. "So did the Huggins."

Walking distance. Less than a mile apart, then, those farm houses, and two Down Syndrome boys of nearly the same age. Coincidence? Something in the water? When I ask my father, he says, "Nobody talked about such things in 1950." But it's no wonder I was confused. The Down Syndrome double play is the sort of detail that makes a story implausible. In fiction, I would strike one of those retarded boys. And I would make The Prince worse.

"So I just think we were visiting The Prince. We really weren't?"

"Oh no. Never."

"But he was within walking distance?"

"Well, call it what you want."

It was absurd, of course, that my father, my sister, and I visited one farm so my mother could visit with her father at another. And it was miraculous that The Prince tumbled off the top of a silo and not only lived, but walked away unharmed—relaxed as a cat, according to Aunt Margaret, my mother's oldest sister, by alcohol. "He looked like Little Boy Blue in that haystack," Aunt Margaret would say every time she told that story. "The s-o-b. Only an old stew would live through a fall like that."

He fell in 1950, the same summer my parents took my sister and me with them to visit Bethesda Children's Home, the orphanage overseen by a friend of my parents. We took a tour around the spacious grounds and ended up entering the dining hall when hundreds of children of all ages were sitting down to Sunday dinner. "Children," the director said, "I have someone to introduce to you. These are the Finckes, Judy and Gary. Welcome them to Bethesda."

The children clapped, but I had just turned five years old and became terrified by the last sentence. My sister and I were staying! She waved and smiled like an idiot who was happy to move into Bethesda, and I began to cry, convinced I was about to be led to a seat along the benches.

I took a step forward and turned to plead with the director just as he extended his hands. "Aren't you feeling well?" he said, leading me up the stairs into daylight. My parents were sitting in chairs talking with the director's parents. "Did you fall?" my mother said.

"No."

"What's wrong then?"

"Nothing," I said, and I smiled so broadly I could have blossomed into my own version of Down Syndrome, goofy and congenial. I had another year before I started first grade. By that time, The Prince was taken in by the St. Barnabas Home, where at first he worked for room and board, before becoming, like all the other residents, an outright charity case.

My father, earlier in the afternoon, handed me the hospital bill for my birth. "You might want this," he said, and I followed the numbers down the column to the total: $95.96. After deductions for his "subscriber savings," my birth cost him and my mother $15.80.

Remarkable, considering my mother and I both stayed in the hospital for ten days in July, 1945: $6.00 a day for my mother, $1.00 per day for me.

So I came cheaply into this world, but I'd been asking my father for information, not about my mother's son, but about her father, and he finally handed me a handwritten letter from July 1920. The volunteer fire company had passed a resolution congratulating my grandfather on the birth of his daughter Ruth and wished to thank him for "the box of cigars presented to the company."

Now I was getting somewhere. Soon I had pictures, newspaper clippings, and a series of anecdotes my father was willing to tell, nearly all of them preceded by the qualification, "I never told your mother this, but...."

Because all of the stories had alcohol in them. Because all of the stories featured waste of some kind—money, jobs, friends, family, respect.

"He made some sort of mistake with the furnace," my father said, explaining how my grandfather lost his job as the high school janitor. "A dangerous one."

I understood the mistake to have arisen from alcohol. I understood that without a job, sixteen years after the firemen had congratulated him, my grandfather was lost, eventually becoming a farm hand for room and board, and then, at last, becoming a destitute resident of a charity home. There was no divorce, an action unthinkable to my grandmother, but my mother's family had locked him out of his house for good.

Tracing a family tree is often a leisure-time activity, like collecting stamps or coins or all the commemorative plates replicating Gone with the Wind characters, advertised in the Sunday paper. Often it's a matter of "roots," trying to get at the place and culture of family origin.

Because it's not a matter of all the "begats" of family history, where my ancestors lived, what church they went to, their politics or ethnicity. It's a matter of behavior. It's a matter of values. It's the passing down of fears and ambitions and weaknesses.

A student in one of my writing workshops had told me, the week before, how she'd found a bottle of vodka in every drawer in her father's bedroom. Among underwear, between shirts, under sweaters, even beneath a sheaf of bills saved for income-tax deductions.

Another student had begun his memoir with this sentence: "'Matt, make me another fucking drink,' my father said every time we were home together at night during my senior year in high school." My grandfather, however, never drank in his house. Which is why, my father says, as we drive back to Etna, he lasted as long as he did.

I knew about the private club most often frequented by my grandfather. I knew the DOH ("Doors of Hell," according to my Aunt Margaret) and its bar had survived the sixty years since my grandfather had leaned on it. I'd met a few of the old-timers who still talked over beer and bratwurst there, but nobody was ancient enough to remember specific stories about The Prince firsthand. The best I'd gotten was, "I heard he was a real character." If I wanted to know firsthand what was behind the "doors of hell," I needed, sooner or later, to enter the DOH.

I take us through Etna to the Circle Bar (you could see it from my grandmother's porch), but now it's somebody or other's sports bar, one of those places with two pool tables, a dart board, and dual televisions tuned in to ESPN and ESPN2 below a display of Pittsburgh sports memorabilia and a sign advertising fifteen-cent wings during Monday Night Football. Late afternoon on a weekday, it's deserted, except for two men simultaneously watching an equestrian competition and a dog show. "You're too late for all this," my father says. "You should have been this interested when your mother was alive."

I look up the street and see Ogrodnik's, the funeral home where my grandmother was laid out more than forty years ago. Nothing else looks familiar, but I let the car idle until my father says, "You want to see what you don't remember?"

I nod, and he tells me to drive down an alley, and there, in the town a few miles north of Pittsburgh where I grew up, is an entire neighborhood I never knew existed. "What's all this?" I say.

"The Prince was a regular at Tomashek's," my father says. "It's down this way."

I remember the name. "Hell itself," Aunt Margaret called it.

"I never told Ruthy this," my father finally says. "After a softball game—The Prince was sitting on the curb outside Tomashek's. My friends asked him to sing. You know, because he was feeling good.

"He was a character by then. I started dating your mother just after that. I never went back to Tomashek's."

I understand this story illustrates public humiliation, but my father simply relates it and then tells me to turn into an alley of decrepit houses. He shows me three houses from his Meals-on-Wheels route, one where a man has just lost a leg to diabetes. When we turn into the last street, the freeway bypass looms over our heads.

Miraculously, the field my father played semipro football on is still here, level and hard packed. "Millvale, Arsenal—the fields were used so much and baked so hard that the grass only grew over by the sidelines," my father says. "You knew you'd played a game when you came off a field like that."

I stop and get out. My father sits in the car. Well past eighty years old, he's grown as small as The Prince sitting on his bed in the St. Barnabas charity home.

"You go on," he says, meaning for me to believe he isn't going to follow. I walk, listening for the click of the car-door latch, and when I hear it, I make myself keep walking so he can get out in his own good time.

I don't have to look back to know how he puts his hands to both sides, how he swings both legs outside and then pushes off slowly with his arms, gritting his teeth until the short, tight lift of his head means the pain is running through the bone-on-bone contact in his knees.

It's level here. After a few breaths to settle things down, he's able to shuffle. I give him a minute, and he manages twenty feet or so—far enough that when I turn, he can stop as if he's decided that patch of packed earth is the perfect spot, right there, along the near sideline. He can look around as well from there as I can from the end zone to our left.

I stare up at the bypass from underneath, remembering when traffic backed up the entire six miles to Pittsburgh during rush hour because tens of thousands of people who worked in the city had moved to its northern suburbs after World War II. By the time this bypass had been built, Etna, a small steel-mill town, was a bottleneck. A year after the new highway was opened, Etna was a town without a steel mill that people passed rather than visited.

Tomashek's, when we finally reach it, is closed, its beer and whiskey signs replaced by boarded windows and a padlocked door. The building is three times larger than the ones that house the other local bars. That size would doom any sort of reopening in this decaying neighborhood.

"My football coach got himself killed in there," my father says. "Drinking and money."

I look again at the shut-down building and the deserted street. "Fats Skertich. He made a bet and there were words spoken about paying. Fats slapped a man, and that man went home, got a gun, came back, and killed him right there in Tomashek's." My father stares at the door as if he expects to see Fats Skertich walk out with his arm over the shoulders of The Prince. "A baseball bet. It was summer."

"Fats Skertich was a man you listened to," my father says, and then he adds, "You know, I always thought there were reasons The Prince had problems. A man gets married and moves into his wife's house. It's a hard thing. He and your grandmother sleeping in a room between her parents and her brothers, all four of them still there when they were starting out."

I remember the layout of the rooms in that house, how there were doors that connected those bedrooms, how you'd have to lock them if you wanted privacy. Or leave them unlocked as a sign of trust.

"The Prince fixed things around the house. All those men lived there, and none of them could fix anything but The Prince. Right up to the end, there were still two brothers and the father plus his own five children, all old enough to have a mind of their own. The house was never his."

I drive us through Etna, past the long-closed steel mill, across the railroad tracks. "The Prince went out to Huggins' Farm before the war," my father says as we reach the block where his bakery had stood. He stares at each building as if he expects to see someone he knows standing in a doorway. "You might want to know this, too," he says. "When the war started, I didn't want to go in the service. I had deferments for a year—married, a baker—and then they just needed too many to not call me up."

I turn down the alley that I remember curling behind the bakery. Large patches of its bricks are missing; a chunk of concrete, displaced from an abandoned garage, sits so far into the alley I have to squeeze by it. Weeds that have grown door-handle high scrape against the car as I creep past them. When a section of newspaper, caught among a patch of thistle, flutters open, I expect to see headlines about Kennedy's assassination.

"I went down there with Al Kopniski, who played football with me," my father keeps on. "He went through the line and passed. I got taken aside because of this bum ear. We didn't talk about it. Al went and I didn't. And then he didn't make it back. So neither would've I. And then where would we be?"

It's been a mistake to drive my father here, I think. It's like his high school reunion gone bad—classmates unchanged, just older and uglier and bunching up in the same way they had nearly seventy years ago.

Behind where the bakery had stood, I stop and let the car idle. "It's the same," my father says, "only worse."

He's right, I think. Except for the bakery being leveled, the area looks untouched by the last thirty years. "You can see the ass-end of everything from here, that's for sure," my father says. "Your mother hated to even park back here."

The shale hillside seems dotted with the same sparse sumac and burdock that grew there when I was a child. What I remember is the summer before second grade and the first time I left the sidewalk in front of the bakery where I was supposed to stay "no matter what" while my mother worked inside. I'd been trying to sell paper for a penny a sheet from my Rainbow Pad tablet in front of Miller's Tavern. For fifteen minutes, nobody passing by gave in to my simple sales pitch of "One-cent paper here." Then, instead of walking back to the bakery along the sidewalk, I took the path over the hill beside Miller's, ending up where the back door opened into the alley beside the railroad tracks.

From the rear, the six buildings between Miller's and the bakery appeared to be in danger of tumbling backwards down the hill. A train heading toward Pittsburgh looked enormous hurtling on the downgrade, arm's length from where I stood staring at it. As soon as it passed, I noticed the dogs, two of them emerging from under the loading dock behind Hoburg's Hardware.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from the canals of mars by GARY FINCKE Copyright © 2010 by Gary Fincke. Excerpted by permission of MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Beginnings....................3
The Ass-End of Everything....................11
The Plagues....................21
Home Remedies....................31
The Canals of Mars....................39
Look Both Ways....................51
God....................61
God of Our Fathers....................71
The Faces of Christ....................77
Say It....................89
Work....................97
Clemente Stuff....................109
The Handmade Court....................119
In the Bakery....................125
Union Grades....................135
The Theory of Stinks....................145
Weakness....................149
Going Inside....................157
Subsidence, Mine Fire, Bypass, Golf....................161
Alcohol....................171
Night Vision....................181
Labored Breathing....................191
Endings....................203
My Father Told Me....................213
The Piecework of Writing....................217
Cemeteries....................223
Looking Again: An Epilogue....................231