The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  Anyhow, it was also at this time that my father was killed unexpectedly in a CTA subway accident in Chicago, during the almost indescribably horrible and chaotic holiday shopping rush of December 1977, and the accident actually occurred while he was in the process of weekend Christmas shopping, which probably helped contribute to making the whole thing even more tragic. The accident was not on the famous ‘El’ part of the CTA—he and I were in the Washington Square station, to which we’d ridden in from Libertyville on the commuter line in order to transfer to a subway line going further downtown. I think we were ultimately headed to the Art Institute gift shop. I was back at my father’s house for the weekend, I remember, at least partly because I had intensive studying to do for my first round of final exams since reenrolling at DePaul, where I was living in a dorm on the Loop campus. In retrospect, part of the reason for coming home to Libertyville to cram may also have been to give my father an opportunity to watch me apply myself to serious studying on a weekend, though I don’t remember being aware of this motivation at the time. Also, for those who do not know, the Chicago Transit Authority’s train system is a mishmash of elevated, conventional underground, and high-speed commuter rails. By prior agreement, I came into the city with him on Saturday in order to help him find some kind of Christmas gift for my mother and Joyce—a task I imagine he must have found difficult every year—and also, I think, for his sister, who lives with her husband and children in Fair Oaks OK.

  Essentially, what happened in the Washington Square station, where we were transferring downtown, is that we descended the cement steps of the subway level into the dense crowds and heat of the platform—even in December, Chicago’s subway tunnels tend to be hot, although not nearly as unbearable as during the summer months, but, on the other hand, the platforms’ winter heat is undergone while wearing a winter coat and scarf, and it was also extremely crowded, it being the holiday shopping rush, with the additional frenzy and chaos of the progressive sales tax being under way this year as well. Anyhow, I remember that we reached the bottom of the stairs and the platform’s crowds just as the train slid in—it was stainless steel and tan plastic, with both full and partially pulled-off holly decals around some of the cars’ windows—and the automatic doors opened with a pneumatic sound, and the train stood idling for the moment as large masses of impatient, numerous-small-purchase-laden holiday shoppers pushed on and off. In terms of crowdedness, it was also the peak shopping hours of Saturday afternoon. My father had wanted to do the shopping in the morning before the downtown crowds got completely out of control, but I had overslept, and he had waited for me, although he was not pleased about it and did not disguise this. We finally left after lunch—meaning, in my case, breakfast—and even on the commuter line into the city, the crowds had been intense. Now we arrived on the even more crowded platform at a moment that most subway riders will acknowledge as awkward and somewhat stressful, with the train idling and the doors open but one never knowing for sure how much longer they’ll stay that way as you move through the platform’s crowds, trying to get to the train before the doors close. You don’t quite want to break into a run or start shoving people out of the way, as the more rational part of you knows it’s hardly a matter of life and death, that another train will be along soon, and that the worst that can happen is that you’ll barely miss it, that the doors will slide shut just as you get to the train, and you will have barely missed getting on and will have to wait on the hot, crowded platform for a few minutes. And yet there’s always another part of you—or of me, anyhow, and I’m quite sure, in hindsight, of my father—which almost panics. The idea of the doors closing and the train with its crowds of people who did make it inside pulling away just as you get up to the doors provokes some kind of strange, involuntary feeling of anxiety or urgency—I don’t think there’s even a specific word for it, psychologically, though possibly it’s related to primal, prehistoric fears that you would somehow miss getting to eat your fair share of the tribe’s kill or would be caught out alone in the veldt’s tall grass as night falls—and, though he and I had certainly never talked about it, I now suspect that this deep, involuntary sense of anxiety about getting to idling trains just in time was especially bad for my father, who was a man of extreme organization and personal discipline and precise schedules who was always precisely on time for everything, and for whom the primal anxiety of just barely missing something was especially intense—although on the other hand he was also a man of enormous personal dignity and composure, and would normally never allow himself to be seen shouldering people aside or running on a public platform with his topcoat billowing and one hand holding his dark-gray hat down on his head and his keys and assorted pocket change audibly jingling, not unless he felt some kind of intense, irrational pressure to make the train, the way it is often the most disciplined, organized, dignified people who, it turns out, are under the most intense internal pressure from their repressions or superego, and can sometimes suddenly kind of snap in various small ways and, under enough pressure, behave in ways which might at first seem totally out of sync with your view of them. I was not able to see his eyes or facial expression; I was behind him on the platform, partly because he walked more quickly in general than I did—when I was a child, the term he used for this was ‘dawdle’—although, on that day, it was partly also because he and I were in the midst of yet another petty psychological struggle over the fact that I had overslept and made him, according to his perspective, ‘late,’ there being therefore something pointedly impatient about his rapid stride and hurry through the CTA station, to which I was responding by deliberately not increasing my own normal pace very much or making much of an effort to keep up with him, staying just far enough behind him to annoy him but not far enough back quite to warrant his turning and actually squeezing my shoes over it, as well as assuming a kind of spacey, apathetic demeanor—much like a dawdling child, in fact, though of course I would never have acknowledged this at the time. In other words, the basic situation was that he was peeved and I was sulking, but neither of us was consciously aware of this, nor of how habitual, for us, this sort of petty psychological struggle was—in retrospect, it seems to me that we did this sort of thing to one another constantly, out of possibly nothing more than unconscious habit. It’s a typical sort of dynamic between fathers and sons. It may even have been part of the unconscious motivation behind my indifferent drifting and lump-like sloth at all of the various colleges he had to get up on time every day and go to work to pay for. Of course, none of this entered into my awareness at the time, much less ever got acknowledged or discussed by either of us. In some sense, you could say that my father died before either of us could become aware of how invested we actually were in these petty little rituals of conflict, or of how much it had affected their marriage that my mother had so often been put in the role of mediator between us, all of us acting out typical roles which none of us were conscious of, like machines going through their programmed motions.

  I remember, hurrying through the platform’s crowds, that I saw him turn sideways to shoulder his way between two large, slow-moving Hispanic women who were heading towards the train’s open doors with twine-handled shopping bags, one of which my father’s leg jostled and caused to swing slightly back and forth. I don’t know whether these women were actually together or were just forced by their size and the surrounding crowds’ pressure to walk so closely side by side. They were not among those interviewed after the accident, which means they were probably on the train by the time it happened. I was only eight to ten feet behind him by this time, and openly hurrying to catch up, as there was the idling downtown train just ahead, and the idea of my father just making it onto the train but of me lagging too far behind him and getting to the doors just as they closed, and of watching his face’s expression framed by holly decals as we looked at one another through the doors’ glass portions as he pulled away in the train—I think anyone could imagine how peeved and disgusted he would be, a
nd also vindicated and triumphant in our little psychological struggle over hurry and ‘lateness,’ and I could now feel my own rising anxiety at the thought of him making the train and me just barely missing it, so at this point I was trying to close the gap between us. I still, to this day, do not know whether my father was aware then that I was almost right behind him, or that I was nearly butting and shoving people out of the way myself in my hurry to catch up, because, as far as I know, he did not look back over his shoulder or signal to me in any way as he made for the train’s doors. During all of the litigation that followed, none of the respondents or their counsel ever once disputed the fact that CTA trains are not supposed to be able to begin moving unless all of the doors are completely closed. Nor did anyone seek to challenge my account of the exact order of what happened, as at this point I was a few feet at most behind him, and witnessed the whole thing with what everyone conceded was terrible clarity. The two halves of the car’s door had begun to slide shut with their familiar pneumatic sound just as my father reached the doors and shot out one arm in between the halves to keep them from closing so that he could squeeze his way in, and the doors closed on his arm—too firmly, evidently, to allow either the rest of my father to squeeze through the doors’ gap or to allow the doors to be forced back open enough to let him withdraw his arm, which it turned out was caused by a possible malfunction involving the machinery that controlled the force with which the doors closed—by which time the subway train had begun moving, which was another blatant malfunction—special circuit breakers between the doors’ sensors and the train operator’s console are supposed to disengage the throttle if any of the doors on any car are open (as one can imagine, we all learned a great deal about CTA trains’ design and safety specifications during the litigation following the accident)—and my father was being forced to trot with gradually increasing speed alongside it, the train, releasing his hold on his head’s hat to pound with his fist against the doors as two or possibly three men inside the subway car were now at the slight gap in the doors, trying to pull or pry them open further enough to at least allow my father to extract his arm. My father’s hat, which he prized and owned a special hat block for, flew off and was lost in the platform’s dense crowds, in which a visibly widening gap or tear appeared—by which I mean it appeared in the crowd further down the platform, which I could see from my own place, trapped in the crowd at the platform’s edge at a point further and further behind the widening gap or fissure that opened in the platform’s crowds as my father was forced to run faster and faster at the accelerating train’s side and people moved or leapt back to avoid being knocked onto the track. Given that many of these people were also holding numerous small, subdivided packages and individually purchased bags, many of these could be seen flying up in the air and rotating or spilling their contents in various ways above the widening gap as shoppers jettisoned their purchases in an attempt to leap clear of my father’s path, so that part of the appearance of the gap was the illusion that it was somehow spurting or raining consumer goods. Also, the causal issues related to legal liability for the incident turned out to be incredibly complex. The manufacturer’s specifications for the doors’ pneumatic systems did not adequately explain how the doors could close with such force that a healthy adult male could not withdraw his arm, which meant that the manufacturer’s claim that my father—perhaps out of panic, or because of injury to his arm—failed to take reasonable action to extricate his arm was difficult to refute. The male subway riders who appeared to be attempting so forcefully to pry the doors open from within subsequently vanished down the track with the departing train and were not successfully identified, this due partly to the fact that the subsequent transit and police investigators did not pursue these identifications very aggressively, possibly as it was clear, even at the scene, that the incident was a civil and not criminal matter. My mother’s first lawyer did place personal ads in the Tribune and Sun-Times requesting that these two or three passengers come forward and be deposed for legal purposes, but for what they claimed were reasons of expense and practicability, these ads were quite small, and were buried in the Classified section towards the rear of the paper, and ran for what my mother would later claim was an unreasonably brief and unaggressive period of time during which all too many Chicagoland residents left the city for the holidays anyhow—so that this eventually became one more protracted, complex element of the litigation’s second phase.

  At the Washington Square station, the official ‘scene of the accident’—which, in a fatality, is legally deemed to be ‘[the] location at which death or injuries causing death are sustained’—was listed at 65 yards off of the subway platform, in the southbound tunnel itself, at which point the CTA train was determined to have been traveling at between 51 and 54 miles per hour and portions of my father’s upper body impacted the iron bars of a built-in ladder protruding from the tunnel’s west wall—this ladder had been installed to allow CTA maintenance personnel to access a box of multi-bus circuitry in the tunnel’s ceiling—and the trauma, confusion, shock, noise, screaming, rain of small individual purchases, and nearly stampede-like evacuation of the platform as my father cut an increasingly forceful and high-velocity swath through the dense crowds of shoppers all disqualified even those few people who still remained there on the scene—most of them injured, or claiming injury—as ‘reliable’ witnesses for authorities to interview. Shock is evidently common in situations of graphic death. Less than an hour after the accident, all that any bystanders could seem to remember were screams, loss of holiday purchases, concern for personal safety, and vivid but fragmentary details as to my father’s affect and actions, various rippling things the onrushing air did to his topcoat and scarf, and the successive injuries he appeared to receive as he was borne at increasing speed towards the platform’s end and fully or partly collided with a wire mesh trash receptacle, several airborne packages and shopping bags, a pillar’s steel rivets, and an older male commuter’s steel or aluminum luggage cart—this last item was somehow knocked by the impact across the tunnel and onto the northbound tracks, causing sparks from that track’s third rail and adding to the stampeding crowds’ chaos. I remember that a young Hispanic or Puerto Rican man wearing what looked to be a type of tight black hairnet was interviewed while holding my father’s right shoe, a tasseled Florsheim loafer, of which the toe portion and welt were so abraded by the platform’s cement that the sole’s front portion had detached and was hanging loose, and that the man could not recall how he’d come to be holding it. He, too, was later determined to be in shock, and I can clearly remember seeing the Hispanic man afterward again in the triage area of the emergency room—which was at Loyola Marymount Hospital, only one or two blocks away from the Washington Square CTA station—seated in a plastic chair and trying to fill out forms on a clipboard with a ballpoint pen attached by a piece of white string to the clipboard, still holding the shoe.

  And the wrongful-death litigation was, as mentioned, incredibly complex, even though it all technically never even proceeded past the initial legal stages of determining whether the City of Chicago, the CTA, the CTA’s Maintenance Division (the emergency brake’s cord in the car to which my father was forcibly appended was discovered to have been vandalized and cut, although expert opinion was divided on whether the forensic evidence represented a very recent cut or one of weeks’ duration. Evidently, the microscopic evaluation of severed plastic fibers can be interpreted in just about any way one’s interests lead one to interpret it), the train’s manufacturer of record, the train’s engineer, his immediate supervisor, AFSCME, and the over two dozen different subcontractors and vendors of various components of the various systems adjudged by the forensic engineers retained by our legal team to have played a part in the accident should, as respondents, be classified in the action as strictly liable, liable, negligent, or FEDD, the latter abbreviation standing for ‘failure to exercise due diligence.’ According to my mother, our legal team’s client li
aison had confided to her that the multiplicity of named respondents was just an initial strategic gambit, and that we would ultimately be primarily suing the City of Chicago—which was, of course, my father’s employer, in an ironic twist—citing ‘common carrier tort law’ and a precedent case entitled Ybarra v. Coca-Cola to justify collapsing liability onto the shoulders of the respondent that could be shown to have been most cheaply and efficiently able to take reasonable steps to prevent the accident—presumably by having required more stringent quality-assurance of the doors’ pneumatics and sensors in the CTA’s contract with the train’s manufacturer of record, a responsibility which fell, in a further irony, at least partly to the City of Chicago’s bursar’s office’s cost systems division, in which one of my father’s own responsibilities had involved weighted evaluations of up-front cost versus liability exposure in certain classes of city agencies’ contracts—although fortunately, it turned out that CTA capital equipment expenditures were vetted by a different detail or team in cost systems. Anyhow, to my mother’s, Joyce’s, and my dismay, it became evident to us that our legal team’s major criterion for arguing for different companies’, agencies’, and municipal entities’ different liability designations involved those different possible respondents’ cash resources and their respective insurance carriers’ record of settlement in similar cases—that is, that the entire process was about numbers and money rather than anything like justice, responsibility, and the prevention of further wrongful, public, and totally undignified and pointless deaths. To be honest, I’m not sure that I’m explaining all this very well. As mentioned, the whole legal process was so complicated as to almost defy description, and the junior associate that the legal team had assigned to keep us apprised of developments and evolving strategies for the first sixteen months was not exactly the clearest or most empathetic counsel one could have hoped for. Plus it goes without saying that we were also all really upset, understandably, and my mother—whose emotional health had always been pretty delicate since the breakdown or abrupt changes of 1971–72 and subsequent divorce—was going in and out of what could probably be classified as disassociative shock or conversion reaction, and had actually moved back into the house in Libertyville that she’d shared with my father prior to their separation, supposedly ‘just temporarily’ and for reasons that changed each time Joyce or I pressed her on whether this moving back there was a very good idea for her, and she was generally not in good shape at all, psychologically speaking. In fact, after only the first round of depositions in an ancillary lawsuit between one of the respondents and its insurance company over just what percentage of the legal costs for the respondent’s defense against our ongoing suit were covered in the respondent’s liability policy with the insurance company—plus, to further complicate matters, a former partner in the lead law firm that was representing my mother and Joyce was now representing the insurance company, whose national headquarters turned out to be in Glenview, and there was a subsidiary set of briefs and depositions in that case concerning whether this fact could in any way constitute a conflict of interest—and procedurally, this ancillary suit had to be resolved or settled before preliminary depositions in our own suit—which by that point had evolved into the twin classifications of civil liability and wrongful death, and was so complex that it took almost a year for the team’s litigators even to agree on how to file it correctly—such that, by this point, my mother’s emotional state reached the point where she elected to discontinue all litigation, a decision which privately upset Joyce very much but which she, Joyce, was legally powerless to enjoin or influence, and there was then a very complicated domestic struggle in which Joyce kept trying, without my mother’s knowledge, to get me to reinitiate the suit with myself, who was over twenty-one and the decedent’s dependent and son, as sole plaintiff. But for complicated reasons—chief among them that I had been listed as a dependent on both my parents’ 1977 federal tax returns, which, in my mother’s case, would have been promptly disallowed in even a routine office audit, but which escaped notice in the more primitive Examinations environment of the Service in that era—it emerged that in order to do this, I would have had to have my mother declared legally ‘non compos mentis,’ which would have required a mandatory two-week psychiatric hospitalization for observation before we could obtain a legal declaration from a court-authorized psychiatrist, which was something no one in the family was even close to having the stomach for. So after sixteen months, the whole litigation process ended, with the exception of our former legal team’s subsequent suit against my mother for recovery of fees and expenses that, to all appearances, the contract that Joyce and my mother signed had explicitly waived in lieu of a 40 percent contingency fee. The recondite arguments by which our former team was attempting to have this contract declared null and void because of some ambiguity in the legal language of one of their own contract’s subclauses were never explained or made clear enough to me to be able to tell if they were anything more than frivolous or not, as at this juncture I was in my final semester at DePaul and also in the process of recruitment by the Service, and my mother and Joyce had to hire yet another lawyer to defend my mother against the former lawyers’ suit, which still, if you can believe it, still drags on to this day, and is one of the main reasons my mother will give as a rationale for having become a virtual shut-in in the Libertyville house, where she still now resides, and for letting the home’s telephone service lapse, although evidence of some kind of major psychological deterioration had already appeared much earlier, actually probably even in the midst of the original litigation and her moving back home to my father’s house following the accident, with the first psychological symptom I can remember involving her growing preoccupation with the welfare of the birds in a nest of finches or starlings that for years had been up over one of the joists on the large, open wooden porch, which had been one of the chief attractions of the Libertyville house when my parents had made the original decision to move there, the obsession then progressing from that one nest to the neighborhood’s birds in general, and she began having more and more standing and tube-style feeders installed on the porch and the front lawn and buying and leaving out more and more seed and then eventually also all different kinds of human food and various ‘bird supplies’ for them on the steps of the porch, at one low point including tiny pieces of furniture from a dollhouse from her girlhood in Beloit, which I knew she had treasured as memorabilia as I’d heard her recount all sorts of childhood anecdotes to Joyce about how much she’d treasured the thing and had collected miniature furniture for it, and which she’d kept for many years in the storage room of the Libertyville house, along with a lot of memorabilia from my own early childhood in Rockford, and Joyce, who has remained my mother’s loyal friend and sometimes virtual nurse—even though she did, in 1979, fall head over heels in love with the attorney who helped them close Speculum Books under Chapter 13 provisions, and is now married to him and lives with him and his two children in Wilmette—Joyce agrees that the tedious, complex, cynical endlessness of the accident’s legal fallout was a large part of what kept my mother from processing the trauma of my father’s passing and working through some of the prior, 1971-era unresolved emotions and conflicts which the accident had now brought rushing back up to the surface. Although at a certain point you have to just suck it up and play the hand you’re dealt and get on with your life, in my own opinion.