A History of the Telephone
The first night the man called, we were living in the other house, the one on Plum Street. My son was a baby then and he turns thirty next summer, so that gives you some idea how long ago all of this started. It was Christmas Eve, and my wife and I had taken our son to the candlelight service at a church we’d recently discovered. They didn’t expect you to believe anything you didn’t want to believe at that church, which was a relief to me. My wife is pagan from way back, so she doesn’t mind singing the hymns or hearing the stories. They’re fables to her. I try to see them that way, and I’m better at it than I used to be, but still, a small out-of-the-way church is all I can handle. I’m not up to the big events they have at the church downtown, the one they call Fort God.
After we came in from the service, we were sitting at the kitchen table with tea and butter cookies, thinking we ought to get the baby to go down. He was a good baby, though we didn’t know it. We thought all babies slept through the night. And we didn’t know the rest of it, the harder truth, that all babies are good babies. When the phone rang, I thought it must be one of my wife’s relatives. It’s what we did thirty years ago. We called people on the telephone on Christmas Eve, and the phone was still attached to the wall by a long cord, and babies wanted their mothers in the night, and fathers sometimes felt inadequate but you didn’t make a big deal out of it.
I turned the radio down before I answered the phone. You remember the kind of clock radio that sat on the counter in all of our kitchens, the lit-up face that kept fairly good time. The second hand was always falling off during a move from one grad-school apartment to another: it lay at the bottom of the display, a thin red needle. My wife was the one in school. She was taking a few months away from her studies to be in love with our baby. We had a black and white dog who ran away every chance he got, but he always came home eventually, and I had my first fulltime teaching job. If I didn’t completely know what I was doing, the students weren’t aware of it.
I could figure it out eventually. We had all we needed.
The voice on the phone sounded familiar. I grew up with kids from Mexico, and the accent with this voice made me think for a moment I was talking to one of my old friends from high school. It was comforting to me on Christmas Eve.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” said the voice once we got past the hello, hello part. “I wonder if I could talk to Frankie.”
I didn’t speak up right away. My father’s name was Frank, but he passed away when I was just a kid, and I was confused for a moment.
“Francisco,” he said, as if he couldn’t be sure what name I would know this person by. The thing was, I didn’t know this person at all. Nobody named Frankie Francisco lived at our address. This was a new house for us. We’d been in it a few months, and it was a lot nicer than the one before. No roaches, the heat worked. We had a garage and for a few months we managed to squeeze our car into it.
“You must have the wrong number,” I told the guy on the phone. “No Frankies here.”
My name is Todd, and my wife is Nan. We named the baby Todd Junior, but we called him TJ. You know, like Todd Jr.
“Let me start over,” said the voice on the phone. “My name is Richard Huerta, and I was hoping I could talk to my brother Frankie.”
“I don’t know your brother,” I said. “He doesn’t live here.”
My wife says I try to sound clever on the telephone, so I was being careful. I also know this about me: when I’m talking to somebody with a certain kind of accent, I start to speak with that accent too. It’s not something I do on purpose. It’s like I can’t help myself.
“Are you …” said Richard Huerta. “Where are you from?
“I’m from here,” I said.
“Are you …. Mexican?” he said.
“No,” I said. “It’s just, Christmas and all. I could have a cold.”
“But this is the number I have for Frankie,” he said. “He doesn’t live there anymore?”
“Here?” I said. “With us?”
“I haven’t spoken to him in a long time,” said the voice that belonged to Richard Huerta.
“I was hoping this number would still work for him.”
Something in that voice, it was sadness, maybe it was regret, I didn’t hang up on him. He kept talking. I didn’t judge him for it. One time I sat up all night at the airport and exchanged life stories with a man from Lebanon, just because the man’s wife had the same name as my sister. Helen. I’ve ridden across the country a couple of times on Greyhound buses. There’s no holding back on a Greyhound bus.
“You don’t know where Frankie lives?” said Richard.
“Sorry,” I said. I didn’t say anything rude, like, how would I know where your damn brother lives? It was Christmas.
The man’s voice sounded far away. “Are you calling long distance?” I said. It was none of my business.
“Washington,” he said. “The state.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“I lost track of my brother,” he said. “This is what I have for him.” And he read off a phone number, but the number couldn’t have belonged to Frankie Huerta because it was my number, mine and Nan’s. We’d had it for at least two years.
“I guess he moved away or something,” I said.
There was the sad kind of silence on the phone then. This wasn’t what Richard Huerta had hoped to hear.
“How many years since you spoke to him?” I said.
“Six years,” he said. “Eight years. I can’t believe how many years. We had a disagreement. He was throwing his life away.”
“That,” I said. “I know that disagreement.”
I was always on the wrong end of that disagreement. I was trying to write stories, and before I met Nan, I worked at three or four mind-numbing jobs so I could afford a room to live in, a couple of meals a day. Some of my family thought I could do better than the path I was on.
“This area code,” he said, “this is for Ohio?”
In those days a phone was connected to a house. You didn’t take the phone with you to the store or to the ball game. And nobody in Ohio would have a phone number that belonged to a different state.
I told him the name of our town. I would have given him the address if he’d asked for it.
“It’s not Cincinnati?” he said.
“I visited Frankie in Cincinnati,” he said. “Just one visit. We had a good time.”
“How old is Frankie?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Richard. “Thirty-one? Thirty-two?”
“You’re the big brother.”
“How did you know?”
My wife walked through the kitchen and she gave me a funny look, like who was I talking to? I held my hand over the phone.
“Richard Huerta,” I said. “You don’t know him.”
“I’m going to bed,” said Nan. “I’ll get this little guy to sleep.”
I talked to Richard quite a while that night. He said his brother had gotten himself in trouble with drugs. I thought marijuana, which was illegal everywhere then. I thought cocaine, heroin. Richard didn’t come right out and say Frankie was an addict. All he said was he hadn’t spoken to his younger brother in years, and he wanted to make things right.
“Did you go to Mass tonight?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“I thought maybe you went, Christmas Eve and all.”
“I went to a different kind of church,” I said. I wanted to make Richard Huerta feel better, like maybe he and I weren’t so different from each other.
“I started thinking about my brother,” he said. “I hope he was in a church somewhere on Christmas Eve. It wouldn’t have to be Catholic. I want to think of him holding one of those little white candles, listening to the music. Did you have music, the place where you went?”
“We did,” I said. “Guitar music. A woman sang.”
“That sounds nice,” he said. “I wanted that for Frankie tonight.”
I heard my wife running water in the bathroom, which meant the baby was asleep. She would want me to come to bed now, but I kept talking to Richard Huerta. I made some more tea.
I let the dog out.
“My brother likes dogs,” said Richard. “He has a way with dogs. They do what he asks them to do.”
“He never met this dog,” I said.
“He could help you with your dog,” said Richard.
My dog had eaten the sleeve off my wife’s wool jacket that very afternoon. We could have used some help. I almost asked Richard Huerta for his brother’s phone number so I could call Frankie up. Then I remembered the thing about the phone.
“It’s getting late here,” I said. “This is Ohio. Maybe you should try another number?”
“It’s the only number I have for him,” said Richard. He apologized for it. More than once he said he was sorry. I wished him luck finding his brother.
In the morning, I had a hard time telling my wife what I talked about with Richard Huerta. She was miffed at me for staying up so late, but I made her some breakfast and I took the baby for a walk so she could have a soak in the tub. It was a good Christmas Day. Then the holidays were over, and it was back to the grind, and then winter was over, and then the school year was over. Time passes. Even when you’re aware that time is going by fast and you try to hang on to certain moments, you can’t do anything about it. I kept that teaching job a long time.
It was a small school, and there were one or two people there who I didn’t like, sure, but I kept those thoughts to myself.
Our little boy was walking and talking and getting into things when Christmas came around again. He and the dog were a pair. When I wasn’t cleaning up after one of them, I was cleaning up after the other. We went to the same church as the year before for the candles and the singing, and people carried on about how much TJ had grown. You get the feeling sometimes like you’ve done this all before, but it’s not a bad feeling.
We got home from the Christmas service and it was my wife’s turn to read a book to the boy, so I was sitting at the kitchen table going over something I’d been working on, a story. I was trying to write some really short ones, but I had a hard time keeping them short, and it was a Christmas story. In the stories I wrote, Christmas didn’t play a big part. I’d more likely write a story about Christmas never coming again, or about a new religion where people celebrated it by robbing their neighbors’ houses. I was into irony.
When the phone rang, and this was the only time it ever happened to me, I knew who was calling before I even picked up the receiver.
“Hello,” said the voice of Richard Huerta. “I hope it’s not too late to call.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I was wondering,” he said, “if I could talk to my brother Frankie.”
That probably sounds funny, but the guy wasn’t trying to be funny. He didn’t recognize my voice at first. He was dialing the number again, thinking maybe this Christmas it would work.
“Richard,” I said.
“Yes?”
“It’s me,” I said. “Todd. Same guy as last year.”
We had a laugh about it, and he asked how my family was doing, if my wife was still in school, if the boy had grown. We talked about the weather out in Washington. Out west they’re always having a flood or a fire. Volcanoes.
“Nothing like that this year,” he said.
“Nothing?” I tried not to sound disappointed.
He wanted me to ask about Frankie. I mean, it’s why he called.
“You haven’t heard anything?” he said.
“I haven’t.”
“He was going to help you with that dog,” he said.
The dog lay under the table. She was chewing on a chair leg.
“Does he do miracles?” I said.
“I wish he did,” said Richard. “It would be a miracle to me if Frankie showed up one day. If he picked up the phone.”
A man who was trying to help me learn how to write stories told me once I should do everything I could to savor the moments of my life.
“Especially with kids,” he said. “One day you’ll look back and you’ll remember two or three Christmases and a trip to the Smokies. You’ll wonder about the rest of it, where it went.”
I believed him, but what could I do about it? It was like trying to make the sun stop shining on a hot day. Photographs helped. My wife kept albums back when we owned a real camera.
We got by okay. Every Christmas Eve we found a church with a candlelight service. If we went to the same place three years in a row, my wife called it our church, but I kept my distance. And every evening after the service, the phone would ring.
I remember this one year, I deliberated a long moment before I answered it. Oh hell, I deliberated the same way every year. I thought about not picking up that time because I was in a bad mood. We had to fix our car the first week of December, and we didn’t have money for Christmas presents but I went out and bought some stuff on credit. My wife didn’t think it was a good idea. We argued and we didn’t light each other’s candle at the church. We pretended we were making new friends, but we weren’t really. We were just being that way.
On the ninth or tenth ring, I went to the phone, and it was him. Of course it was. It was Richard. He asked if Frankie had showed up. My wife put her head in at the kitchen door, and she gave me a questioning look. I knew behind that look she hoped to show me we shouldn’t argue any more.
“It’s Richard,” I said.
She wasn’t surprised. “Say hi to him for me,” she said. “I love you, Todd,” she said.
“Merry Christmas.”
That year I didn’t talk on the phone a long time. I told him why I didn’t want to stay on the phone, how I wanted to go to my wife and make things up with her.
“That’s good,” said Richard. “You should do that. Give her a hug for me. Tell her, this hug is from Richard.”
I said I would, although I forgot to say that part until the next morning. You know what it’s like.
“I appreciate that,” said my wife when I remembered what Richard said. “I feel like I know him. Your Richard Huerta.”
We left Plum Street that summer and moved across town to a better neighborhood, a smaller house. My wife had another baby. We were getting by without getting ahead, but what can you do? I come from people who never owned much, hard-luck people. My wife didn’t complain about our life. She liked reading history books and talking about ideas. She hoped someone would pay her to do that eventually.
Richard Huerta called us every Christmas Eve. I had to remind myself that I’d never even met his brother, but I was happy to talk to Richard anyway. He asked, year after year, if I’d heard from Frankie. As if I was holding onto his brother’s mail or something. It made no sense, but I didn’t bring it up. Part of my Christmas was about Richard Huerta now. I would have missed him if he didn’t call.
One winter I talked to him from the back yard while I put together a basketball goal for my kids. It was the first time Nan and I had a phone that wasn’t attached to the wall. I wasn’t sure how far out into the yard I could carry the phone and have it still work. The part of Ohio where we lived got cold in the winter and I was chilled to the bone in the backyard. There was a little snow on the ground, and more snow falling.
I wasn’t reading the directions carefully because the light was bad out there in the yard. To tell the truth, I don’t do directions. I put some pieces together backwards. With a project like that, once you put two pieces together, you can’t take them apart again. They’re locked in place.
“Tell me what it looks like,” said Richard. “I’m pretty good at putting stuff together.”
There had been some static on the phone earlier, and once for a brief moment we heard somebody else’s conversation, a woman crying softly, telling her father she was sorry for what she’d done. But then the line cleared, so I described it to Richard, the basketball thing, and he walked me through the steps like he had the directions right in front of him. I thought I was going to freeze my privates off in the back yard, but eventually I got all the pieces put together, some of them upside down. You could hardly tell. It was three in the morning in Ohio. At one point, not that late maybe but past midnight, Richard put his coat on and went out and stood in his own back yard so he could be cold too.
“Is there air in the ball?” said Richard. “You want that ball to be pumped up good when TJ runs outside and sees his basketball goal.”
I hadn’t thought about that, my brain was so cold. I found the pump in the closet and I gave the ball what-for. When we couldn’t think of another thing to do, I said goodnight and I told Richard I’d let him know if the kids liked what we’d built together.
In the morning, they did like it. Nan swept the snow off the patio and we threw the ball through the hoop a few times, and I should have called Richard and told him about it. I didn’t tell him until the next year.
It was a thing, our Christmas Eve ritual. It was fifteen or sixteen years in a row, almost without fail, we talked about everything, not just Frankie. Richard wanted to hear about my son and my little girl. He said it was the part of life he’d missed out on, the children part, not being married.
Some years we talked way into the night. Like the one Christmas we had a major ice storm, and Richard told me he had the feeling something bad had happened to his brother, just an impression that came over him. He couldn’t shake it.
“Is your friend okay?” asked Nan when I turned the lights out and slipped into our room.
I thought I could come to bed without waking her up, but she’s always been a light sleeper.
“His brother,” I said. “He’s worried about Frankie.”
That night, Nan put her arms around me and pressed herself into my tired back.
“We have a good life, don’t we, Todd?”
“We do,” I said.
I was thinking about people who have brothers. Nan and me, we were lucky.
And some years Richard asked how my writing was going. I admitted to him, the year my wife took a job at the city library, that I sometimes thought about giving up writing altogether.
All those books in that library, they intimidated me.
“I’ll never make any money at it,” I told Richard. We were talking quietly. I liked our house, but it felt like Nan and I had slipped backwards down the financial slope. My daughter put the cordless phone in the toilet, so we were using the old-fashioned kind of phone again, one that was wired into the wall. The phone jack was in the hallway and you couldn’t talk too loud or you’d wake up the entire family. My wife was in the living room putting chocolates and oranges in Christmas stockings. She didn’t want the kids to have a lot of candy, but she made an exception at Christmas.
“Maybe it’s not about that,” said Richard. “The money part.”
“It better not be,” I said. “I might as well write poetry, for God’s sake.”
Richard laughed. He was an easy person to talk to.
“I think Frankie’s in Indiana now,” said Richard. “He was in jail there for a while. It was serious.”
“That’s really tough,” I told him.
I could feel guilty for having my life, the way you feel when you watch the news on TV or drive past one of those crummy motels where you know people are living, not just staying for a tragic weekend.
“I hope you’ll keep writing,” said Richard. “I like your stories.”
That surprised me.
“You read something I wrote?” I said.
“I read it in a magazine,” he said.
“Which magazine?” There weren’t a lot of them.
“I looked you up,” he said. “It was an Ohio story. Well, I liked it.”
That year, the year he looked me up on the internet, I decided I would search out his brother. We had learned to Google ourselves or Google other people. I looked for what I could find on a Francisco Huerta, or a Frankie, or a Frank. The name Huerta isn’t unusual. There were a few of them. One guy was a preacher, the first Hispanic Methodist preacher in his part of the country. There were a couple of obituaries for old guys. In Indiana, a Frank Huerta sat on death row. I didn’t want it to be Richard’s brother.
Why is it sometimes when you know you shouldn’t bring something up, and you’ve already told yourself you won’t, and you have lots of other things to talk about, you end up saying the thing anyway? I brought it up to Richard about Frankie and the prison, and that was the night Richard had to get off the phone for a few minutes. He didn’t say it was because of his brother, but now I knew about Frankie’s situation, and it was too much for Richard. If I knew Frankie was on Death Row, that made it all real somehow.
When he called back, we tried to talk through it.
“I don’t think that’s my brother,” said Richard. “And nothing says they have to execute him. Whoever he is. That Frank Huerta.”
I agreed with him.
“They keep a lot of guys on death row,” he said.
My wife had been out late buying some special ingredients for a pie for our Christmas dinner. She came in through the living room and told the dog to stop jumping up on her, and Richard heard her voice. He told me he really should get off the phone. He had things to do.
“Just a minute,” I said. “Please, wait just a minute.”
I got Nan to come to the phone to say hi to him, and then I got my son and my daughter pulled away from the TV. My son was always a quiet kid, but my daughter would talk to anybody.
“How do you know my dad?” she asked Richard.
I couldn’t hear his voice, but what he said seemed to satisfy her.
“Merry Christmas, Mr. Richard,” she said. “I hope we get to talk again next year.”
I knew he wasn’t going to call the next year. I sat on a chair in the hallway and waited for the phone to ring. By then my wife had a cell phone, the first one we owned. I wanted her to have it when she was driving home from the library on Thursday nights. But I preferred to talk to Richard on the old-fashioned line. I could hear him better. He had moved to California for a few years to be near some family in San Diego. He’d hoped someone there would know more about Frankie.
The night he didn’t call, I sat in the hallway and tried to read a magazine, a slick one from New York. I used to imagine publishing one of my stories in that magazine. “Daddy,” said my little girl. We named her Dana. “When’s he going to call?”
I was surprised she said that. I didn’t realize she was waiting too.
“I want to talk to the sad man,” she said.
I told her I didn’t think he was going to call us this year.
“You could call him,” she said.
Which made me wonder. He had never given his number to me, but I knew most of it just from seeing it light up on the newer telephones. I was sure of the area code.
I dialed the numbers as best I remembered them. I knew a 5 and a 9 were important in this case.
“Hello,” said a voice after the phone rang a few times. It didn’t sound like Richard’s voice.
“I hope I’m not calling too late,” I said. “Could I speak to Richard? Richard Huerta?”
“You must have the wrong number.” This voice was a little drunk.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry…but if he comes in, would you tell him I called?”
“What the hell is this?”
“Merry Christmas,” I said quickly and hung up the phone.
“I feel sad now,” said my daughter.
“It happens sometimes,” said Nan. I didn’t realize my wife had been listening to my part of the conversation. My son was there too. He had new glasses that winter, and they made him look serious, like the problems of the world were his problems.
“It sometimes happens at Christmas time,” said Nan.
The following December, this was ‘09, Richard called again, but he didn’t mention why he hadn’t phoned the year before, why he’d skipped a Christmas Eve. He didn’t need to. I’d done a little more research one night at the library while I waited for Nan to get off work—we were down to one car for a while—and I Googled Frank Huerta again. I found out they killed Frankie in the fall of ‘09, sometime after Thanksgiving but before Christmas. Someone got to him in the prison yard.
So Richard took a year off, but then he called again, and we stayed on the phone a long time that year. I moved my chair so I could look out the kitchen window while we talked. I could see the kids’ basketball goal in the driveway. It was in bad shape, but the kids had played on it a lot by then. It would have been in better shape if I’d put it together right.
e went for moments at a time without saying much, Richard and me. I asked him if it was snowing where he was. He was back in the state of Washington again. He felt like he had to get away from his California family.
“Maybe not forever,” he said. “Just for now.”
I used to feel it was stupid to mention the weather when you talked on the phone, but that night I was grateful for the weather. I wanted to know how his world looked right then as we were speaking.
“Only a little snow,” he said. “A dusting.”
He asked if we went to the candlelight service.
“Of course,” I said.
“Was there music?”
“They always have music,” I said.
He was tired, and he was going to get off the phone. “Hold on a minute,” I said. “Someone wants to talk to you.”
“No, really, Todd,” he said.
I waited to make sure he wasn’t going to hang up before I handed the phone to my daughter.
“Hello,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Richard.”
“Oh,” he said. I could hear his voice. He was surprised. “You’re up late.”
“Tell me again,” she said. “How do you know my dad?”
They were lined up in the hall then, my daughter, my son, and behind those two, my wife.
“Don’t cry, Mr. Richard,” said my daughter. “Please don’t cry.”
My daughter looked up at me, and she looked at Nan.
“Ask him a question,” said my son. He was good that way, always willing to help his sister out if she got in a jam.
“What do I ask him?” said my daughter.
“Ask him what kind of cookies he likes,” said my son. “Ask him if he has a dog. Really,” he said, “you could ask him anything.”
We talked some more. We stayed on the phone a long time. It was like we weren’t sure if we would have this chance again. You never really know with life.
“Hey,” said Richard when it was his turn to talk. “Would you do something for me?”
“I guess,” I said. “I mean, sure, why not?”
“Light a candle for me,” he said. “For me and Frankie.”
So I lit a candle. And I did something else I never did before. I said a blessing on Frankie Huerta. And on his brother Richard. And Nan and I went to bed.
“I wish we could do more for him,” said Nan. “I wish we could help him out.”
“We’ll call him next year,” I said. “Or he’ll call us.” I’d forgotten to write down his number, but I could get it off the phone.
“Hold me,” Nan said that night. “Hold me as long as you can.”
“Okay,” I said. “Sure. I can do that.”
I went to bed with this thought in my mind: maybe in the future, people will only think of each other, and they’ll be connected just like that. Maybe there won’t be any telephones. I have to say, I don’t know what I feel about that.
• • •
Barry Kitterman has been writing fiction for more than forty years. He is the author of The Baker’s Boy, a novel, and a collection of short stories, From the San Joaquin. After a long career teaching writing in Tennessee, he is retired and living in Michigan, and still at it.